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So, let’s talk about the clever use of negative space in the episode:

Castiel doesn’t understand how “orange correlates with black in a way that’s new”. Dean immediately understands what Castiel is referring to, he gets the reference although the association would not be obvious to people unfamiliar with the show Orange Is The New Black.

Dean tells Castiel that everyone has binge watched on Netflix, although he doesn’t admit to binge watching the show OITNB specifically.

When Castiel calls again, Dean asks Cas to tell him something that doesn’t involve chicks in prison. This indicates that Dean knows what the story of OITNB is, has likely watched it.

Sam, now in the car with them but having missed the previous conversation, doesn’t make the connection between “chicks in prison” and OITNB, but instead seems to assume on past precedent that it’s some kind of lesbian porn thing. He laughs derisively at his brother and says “Bet you thought you’d never say that out loud”. Sam assumes that Dean is making a reference to objectifying pornography because that’s what he expects his brother to do.

Previously in the episode, Dean raised his eyebrows at Sam’s hook-up being named Piper (a bisexual character from the show OITNB) as though it amused him, whereas Sam made nothing of it. Sam hasn’t watched the show. But Dean has.

Sam is missing context here. Just like the audience is missing the context on what happened inside the Road House during the night Dean spent there. Robbie Thompson continues in the grand tradition of the polysemic storytelling the show has been engaged with since its inception.

Dean has watched a show about women, featuring a bisexual main character, with a massive queer following, but because Sam is lacking context, his brother continues to interpret Dean’s character through his own bias.

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there’s a certain type of Manly Man character who queer people can instantly sniff out as putting on a charade of masculinity that only the deeply repressed can perform but when you point this out to cishet people they’re like “whattt??? but he’s so manly!!! he likes cars and beer and has sex with women!!! how could he possibly be a f - uh, gay”

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regarding!dean would have GRABBED cas' face between his hands and grinned widely at him and cas would have been like (hard squint) UHHHH. and dean would have been like (eyes softening) you've got a great face. and cas would've been like (slowly removing dean's hands) th-thank you. sam. what's wrong with him? and sam would've been like yea seems like severe memory loss. witch spell. told you. and dean would've been like (puts his hands back on cas face) i'm keepin' you . don't go anywhere. and sam would've been like uhhhhh. you. you've got this, right cas? and cas would've been like (heart splintering) yeah. yeah.

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early homo sapiens b like help i cant stop making bowls . help i cant stop domesticating plants and animals. help i cant stop developing language and architecture and religion

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Do you have the Libby library app?

If not, download it to your phone, and under "Add library card" select the button to search for a library and start typing in "queer"...

Sign up with an email, no actual address required, and you are good to go 🏳️‍🌈

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“Fyp” we don’t do that here. I mean, Tumblr the app and website tries, but we don't do that here.

“But then how will anyone see it?” peer review.

“How do you get engagement?” by talking and engaging with other people. Or making a devastating typo. Either way.

“But—” Listen, you’re not doing solo stand up anymore. This is a group improv class being held in a SAW dungeon. Good luck.

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The famous Falkirk Wheel, which links the Forth and Clyde Canal with the Union Canal.

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that stupid lumon animation is making me want to chew cement because it's such a good example of propaganda that sanitizes rebellion and the most obvious part of that is irving's story i think. like they include his line about wanting to burn lumon to the ground but they don't ever say why. they can exploit helly and mark's workplace romance but not irving and burt's because they fucking killed burt!! they show the optics and design department but not any of the people in it!!!!! come on

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Severance 2.01 + tumblr text posts

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severance is so scary i hope jobs arent real

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me: and the foundational family myth, the Winchester Story, the altar upon which john sacrificed his sons' childhoods, comes CRASHING down in season five with the revelation that john and mary had a rocky, tumultuous marriage and that heaven had to conspire to magically brainwash them to stay together long enough to produce their fated angel vessel offspring as part of a millennia-long human breeding program ensuring that the fated apocalypse would come to pass

my date: *puts down half-eaten breadstick* we're talking about the cable tv show? about the bitches in the car?

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pretty happy about my filtering choices today.

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Still collecting the full alphabet of the “live, laugh, love” variants if anyone has some good examples.

Bonus if they can fit the “We can’t ___, _____, ____ our way out of this.”

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20 - We Gull Way Back

little papercut guys, who am I to resist the toe touch.

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About that Scientology connection...

One of the details that came to light this week in the latest article detailing the horrific allegations against Neil Gaiman (which I believe are true, to be clear, but not the primary focus of what I'm writing about here) is the extent of his ties to the Church of Scientology. I was most engaged with Neil's work as a teenager and in my early 20s, and I didn't recall seeing mention of the connection at the time (granted, that was more than a few years ago!). I couldn't let it go after reading the Vulture article, so I started to dig a bit and found a lot of information being shared on Reddit and even further digging uncovered archived forum posts from over a decade ago by former CoS members.

There are a lot of details in this article by Mikey Crotty, who appears to be an independent comics journalist, which was published by Mike Rinder on his blog in 2023. Rinder was famously an executive in the "church" in Australia and ran SeaOrg (the elite force of CoS, essentially, and responsible for internal discipline within the broader org) before ultimately leaving the organization and speaking out as loudly as he could about the abuses he had been complicit in as a member (at great personal risk, as anyone who is familiar with the tactics used against former CoS members will know).

The piece was written as an exposé about Gaiman's novel, The Ocean at the End of the Lane, which was semi-autobiographical. Crotty discusses details about Gaiman's family, Gaiman's participation in CoS, and the coverup his father orchestrated for an apparent suicide of a student of Scientology who had immigrated to the UK and was living with the Gaimans at the time. This suicide is written into The Ocean at the End of the Lane.

Neil's father, David Gaiman, was head of worldwide communications for the Church of Scientology in the 60s, and was leading the PR spin to protect the organization from increasing legal scrutiny in the UK at the time. Around the same time, a suicide occurred while a young man, Johannes Scheepers, was living with them (the Gaiman's took in CoS students as lodgers at their home on a regular basis, apparently). The Gaiman family launched a campaign to depict him as a broken down gambler to avoid further scandal for the organization. The logic doesn't quite add up, and it's more likely that Johannes was a new adherent who had been badly taken advantage of. You can read more details in the article I linked. Crotty makes the case that not only were the Gaimans lying about the death of the student, even going so far as to claim he wasn't actually lodging with them, but that Neil then went further to spread these lies in the form of fiction decades later (we now know this book was written as a result of the prompting of Amanda Palmer, who was encouraging him to confront his childhood experiences with CoS per the article in Vulture).

The article also points out evidence of Neil's continued involvement with Scientology:

Neil Gaiman’s history with Scientology is very murky; deliberately so. His family are practically Scientology royalty in the UK, he met his first wife Mary McGrath while she was studying Scientology and lodging at Harrow House and he himself worked as a Scientology Auditor for several years in the Eighties and was a Director of a Scientologist’s property company ‘Centrepoint’ until 1999.  He now won’t discuss his own Scientology connections and states, without any details, that he’s no longer a member of the Cult that supported Apartheid up until the mid eighties, believes homosexuals are deviants and mental illness is a manifestation of personal failure in the sufferer’s current or past life; beliefs which are anathema to most of Neil’s adoring audience. His connection to Scientology and apparent departure from the cult first went public as part of a court case in 2002 where when asked “Are you still involved with the Church of Scientology?” Neil said “I don’t understand the question”, subsequently asked “Are you still a member of the Church of Scientology?” he replied “I don’t consider myself as such”. Even then his admission that he worked for the Church for 3 years is somewhat confusing: “I worked for a 3 year period after getting out of school as a ‘Counsellor’ for the Church of Scientology”; in fact he actually worked as an ‘Auditor’ in a process made famous in the award winning 2015 Documentary ‘Going Clear’ which explains how officials in the Church of Scientology keep in-depth records on everything its members say during private ‘auditing’ sessions and then use their secrets against them. Renowned Journalist and author on Scientology Tony Ortega says that Gaiman “became a Class VIII auditor, and even ran the Birmingham “org” as its ED, executive director. “. While there is no contradiction in Neil’s actual admission of working for Scientology up till the late Nineties and subsequently leaving the cult and its beliefs sometime in the early Noughties, conflicting details arise in the period since, when Neil has insisted he’s not a Scientologist. According to public records he was a shareholder in the family firm G&G Foods, which produces the vitamins used in Scientology’s highly criticized Narconon and De-Tox practices, since 2011. He transferred approximately a quarter of a million shares to Scientologist shareholders in 2013. There’s the book ‘Ocean’ also from 2013 and then there’s also his production company ‘The Blank Corporation’. ‘The Blank Corporation’ is Neil’s production company which works on all his adaptations such as ‘Sandman’, ‘Anansi Boys’, ‘Good Omens’ and the upcoming ‘Ocean at the End of the Lane’ in partnership with Netflix, Amazon, Warner Bros, the BBC and others. According to the website and any interviews, Neil founded ‘The Blank Corporation’ in 2016 with his Vice President and former P.A. Cat Mihos. According to the official Companies registration however, the company was actually set up by Neil and then wife (and still devout Scientologist) Mary McGrath in 2000. The company is still registered to a Scientologist’s P.O Box in Wisconsin, where Mary McGrath still works for the Church of Scientology. One company; two very different stories, it’s just another mystery, like what really happened to cause Johannes Scheepers to take his own life in 1968.

I want to note that based on what I've read, being a Class VIII auditor is the highest level you can go as an auditor in CoS without becoming a member of SeaOrg. Auditors are individuals who are key to the brainwashing process members of CoS undergo; they utilize the org's "technology" to identify past sins by doing intensive interrogation sessions with members. This means Neil was well trained in how to psychologically interrogate org members and held a position of relative power over them as he documented their dearest secrets for the org (primarily to blackmail them with should they ever want to leave, based on CoS records and former members' experiences).

I found forum posts where others reviewed public records that confirmed the majority of these claims, although unable to confirm the PO Box in Wisconsin. His sister, Lizzy Calcioli, is the current company director of G&G, which supplies pseudoscientific vitamin treatments to drug rehabilitation seekers that are horribly abused by Narconon (CoS does not allow actual medical intervention or medical practices in its org). According to public filings, Neil still owns shares in G&G.

There is also this interview from 2010 with the New Yorker, in which Neil claims he is no longer a member of CoS, but expresses sympathy with them:

These days, Gaiman tends to avoid questions about his faith, but says he is not a Scientologist. Like Judaism, Scientology is the religion of his family, and he feels some solidarity with them. “I will stand with groups when I feel like they’re being properly persecuted,” he told me.

It is also well known that celebrity members of CoS are encouraged/allowed to lie about their connection to it in order to support their monetary success. Because of course they're going to contribute back to the organization through that success, which it appears Neil has done.

Additionally, we know from public accounts of CoS's practices and leaked documents that once someone leaves the organization, they are not allowed to continue to associate with anyone within the cult. Isolation of former victims is one of the many tools used against them. The fact that Neil maintained a marriage for decades to an active member who still works for CoS, as well as relationships with his family members who are leaders in CoS, indicates he is either still on the books as a member or is contributing to CoS in order to avoid alienation from his family. Any sympathy a desire to remain connected with his family might conjure is misguided in my opinion, because we know that he's likely profiting off of shares in a company that takes advantage of and contributes to the traumatization of vulnerable patients as a CoS affiliated business.

Had I known Neil Gaiman was so closely connected to the "church" sooner (one degree away from L. Ron Hubbard himself as a child!), I would not have supported his work in the way that I did in the past. And I think he knew that a significant portion of his audience would respond the same way, which is why he obfuscated and downplayed those connections.

His alleged ongoing involvement also changes the way I perceive his actions - Deception and manipulation is, by former member's accounts, standard procedure for leaders within Scientology. It should come as no surprise that he will continue to deny any evidence, attempt to blame his victims, and lie lie lie to avoid potential consequences. It is, after all, the example he was given and trained in as an active participant in a destructive cult that he has never publicly disavowed and that he appears to continue to support.

I think this information should be taken into account as former (hopefully) fans react to his responses to these accusations. I wish for peace for the victims who are now speaking out, and I hope they are able to reach the resolution they deserve.

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dog being very cute today

your dog is SO cute thank you for introducing us!!!

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the curse of adhd:

i will remember with absolute clarity, when the thought strikes me that i have a text to send someone, that this is the fourth time in three days i've attempted to send this specific text

i will forget, in the time it takes me to pick up my phone, that i picked it up intending to send a text