carrieonfighting

[carrieonfighting]

this post is not gonna be well put together but i am having feelings

mean girls is trending right now because the musical movie just came out and i feel insane. idk why i do, it was stupid of me to think that most people Got It, no one ever gets it, it was always about the memes and the aesthetic.

the first mean girls movie was based on a nonfiction book called queen bees and wannabes. it interviewed and discussed the social caste system in teen girl friendships. how they hold each other to these insane standards of heternormative femininity out of sheer terror that they won't meet those standards themselves. the way they leverage their relationships for some small degree of power in a world designed to strip them of it, even if it drags other girls down.

the "you can only wear your hair in a ponytail once a week and on wednesdays we wear pink" speech was not an original creation for the script. it's a QUOTE from a real teenage girl. those were REAL RULES.

then the musical came, and it was one step removed from the intended messaging of the film. OG mean girls was not perfect (and was extremely racist), but it said what needed said. the musical leaned on the comedy more, but still left a heartfelt undertone, and still critiqued the systems in place. of course no piece of media is going to be perfect, but it was about the conversation.

then this new movie comes out and it is washed over in the veneer of white hollywood feminism so thick you can't see anymore. the problematic aspects of the original movie are taken out to avoid "offending" when the offense was the point. it becomes toothless, it becomes some other thing entirely. they changed karen's line "i expect to run the world in shoes i cannot walk in" to "watch me as i run the world in shoes i cannot walk in." because choice feminism is in vogue, suddenly this character whose entire point is that she doesn't think deeply about WHY she does anything is suddenly hip to the fact that the world is against her.

i think of sokka losing his misogyny arc in the new atla. i think of the Heathers remake casting the bitchy, identical heathers as queer and hollywood-fat outcasts. as if the story, the meaning, the allegory is hidden in the sets and the jokes and the music. it's a whole new thing now, and it's a thing that means nothing in particular.

the plastics should not wear jeans. they should not have curves. their queerness should be suppressed, painful. their sexuality is not a slay, it's the only thing they think they have of value. the santa dance isn't sexy, it's shocking, it's mortifying - they are children.

they're not mean because "we are all mean." they are mean because they are girls in a world that brutalizes them and crushes them into a standardized shape. they are mean because the world is mean to them. they are mean because it gives them some power back. they are mean because it's the only weapon they have.

the landscape of femininity today has shifted to camera-ready makeup at the age of 10, stringent performative hygiene standards, and avoiding being caught on film while having a genuine emotion. the consumerism, the fatphobia, the racism, the classism, the homophobia remain. We could have had a conversation about that.

[carrieonfighting]

Taylor Swift on film at the VMAs 2023

creds: jalen hemphill on insta

[carrieonfighting]

My answer is yes for Heath Ledger. I was obsessed with him when he died and it broke my little pre-teen heart 💔

[carrieonfighting]

It seems pretty obvious to me that 2nd poster is agreeing with you, and commenting on the imagined statement you included in your original post to expound on your point. Like yes you're right, and people who say escapism is not picking the good options don't know how to have fun.

people will say "rpgs are for escapism why do you always pick the nice/heroic dialogue options" and well u see, the escapism IS being able to help everyone

[carrieonfighting]

My tinfoil hat conspiracy theory is that as people feel more and more helpless in a society that doesn't care about them, they become more and more entitled as consumers, hence the growing number of people nowadays who have no respect for artists even as they rely on their works to get by on a daily basis. When the only time you feel any semblance of power is through the money you spend on artistic consumption, you can easily tip over from feeling like an audience to an investor, feeling disproportionate ownership over the work just for having deigned to watch/view/read it and feeling like you have a say in what or how the artist creates in the future to cater to you specifically

[carrieonfighting]

tldr I was looking up the classification system for cerebral palsy (GMFCS) and part of the 2nd level is "climbing stairs with the use of a railing" which just about knocked me out. Ableds. . . are you not. . . using railings? it's right there? this is trying to tell me it's abled culture Not to use the railing?

(use your best judgement as to whether or not abledness applies to you here. mostly I mean disabilities that would have some impact on stair-climbing, natch. chronic pain/fatigue counts, but, like, d/Deafness wouldn't, you get me?)

[carrieonfighting]

Put in the tags please if you answered yes lets have fun with this

For example my childhood dog was named Cher after the singer and yes she had a brother named Sunny

[carrieonfighting]

[carrieonfighting]

if ur confused about why animal people advocate for keeping your pets at a "healthy weight" but sometimes also in the same breath will advocate against human diet culture, its because we know what body condition a cat is supposed to be at optimally. but literally there is not one for humans as far as we can tell.

humans are a weird, opportunistic, hyper-adaptable and variable primate and we have evolved to have a LOT of variety in size, shape, metabolism, and weight retention. this has been essential to survival in hard times and easy times. you know the thing people talk about sometimes how about half the population are night people and about half are morning people so we'd be better able to watch at night as a group? yeah, weight variation is like that: there's a lot of latent variation in human populations because as a community we survive significantly better if some of us are fuckin ready to not die during the longass winter of death and some of us can eat their weight in fish and then run a mile immediately after. this is also why some people gain muscle crazy fast and some people don't: muscle requires a lot of energy, so some people are built to gain a lot during a plentiful season and be really efficient then and some people are built to use less energy over time and be more useful during a long hungry period. cats and almost all other vertebrates simply don't have this kind of complex community variation built in, and tend to be much more uniform in build and weight. humans tend to be really variable in body and brain, and that's one of the biggest factors that's made us so successful! there are just a LOT of ways to be a human being.

all of the "science" on "ideal human body condition" we have at the moment is almost entirely bullshit and was done by white supremacists for eugenics purposes. it's just not something we know, and right now there's significantly more evidence that there is no ideal body type for everyone to reach. recent research indicates that humans are healthiest at a variety of weights and builds, and dieting is almost universally bad for you. even if the culture hasn't caught up yet.

[carrieonfighting]

The Locked Tomb Sexywoman Tournament

Round One

Coronabeth Tridentarius vs Awake Remembrance of These Valiant Dead Kia Hua Ko Te Pai Snap Back to Reality Oops There Goes Gravity

Alecto vs Juno Zeta

Abigail Pent vs Ianthe Tridentarius

Camilla Hect vs Gideon Nav

Mercymorn the First vs Judith Deuteros

Pyrrha Dve vs Cytherea Loveday

Marta Dyas vs Dulcinea Septimus

Aiglamene vs Harrowhark Nonageismus

[carrieonfighting]

he’s been there the whole time

[carrieonfighting]

for real! (from kadji amin)

[Image description: Screenshot of text:

What I’ve realized is that I believe that the matter of gender is practical and relational. It’s not about who you are inside, it’s more about how you would feel most comfortable in the world. It’s not ‘Who are you?’ but ‘How do you want to live?’

Had that been the discourse when I was coming up, I would have breathed a sigh of relief. I don’t have to figure out who I am on the inside, I just have to figure out how I want to live.

end of ID]

[carrieonfighting]

Even the phrase ​“eat the rich” feels trite. It neatly sums up a tote bag slogan era of anti-capitalism in culture, cutesy shorthand that’s now entirely representative of a watered down, inoffensive type of politics. You could argue that satire born out of this politics is predictable because its targets are predictable: we all know rich people suck and perhaps they don’t necessarily deserve nuance. But the beauty of good satire is in using a scalpel to eviscerate a subject, by having a distinct perspective and striking with precision. - Patrick Sproull, "Why all ​“eat the rich” satire looks the same now"

[carrieonfighting]

"And now I will burn him and burn him and burn him and he will never really die." - Ianthe, TLT

Gaslight. Gatekeep. Girlboss. Third First House.

[carrieonfighting]

I honestly think the best direction @staff can take right now is the one Firefox and DuckDuckGo took back in the day, which is to realize that they're the only major alternative to a bunch of really morally reprehensible options and actively try to become morally decent, then use that as marketing

Like if the messaging around tumblr was "We'll never have an algorithm. We'll never sell your data. We'll never be bought by Elon Musk" and then they actually followed through on it all, they could fill a very desperately needed niche in the market. Rebrand tumblr as the not-predatory social media site and people will actually have a reason to check it out other than nostalgia

I think the consensus of the userbase is moving towards "staff is actually doing a pretty good job now for effectively the first time in history" so I don't think it's too far-fetched that they could go in this direction. And now really is the perfect time to do it

@cyle

[carrieonfighting]

dialogue between an AI and a poet

poem by me, 3.21.2020