Stuff or whatever

you people will just. say anything

#Tbf tho the bechdel test is pretty shitty #Like dgmw this is a stupid take but it's a lame test anyway

okay but do you understand that liz wallace made the bechdel-WALLACE test because she was a dyke who wanted to go to movies and pretend the characters were dykes and her friend alison bechdel happened to put her silly little litmus assessment into a comic strip and then the rest of everyone else decided it was a bona fide way of means testing media for Feminist Content? do you know that? it doesn't sound like you know that

some of you are the dumbest motherfuckers alive

This is the comic in question, from Alison Bechdel’s comic strip Dykes to Watch Out For. The comic was published in 1985. The whole joke was that the bar is on the ground and lots of movies still can’t even do that much. It was never meant to be some big serious rule that all media must adhere to, it was just a sad observation on how much mainstream media sucks ass at representation.

It’s called “environmental amnesia” and it’s an actual issue environmentalists discuss how to combat. The climate crisis makes it more widespread but it’s been something that’s happening for generations. The story of The Lorax describes it beautifully. The idea that what you remember is what you consider normal, but if the changes happen slowly over generations, you don’t see how large they are because you don’t personally remember them being very different, even if you were told stories about it.

i hate pessimistic takes on human nature so much

saying humans are inherently bad just excuses you from doing the work to improve yourself and the world around you. saying humans are inherently selfish means there's no reason to even try to make things better. and for some reason people think these are radical takes, that they're being smart or philosophical by saying humanity is doomed - these are not new takes. you're just catholic.

you have to believe that people are inherently good. you have to. why have hearts if not to love, hands if not to hold, minds if not to dream. you can't ignore love. there's some good in this world, mr frodo, and it's worth fighting for.

Something just occurred to me.

You know how back in the pre-Internet days, it was nearly impossible to watch a TV series in its entirety because the local affiliate stations would deliberately air the episodes all out of order, then do some sort of statistical sorcery to figure out which particular episodes gave the advertisers the best return for their dollar and just run those ten or twelve specific episodes in an endless semi-randomised rotation, and that was why every time you channel-surfed across a particular show it always seemed to be the same damn episode?

Twitter’s algorithm is literally the social media equivalent of that.

In middle/high school I put all the music I had on an off-brand mp3 player and would just set it to Shuffle All. I quickly realized the player’s shuffle fuction wasn’t purely random–it was weighted towards my favorite songs (aka the songs with the most plays).

Only I had never chosen those songs. They were just the random few to pop up the first time I shuffled everything, and they started playing more and more frequently as this horribly short-sighted algorithm fed itself bad data, until I was so annoyed at those few songs that I stopped listening entirely.

Anyway a few years later Facebook did the exact same thing with my friends list, siphoning me off from seeing most of my feed because OBVIOUSLY I interacted with them the most, therefore they must be my besties. But really they were just the only people showing up for me to interact with in the first place, until I was down to just a few people I never really talked to from high school, a college prof, and my racist uncle I kept calling out.

And shortly after that, YouTube followed suit, replacing “Subscriptions” with “Recommended” as the default category, and trying to find “things I liked” when it was really just whatever three channels I’d watched last, whatever unrelated viral vid it wanted to push that week, and weird perennials like Whose Line clips or lockpick reviews or YTPs that seem to hibernate for months at a time then return like locusts.

All this to say: the big mysterious algorithms that now run all the major platforms on the internet are never acting in your best interests. They’re just that junky mp3 player’s Shuffle All with a fresh coat of paint, and, to be clear, this is by design. They are VERY good at what they do, which is funneling users into nice predictable pockets of content that advertisers can exploit.

"the education system traumatizes students it deems stupid" and "the education system traumatizes students it deems gifted" are two concepts that can and should coexist.

I think I've got a compromise

We should talk more about what a dick move it is to name horror movie villains regular-ass people names.

Michael Meyers? Dick move. How many thousands of Mr. Michael Meyers are out there every day meeting people going "Ope! Haha Michael Meyers! Oh just don't kill me! Haha." Shut up. Meyers et al should kill you, and John Carpenter for causing this.

You know who did this right? Thomas Harris. Named his villain just the right inconceivable combination of sounds. I don't think there are any fucking Hannibal Lecters out there uncomfortably laughing off cannibal jokes in a job interview. And if there are, then I think they've got bigger problems coming from parents willing to name a squishy little baby Hannibal Fucking Lecter.

"Hannibal Fucking Lecter, you were named after the best chance at achieving internet privacy in the digital age because all attempts to search for you will be buried beneath three decades worth of horror movie discourse and an unspeakable amount of Hannigram porn."

watchin a sasquatch doc n this guy just randomly plays the drums throughout the show

oh he just explained he plays the drums to attract bigfoot. reasonable

this guy: (kickass drum solo)

bigfoot: (shows up) whoa man sick!!!!!!!!!

Not to get dark or anything, but 9/11 is coming up in the USA

Or, let me rephrase that: an annual day where Muslims in the USA are scared to leave their homes. If you have Muslim friends or neighbors - watch their backs. Check up on them. Without fail, every year, there's always an attack. Every year someone I know or someone I know by extension becomes a victim.

One year I had to go pick up my roommate from the library because she was too scared to leave. Some grown ass men had followed her there throwing rocks and yelling threats.

Another year I got a knife threat slipped into my mailbox.

Another year someone shot up the side of our mosque while we prayed for peace inside.

Check up on your neighbors and call out racist and islamophobic behavior where you see it. This year, with all the unrest and elections coming up, it's bound to be bad and everyone I know is already on edge and taking precautions.

Stay vigilant and stay woke ✌️

this is so important

to reiterate:

Check!! In!! On!! Your!! Muslim!! Friends!! And!! Neighbours!!

and yes, this is applicable everywhere, not just America. don't leave it because you're from the UK or Canada or France or anywhere else.

Also important!!

The majority of Muslims in the USA aren't even immigrants or Pakistani, or Indonesian or anything else - the highest percentage is actually African American.

Given the political climate and recent surge in violence - protect your neighbors, and protect black Muslims especially!!!!!

That carrot sounds really good

I’ve spent hours trying to play instruments and this guy just whittles up a carrot and kills it

The notes are so full of extremely salty clarinet players and I love it

I still stand by this statement, dude just drills up a carrot and knocks everyone flat off their socks while simultaneously ensuring that every single clarinet player who hears this is foaming at the mouth and out for his blood. Absolute legend.

Me on Fourth of July like

Anyway, stop spreading white nationalist rhetoric and toxic nationalism thanks

Nobody said anything about race. Stop that.

It’s nationalist to state facts now?

How is this toxic?

Show me countries better than the USA.

economically

x

human freedom

x

quality of life

x

social progress 

x

income equality (america was among the worst)

x

healthcare

x x

gender equality

x

what exactly makes america the “best country” here? america doesn’t excel in anything.

I was gonna say aren’t we like #1 in a bunch of bad stats? Like aren’t we the top for rape and abuse?

we are superior in waging wars, exporting and using firearms, and incarcerating the population among a lot of other terrible things. how depressing is patriotism and nationalism?

I remember this epic moment from The Newsroom

Americans just buy into the propaganda they are the greatest country when there is absolutely zero evidence to say so.

patriots love to try and counter this with points like “if america is SO bad then why are so many people coming here illegal/legally” because I guess they just somehow don’t realize thousands of people are immigrating to other countries, every single day. 

Our education in understanding how the rest of the world works is severely lacking. 

Still doesn’t invalidate their question. If the US is so awful why are thousands upon thousands begging and pushing their way to come here.

Really doesn’t make much sense if you ask me.

Because we destabilized their countries into war-torn battlefields, and, like it or not, the US is still (for the moment) not in the midst of a civil war, and they have the right to try to seek asylum in a place that’s apparently peaceful.  Also, they might not know what a hellhole it’s become and still believe that old propaganda line about the “Land of Opportunity”.  

Simple as that.

if your choices are hell & hell adjacent you too would pick hell adjacent

There once was a man trying to make a point about the kitchen. "The sink!" He said "the sink is the single most important thing in the kitchen! It washes, it provides drinking water! It helps you prepare all of your meals and cleans your dishes for you after! The sink is the most important!"

"However," said a stranger coming through the crowd "you are forgetting about the countertop. It holds everything in the kitchen together. You prepare your food and serve your food ON the countertop. Even your prescious sink would have no where to be if it weren't for the countertop!"

The man was stunned. He wasn't prepared for a counterargument

I wrote this joke in a sleep deprived rage and its one of the best pieces of writing I have ever produced

@awritersbro

RB IF YOU AGREE

if anyone’s got an in at dominos, please message me

People who perform manual labor should be not only given high and liveable wages, but unlimited access to healthcare and physical therapy to help manage the myriad conditions that come from doing back-breaking work.

Like this is not an absurd concept. It bothers me that people think that it is.

*They should also be entitled to the same share of profit off their own personal labor as all other employees including their boss. It should not be legal for a business to make $50 off one person’s hour of work and give them $10.

in superman adventures #19, there’s a villain named multi-face who can convincingly disguise himself as anyone, even tricking dna tests and x-ray vision. Superman initially can’t stop him

and the only reason he gets caught is because multiface decides to disguise himself as, of all people, CLARK KENT i’m screaming

why do villains always mess up so badly

Clark Kent attending Bruce Wayne’s yacht party where Bruce told Clark to wear his clothes and……

This bullshit needs to get into the movies, not edgy-grimdark shit

I especially love the fact that, in many depictions, Bruce Wayne somehow ended up looking similar enough to the one Kryptonian on Earth that they can Parent Trap people

*Deathstroke bursts into the Legion of Doom headquarters* “Guys, you won’t believe this, but I think Bruce Wayne is Superman!“

today I learned that Clark Kent is sloppy drunk and I am in eternal gratitude for that

I’ve seen this post go around a couple of times and I’ve never seen anyone add the time that Clark somehow got high.

i say “somebody’s making brownies in North Dakota” whenever my irl bizarrely strong sense of smell is bugging me plz reblog so ppl will get the reference thx

i’m legitimately wheezing over “ta-da! sard borken!”

Even funnier fact, the va for flash in Justice League, and Justice League Unlimited was Michael Rosenbaum, the actor who played Lex Luthor in the WB series Smallville.

fascism in italy was not defeated by discourse.

Something I heard recently: if you insist on sheltering both lambs and wolves, you will get in the end only wolves. If you insist your safe space is safe for bigots as well as minorities you will have a space full of bigots- minorities will be driven out.