alan713ch

[alan713ch]

Scott and Jackson's dynamic is the most under-rated in all of TW-land, as far as I'm concerned.

And I think how little it gets talked about....even all the way back in the days of yore and yesteryear aka Season One....

Had a fucking LOT to do with how effectively it spears (to death) the preferred fandom narrative about Scott being all holier-than-thou and that's why fandom "prefers" literally everyone but him.

Because Scott fucking HATES Jackson. He displays it every time Jackson's onscreen. He's never ever tried to hide it or pretend to be above it. This douchebag pisses him the fuck OFF. He's like "you're breathing my air. What if you weren't." Jackson opens his mouth and Scott's like "close that please." Jackson has never said anything to Scott that Scott wants to hear.

There is absolutely NOTHING holier-than-thou about Scott's interactions with Jackson. They rumble in those halls. Throw each other into walls. Jackson is the literal only person we repeatedly see bring out Scott's worst tendencies, his spitefulness, all the less than noble hallmarks of humanity people point to as proof that someone is "only human".....

And fandom from day one was just "Insert Mariah Carey I can't read suddenly" GIF. We don't see that. We see an uptight wannabe Patron Saint of Lecturing People going to door to door like "Have you heard the Good News about being a Better but Boring Person" and THAT'S why we simply choose to focus our attention elsewhere. On all the characters that feel real and relatable and human on accounts of them making mistakes and not always doing the right thing and sometimes being mean, even.

Ahh, TW. The fandom that insisted there was nothing weird about hating a character for being "too perfect" and "the Morality Police" while nursing a grudge about that mean & disrespectful thing the sixteen year old once said about the dead family of the guy who kept breaking into his house and breaking his arm and other things that understandably might piss a "normal" sixteen year old off.

[alan713ch]

I think one of the primary things that finally convinced me that Scott hate in the Teen Wolf fandom was primarily motivated by racism was how many people in the fandom expressed the wish that the show would have shifted attention and focus to Jackson Whittemore instead of Scott McCall.

Now, this shouldn't taken to be Jackson critical. It's certainly not meant to attack people who find Jackson relatable. Jackson was a fully realized character and I enjoyed how Colton Haynes played him. That's not what I'm talking about.

I'm talking about people like Minerva Dim who tried to convince the fandom that Jackson Whittemore was the character intended to be the True Alpha and that Scott was merely a point of view character. I'm talking about the many, many members of the fandom who have tried to argue that Jackson would be a better friend to Stiles than Scott or that Jackson would be a good and loyal pack member for Derek. I'm talking about the assumption that Jackson would be a better candidate for a lead protagonist.

Jackson was a terrible person, in many ways worse than Derek because at least Derek had some real tragedy in his past to explain his sharp edges. Jackson was wealthy, popular, had a circle of friends (or at least minions), a gorgeous girlfriend, naturally talented, a hard worker, and an excellent best friend. At certain points, though, he became almost a caricature of the bully jock. His teasing of Scott in Wolf's Bane (1x09), his refusal to admit what happened at the Hale House in Co-Captain (1x10), his treatment of the homeless werewolf in Omega (2x01), and his flippant dismissal of the way Coach Lahey treated Isaac in Shape Shifted (2x02) were examples of extreme behavior.

Again, this is not an attack on people who relate to Jackson, but rather pointing out the absurdity of those who promote him as alternate hero. On what planet would he be more qualified for the role than Scott McCall? Would Jackson, if he were in Scott's position, lift a finger to help Derek? Would he, as Scott did, make allowances for Stiles's insecurities? Of course not.

But parts of the fandom certainly enjoy thinking that it would be better if Jeff Davis had tried.

[alan713ch]

So it was already ridiculous for this guy (the Matt guy, not Adam lol) to justify his takeout obsession with "lost productivity", but he really gave away the game with "you can't possibly expect me to cook anything, that should be my domestic servant's job--I mean my live-in girlfriend's job, but that bitch might be in school or at work and won't be able to cook for me every single day!"

Honestly, I didn't realize that this might be an element of the burrito taxi discourse until now, but consider: how many of the people angrily insisting that their burrito taxi should be cheap and that you can't expect them to just prepare their own meals are young men who live alone, never learned basic cooking because they always expected to have a wife or girlfriend do it for them, refuse to learn how to prepare any meals because they think they're entitled to a woman doing domestic labor for them, and they're now really angry that they're not getting regular home-cooked meals because they're single, or their girlfriends won't act like personal chefs because women have jobs and higher standards now?

If you think your only options are going broke with DoorDash or having a "live-in girlfriend" who cooks for you 7 days a week, then go broke and starve, dickhead

[alan713ch]

I know it’s hard to poll young people, but I can’t believe we were subjected to years of young people openly jerking off to their own sense of moral superiority, saying that we just needed to wait for old people to die for bigotry to go away and that Boomers were the ultimate evil, only for them to view honest-to-god white supremacists and misogynists more favorably than the first black woman to run for president, and liberals in general. You’re just like your Fox-News-watching parents

[alan713ch]

The First Ever Trans member of Congress on her way to cast her first vote.

[alan713ch]

Millions of young boys and men worship an abuser and misogynist like Andrew Tate, millions of young people voted for Trump, and we watched young people online and on some college campuses morph into the new Hitler Youth, but people still don't like when someone says that not all young people are magical progressive unicorns.

[alan713ch]

when i went to alaska last summer, at all the parks and nature reserves and stuff there they of course had safety warnings about the wildlife.

for bears, the safety warnings were like, make noise, wave your arms, talk in a normal speaking voice, stay calm, don’t run, wait for the bear to move on which it will do 99% of the time, and you will be ok! 👍

for moose, the safety warnings were like. RUN.

[alan713ch]

[alan713ch]

please settle a debate among my friends.

[alan713ch]

*things such as video game systems are not included in this poll

**your own, not a family/shared computer

reblog for reach/bigger sample size!!

[alan713ch]

Bad Film - b&w thought exercise

June 2024

Location: San Francisco, California

[alan713ch]

Vista de la Catedral de Cuernavaca mostrando parte del atrio del Convento de Nuestra Señora de la Asunción en Cuernavaca, Mor. México.

Ca. 1901

[alan713ch]

Judge Merchan saw Jimmy Carter dying and having the flag lowered for his honor being the biggest thing making Trump throw a bitch-fit about ruining the mood of his inauguration and said "Hold my beer."

(He's not going to be sentenced to prison time but take our W's where we can.)

[alan713ch]

YOUR character lives rent free in your head. MINE pays the rent by being my court jester whenever i summon them to entertain me.

[alan713ch]

Are you, like millions of Americans, feeling hopeless and fearful about the dawning of a new age of fascism? And are you, like millions of Americans, in search of a New Year’s resolution that won’t require you to lose weight or go to therapy? Happily, both of these problems can be solved with one action: resolve to make 2025 the year of no snitching.

Choose as your New Year’s mantra that great civic-minded slogan: “If you saw something, no you didn’t.”

Bad times are coming. In less than a month, Trump will return to the White House, with far fewer checks on his power than he had the first time around. He will be surrounded by a team of sociopaths, internet-poisoned bigots and single-issue quacks who have figured out that for the low, low price of absolute loyalty, their boss will grant them the absolute right to pursue their deranged passions as far as they please.

We are entering an age of boutique persecution, in which a broad swath of maniacs will be unleashed by a president devoid of ideology but full of narcissistic craving. A thousand petty tyrants will soon occupy the halls of the federal government. On the other side of this corps of gleeful little bullies sits the general public. We will all be enlisted, to varying degrees, as either collaborators or targets.

Yet hidden in this grim forecast is a chance for all of us to do something righteous. Government persecution requires a lot of informers. It is hard to deport immigrants, infiltrate protest groups and attack civil society without a lot of people telling the powers-that-be where all their enemies are and what they’re doing. None of the most oppressive regimes in history could do it with secret police alone. They needed the help of snitches. Fascism needs snitches everywhere in order to work. By vowing not to snitch, you can therefore strike a blow for justice, without doing anything at all.

It’s easy: when Ice shows up at your workplace asking whether you’ve got any immigrants working there – you don’t know. Have you seen any foreign-looking day laborers working around town? You sure haven’t. Has anyone speaking Spanish offered to babysit for you, tutor your kids, sell you food, do your yardwork or write for your op-ed page? Nope. Hey, have you left water for people wandering through the desert borderlands, or given money to immigrant mothers peddling candy on the train? No, officer, I’m sorry. It doesn’t ring a bell.

“But if you give me your card, officer, I’ll be sure to give you a call if I see anything,” you add helpfully, while dropping the card directly into an oversized envelope with “FOR ANTIFA” scrawled on the outside.

Protecting hardworking immigrants from red-faced deportation thugs is only the most obvious venue for not snitching. The principle can also be applied anywhere that a boss is likely to take advantage of our newly callous political climate.

Have you heard any whispers about a union drive here at our lovely workplace? Sorry, no. Have you heard any of your fellow college students plotting a new Gaza protest encampment? No, sir, not a word. We’ve gotten reports that your co-workers have commandeered one of the storage closets here at Walmart and turned it into an unauthorized nap room; can you point us in the right direction? There could be a promotion in it for you.

Gosh. You would love to. But you just don’t know anything about it.

A resolution not to snitch will, I assure you, be condemned as anti-American. So it is. The US relies on snitches to carry out secret drone strikes, to kidnap foreign nationals to black-site prisons, to send Swat teams breaking through the door of your friend who sells weed, to sic the code enforcement squad on your neighbor who has not kept their lawn trimmed to the mandatory length. Snitching is as necessary to the US’s most oppressive impulses as oxygen is to fire.

This dynamic will only get more true next year, since Donald Trump makes retaliatory decisions based not on the consensus advice of a meticulous team of professionals, but rather on the gossip he heard from a thrice-divorced Mazda dealership owner on the patio at Mar-a-Lago. The full apparatus of the state will now be conducted according to rumors and innuendo filtered through the addled mind of a reality television star. If there were ever a time to refrain from unleashing the authorities on a minor quality-of-life offender out of an abundance of concern for human rights, this is it.

Though always popular with normal people, “no snitching” has long been derided by the lords of public opinion: “Why, that is a slogan of rappers, and gang members, and people who are stealing cable straight from the pole! Hardly something that should be tolerated in civic society!” That haughty attitude is more wrong now than ever.

Set aside the slogan and consider the values that we are trying to promote here: protecting the weak from the strong; shielding the vulnerable from powerful sadists; and, above all, trying to make high-strung White House crypto-fascist Stephen Miller so frustrated that he bursts into a puff of smoke like the villain in a Looney Tunes cartoon. These are all proper – even admirable – ethical goals.

So stop asking yourself what you can do to help our nation next year. Channel your nervous energy into keeping your mouth shut. The truth is that the country’s problems are not, and have never been, caused by unlicensed taco vendors or people playing reggaeton a little too loud or people whose zealous Halloween decorations are not explicitly allowed by zoning bylaws.

The country’s problems are caused by the people most likely to be snitched to, not snitched on. What we really need to fear are those eager to lord their positions over everyone else. The boss, not the worker. The cop, not the vagrant. The president, not the protesters. Today, billionaires with White House offices are much greater threats to our quality of life than anyone whom those billionaires might brand an enemy.

That is why it’s OK to maintain at least one exception to your New Year’s resolution: if you know a rich person cheating on their taxes, snitch away. Law and order, after all, must be maintained.

What’s giving me hope right now

Trump’s election in 2016 produced widespread shock, followed by a fruitless four years of quasi-religious belief that our precious norms would save us from his ravages. This time around, we have that experience to teach us all that those norms are utterly illusory. Resisting a slide into fascism means building institutions powerful enough to counter Trump on his own terms.

I put my hope in a resurgent labor movement, which is now boiling with grassroots enthusiasm, as well as the unavoidable fact that a growth in worker power is the only thing that can reverse our 50-year-long crisis of inequality. If you need hope, join a union. We’re all going to need them.

[alan713ch]

I know a lot of people find it uncomfortable and invasive but I actually kinda love my head being manhandled at the barber's. Every time they tilt my head or move me to one side I feel like a docile sheep about to have my winter coat shorn off by a well trained farmer with strong but gentle hands

[alan713ch]