infamousbrad

[infamousbrad]

I love that the internet saw people comparing women and other alienated groups of people and went, “they’re dating,” and, “they support each other.” We’re improving as a society.

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Lambert Field changed their name to St. Louis International airport many decades ago. Some day, I may yet meet a St. Louisan who doesn't call it Lambert, but that day has not yet come.

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(To avoid skewing the results, I'd request that, while the poll is active, that you not put this on a blog specifically about chronic pain; "your personal blog, where you happen to talk about chronic pain" is fine.)

[infamousbrad]

Yep. Hazbin Hotel and Helluva Boss are bible fanfic. So what?

The Paradise Lost trilogy is bible fanfic. Dante's Inferno is bible fanfic. The Great Divorce is bible fanfic. It's a Wonderful Life is bible fanfic. The Late Great Planet Earth is terrible fanfic, and the Left Behind series is even worse fanfic, but they're both bible fanfic too.

And y'know what? The bible says so little about the details of the afterlife it practically invites fanfic. And you know what's even more true? If you asked a focus group of bible-believing Christians to list, from memory, everything the bible says about the afterlife? Nearly everything on that list would be something that isn't in the bible, their ancestors adopted it as fanon from long-ago popular fanfics.

This is literally how cultural transmission of knowledge works.

We could argue all day on wheter "Viv makes OCs not characters" makes sense or not (because OCs ARE characters), but that doesn't change the fact that the people saying this see OCs as a bad thing that can be used as an insult, and THAT is the problem here that automatically makes them in the wrong.

Also, isn't that LITERALLY what the Hellaverse is?

OCs and ideas Viv had that enough people liked, so she got it funded and off the ground as actual shows? Like, if these haters wanna be "right" so bad about there "technically" being a difference, then sure, she makes OCs instead of characters. But it says more about you than about her that YOU think that's a bad thing.

Viv grew up in fandom culture and embraces "fandom cringe", which is literally what makes her shows so good in the first place.

I've talked before how HB and HH are literally if you take the 2000s fandom (with a bit of modernization, because obviously the 2000s weren't perfect) of a show and make it the actual show instead. So, as someone who grew up in 2000s fandoms as well, how in hell am I supposed to see that as a bad thing!?

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Moxxie was too broken to even try.

Loona, who knew from her father's own mouth that his greatest fear was dying alone, tried but couldn't do it; at the last moment whimpered and shut her eyes and turned away.

Millie almost let her tears overwhelm her, but she caught herself, looked up, opened her crying eyes almost as wide as we've ever seen them and LOCKED eyes with Blitz. They all "knew" he was going to die right in front of them (as so many of their victims, let's not forget, died in front of their friends and family) and it was clearly ruining her to do it, but Millie made sure that Blitz wasn't going to die alone.

She kept the promise that Loona couldn't, and it was the bravest thing anybody in this show has done in two whole seasons. (As the saying goes, dying is easy, living is what's hard.) I was so proud of her. And I cried with her. Cried hard.

The animation of that scene was amazing, best thing I've seen since the re-fusion of Steven Universe. This fscking show, man.

Millie didn't look away.

Watching it happen, actually seeing the axe sever his head, would almost certainly scar her even more than the rest of the situation was doing. There's just no way to unsee some shit, no matter how strong you are. Millie is undeniably strong, maybe the strongest of them all, but she loves Blitz. She loves him, and she was willing to sacrifice part of herself to give him comfort and strength in the end.

And she did give him those things, she absolutely did. Millie kept eye contact with him. Even when he smiled and said his final words, when she could have looked away and no one really could have blamed her, Millie stayed with him. She couldn't hold his hand or hold him, not physically, but she held Blitz all the same. She saw him, saw what he was doing, saw his love, and she held him, best fucking friends until the literal end.

And Blitz didn't feel alone.

He hated that they were all there, that he had gotten them into this. Still, if they had all been looking away, it might have been more terrifying than it already was. He wouldn't have blamed them for it, he would have understood, but all the same... All the same, he would have felt so alone in those last few seconds.

But he didn't feel alone, and so much of that was Millie. Her courage. Her kindness. Her steadfastness.

Blitz was grateful to her in that moment, and will be grateful to her for the rest of his life.

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For years, it was a mystery: Seemingly out of the blue, therapists would feel like they’d tripped some invisible wire and become a target of UnitedHealth Group. A company representative with the Orwellian title “care advocate” would call and grill them about why they’d seen a patient twice a week or weekly for six months. In case after case, United would refuse to cover care, leaving patients to pay out-of-pocket or go without it. The severity of their issues seemed not to matter. Around 2016, government officials began to pry open United’s black box. They found that the nation’s largest health insurance conglomerate had been using algorithms to identify providers it determined were giving too much therapy and patients it believed were receiving too much; then, the company scrutinized their cases and cut off reimbursements. By the end of 2021, United’s algorithm program had been deemed illegal in three states. But that has not stopped the company from continuing to police mental health care with arbitrary thresholds and cost-driven targets, ProPublica found, after reviewing what is effectively the company’s internal playbook for limiting and cutting therapy expenses. The insurer’s strategies are still very much alive, putting countless patients at risk of losing mental health care.

[infamousbrad]

I hate to see it, but it's not surprising ...

... that the CEO of United Health Care, America's wealthiest for-profit health insurance, was killed in what so far looks like an assassination: (Washington Post gift link to the ongoing story here.)

And you hate to see it, because assassination is both a monstrous crime and poor revolutionary praxis, but you know what? If I were a senior official at a company that has earned billions of dollars from collecting premiums and then turning the rate-payers down for life-saving health care? I wouldn't feel safe on any public street without Secret Service level protection.

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[infamousbrad]

Trauma didn't make me nice, I consciously made me nice because I don't want anyone else to suffer like I did. Trauma didn't make me strong, I made me strong. Don't you dare ever tell me my trauma made me anything but scared, broken, and confused. Don't give credit to the abusers for me being a good person. They didn't make me good, I made myself good.

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The current fantasy is that I'll use it to post links to any original content here, and any reblogs to which I actually add anything.

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Y'know, it occurred to me a while ago that there's a reason why I'm incapable of taking trans bathroom panic seriously.

1971, 6th grade, I'm walking back to class after lunch and there's a crowd outside the girls' restroom and a lot of yelling. When I get closer, I see a group of at least 5, maybe 6 guys trying to shoulder their way into the girls' room, with someone helplessly trying to keep them out on the other side, clearly losing. A few people who are closer than I am try to intervene and get shoved aside.

The girl(s) holding the door shut screams something as the boys crash in like a pile of linebackers, just as the first teachers arrive. They do not rush for the restroom, they rush to chase away the witnesses.

I heard later that once the last of the witnesses were chased to their respective classes, the teachers went back and of course the attackers were gone. Two girls had been molested, one of whom partially stripped.

The investigation afterwards was laughable and short. No witnesses nor victims were believed when they said they saw and knew who the attackers were. None of the attackers were punished. Both of the victims were given out-of-school suspensions for "trying to ruin those boys' lives."

None of the boys were in girl clothes. Not only did they not need to be, they knew on at least some level that failing to be masculine at all times would open them up to exactly the kind of violence that they were going to inflict on those girls. If a man wants to assault a woman in a women's restroom, he doesn't need or want to surrender his fragile masculinity to do so. And in all cases I've heard documented, they've never done so.

[infamousbrad]

Trump's election means that Washington DC is going to be useless for the next four years. Useless at best. Nothing important is going to get fixed if it has to get permission from the President of the United States. So ignore the President of the United States as much as you can and do what lots of other people were doing even before the election: saving the world ourselves.

You're going to hear this from me over and over again, in varying words, whenever I can give you a beautiful example like this one:

Dave Roberts, whose Volts podcast is the absolute premier source on zero-carbon electrification, interviewed the CEO of Sunrun, Mary Powell (transcript included at that link, if you'd rather read it) live on stage and, if this doesn't give you hope, I don't know what to offer you. She details all the progress her company has made, the progress her company is making, and the progress she's confident Sunrun can make in the next few years. And it is a lot of progress.

No matter how little help she gets from DC, which help Sunrun no longer needs. Not even if they try to stop her. Sunrun is ignoring Washington DC and getting on with saving the world, one solar plus battery system with built-in resilience and opt-out personal for-profit virtual power plant system for the price of your current energy bill or less per customer.

[infamousbrad]

Body image vs. anti fatness

[infamousbrad]

It's been this bad or worse before. Polk. Hoover. Reagan. Bush the Younger. Yeah, a lot of people got hurt those times too. I'm not going to pretend that the next two years, maybe more, aren't going to suck.

But smarter guys than him have looked for excuses to cancel an election before, too. For crying out loud, look up what happened with the younger Bush administration proposed suspending elections for the duration of the War on Terror, back in 2004. For that matter, the US had a presidential election during the Civil War. There will be another election in two years. And two years after that.

And if you only believe in democracy when your party wins, you don't really believe in democracy. As H.L. Mencken said, democracy is the theory that the public knows what they want and deserves to get it, good and hard. How else do they learn?

Go read (or re-read) Sandra Newman's Julia: A Novel of 1984. Strong-man authoritarian government is so stupid that it never lasts as long as it looks like it will. And if it's not time yet, if all you can do is survive with a relatively clear conscience, that's still a victory.

[infamousbrad]

I'm glad to discover you're active over here. I'd been following you on FB but thought you'd gone radio silent. I went to show someone your "Christians in the Hands of an Angry God" series, and other things of that nature, as background on how we got where we are today, and was really bummed that it seems to be gone from the public internet. Is it possible to get it back?

No one was less surprised than me that Six Apart, a tool of the Putin regime, nuked my old blog; the astonishing thing was that it stayed up as long as it did. Right now the only place to find it is Internet Archive.