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To Shoot For The Stars

@toshootforthestars

I post about ideas, wisdom, equality & social justice, current events & creative stuff for you to reblog. shootingforthosestars.tumblr.com has my old posts before July 2017. toshootforthestars.blogspot.com is a side blerg I do. I'm Will, 39 (ancient), nb, traveler. BPD, PTSD. Be well, do good, be strong and stay safe. Shoot for the stars.

Hey!

This tumblr is literally just me screaming into the void. It's terrible. I'm glad that some of you like a few of the things I post, and I hope I'm making a positive difference...

I put tags in most of my posts. Some frequent tags:

news

2020 us presidential election

the way things work

words of wisdom

this is nice

recovery from mental illness

new york state

music I like

"surely im faking this," i think, directly experiencing all the symptoms nd not benefiting from it at all

"Surely I am faking this" I tell myself and absolutely no one else because I refuse to even let them know I'm struggling in any way shape or form

OH THIS FOR FUCKING REAL

From the report by Chris Lee, posted 24 June 2023:

Multiple Across the Spider-Verse crew members — ranging from artists to production executives who have worked anywhere from five to a dozen years in the animation business — describe the process of making the the $150 million Sony project as uniquely arduous, involving a relentless kind of revisionism that compelled approximately 100 artists to flee the movie before its completion. Four of these crew members agreed to speak pseudonymously about the sprint to finish the movie three years into the sequel’s development and production, a period whose franticness they attribute to Lord’s management style — in particular, his seeming inability to conceptualize 3-D animation during the early planning stages and his preference to edit fully rendered work instead.

.....

Sony executives dispute these claims about Lord’s management style, including his alleged insistence on approving every sequence in the film, describing feature animation as a generally “iterative process.” According to Amy Pascal, the former Sony Pictures Entertainment chairperson who produced the three most recent live-action Spider-Man movies as well as both Into and Across the Spider-Verse, “over a thousand” artists and techs worked on Across the Spider-Verse alone, tasked with scripting, storyboarding, animating, editing, and visually enhancing the film. So it’s unsurprising, she says, that as many as 100 of the Across the Spider-Verse film crew would choose to depart the grueling project, which Pascal admits involved major overhauls to both the narrative and visuals, along the way. Michelle Grady, the executive vice-president and general manager of Sony Pictures Imageworks, agrees, claiming that Lord is not to blame for the delays. He, as the main messenger for editorial changes coming from the three co-directors, executive producers, Miller, and the studio, is instead a convenient target for worker ire. “It really does happen on every film,” she says of the revisions. “Truly, honestly, it can be a little bit frustrating, but we always try to explain that this is the process.” “One of the things about animation that makes it such a wonderful thing to work on is that you get to keep going until the story is right,” adds Pascal. “If the story isn’t right, you have to keep going until it is.” To the workers who felt demoralized by having to revise final renders five times in a row, the Spider-Verse producer says, “I guess, Welcome to making a movie.” Grady says the sources who spoke to Vulture are not representative of the majority of crew on Spider-Verse 2, who she says found the production process difficult yet “extraordinarily rewarding.” But our sources’ concerns amplify those of the Animation Guild, a 6,000-member branch of Hollywood’s below-the-line union IATSE, established in 1952 to ensure equitable employment practices within a once-sleepy industry that has become a multibillion-dollar powerhouse since the animation explosion of the 1990s. A half-century ago, there were around 1,000 animators working in Hollywood, around half of them just for Disney. In 2023, no data exists for the number of artists, digital compositors, and effects specialists working across the globe, but their ranks have grown exponentially to meet the metastasizing demand for animated fare. Like organizers within the VFX and gaming worlds (which often overlap with each other and with animation), TAG hopes to formally obtain a seat at the bargaining table of an industry that is increasingly reliant on animation talent but that has historically treated its artists and technicians as gig workers, According to TAG, the guild recently renegotiated an agreement with Sony Pictures Animation and achieved increases to minimum wages for pre-production staff. However, Sony Pictures Imageworks, which despite its corporate affiliation is an independent vendor contracted by Sony Pictures Animation to do the physical animation on Across the Spider-Verse, remains a non-union studio. “Having spent time in the lower ranks of the visual effects industry,” says Steve Kaplan, business representative for TAG, “I am intimately familiar with how different those workplaces can be."
Source: vulture.com

"So YoU'rE sAyInG mEn HaTe OtHeR mEn?"

Yes. Yes I am. And you can ask literally any marginalized man and they will tell you American Patriarchy hates them, too, specifically because they are being men in the "wrong way".

Like fuck, this is feminism 101.

Edit: it's non-radfem feminism 101.

Just look at the way that manosphere wierdos talk in reference to other men: they are competitors to be dominated either socially or with explicit violence. The whole grift is built on selling men the idea that they can climb their way to the top of the pile

^^^ This. It's like a pyramid scheme of abuse. "If you throw fifteen men under the bus and convince five of your friends to throw fifteen other men under the bus, you can Win at Patriarchy, we promise!"

I can't agree enough with this, and it's something more and more men are speaking up about, even if our voices aren't being heard.

Man box culture, as some call it, starts when we're young. It's pervasive - the competition to be a real "man" as defined by violence, dominance, and this absolutely fucked up concept of emotional detachment. It's a raw struggle to not appear weak, and it starts with how adult men treat male children - the toxic values they instill, sometimes with words and sometimes with fists. And even if you grow up in a less toxic and more loving environment, you're never really free from it. Your male role models, male adults like teachers and such, but especially male friends who are your age, all get caught up in this toxic system of abuse. And "real men" don't have emotions, right? So you have to bottle all that up rather than understanding any of it because it's *weakness.* All of that tends to come out in the one emotional state that men allow each other to display: anger. Shit, by the time most boys reach high school, they've been struggling against each other for years. All that hate, that anger, that uncontrollable rage? That's been taught to them long before teenage testosterone hits. And by that time, it's gotten worse because the patriarchy has defined how "real men" see and treat women. Underneath everything is this deep, deep fear of failing and becoming the weak punching bag. There's so much shame to it all.

It isn't always like this for every boy growing up, but no one is left unaware of its existence. And the only true way to stop it begins when we are young.

This is fucking heartbreaking.

One of my friends in law school once opened up to me and a few other people in our mixed-gender friend group that he didn't really have friends before he knew us, even though he thought he did. We sort of nodded like, yeah man, we're glad you're our friend too, sorry people back in your home town were shitty – and he stopped us like, no, you don't understand. He told us that he thought he had friends, and that those people thought that they were his friends – but that his all-male small-town social circle constantly hurled abuse at each other, and that they all thought that that was normal. He told us that he used to go out partying with them, and whereas when we'd go out, we'd talk each other up – like, man, nice shirt, love what you did with your hair, I bet chicks are gonna dig it, etc. – back in his old circle of friends? All they'd ever do before going out was talk each other down. You're dressed worse than your friends? You look like trash. You're dressed better than your friends? Why do you care so much about you're appearance, are you gay? You're dressed exactly the same as your friends? Wow, look at this loser copying other people's look. You could never win, you could never even break even, and you were expected to not only put up with this, but to participate, because that sort of normalized constant stream of verbal abuse was the main way that you and other men your age socialized. He literally did not realize that men could have actual, real friendships – with women, sure, but also with other men – until he met us, because to him, the act of hanging out with people who you weren't dating was so deeply intertwined with toxic competitive expectations that he flat out didn't know that there was a different way to be until he moved halfway across the country for law school in his late 20s.

It's incredibly fucked up, and men should be able to talk about what a patriarchal culture like that does to them without being silenced.

I wrote this post years ago, but for the life of me can't find the original to repost on Father's Day like I do every year.

Take care of yourself today, you are loved 🩷❤️🧡💛💚💙💜

ID: A small cross stitch that reads "The horrors persist/but so do I" in blue, bracketed above and below with simple stylized florals.

I love you (many of you!) and hope you're safe, internet people.