Audrey R., who’s running for the OTW board, is apparently also currently running for office. As a Republican

so uhhhhhh keep that in mind when you’re voting

you’re saying this like a liberal who has the view of republicans.bad dems good and vote blue no mayter who.

y-yes? i sort of think the website that was founded because every other website was purging queer fanwork would be best served by someone who isn’t a member of the We Love Burning Books and Killing Gay People party. but that’s just the humble opinion of someone with a brain that works

For give me, but is this person running for Ao3 board and CONGRESSS at the same time??

Read Fairestcat’s breakdown of Audrey R’s answers to the OTW candidate Q&A for more in-depth reasons you probably don’t want to vote her onto the board https://fairestcat.dreamwidth.org/678527.html

Then read about all the other candidates and decide who you DO want to vote for -- there are 6 candidates and 4 open seats -- https://elections.transformativeworks.org/otw-elections-candidates/

Reminder that if you want to vote AGAINST someone in the OTW Board elections, you need to NOT RANK THEM AT ALL. If you rank them last, you've still voted for them--just less enthusiastically than you've voted for everyone else.

Rank ONLY the candidates you would be WILLING to see win. DO NOT rank any candidates you would not be willing to see win.

Audrey R being a Republican is not the issue.

Audrey R working for a pro-censorship think tank that claims that gay media and any information about sex and "problematic relationships in fiction" should be banned because tHiNk Of ThE cHiLdReN and saying in her policy piece for her AO3 election that she wants to look at implementing age verification for AO3 is the ACTUAL issue.

Does her holding these beliefs AND being a Republican politician have a correlation? Almost certainly. But when making the argument about why eligible voters should vote for literally anyone but her please use the actual reason of "she holds these specific views that are bad" not "she's from the bad people party" because otherwise you end up in this exact situation wasting time and energy arguing with people about "well how do you know she has problematic views?" And having to justify why you think literally millions of people hold bad views for a whole host of things instead of simply talking about why this one specific woman's views are bad for this one specific thing which is what you wanted to talk about in the first place!

Also in case anyone is thinking "age verification actually sounds like a good thing" it's literally impossible to do. It would require OTW to collect the legal IDs of every single user and it's just not logistically possible. The British government passed a law a few years ago trying to make all porn sites do this for people accessing from the UK and they had to very awkwardly cancel it because it's a logistical fucking nightmare and someone from Pornhub sat politicians down and used small words to explain why it not only wouldn't work but would also be a data privacy disaster the second anyone hacked a database.

I really hope people online aren't getting the wrong impression of unions and that they're flawless Things that will protect them from any and all mistreatment and that strikes are fun little treats union workers get

Unions are People not Things. Union leaders can fuck up. Unions can definitely operate in a way that gets you low wages and poor benefits if you're not being represented well.

A union by itself does not guarantee you anything. Unions take work and money to run. You pay dues, you go to meetings, you vote. You protect each other in a union. You don't join a union and magically have everything taken care of for you.

Strikes are a powerful tool but are scary. They're not a goal to achieve. Unions don't aim to go on strike during negotiations.

Unions are the pinnacle of "Decisions are made by the people who show up".

If you don't like the decision, you have to show up. And it's gonna be a lot of work and take a long time, but if you keep showing up and you bring others with you then you will get to be the ones making the decisions.

The people you disagree with already know this. They already do this. So you gotta do it too or else they get to keep making the decisions.

They’re about to break so many laws it’s not even funny, I can feel it in my bones

I feel like we are so caught up in the stupidity of him doing this because of some petty fight he lost 20 years ago that we're totally glossing over the fact that Linda's shiny new mission statement says that Twitter will be the centre of online messaging on THE EXACT SAME DAY that they limited direct messaging for literally 95% of users.

women should lift weights because it prevents osteoporosis in old age and makes you a more capable person in everyday life please shut up about butts and waists and hourglasses i’m going to fucking kill

;___;♡♡♡♡

genuine question from someone who would rather chew their arm off than go to a public gym, and also doesnt have a lot of money: how do you safely get into strength training? are there youtube channels, apps (android), etc anyone recommends that makes it approachable and don’t lean into diet culture / body shaming?

also the biggest thing that keeps me from working out is that I already have joint and spinal issues and moving the wrong way can fuck up a knee or a shoulder or my spine for days. I really don’t want to injure myself, and have unwittingly done so before. resources that are extremely clear on exactly how to move and offer gentler / alternative ways to move for people with limited range are vital.

Okay, so this may not technically be strength training, but muscles are dumber than bricks and cannot tell the difference between your own bodyweight and actual weights.

So, may I recommend:

He runs a YouTube channel where he goes over how to work your way up to more complex exercises (for instance, his pull-ups videos start with using a door jamb and moving your weight back and forth) so it’s good for easing yourself into things.

You also don’t have to fork out for expensive weights and such if you don’t want to/can’t. Substitute with stuff you either already have at home or can get from the supermarket and build up the weight you can exercise with. 500 gram cans of butter beans then 750 gram bottles of pasta sauce. 1 litre drink bottle then your 1.5 litre milk bottle. 3 litre bulk-buy bottle of laundry detergent. Etc. One of my dogs weighs 13 kilos and I pick her up on the regular (to her delight). One weighs 16 kg and I pick him up too (to his consternation and mild disapproval). You don’t have to fit out some fancy home gym before you can start strength training.

I second Hybrid Calisthenics, that’s the program I use. It’s run by one guy who’s taken it upon himself to make exercising more accessible and it’s completely free! Each exercise has different variations based on your ability and each variation is further divided into different levels of difficulty so you can work up to where you want to be. If you can’t do a single push up for example then this program will help you work up to the point where you can, and if you’re a master of push ups then there are more advanced body weight exercises you can tackle so you can keep moving forward in your training without stagnating. The routine offers a full body workout with absolutely no equipment required for the beginning levels. The only reason you would need to buy anything is if you want to work up to a full pull up, at which point you would need actual pull up rings

Here’s his actual website which I feel is easier to navigate than the YouTube channel on its own and organizes things in a way that’s easy to understand. He explains everything you need to know about the routine and each individual exercise has both a text description and a video tutorial

the rationalist "we should clone a few thousand copies of von neumann cause they'll have really high IQ and solve all our problems" thing but for napoleon. what america needs is a (eunuch?) vat-grown napoleon clone leader class

they would literally all just kill each other

that's what the castration option is there for if necessary

Actually Napoleon had a ton of loyalty to his family and loved delegating so I think as long as you had one that was clearly a few years older than the rest to establish the initial hierarchy it would go ok

I was imagining that I personally would act as a father/uncle figure to my brood of napoleons, as head of the cloning program

"I bred a legion of Napoleon clones to be the officer corps of my fledgling dictatorship and now they've overthrown me and plunged the nation into a civil war of genetically identical but ideologically diverse factions that I must somehow defeat???"

Napoleon #08C0: Begone with you, Napoleon #1014! We'll never ally ourselves with a Bonapartist!

Comic Relief Sidekick Napoleon: Guys why can't we just Bon-together instead of Bon-aparte -_-

I would euthanize that one humanely. this is serious business

Well I wouldn't! I would kill it horribly and inhumanely, like say through drawing and quartering, and that's that!

Comic Relief Sidekick Napoleon getting drawn and quartered: "Aaaaa I'm getting Napoleon Tornaparte!!!"

this shit is why I came back to tumblr

This is very clever.

I like this.

One of the issues we are facing now, given that venture capital is no longer fire hosing cash into social media networks (or at least not in the way it used to 10-15 years ago) is sites need to make money.

Having a tag that is affordable to say "I have services, they are available" helps fix that.

Independent creators have been able to create relatively gargantuan-sized audiences for very, very, very little money in comparison to pre-social media methods. Which is a good thing.

As we start hitting the brick wall of "networks need money" + "independent creators having access to cheap marketing is a good thing," clever solutions need to exist.

This is one such and it's great.

Sorting and filtering capabilities are undoubtedly not far behind and/or on some whiteboard somewhere.

This is immensely pleasing.

Hey, if this is real and any of my mutuals wants to get a badge for advertising purposes, hit me up. I'll buy your badge for you.

Oh, this is FUN.

We live in a dystopia....

If the background actors don't come in for work because they exist virtually then the background costume and background hair and make up and their catering and transport and all the other departments that look after them get cut too. These things have knock on effects...

And background actors become the stars of the future. If they have a rosta of digital actors they can promote AI "stars" and then that's game over. The entire industry dead except for a couple of VFX sweatshops and literally hundreds of thousands of jobs destroyed.

#SAGAFTRAstrong #WGAstrong

Bob Iger's personal contract with Disney would pay for this deal, a deal that affects literally hundreds of thousands of employees across dozens of studios and two unions.

They have the money. They just don't want to share it.

I'm on the record as saying that I never care when white characters get recast as POC (like with Namor and MJ in the MCU); however, there is one distinct exception to that. I believe Charles Xavier has to be white. Hear me out.

I'm approaching this with the characterization of Charles Xavier in the comics (not the Fox films, as it has been so long since I've seen them) and my own interpretation of the politics surrounding his character. I would love to hear some alternate perspectives, provided that it is all polite discussion ofc.

As I alluded to in an older post I see Charles Xavier as a very liberal character. He is always for assimilation and has a tendency to prescribe the "model minority" mindset. He uses his most attractive and human passing mutants as the face of his team. Never in the comics did he publicly identify himself as a mutant- Cassandra Nova was the one controlling his body when he publicly came out as a mutant. Charles' wealth and his whiteness prevents him from seeing the reality of the mutant situation, it is the reason why him and Erik are always at odds. Erik, as a Holocaust survivor, understands the patterns of discrimination and bigotry. He understands that no matter how much the submit to the mold of "well behaved mutants" they will never be treated the same.

Charles, in my mind, encapsulates the liberal fixation on both the aesthetics of bigotry and the individual. Bigotry is bad when people yell slurs and commit hate crimes. Slurs are yelled by individuals, and hate crimes are solitary events perpetuated by individual bigots. Erik was always a character who attacked the system. He wanted to dismantle the systems responsible for the oppression of mutants. Charles is someone who has benefitted from that system, even as a mutant, and on some innate level is afraid of changing that fact. I think being white and wealthy contributes greatly to the philosophy of Charles Xavier. The politics of mutants and the X-Men universe has always been something of great interest to me and this is just the way I see it. But, what do you guys think?

All good points but like, the Professor X/Magneto dynamic literally draws from the relationship between Martin Luther King and Malcom X.

All of these points can be applied to a wealthy man of colour too.

White men do not think about how their community can be a "model minority" because they do not see themselves as the minority. Rich white men don't long to "fit into the system" because it's their system. To them that's just how the world is and they don't even think about it. You have to be different to want to fit in. If you're not different then you just fit in and you don't think about it.

Professor X can be any race, he just has to be the "pleasant, successful, non-threatening" stereotype of whatever race he is cast as. He is "one of the good ones" whatever that means to that community.

There's nothing here that is fundamentally white. In fact a wealthy and successful POC Professor X who is used to being the only non-white face in a room, used to soothing fragile sensibilities about stereotypes of one of his communities easily using the same tactics for another one he belongs to makes a lot of sense.

And again, a lot of the early character dynamics came from the Civil Rights movement and the politics surrounding it. It seems a bit ridiculous to me to have a character born from that moment never be a black man.

I completely understand what you’re saying BUT I have to make sure everyone knows this— the MLK/Malcom X things is 150% not true. Stan Lee was talking out of his ass, he didn’t write Magneto as a particularly political character. Magneto was a generically evil character who was really a cookie cutter villain until Chris Claremont rewrote him in Giant Size (a bit more detail on that here).

Chris Claremont is quoted saying:

“It was blended in. There’s a lot of talk online now that Magneto stands in for Malcolm X and Xavier stands in for Martin Luther King, which is totally valid but for me, being an immigrant white (Claremont was born in England), to make that analogy felt incredibly presumptuous. An equivalent analogy could be made to [Israeli prime minister] Menachem Begin as Magneto, evolving through his life from a terrorist in 1947 to a winner of the Nobel Peace Prize 30 years later. That evolution was something I wanted to apply to the relationship between Xavier and Magneto.” (source)

I think when you read the comics with that MLK/Malcom X read it does an incredible disservice to the civil rights movement and fundamentally misunderstands both of those figures. MLK was not a conformist pacifist and Malcom X was not a murderous missel-twirling villain (which for all the ways I understand and agree with him— Magneto was almost always written as a villain). Stan Lee, for all his accomplishments, has no place to talk about Magneto politics because he had almost nothing to do with the version of Magneto we know today. A version of Professor X based on MLK would be almost a complete rewrite of the character, which I’m not at all opposed to in any way. This post is assuming we’re adapting the Charles Xavier of modern X-Men comics.

See this is what I get for taking Stan Lee at his word. Thank you.

So scrap the MLK bit. But yeah, in general, I don't really see anything that Xavier does as fundamentally white.

I see Hollywood is now very into the idea of buying something once and then owning it forever and being able to make infinite copies. Which. Isn’t quite the message they imparted upon me in my childhood. In the spirit of their own long-held stance:

How to Get a Chronological Dash as a New Blog

I've been working on a Tumblr Roleplaying 101 guide, and in doing so wound up making a brand new Tumblr account for some screenshots. And this process made me realize how weirdly complicated Tumblr has made it for new accounts to get a chronological dash. So if you just want to see posts from people you follow, in the order that they made them, this what you have to do.

First, go to your settings, go under Dashboard, and scroll down to Preferences. Toggle off Best Stuff First. This switches your dash from an algorithm feed to a chronological one.

If you have an older blog, that's all you have to do. But if your blog was created more recently, you have an extra step.

The Tumblr dashboard has different tabs, which you can see across the top of your feed. Most older users have completed tuned these out, because we don't care about anything other than the basic feed. There is a Following tab, which shows posts from users you follow, and a For you tab, which shows recommend posts Tumblr thinks you'll like.

On blogs created before May 8, 2023, the Following tab is the default view. However, blogs created after this date have the For you tab as the default view. (This is an intentional change by Tumblr.)

This means if you are a newer blog and want to see posts from people you follow, you'll need to manually switch to the Following tab every time you open the dashboard.

If you do not like this change, consider contacting Tumblr staff. Submit a form under the Feedback category and explain that you'd like the option to make the Following tab the default for new blogs. And please, be polite! There is a person on the other side of the screen who likely had no say in this change, and even if they did, they don't deserve to be yelled at.

Anyway, fuck the CEOs and other execs. Support the strikers.

And you have to be in what...3-5 things before they offer you SAG membership?  How is ANYONE EVER going to join if they have one job and then their likeness is owned?!?!?  No one will ever break into the industry.

Fucking assholes.

It also means you don't need to clothe those actors or do their hair and makeup, you don't need transport for them, you don't need to feed them, you don't need to pay them, you don't need anyone to check they're being safe, you don't need anyone to light them.

The average Hollywood film employs 276 crew. Some films of course this can be even higher especially if you have have hundreds of background extras for big scenes.

This plan would cut that figure down drastically to perhaps a dozen disgustingly underpaid guys in a VFX sweatshop abroad.

The film industry as we know it would be utterly dead.

Doctor: $140,000 a year

Furry artist on Patreon: $160,000 a year

i think you’re lowballing the furry art amount tbh

I’m sorry for the inaccuracies, Doctor Yiff

no matter how I respond to this I don’t look good, well played. i walked right into that

Well, furry artists are typically more competent and courteous than your average doctor, so I can see that.

Did you just legitimately tell me that a person who draws wolf ass is more competent than a dude who spent 8+ years in a university to give you your lung transplant?

doctors are bullshit and furry artists perform an infinitely more valuable service to society compared to them

You will die in 7 days

It took doctor’s like 10 years to diagnose what was wrong with me, some insisting I was faking for attention while a furry artist I knew just went “that sounds like crohn’s” after hearing me complain once and ended up being right

Also I can’t go to a doctor and ask them to draw Rouge the Bat wider than she is tall with tits to match, now can I

You could if you weren’t a fucking coward

World Heritage Post

Art by coolfrogdude together at last

[ID: a comic illustrating the above thread as if it was happening in a theater. The users are mostly shaped like their icons, pukicho is a pikachu and hokuto-ju-no-ken is a gengar. The last panel is gengar looks back where a speech bubble comes out of the crowd to say, “you could if you weren’t a fucking coward.” /end]

I can’t believe I’m actually seeing this post

Magic of tumblr,

I am morally obligated to add the YouTube video whenever this thread crosses my dash

I’ve seen this thread more than a few times. But this is the first time I’ve seen this video. So thank you for your service.

If you're new to Tumblr and don't quite get it this is the fundamental core of our culture as a site. Put yourself in the mentality of being in an auditorium where people are welcome to just sit and watch or join in the conversation if they want.

Tumblr is a true Athenian Democracy, in both the good and bad sense of the term, up to and including ritually ostracising community members who get too popular.

literally traumatizing to learn that the london bridge is in fucking arizona

this is rocking my world view i feel like i have to call my family

....where did people think 'london bridge is falling down' came from?

i don’t necessarily conflate “falling down” with “being dismantled brick by brick and shipped to arizona to be rebuilt” but i guess its not my area of expertise

Wait WHAT

okay, ugh, i hate these long “let’s learn a thing!” tumblr posts but i guess i’m making one?

to my fellow americans and other non-english/non-londoners (no clue if this is just General Knowledge in the rest of the country). the bridge you’re thinking of as “the big bridge in london”? this guy?

this is not the london bridge. this is the tower bridge, located about half a mile downstream from the current london bridge. 

“wait, kiwi, the ‘current’ london bridge??”

well...

ew.

so there has been “a bridge at this spot in the thames” since roman times. the romans building a bridge at this spot is part of the founding of london. but the bridges have fallen down and been replaced a number of times because, like, bridges are hard to build and london is a busy place. we’re going against ship-of-theseus rules here and saying when you tear down an old bridge and build a new one in the same place, it’s a new bridge.

my favorite is definitely the “old” london bridge:

which stood from 1209 to 1831, and yes, there is a whole-ass neighborhood on that bridge. it started with henry plantagenet, who accidentally (maybe) ordered the assassination of the archbishop of canterbury, and as public penance ordered a new london bridge to be built, with a chapel to “saint thomas of the bridge” at its center. the city was due for a new bridge anyway, but making a sturdier stone bridge + the very ostentatious chapel made it A Big Deal and also Hella Expensive. later kings would sell plots of property (i almost typed “plots of land” but No) on the bridge to offset costs, but it was still. HELLA EXPENSIVE. which is good because it lasted SIX HUNDRED YEARS. and went through lots of renovations and partial rebuilds and, you know, all the houses and shops on the bridge being renovated because oh my god you put a neighborhood on a bridge and left it there for six hundred years. 

but at the end of six hundred years it was falling apart, because all the renovations on top of renovations does weird shit to masonry after awhile, and also hey! that’s a long time and london is a busy city! so they built “new” london bridge, which opened for transit in 1831:

and it’s an okay-looking bridge, for a stone bridge. but in the timeline of bridge architecture this is about when humans start to get real creative with steel and suspension and other fun engineering tricks. a stone bridge is just kinda... utilitarian. and also, when you’re the busiest bridge in one of the busiest cities in the world, you’re prone to depression. [laugh track]

no, seriously, the bridge started to sink at a rate of about an inch every eight years, slightly faster on one side than on the other. which doesn’t sound like much, but the old bridge lasted six hundred years! new guy’s only been on the job for a century and already slacking like this? suck it up!

but instead of saying that, because it’s a ridiculous thing to say to depressed humans let alone depressed bridges, they decided to dismantle and replace it. city council member ivan luckin, presumably as a joke, suggested selling the pieces of the bridge to offset the cost of building a new one.

robert mcculloch, american oil baron, wannabe real-estate icon, and genuine crazyperson, said “oh, a bridge for sale, you say?”

mcculloch, see, made a deal with the us government to build a city on this deserted chunk of lakeshore. a tourist attraction like “a whole ass bridge shipped from london, england” would bring attention and hopefully buyers to fuckall lake havasu, arizona (the fuckall is silent).

so the deal was struck, the bridge was dismantled and its outermost stones (the pretty, non-structural stuff) were labeled neatly and shipped to the states, and rebuilt over a new concrete structure.

and it... kind of worked? lake havasu isn’t a major tourist attraction in the grand scheme of the country, but considering it’s competing with the grand fucking canyon on the other side of arizona it does alright. it’s a real city and everything!

meanwhile, back in london, it’s the late sixties-early seventies, and that means concrete and brutalism are in in a big way. so here’s your new-new “modern” london bridge, kids.

again, eww.

so to summarize: the tower bridge is a different thing and it’s where you think it is (aka in london), london bridge has been torn down and rebuilt a bunch of times and it’s fine, an american oil baron recycled Once and specifically did it as a macho flex, and humans are amused by ridiculous shit. 

this has been your Annoying Tumblr Educational Post, thanks for reading, tip your waitresses and have a nice day.

"Old" London Bridge was also one of the reasons why the thames used to freeze over. Its many small arches meant that the river slowed down and so when it got cold it froze more easily. Since the building of the "new" bridge in the 1830s and the current bridge in the 1960s the arches have only gotten wider which means the thames flows more freely and so can no longer freeze.

Wait hold on so "London bridge is falling down" is a nursery rhyme about Henry Plataganet feeling So Bad about having Thomas Aquinas killed that he built an extra ornate heavy bridge with an expemsive chapel and then had to build loads of properties to offset the costs of the chapel and all of that weight slowly caused the bridge to start falling down over time?

Excellent bit of historical trivia.

No "London bridge is falling down" is a Victorian nursery rhyme about how London Bridge was 600 years old and needed replacing because 600 years was a long time for a bridge to be in constant use.

If anything the selling of property on the bridge probably kept it up for longer rather than causing it to fall down because people were motivated to maintain the bridge since they lived and worked on it.

literally traumatizing to learn that the london bridge is in fucking arizona

this is rocking my world view i feel like i have to call my family

....where did people think 'london bridge is falling down' came from?

i don’t necessarily conflate “falling down” with “being dismantled brick by brick and shipped to arizona to be rebuilt” but i guess its not my area of expertise

Wait WHAT

okay, ugh, i hate these long “let’s learn a thing!” tumblr posts but i guess i’m making one?

to my fellow americans and other non-english/non-londoners (no clue if this is just General Knowledge in the rest of the country). the bridge you’re thinking of as “the big bridge in london”? this guy?

this is not the london bridge. this is the tower bridge, located about half a mile downstream from the current london bridge. 

“wait, kiwi, the ‘current’ london bridge??”

well...

ew.

so there has been “a bridge at this spot in the thames” since roman times. the romans building a bridge at this spot is part of the founding of london. but the bridges have fallen down and been replaced a number of times because, like, bridges are hard to build and london is a busy place. we’re going against ship-of-theseus rules here and saying when you tear down an old bridge and build a new one in the same place, it’s a new bridge.

my favorite is definitely the “old” london bridge:

which stood from 1209 to 1831, and yes, there is a whole-ass neighborhood on that bridge. it started with henry plantagenet, who accidentally (maybe) ordered the assassination of the archbishop of canterbury, and as public penance ordered a new london bridge to be built, with a chapel to “saint thomas of the bridge” at its center. the city was due for a new bridge anyway, but making a sturdier stone bridge + the very ostentatious chapel made it A Big Deal and also Hella Expensive. later kings would sell plots of property (i almost typed “plots of land” but No) on the bridge to offset costs, but it was still. HELLA EXPENSIVE. which is good because it lasted SIX HUNDRED YEARS. and went through lots of renovations and partial rebuilds and, you know, all the houses and shops on the bridge being renovated because oh my god you put a neighborhood on a bridge and left it there for six hundred years. 

but at the end of six hundred years it was falling apart, because all the renovations on top of renovations does weird shit to masonry after awhile, and also hey! that’s a long time and london is a busy city! so they built “new” london bridge, which opened for transit in 1831:

and it’s an okay-looking bridge, for a stone bridge. but in the timeline of bridge architecture this is about when humans start to get real creative with steel and suspension and other fun engineering tricks. a stone bridge is just kinda... utilitarian. and also, when you’re the busiest bridge in one of the busiest cities in the world, you’re prone to depression. [laugh track]

no, seriously, the bridge started to sink at a rate of about an inch every eight years, slightly faster on one side than on the other. which doesn’t sound like much, but the old bridge lasted six hundred years! new guy’s only been on the job for a century and already slacking like this? suck it up!

but instead of saying that, because it’s a ridiculous thing to say to depressed humans let alone depressed bridges, they decided to dismantle and replace it. city council member ivan luckin, presumably as a joke, suggested selling the pieces of the bridge to offset the cost of building a new one.

robert mcculloch, american oil baron, wannabe real-estate icon, and genuine crazyperson, said “oh, a bridge for sale, you say?”

mcculloch, see, made a deal with the us government to build a city on this deserted chunk of lakeshore. a tourist attraction like “a whole ass bridge shipped from london, england” would bring attention and hopefully buyers to fuckall lake havasu, arizona (the fuckall is silent).

so the deal was struck, the bridge was dismantled and its outermost stones (the pretty, non-structural stuff) were labeled neatly and shipped to the states, and rebuilt over a new concrete structure.

and it... kind of worked? lake havasu isn’t a major tourist attraction in the grand scheme of the country, but considering it’s competing with the grand fucking canyon on the other side of arizona it does alright. it’s a real city and everything!

meanwhile, back in london, it’s the late sixties-early seventies, and that means concrete and brutalism are in in a big way. so here’s your new-new “modern” london bridge, kids.

again, eww.

so to summarize: the tower bridge is a different thing and it’s where you think it is (aka in london), london bridge has been torn down and rebuilt a bunch of times and it’s fine, an american oil baron recycled Once and specifically did it as a macho flex, and humans are amused by ridiculous shit. 

this has been your Annoying Tumblr Educational Post, thanks for reading, tip your waitresses and have a nice day.

"Old" London Bridge was also one of the reasons why the thames used to freeze over. Its many small arches meant that the river slowed down and so when it got cold it froze more easily. Since the building of the "new" bridge in the 1830s and the current bridge in the 1960s the arches have only gotten wider which means the thames flows more freely and so can no longer freeze.

I'm on the record as saying that I never care when white characters get recast as POC (like with Namor and MJ in the MCU); however, there is one distinct exception to that. I believe Charles Xavier has to be white. Hear me out.

I'm approaching this with the characterization of Charles Xavier in the comics (not the Fox films, as it has been so long since I've seen them) and my own interpretation of the politics surrounding his character. I would love to hear some alternate perspectives, provided that it is all polite discussion ofc.

As I alluded to in an older post I see Charles Xavier as a very liberal character. He is always for assimilation and has a tendency to prescribe the "model minority" mindset. He uses his most attractive and human passing mutants as the face of his team. Never in the comics did he publicly identify himself as a mutant- Cassandra Nova was the one controlling his body when he publicly came out as a mutant. Charles' wealth and his whiteness prevents him from seeing the reality of the mutant situation, it is the reason why him and Erik are always at odds. Erik, as a Holocaust survivor, understands the patterns of discrimination and bigotry. He understands that no matter how much the submit to the mold of "well behaved mutants" they will never be treated the same.

Charles, in my mind, encapsulates the liberal fixation on both the aesthetics of bigotry and the individual. Bigotry is bad when people yell slurs and commit hate crimes. Slurs are yelled by individuals, and hate crimes are solitary events perpetuated by individual bigots. Erik was always a character who attacked the system. He wanted to dismantle the systems responsible for the oppression of mutants. Charles is someone who has benefitted from that system, even as a mutant, and on some innate level is afraid of changing that fact. I think being white and wealthy contributes greatly to the philosophy of Charles Xavier. The politics of mutants and the X-Men universe has always been something of great interest to me and this is just the way I see it. But, what do you guys think?

All good points but like, the Professor X/Magneto dynamic literally draws from the relationship between Martin Luther King and Malcom X.

All of these points can be applied to a wealthy man of colour too.

White men do not think about how their community can be a "model minority" because they do not see themselves as the minority. Rich white men don't long to "fit into the system" because it's their system. To them that's just how the world is and they don't even think about it. You have to be different to want to fit in. If you're not different then you just fit in and you don't think about it.

Professor X can be any race, he just has to be the "pleasant, successful, non-threatening" stereotype of whatever race he is cast as. He is "one of the good ones" whatever that means to that community.

There's nothing here that is fundamentally white. In fact a wealthy and successful POC Professor X who is used to being the only non-white face in a room, used to soothing fragile sensibilities about stereotypes of one of his communities easily using the same tactics for another one he belongs to makes a lot of sense.

And again, a lot of the early character dynamics came from the Civil Rights movement and the politics surrounding it. It seems a bit ridiculous to me to have a character born from that moment never be a black man.

doggo's first day of work after a week off

This is the exact opposite of Garfield

We had one of Steff's comedian friends staying with us on the weekend, lovely lad called Sam from Singapore. He had never been to Wales before, and he requested that we take him to a Welsh restaurant so he could try Welsh food

That's surprisingly difficult, actually. Like a lot of Welsh culture, our culinary traditions have not exactly been applauded over the years, so you don't really see them. But a lucky Google search revealed a brand new one has just opened in SA1 called the Welsh House, so great! Away we went.

Fuck me, they went all in.

It wasn't just the menu (though fuck me, what a menu - one of their 'for the table to share' options was little mini leek and cheddar Welsh cakes with salted butter and they were paralysingly good). It wasn't just that every alcohol was Welsh, even including the wine (surprisingly good btw, called 'Naturiol'.)

The table centerpieces were daffodils. All signs for the toilets were Welsh only. The walls had photos of Wales, modern and historical; the windows had the fleur de lis; the specials board (pork belly in Welsh cider and damson sauce with honey and wild garlic glazed carrots) had dragons on. I realise this is probably normal for country-themed restaurants, but I've never been to one for Wales before.

But the best bit, see, was the music

I clocked, when we walked in, that they were playing If You Tolerate This Then Your Children Will Be Next by the Manic Street Preachers (you always clock the Manics). Ah, I thought. A Welsh song! In a Welsh restaurant! Ho ho ho.

As they seated us, it became What's New Pussycat. Ah! I thought. Another Welsh song! Fu fu fu.

Then they played Monster by the Automatic and I was like my god are they only playing Welsh music?? That's so cool! What an eclectic mix that's going to be. We should suggest to them they should look into Welsh language music too, really mix it up.

And then they played Anrheoli by Yws Gwynedd and lads, Steff and I lost our shit. We lost our fucking shit. Sam's sitting there, utterly bewildered. The staff are nervously edging away from us. We don't care. It's the first time I have ever heard a Welsh language song played outside of a Welsh language setting. We're so excited.

"They're playing Welsh music!!!" says Steff. "Holy shit!!!"

"Imagine if they played Sebona Fi!" I say, humorously.

"Nah," says Steff. "You can't in a restaurant. There'd be a riot, it's faerie music."

"...what?" says Sam

We explain the cultural phenomenon that is Sebona Fi. The song changes: Primadonna Girl, by Marina and the Diamonds.

"She's Welsh??" says Sam.

"She's from Abergavenny!" we beam.

"I don't know what that means," nods Sam, who is from Singapore.

Next: The Bartender and the Thief, by the Stereophonics. We're in high spirits. The extraordinarily Welsh wine arrives, as does the rarebit on sourdough starter. Sam, a gay man, delightedly orders the faggots and peas.

They play Ben Rhys by Gwilym Bowen Rhys, and we lose our shit again. Sam is now used to this, because comedians are adaptable. "They even have daffodils!" I say, misty eyed. "Is that relevant?" Sam asks, fascinated.

They play Hiraeth, by PLU. Hard to explain that one. Very hard to explain the effect it has when it's played in a restaurant, but Sam looks around the suddenly muted room and whispers "Are we in church?"

"It's about Hiraeth," whispers Steff. "So kind of."

Next: the Masses Against the Classes, by the Manics. Utter tonal whiplash. This playlist is not remotely restaurant appropriate. It's perfect.

"You'd think they'd pick like... a genre," Sam says dreamily. "We just went from church to the barricades."

The faggots arrive. "I forgot it would be a western sized portion," Sam says morosely, of what to me is a normal sized plate of food. He tries one, and brightens.

They play Sebona Fi.

The place erupts.

Oh my God I'm getting overwhelming "It comes in Pints? I'm getting one!" feels here!

If you want to know what the SAG-AFTRA strike is about, watch this video.

(I'm a SAG-AFTRA member as well, having played me on television from time to time. So I'm doubly on strike.)

Ms Drescher has very much not been an activist in her presidency of SAG-AFTRA. She has, for the most part, maintained the status quo and at times deeply frustrated members with her reluctance to threaten action in contract negotiations.

The fact that she gives this speech literally shaking with anger and fully endorsing strike action should tell you just how unacceptable the Studios' offer to SAG-AFTRA was. This is the least militant leader the Union could possibly have and she's talking about how it's time to "storm the gates of Versailles".

This is a very big deal and the studios have fucked up big time.