arondirk

[arondirk]

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the best trope in media is: “characters turn on the lights, see the monster, and immediately turn the lights back off”

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my phone isn’t charging even though i plugged her innnnn dramatic ass bitch. YOUR PUSSY IS FILLED! WHAT MORE COULD YOU WANT

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A dancer raised a Palestine and Sudan Flag at SuperBowl Halftime show.

FREE PALESTINE and SUDAN

🇸🇩 🇵🇸

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You need to have the 28 other mods and all their dependencies for this mod to work, plus all the mods that they depend on. You also need to go into your x69 files and delete the .gloop file (NOT the .gleeb file!!!) and you need to run CuntExpander to generate a working skeleton for the animations and when that's done you have to reconfigure PNIS (which you should honestly be using NippleSense by now) and then deploy mods, uninstall then reinstall everything, then run PNIS again IN A SEPARATE FILE and deploy. Then it should work 👍

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A Crash Course to Kendrick's Super Bowl Performance, from a Black Woman

Note: this does NOT go in depth into all of the song's lyrics. I don't have time to recount two decades of his discography. This is just a summary of the performance itself.

Let's start with the first visual we get:

UNCLE SAM - most notably recognized from WWII American wartime propaganda, Uncle Sam is the personification of American patriotism and freedom. The term "uncle" is also evocative of Uncle Tom from Uncle Tom's Cabin, an abolitionist book that aided in inciting the Civil War. Uncle is also a very common term (both endearment and derogatory) towards Black men (eg. "unc"). Samuel L Jackson was fantastic.

Uncle Sam also resembles a circus ringleader, notable for my next point:

THE GREAT AMERICAN GAME - no, not Super Bowl. The GAG is us the people being pitted against each other: through late-stage capitalism, through the culture war, through class warfare, through being built of the backs of slaves. We are all players in the GAG because none of us on this site were the oligarchs seated at the inauguration.

This is also seen as Kendrick's stage was a Play Station controller. Not only did it remind of circus rings visually, but it was a game battle stage. The Great American Game is a battle royale of the commoners for the amusement of the rich whites.

Remember the foods / Them color was tin and brown / But now they 100 and blue - For this I'll just say, look what the last election said about lowering the price of eggs... and look at the prices now.

The revolution about to be televised / You picked the right time / But the wrong guy - Election 2024 once more.

THE FLAG DANCERS - yes, the dancers formed the US flag... off of the backs of Black people. Not a single white person in sight, and that's true of the cotton pickers in the fields. Plantations are part of how the US came to economic prominence after being a "backwater" colony. Remember tobacco? Cotton? Our bloodlines do.

The red and blue dancers are also notable for representing the Crips and Bloods, two infamous street gangs. The dance in Not Like Us is the Crip Walk. I recommend researching more on your own time about them, but just know they are a large part of the stereotype of Black people being "ghetto."

TOO LOUD, TOO RECKLESS, TOO GHETTO. Do you really know how to play the game? - This is exactly what Black people, especially Black men, get told all the time. It's why we change our names on resumes if they sound "too Black." It's why we codeswitch in non-Black company. This is especially rich considering how non-Black people love our culture and love to make money off of us, as the latter part of the quote points to. And it's even more profound during the Super Bowl-- the NFL is majority Black players.

STREET LIGHT A CAPELLA -- "thug" stereotype dancers to counteract the a capella connotations, with Uncle Sam then saying that Kendrick figured out "bringing other street guys around being a culture cheat code." Yes, this is a direct hit at Drake (listen to "Not Like Us") but also politically. Look up "model minority". Notably I would point to Candace Owens, or the Miami Venezuelan political group that's been in the news recently, especially as this directly led to Kendrick being surrounded by...

DANCERS IN WHITE -- it's white America. That's... that's the allegory.

NOT LIKE US TEASER -- Kendrick says "Not Like Us" is "their favorite song." -> he means white people specifically here. It comes after he's surrounded by all white dancers, the women around him who are his call and response are also in white (my opinion, they represent the industry). He's saying "Not Like Us" is the favorite of yts because it is about BLACK MEN FIGHTING. This again is reflected in the video game stage and ringleader Uncle Sam.

SZA -- instead of giving what they want, we see SZA. She's one of Drake's exes and Kendrick has always supported her.

ALL THE STARS -- This was in the first Black Panther movie, which I recommend you watch. Rest in Power Chadwick. Notably, this movie was incredibly mainstream as a major Marvel movie, and then we have Uncle Sam say...

"THAT'S WHAT AMERICA WANTS: NICE AND CALM. DON'T MESS THIS UP" -- translation: Marvel (the industry, America, etc.) wanted a safe, semi-pop song because white American likes safe pop songs, not Kendrick's usual heavy rap style about his life as a Black man! Don't mess up what you've got going mainstream for having this "Black rap feud" with Drake, who is an R&B model minority to white people because he's safe.

So what does Kendrick say?

IT'S A CULTURAL DIVIDE / IMMA GET IT ON THE FLOOR -- He was warned not to be political or apologetically Black for this Super Bowl performance, but he is using this big stage opportunity to speak out.

40 ACRES AND A MULE / THIS IS BIGGER THAN THE MUSIC -- 40 acres and a mule are what the freed slaves were promised. Instead, this land went to white sharecroppers. Research Jim Crow laws.

THEY TRIED TO RIG THE GAME / BUT YOU CAN'T FAKE INFLUENCE -- rig the election, rig the industry like with model minority Drake, rig the Great American Game with culture war to distract from active class warfare.

NOT LIKE US -- the only thing I'll mention because it made me holler is Serena Williams crip walking on Drake's metaphorical grave. She's another one of his exes.

TURN THE TV OFF -- exactly like he said! The TV is a distraction, the Super Bowl is a distraction, the mainstream news is often a distraction. Turn it off and get with your people!

GAME OVER — could not see this on my stream but at the end of the performance, the lights in the stadium spelled this out. The world is watching, America…

In conclusion, Kendrick Lamar is a visionary and thank you for coming to my TED Talk.

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I wanna talk about some vitally important symbolism in Kendrick’s performance this evening.

Follow me.

Kendrick had an entirely Black dance cast for this performance, all dressed in red, white, blue, and some in black. But, I specifically want to focus on this arrangement, at the beginning of the show.

The dancers create the appearance of an American flag. A flag, the symbol of American history and heritage, formed out of Black bodies.

The legacy of America is that of the state that was built on the work of Black bodies. Enslaved Black bodies.

But it’s deeper than that.

Kendrick puts himself at the center of the flag. Now, yeah, part of it is performance; it looks better with your performer surrounded by the “supporting cast,” so to speak. But, with Kendrick, it’s never that simple.

Kendrick centers himself, imo, to demonstrate that he is functionally America. His experiences, his life, is America. He grew up poor, urban, the son of working parents. He was nearly led astray as a youth, but turned to art and philosophy and dedicating himself to his craft, and found both fulfillment and success. In the popular myth of the American dream, that’s the ultimate goal.

And he never once did it by selling his soul to capital (again, in the ‘mythos of Kendrick Lamar’). He never betrayed his culture, or took the quick money, or let his art be co-opted by the vultures that feed on Black culture for mass (white) consumption.

Again, this is just a quick and dirty analysis by one person who only developed an appreciation for hip-hop recently. For deeper, more informed analysis, seek and study the Black academics who know far, far more than me.

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the doctor 0.04 seconds after getting to the floating island

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cw LOUD. my girlfriends audio drivers are fucked somehow but its the funnies tthing in the world. bear witness.

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I was gonna make a joke about how I say “I need to go the circus again” the way people used to say they need to go to the sea to balance their humors. But I realized the circus balances humors too

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what does it mean

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Have you ever drawn your oc interacting with Banjo, Kazooie, or both?

no but i made this in 2019

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she has it all