You're on a train in the alps with a beautiful boy,
not for long you aren’t
Broke: Acknowledging that a character who is an objectively terrible person is also a complex and intentionally well thought out individual with different levels of nuance you can empathize with in some ways while not in others is immediately “woobifying” or “poor little meow meowifying” them.
Woke: “This character is a bad person” and “this character is still a person” are two statements that can, should and do coexist and admitting that they exhibit nuance and depth and are more than just their bad actions doesn’t immediately excuse or condone their bad actions or mean that you’re ignoring or trying to soften the canonical version of the character.
Bespoke: That’s the whole point, that’s always been the point, to be made to empathize with horrible people so you can understand that they can be anyone, that bad people can be likeable, can be interesting, can be human, are human, and it’s scary to think about all the ways they’re just like you and all the ways they’re just like everything you hate, forcing the use of critical skills in media analysis, forcing a confrontation of the duality of man.
Whatever Level is Above Bespoke: But sometimes, yeah, sure, maybe they are a poor little meow meow, what are you gonna do, get a lawyer
...Not to get weird and dark on a useful/amuzing writing post, but...
Years and years ago, I read someone's experience of finding out that his mom's boyfriend was a serial killer. How much it sickened him to put together odd bits and pieces of their experiences together, recontextualizing them, suddenly understanding new and horrifying things.
But while that was awful, what really fucked him up later wasn't the clues he'd missed or anything-- it was that, one time, they'd been working together on some kind of home project, and he'd been on a ladder and suddenly gotten off balance-- and his mom's boyfriend had immediately reached out, yanked him back, both of them frightened and swearing and then gasping in the aftershocks of panic, and how grateful he'd been that the boyfriend had been there, how they'd both started laughing as the adrenaline washed through them and out again, hugging fiercely, how grateful he still was that the boyfriend had been there, because he owed his life to this man, this almost-father that had kept him safe and had been afraid for him, and the cognitive dissonance of that, the visceral disgust and the aching love and what it meant to be beholden to a monster for the gift of that moment--
And that's why we need to practice the little lies of fiction, where we can see that characters may not always be rendered in black and white-- it helps us learn how to live in a world that may serve us the worst people we may ever know doing us the greatest kindness of our lives.
Prompt #3457
“You have to stop making it rain every time you’re sad. Yes, I know it’s aesthetic. Yes, I know it cheers you up to watch people get unexpectedly drenched and have their day ruined.” The hero cupped their phone closer to their ear, desperately scrambling to duck under a shop’s overhang. “Yes, you’re inconveniencing me! But I’m not the one who upset you! So knock it off!”
here at the sandwich shop, we’ve started to notice some people who are new to sandwiches aren’t used to meat and cheese between two slices of bread. they find this practice strange and confusing. that’s why we’ve decided to cut the bread out all together. from now on, we’ll just serve slices of meat and cheese on a plate.
we know that many of our loyal sandwich shop customers have been coming here for years to buy our delicious sandwiches. but some people don’t “get” sandwiches, and we need to try and appeal to them with an easier-to-understand meal format. we will no longer be serving sandwiches. all of our food will just be cold cuts on a paper plate. we love our customers and appreciate your understanding <3
Yes we know Craig's Cold Cuts down the street does cold cuts better than we do and has millions of customers. That's why we need to switch to cold cuts, to get their customers. We hope that our long-time sandwich loving customer base will be patient in this transition to cold cuts and welcome the certain influx of Craig's Cold Cut customers who will surely come here to enjoy our worse cold cuts with you, our sandwich-deprived customer base, whom we value so much.
You know, I was thinking about Monstrous Regiment as I always do, and I just say, damn, Terry Pratchett sure as shit did the "Female attack drone operator killing children" joke ages before we even got there culturally.
Like, OK, during the climax of the book we find out that half of the Military high command are also women right? Disguised as men and wanting to keep their secret hidden as they live as men yes, but still women.
And here's the thing.
That's not, unlike Jackrum's ending, to be read as a trans allegory.
These are women, who joined the military, a sexist and awful military force who would have killed them had it found out for both being women and for crossdressing, got in a position of power by following the rules and not rocking the Boat (unlike Polly and her squad, who were offered the perfect way out yet still decided to come out as women), and then once they become the high command of the military they do NOTHING.
They do not change those same structures who oppressed them, because now they are in power so who care if other women get hurt.
And they do not stop the war, continuing it instead.
"Women can do the same things man can" is one of the Book's arc words, and it does sound like a pretty neat message, until Terry points out how this very same message can be used to sponsor horrible actions too and passing them for progress.
Women can be war criminals just like man can.
Much like back in the days, cigarette companies sold women cancer on a stick presenting it as freedom and liberation for their gender.
Much like The pilot of the drone that's going to burn your house to the ground has a pride flag pin on their lapel.
You are not immune to fucking military propaganda.
no, actually, where is the whimsy?
my ex had a best friend named larry who asked me once: what do you think comes after irony?
we were at the bar where larry worked. it was a quiet night, and he'd hopped over to sit with us on the patron side. i swirled the lemon around my limoncello martini.
earnest positivity, i said, while my ex said, art self-destructs.
i stared at my ex. he stared at me.
his argument was the cinemasins argument: look how bad media is becoming! look at the loopholes and the dumb shit!
it was roughly 2011. galaxy print was still in. at the time, i had a favorite shirt that was a wolf howling at the moon. it got ripped in half in the wash and i honestly still mourn it. i dressed like effie stonem, because everyone did. and irony was the name of the thing. men liked MLP "ironically." the internet liked the kind of crass, "anti-mainstream" vibes of things like fuck romance, touch my butt and buy me pizza. we put cats in sunglasses everywhere, which was because we only liked things in irony.
and media had the same vibe in it: anti-hero white men would be "hard to love" and then storm off the scene. nobody was just earnestly trying to save the world: they were jaded, angry, unoriginal. mad you even asked them to try to help.
my ex ends up not being wrong. cinemasins becomes super popular. a lot of people start viewing media with this lens that is the cruelest, most jaded depiction. it's wrong for your character to have unexplained powers, even if the entire movie is about how strange it is she has unexplained powers - that is still considered a "loophole." characters make thoughtless, panicked choices? loophole. characters are actually kind people, despite hardship? loophole. features a woman doing literally anything without assistance? loophole. movies become hyper-aware of scrutiny, and now irony rules the media.
which means you go to a movie, and the character has to turn to the screen and say "beats me!!" or one of the side characters has to have some kind of quip like "are you seriously telling me that you think this is normal?" because nothing can happen in earnest. like a sitcom laugh track, we now anticipate the fourth-wall break: the moment that the media acknowledges it is telling a story. the media has to apologize for itself, or else someone like my ex rolls their eyes.
but here's the thing: i wasn't wrong either.
the difference might be that i am (and always have been) so soft-hearted that any crack in the light of this world will spear me into the ground. and i was the poet in the relationship. (he thought that was the same thing as being naïve and stupid). i was making things daily. i knew how all of us artists are driven by some strange desire to evolve. he notably liked to critique art, not to create it.
so yes, i've made things that are bitter and angry and even ironic. i've made long, sharp poems with all capital letters, and i've made poems about how the silence stretches out like a song. someone wrote once that we will spend our whole lives just circling the place we grew up. i think it's more that we spend our whole lives trying to remake a home. i think it's that as we age, it becomes less exciting to build the castle on the beach - we become aware of erosion, of windforce. we realize what we really want is to come home to our dog, castle or not.
and while art in the foreground is mired in white male violence and irony, and aggression, and not taking anything seriously - i don't think that's true of all art. i think more and more artists are leaning in to the things we love. the world has changed so much. they have taken so many things from us. the only thing we have left is love. at the bottom of the moving box - all we get is the faint sense that we have to appreciate what little we've got. i can't enjoy this stuff ironically anymore: what room do i have for irony? if it makes me happy, that is an amazing thing. there are so few happy places left for me. i want to be happy because of how leaves shiver beside each other like nestling birds. i want to be happy because of the color pink, and how magenta doesn't exist. i have spent so much of this life suffering, i have earned my right to a gentle ending. if nothing matters, i get to assign meaning to the nothing. i get to create meaning. i am an artist first and foremost, which means creation is my thing.
where is the whimsy? wherever i fucking put it. because if this is my last fucking chance to do any good in this world - i want to do it earnestly. i want to write things that make you happy. that make people feel heard and seen. what comes after irony has to be positivity.
it was close to my 21st birthday. in 7 years, i would end up writing a book about this relationship, which is hopefully coming out somewhere around May 2024. i come back to this bar scene in my memories a lot. i keep thinking of how pale my ex was. the look that crossed his face. how i looked back at him. how for a moment, both of us couldn't recognize the other person. like the gulf between us was a suddenly wide and cavernous thing. like we were alien to each other. he never took my opinion seriously, and he always seemed surprised whenever his manic-pixie-dream-girl ever broke free of the plot. like in the whole time we were together, i wasn't human enough.
this knowledge: where he said nothing comes after, my only instinct was what comes after is love.
Anonymous asked:
Blocking only creates uninformed bubbles.
actually blocking creates a fun internet experience where the people u dont like cant bother u
blocking creates a much more defined shape and more open, visible lace in the finished project
blocking evens out your fabric and allows you to shape the piece to the required dimensions prior to seaming
Blocking lets you turn your forward momentum into upward momentum giving you the proper height for your flip
Blocking allows actors to know where on the stage to stand, ensuring the audience sees them and giving the scene more cohesion
Blocking sets up the major elements on the canvas ensuring a pleasing composition before details are added.
Blocking ensures that a vehicle won’t roll during storage or ground-level maintenance.
Blocking ensures that the dramatic action of your scene is balanced, well characterized, and paced appropriately
he fucking killed the other guy
rare post where every single comment is funny
crying crying crying
guts2002-deactivated20211208
[ID: A tweet from @/pastoralcomical that reads: 'it's crazy that they only figured out tectonic plates in the 60s. a child in the 50s would say "it seems like south america and africa would fit together" and his mom would go "that's cute honey would you like a cigarette"' /End ID]
My Dad actually experienced the transition in a really funny way!
He grew up in a little farming community right outside a mid-sized city. They had a three-room elementary school (first and second grade, third and fourth grade, fifth and sixth grade), but then after that they went to middle and high school in the big schools in the city. Except, they had a special experimental program for kids in 5th and 6th grade they had identified as advanced in every school in and around the city, where they bussed them all in to a central place for advanced teaching half a day once a week. And Dad was in this program in like 1965.
Except, there wasn’t really a set curriculum or anything, because it was experimental. They just had a couple of their best teachers do whatever they wanted with the kids. It was nothing like the later “gifted” programs,” it was a lot less pressure and a lot more interesting things. One of the things they learned was plate tectonics, which was not just cutting edge, it was bleeding edge science at the time. So my Dad learns all about plate tectonics and goes home just happy as a clam.
Not much later, he’s getting a geology/geography lesson in his regular 5th grade class, and it’s out of the standard textbook with the standard explanations from the pre-plate tectonics theories.
So my Dad pipes up that actually that’s all wrong, because he learned it in his special class!
And the teacher says, “All right then, if you think you know better, you teach the class.”
My Dad is autistic, though undiagnosed. (In the 60s, extremely few people were getting diagnosed.) He did not notice the social undercurrents.
He said, “sure!” and popped up and took the eraser and erased her diagrams from the chalkboard, took the pointer out of her hand, and taught the class what he’d learned in his special program. While the class was sitting there in shock and fear because they could see how the teacher was seething with rage. But he didn’t notice, he just taught the class and then sat back down.
The teacher sent home a nasty note and had a talk with his parents. But my grandparents were not sympathetic, because after all, it was her own fault. If she didn’t like what my Dad did, she shouldn’t have made the offer for him to teach.
Wind is my least favourite weather phenomenon. I can pretty much tolerate any other climate condition for as long as I have the means to survive it, but I hate it when it's windy. And the more wind there is, the more I hate it. But I try not to be too negative about things I can do nothing about, so I will have to admit that wind has one great quality that no other weather condition has: it doesn't reach you indoors. Heat and cold can seep into your house, humidity will get inside, dry winter air gets inside, if there's enough rain outside it will get damp inside your house. Every other kind of weather can get inside, but it's never windy indoors.
I mean okay yeah, sufficiently strong wind can remove your roof and your walls. But that still doesn't mean that the wind is now indoors. It just means that neither are you.
I was all set to go "what do you mean wind can't get indoors, have you never experienced a cold draught whistling through an old window on a winter night?" and then I remembered that OP is Finnish and based on my experiences of visiting Finland, there are actual airtight houses there because Finnish winters get cold enough to make them essential.
Whereas in England you can be stuck with century-old single glazing in a frame that rattles if you look at it funny and a door that sits a full inch above the doorstep when closed, and you're culturally expected to just shove a Long Beast in front of the door and suck it up.
Oh yeah I've been to the UK. English houses are more like quaint little privacy curtains than any real shelter from weather or climate. The only exposure that the houses over there seem to reliably protect you from is from making direct eye contact with the people passing by on the street when you're sitting in your own home taking a shit. While your bath towels flutter in the wind.
On a scale of Chang Geng to Luo Binghe, how well does your teenage protagonist cope with the realization that he has a massive thing for the guy that's basically raising him?
“A collection of common glyphs of the poorly understood Memeorite civilization of the Second Silicon Age. Memeorite glyphs possess multiple conflicting interpretations and a complexity of meaning impossible to capture in a few short words. These are rough translations only.”
Source: https://twitter.com/beach_fox/status/1325668490431246336 (which include more “memeorite glyphs”
darkunknowncat
wait….. WAIT WAIT A DAMN MINUTE
Some people have never had to feign laughter at "No price tag? Must be free!" and it shows.
y’all cannot seriously be mad that the people with the most leverage are withholding their labor in solidarity with the people with the least leverage thereby giving them actual bargaining power like do you guys understand what a union is or nah
Anonymous asked:
If none of them married, how desperate would the Bennett girls actually have been?
Well the only dowry they have is £50 apiece from their mother’s small inheritance, per year; so that’s a total of £250 generated by Mrs. Bennet’s inherited investments per annum.
The Dashwoods (four women) are living on £500 a year when they are forced to live in Barton Cottage (with good-will making the rent presumably ridiculously low thanks to Sir John Middleton’s good nature, to say nothing of all the dinners and outings he invites the ladies to, which will help them economize on housekeeping costs for heavier meals.)
So there would be six Bennet women left to live on half as much as the Dashwoods are barely scraping by on. £250 is roughly considered enough to keep ONE gentleman at a barely-genteel level of leisure (presuming he does not keep a horse or estate or have any major expenses beyond securing his own lodgings/clothes/meals at a level becoming of a gentleman.)
None of the Bennet girls have been educated well enough for them to be governesses to support themselves, so…yes, their situation would heavily rely on mega-charity from others to just help them survive, much less maintain them in the lifestyle they’ve been accustomed to. The Dashwood women have NO social life beyond the outings provided by Sir John and the offer of Mrs. Jennings to host the older girls in London–otherwise they’d be stuck in their cottage, meeting absolutely no eligible men, creating a cycle of being poor and unmarried and too poor to meet anyone with money they could marry.
If the Bennet girls don’t at least have ONE of them marry well enough to help the rest before their father dies, they are really, truly, deeply fucked.
They may joke about beautiful Jane being the saviour of the family, but…it’s true. Mr. Bennet failed his daughters several times over in A) presuming he’d have a son, B) not saving money independently from his income to support his family after his death when it became clear he wasn’t going to have a son, C) not educating them well enough to enable them to support themselves in even in the disagreeable way of being a governess, D) not making any effort to escort his daughters to London or even local assemblies to help their matrimonial chances because he just doesn’t feel like it, E) throwing up his hands and shrugging when faced with the crises of Mr. Collins and Wickham.
Much as we are relieved on a romantic level that Mr. Bennet’s support of Elizabeth saves her from parental pressure to accept Mr. Collins, Mrs. Bennet is NOT A DICK for pushing for the match, because on a material level it very much means they get to KEEP THEIR HOUSE and gain a connection to the powerful patron Lady Catherine de Bourgh, which could be VERY advantageous for the other unmarried girls.
And the scandal of Wickham very nearly scuppers the chances of ANY of the other girls, and Wickham is a further DRAIN on the family finances, not a man who is going to substantially be able to support them. It is SUCH a disaster, and of course there’s not much Mr. Bennet can do until they are found, but he’s away in London and doing…what, exactly? Mr. Gardiner takes over and manages everything and Mr. Bennet seems happy to just let him.
Mr. Bennet does the ABSOLUTE LEAST, and actively damages his children’s futures by his inaction AND by his one action to support Lizzie’s individual needs being prioritized over the collective gain, which…I mean, Lizzie is going to be JUST as homeless and destitute as her sisters when he dies, so much good being Dad’s Favourite is going to do her. :/
£50 is around £4200 now, so about £21,000 for 6 women to live on today for the Bennets.
The Dashwoods at £500/year are at about £42,000 for 4 women to live on today.
Mr bennet definitely messed up, and mrs b deserves way more respect for the immense amount of pressure she’s under
I wrote an entire essay about this my last year of school, and my teacher thought I had lost the plot. He was my most hated teacher for other reasons, and this did not help his case.
I am Here for the Mrs. Bennet Defense Squad. Yes, she can be unsubtle in a major way, but she is also terrified of the alternative outcome. However, for all her lack of tact, she is also hella strategic, as demonstrated by setting up an “oh no I’m stuck in your house” romance trope situation for Jane and Bingley. She’s a clever lady, and she sees exactly what kind of shitty situation they’re in, and she can’t get her husband to do anything.
It’s really easy to read Mrs. Bennet’s inability to be subtle about anything as a sign of stupidity or inability to understand “society” (and the Bingley sisters are inclined to do this and link it to her very middle-class family because of classism) but she is literally panicking at all times about a very real concern, and everyone is just rolling their eyes. No compassion for her poor nerves indeed!
Ok so I started to scroll by. But the problem with the Mrs. Bennet discourse is that it can too quickly swing too far in the wrong direction. Yes, everything about this is (mostly) true. The Bennet women are in a really delicate position. Their safety and continued financial security hangs on Mr. Bennet’s faintest breath. It is in fact a conversation point several times that the girls are not educated enough to serve as governesses, but are of too high a social status to expect marriage to a tradesman.
The problem is that while Mrs. Bennet is certainly the only one in the Bennet household taking this issue seriously, she’s also gone too far in the opposite direction. The point of the Bennet marriage is that it’s bad for both of them. Mr. Bennet married a beautiful, foolish woman and then didn’t live according to the economy he would have had to in order to leave her a tidy sum once he died. Mrs. Bennet held herself safe under the happy expectation that she would produce a son, who would inherit the estate and provide for her in her own age.
Once it became clear that wouldn’t happen (and remember Lydia is only fifteen when the book opens, so Mrs. Bennet might only have given up the idea that she would have a son possibly a decade before, when Jane was about twelve) Mrs. Bennet had to focus on her daughters’ marriages in order to ensure the family’s well-being. The problem is that she overcompensated beyond what the society she lives in found good form.
Mrs. Bennet is a foolish, vain, nervous woman who is often called out in the narrative as an older woman with Lydia’s naturally foolish and selfish character. Her husband long ago realized he’d someone for looks who he was incompatible with personality-wise. The readers (especially modern readers) see his neglect of family affairs readily, and his gentle (and at times less than gentle) mockery of his family (particularly his wife and his three youngest daughters). But importantly, Mrs. Bennet also is meant to come across as a lesson to the reader. A silly woman who married above her station (it’s mentioned several times she secured the better marriage compared to her own sister) Mrs. Bennet doesn’t have the social graces she should have been expected to, as her husband’s wife.
This is an important plot point. Raising Mrs. Bennet up as the only Bennet aware of their impending doom as Mr. Bennet ages is important and adds depth to her matrimonial scheming on her daughters’ behalves. But vitally the way she goes about her work causes Mr. Darcy to hold the greatest of disdain for her and her family. It’s that disdain that helps induce him to persuade Mr. Bingley to leave Netherfield Park. This isn’t truly questioned by Elizabeth, who understands that her mother’s over-eager grasping immediately raised Mr. Darcy’s concerns. Remember, at this time there was an abundance of women who were deliberately setting out to marry men of good fortune, and desperate to make themselves amiable enough to secure that marriage, regardless of their true feelings. Mr. Darcy (and honestly Mr. Bingley too should have known better) would have spent his entire later youth and then adulthood on the alert for women whose intentions were only for his wealth, and not for his happiness. That’s important, especially after we see the great care Mr. Darcy takes with Pemberly and his dependents.
Mrs. Bennet’s desperation is understandable. Her character (grasping, foolish, too needy and nervous to understand the social graces she must display to appear acceptable to men of the station she wants her daughters to marry) isn’t virtuous. Mr. and Mrs. Bennet are intended by the narrative to stand as examples for what happens when people who are not of similar or compatible characters marry. Mr. Bennet grew so disillusioned with his wife that his reaction to his family’s financial insecurity is to make jokes and wave his wife’s concerns away as foolishness. He’s not really concerned with the future of his female family members. Mrs. Bennet on the other hand, doted on for her beauty then ignored and trivialized after that beauty lost it’s attraction, is left to indulge her worst impulses as she tries to snap up eligible young men for her daughters. Importantly, Mr. Wickham easily fools her as to his true character, even after he runs off with her daughter.
While we look at Mrs. Bennet’s desperation and find it both pitiable and understandable, that doesn’t mean that she’s the better person in the marriage. These two people could have been better than who they became as they aged. The problem is that in their youth they found a spouse who wasn’t compatible with them, and their own character deficiencies were magnified in the marriage. Mr. and Mrs. Bennet are intended as a warning to the reader over marrying for shallow reasons (beauty for him, money for her). Character matters in a marriage, as does mutual compatibility.
it's still so incredible that at a time where trans politics were nowhere to be found in mainstream & non-queer media Pratchett wrote a trans man who is morally ambiguous yet honorable, cunning and occasionally short-sighted, conservative yet protective over new generations, a military legend and a very fat, middle-aged man