Entitled

Do you ever wonder what happened to the weird girl from your middle school?

The change of pronouns here really seals the deal tbh

Every 21st century piece of writing advice: Make us CARE about the character from page 1! Make us empathize with them! Make them interesting and different but still relatable and likable!

Every piece of classic literature: Hi. It's me. The bland everyman whose only purpose is to tell you this story. I have no actual personality. Here's the story of the time I encountered the worst people I ever met in my life. But first, ten pages of description about the place in which I met them.

Modern writing advice: Yes your protagonist should have flaws but ultimately we should root for them and like them from the beginning :)

Charles Dickens: Here is the worst ugliest rudest meanest nastiest bitch you’ve ever met in your life.

Modern writing advice: Make sure your POV character goes through a significant arc! Make sure they are changed by the narrative! Make sure they learn a lesson!

Narrators of every book of the 19th century: the lesson I learned is these people fucking suck, sayonara you freaks

Modern writing advice: It’s all about the character overcoming obstacles and learning! They learn their lesson so they can fix their mistakes and make good choices in the future! It’s a character arc! It’s called growth! Readers love it!

Everyone from ancient times through the 19th century: would you like to watch a Guy fuck up twenty times in a row

Somewhere or other, C. S. Lewis points out (and I'm paraphrasing here) that every era of writing has its own tropes and its own blind spots; its own failings and its own successes. This is why it's important to read in lots of different eras: so you can see what does and doesn't work, in the long run, and be able to make your own informed choices about how to write.

Transcript: It reminds me of the “bike to work” movement. That is also portrayed as white, but in my city more than half of the people on bike are not white. I was once talking to a white activist who was photographic “bike commuters” and had only pictures of white people with the occasional “Black professional” I asked her why she didn’t photograph the delivery people, construction workers etc… id. the Black and [Latine] and Asian people… and she mumbled something about trying to “improve the image of biking” then admitted that she didn’t really see them as part of the “green movement” since they “probably have no choice” - I was so mad I wanted to quit working on the project she and I were collaborating on. So, in the same way when people in a poor neighborhood grow food in their yards… it’s just being poor- but when white people do it they are saving the earth or something.“ -comment left on the Racialious blog post “Sustainable Food and Privilege: Why is Green always White (and Male and Upper-Class) (via meggannn). END TS

the same thing when you look at the ~tiny house movement~ versus, say, people living in trailers, or even just renting in apartments or sublet housing

This this this this

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.

something something the poetry of science etc

October 3, 1992:  Sinead O’Connor appeared on Saturday Night Live singing an  acapella cover of Bob Marley’s song “War”, changing some of the lyrics to include references to child abuse, and ending the performance by tearing up a photo of Pope John Paull II and saying “fight the real enemy”.

This ruined her career and she was telling the truth, as we all came to find out years later.

Please remember she didn’t consider it as a career ruiner. 

To speak on how it “ruined” her career ignores her own feelings on it. Please acknowledge how she felt about it, instead of how you see it.

Female pilots edited out of the Star Wars movies.

I saw the tweets about this today, and I was like oh yeah, I remember hearing about that.

And then I saw the pictures and just— wow. What it would have meant to have these women in the movie, all this time. I can’t properly articulate it but it’s hitting me unexpectedly hard.

Wow thats a shame, even a nice old lady too.  These Space Valkyries  should have been left in.

They really should have.

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WHAT.

THE.

FUCK.

I lived, ate, and breathed Star Wars from age 2 until 2005 when RotS finally beat the enthusiasm out of me, and I have NEVER, EVER in all my reading on behind-the-scenes and makings-of heard of these shots. It’s a shame there was no relaunched edit of the original trilogy they could have slipped these in OH FUCKING WAIT THERE’S BEEN LIKE 3 OF THOSE NOW.

Fuck. FUCK. Whoever decided to edit out and bury these needs to french kiss an angle grinder.

I want to see the old lady in the A-Wing. Seriously, it’s like, she’s somebody’s grandma. Some kid in the Outer Rim Territories got greased by the Empire for seeing something she wasn’t supposed to see, and her grandma, the bush pilot, decided “Fuck this, I’m gonna strap on an fighter and make the Empire fucking PAY for the moment it decided to fuck with MY FAMILY.”

DON’T. MESS. WITH. GRANDMA.

These are quickly being put into the “always reblog” category.

Whenever there is a war, there are women who are warriors. Then they get erased from history. Happens in real wars and fictional ones alike.

Less than 5% of general aviation licenses go to women.  If these had been left in, you can bet that number would be higher.

^^^That knocked the breath out of me.

I just can’t believe they not only took them out, but refused to put them back in during the seventeen times they updated the movies. And of course the only possible explanation for this is: you do not belong here.

Representation matters. Now we just have to hope they learned that.

In your next story, write about one of the female pilots.

One of those women could have been Poe Dameron’s mother. His backstory talks about Mama Dameron being an A-Wing pilot and a Battle of Endor veteran. It’s a shame this footage got cut, it’d have done so much for the lore and for the fans.

Idk a lot of the backlash to broadening who falls under what terms comes from the need to distinctly fall under the specific label you worked towards…but distance from adjacent labels only limits your allies and puts you in a rigid box you can’t come back out of either.

Saw a post by a trans woman horrified by the concept of having overlapping experience with femboys because “fuck you I am a woman.” You are. A woman with a lot of overlapping experience with a GNC man. You’re not a GNC man. He’s not a woman. And the gap between you two is not a chasm.

“How dare you say trans men are similar to butch lesbians. Trans men are men.” Yeah, men with similar experiences to butch lesbians. The butch lesbian isn’t a man. You aren’t a woman. And the gap between you is not a chasm.

This mindset doesn’t even account for GNC men who also ID as women, trans men who use the label of lesbian. Butch can be a label for a person of either AGAB.

Binary trans people wanna separate themselves from each other and from nonbinary people sooo bad. Now it makes eggs feel like the jump from GNC woman to man is an insurmountable journey. A femboy gets told he’s making a mockery of trans women’s experiences. A transmasc femboy is seen as just a faker. A butch trans lesbian is seen as a faker.

These labels are all just plots on the map, not one side or the other. You journey to the farthest edges and you find twinks and lesbians who look and act identical despite being supposed opposites. It’s all made up, we’re all queer.

the thing is also that the experiences of cishet men and cishet women are not categorically opposite either! the belief that genders exist as distinct and EXCLUSIVE categories of being is the underpinning of heteronormativity, where you define yourself in opposition to everyone outside your own arbitrary category. and that's just not how humans are. my experience in transitioning from woman to man bore this out: women and men have a LOT of thoughts, feelings, and experiences in common, which is precisely why there's such a narrow focus on the (imho few) differences.

you are your gender because that's what you're doing with yourself. it's absolutely a personal thing you get to chose and define. but you're a lot more like other genders than you are different. finding solidarity and commonality with different people won't erase your unique identity , but it WILL gain you a wonderful community.

I think about this every hour of every day of every month by the way

— Paid for by Eric Grevstad, Bradenton, Florida

just go see an ob-gyn

Help me ob-gyn kenobi, you’re my only hope.

She needed more midwife-clorians. 

I really hope everyone reblogging this followed the link and read the article, because it’s larger point is really good “Reproductive health and childbirth is a crutch, and Lucas gets away with it because his audience accepts that these things are mysterious and cannot be intervened with the way that that the loss of limbs can be remedied with robot prosthetics, or the way Luke can be rescued from near-death on Hoth by being submerged in a bacta tank. Having babies is worse than being mauled by a wampa ice creature or being chopped up by lightsabers and falling into a river of lava. Lucas can write a world like that, and worse, the audience will accept it. But uteruses aren’t made of malignant magic. Women’s bodies are real physical things that can be studied and understood and when necessary, cured. ”

IDK about everyone else, but I’ve actually been certified as a doula and childbirth educator and worked in women’s health media for most of a decade.  All points valid, but “Help me OB-GYN Kenobi” broke me. 

had a genuine revelation in therapy that made me burst out laughing, been a while since I had one of those

therapist was talking about urge surfing (the idea that urges are waves that come and go if you ride them out, so the more you delay acting on the urge, the more likely you are not to do it) and then I was talking about how the transient nature of my emotions is actually what gets me so mad, like it’s actually very very annoying to be so so sad but to also be thinking “I know I’m very sad right now but unfortunately I am going to feel better later so I can’t destroy my life for one minute’s gratification,” and it’s just so annoying because if I knew or at least believed that I was gonna be sad FOREVER it would make things much easier, but instead I’m so mad at the knowledge that this too will pass. like it’s a manifestation of weak will to not feel bad forever.

and my therapist was like, “so even at the worst times, you still have hope”

and I was like “holy shit dude” because never once in my life have I considered that the little bastard voice that tells me not to smash all the dishes because they’ll be a pain in the ass to clean up in ten minutes is the last gift/curse of Pandora’s box

hope is a thing with wings, i.e. a bird and like most birds is 1) very beautiful, 2) very annoying, and 3) sometimes shits on you

“And I don’t think anybody should feel bad if they get diagnosed with a mental illness, ’cause it’s just information about you that helps you to know how to take better care of yourself.

“Being bipolar, there’s nothing wrong with it. Being bipolar is like not knowing how to swim. It might be embarrassing to tell people, and it might be hard to take you certain places. But they have arm floaties. And if you just take your arm floaties, you can go wherever the hell you want.

“And I know some of you are like, ‘But Taylor, what if people judge me for taking arm floaties?’ Well, those people don’t care if you live or die, so maybe who cares? Maybe fuck those people a little. I don’t know.”

Taylor Tomlinson, Look At You (2022)

Always reblog

As a former zookeeper we would hear this a lot. “If you don’t study hard you’ll end up cleaning poop for a living.” It’s the one time we’re allowed to go off on the visitors. I once heard my boss rant for five minutes at a lady, in front of her kids, about how he had a Master’s degree, how people literally worked there for free, and how dare she judge people without bothering to know anything about them. Later that day his boss came by and said, roughly, “She told us what happened. Thanks for not throwing anything this time.”

I can count on one hand the amount of times I have gone off on people, but employment snobbery gives me the rage. I was showing the new kid how to use the fry scoop at McDonald’s “.. like this, and then just sort of hold it perpendicular and give it one tap..”

And the new kid sniggered “isn’t perpendicular a bit of a big word for McDonald’s?”

Something in me was just so annoyed by this 16yr old who was learning to work right next to me and somehow felt above us? Fuck that shit. I pointed at the people just on the floor and went off, “she’s a 4th year law student, she’s the primary career for her terminally ill daughter, he raises 100,000 for charity every year, she manages 3 stores and more than £16mil in turnover a year. What the fuck do you do?”

He just sort of mumbled “I didn’t know”

“you shouldn’t have to know, you’re not better than us. So. You tap it once and then move it here to release…”

“I didn’t know.”

“You shouldn’t have to know,”

yes to all this because workers can be educated and intelligent, but also, even if workers are formally uneducated or dont know big words that doesnt mean they arent equally deserving of respect

Zookeepers bust their asses shoveling shit and feeding apex predators so you can stare at an elephant without flying to Asia or Africa.

Fast food workers bust their asses surrounded by hot ovens and boiling oil so you can get food quickly without having to make it yourself or even learn how.

Janitors bust their asses cleaning up the most vile things humans can do to a public room so you don’t have to tiptoe around human waste everywhere you go.

Mail carriers bust their asses going door to door in near-fatal heat/cold and have to deal with the possibility of getting attacked by your poorly-trained pets so you don’t have to drive to the post office every single day.

Warehouse workers bust their asses making sure YOUR latest Amazon crap doesn’t just disappear into thin air.

And retail workers bust their asses coddling and picking up after you like your parents because none of you know how to read a price tag or stop deliberately miss-shelving things you never wanted.

But sure, go ahead and act like you wouldn’t be dead in a week without these people.

Points were made here.

saw this post the other day that talked about how so many of us are soooo scared of appearing even momentarily human towards each other these days. like you can't see me sweat or cry or without makeup or with food stuck in my teeth or laugh loud and ugly. everything must be composed and sanitised and photo ready at all times. it's like corporate office culture seeping out into our homes and our lives and for what. it's not cringe to be a real person around other real people

Btw you can be intensely critical of the Democratic party and recognize that it is full of aged out of touch moderates who are refusing to meet the urgency of the moment,

and also recognize that voting for Democrats is extremely important because it allows things like the confirmation of Justices and prevents the literal fascist party from gaining more power and that harm reduction is an important end in itself

These things can coexist

Politics is a long game. Being disappointed and angry today does not obviate your responsibility to participate

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