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If ya'll ain't listening to Jesse Welles what are you doing?

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Instead of apologizing for liking "trashy" media, consider: what is it doing well? If you like it, if it's making you feel pleasure and interest, then it must be succeeding at something. Is it shaping a set of emotional beats that you find satisfying to watch play out? Did it craft a character you find really compelling? Is something in the styling and aesthetics speaking to you? Did it unexpectedly resonate with a mood or experience you needed to see reflected right then?

However shallow or flawed a piece of media is, if you like it, it's because of something it did well - at least well enough to affect you, on the day that you encountered it.

There are a lot of good reasons to acknowledge this. One is about gratitude and manners: someone worked hard on that thing, and if they provided something that gave you happiness and pleasure, it's nice to honor that. Another is about breaking down the insidious habit of sorting everything into simple good/bad boxes. A piece of media, like a person, can do a lot of things wrong and a lot of things right, and the things on one side do not magically erase the other.

But the most important reason, I believe, is to get in the habit of celebrating what brings you pleasure and happiness. All your life there have been and there will be people telling you that you find joy in the wrong things, that if a particular thing makes you feel good it shows that there's something wrong with you. I reject that utterly. If a particular thing makes you feel good then there's something right, about you and about that thing. I'm not saying that pleasure is the only important thing or that every pleasure should be indulged indiscriminately. All I'm saying is that pleasure is in and of itself a good thing, and deserves notice.

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I’m thinking about Galinda and her song Popular and how it demonstrates her understanding of how to get what she wants.

This has probably been talked about before, I know. I read the book Wicked but over a decade ago. I knew very little about the musical until now.

Anyway, Popular is about how Galinda decides to alter Elphaba’s social image for the better, to make her popular. Surface level, this just seems to be the typical move of a popular girl, to make the unpopular girl more like herself, to “help” her. But Galinda understands that image is sometimes more important than content, how you are perceived can have more impact than what you stand for. She’s her own best example of this, Galinda stands for no real cause, but she’s molded her image to be seemingly Good, beautiful, and charming, so Galinda is popular. This informs her greater view of how to get what she wants, as in if she’s likable and popular, then she can achieve what she dreams of, magic. It’s always worked for herself before but popularity won’t help her gain the ability to use magic.

Galinda’s perspective of how to achieve what you want is at direct odds with Elphaba’s perspective. Her whole life, Elphaba’s mere existence, her presence has been a disturbance, in more than one sense of the word. She’s naturally done her best to go unnoticed and when that isn’t possible, she will stare down the mockery and derision. In munchkinland, she had no possibility to be popular so she has to achieve what she wants another way. Through pure hard work and talent for magic. And this ultimately leads to Elphaba’s perspective that it doesn’t matter what people think of her, as long as she is doing the right thing.

These differences in perspective ultimately comes to a head with Defying Gravity. Elphaba and Glinda learn the truth of the Wizard, Madame Morrible, and their vilification of the Animals. For Elphaba, there is only one course of action, to tell the truth and stop the Wizard from causing more harm. If this makes her a fugitive then so be it, she will be doing the right thing. But she can do this because she has raw magic power. For Glinda, popularity is power (look at how well that works for the Wizard), if she is hated then she has no power because at the time of this song, Glinda isn’t magically powerful, not like Elphaba. As much as they care for each other and say that their partnership makes them unlimited, Glinda’s decision to stay behind demonstrates that she knows, that as she is right then, she would be of no help to Elphaba’s cause. So they part, heartbroken but accepting of the path the other person chooses.

It’s a catchy song, I understand now why my mom will hum it out of nowhere. But it has so many more layers to it than that, quite like the character who sings it.

Anyway, I had a lot of fun watching the movie and am looking forward to Act 2.

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MANNY JACINTO, about playing the role of Qimir / The Stranger in The Acolyte (source)

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PRACTICAL MAGIC (1998) dir. GRIFFIN DUNNE

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I've been seeing a bunch of posts about "why didn't the government do anything in advance" Here are things that were done:

Massive amounts of food, bottled water, medical supplies, and beds were delivered to strong buildings designated as shelters in every town.

The National guard was sandbagging everything they could and knocking on doors all along the coast trying to convince people to evacuate. They were literally going door-to-door.

The government paid for free Uber rides to shelters and provided free buses to evacuate. Unfortunately it appears not many people knew about it.

The government organized and prioritized getting gas stations refilled along evacuation routes. It wasn't enough but it would have been much worse without official help. They also organizes tow trucks to get dead cars off the roads.

Everyone will probably get the same aid Helen victims got - $750 instantly to anyone with ID showing they lived in a hurricane damaged area, and then thousands to tens of thousands to help rebuild or move later on, once there are more detailed damage assessments and victims fill out a request for aid.

The government also speed ran trying to get debris from Helene off the streets before Milton so it wouldn't become projectiles (again not enough but they managed waaaaay more than expected), and will be the ones clearing roads tomorrow ASAP.

Heck, the government runs NOAA and is what told people approximately where it would hit and with what power days ago. They were the ones that did all the research to build the devices that let them make predictions like that. They were the ones flying into the storm to get windspeed measurements every couple hours.

Tomorrow the government will be delivering more generators and gas and bottled water, and a fleet of ambulances and firemen to rescue people.

Yeah we could do better. We could always do better. Florida needs better building codes in storm surge zones for one thing.

But to say the government did nothing? Nah, that's not true. It's not true at all.

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"it's concerning if university students are genuinely struggling to read full adult-level books for class" and "don't overstate the reporting of a single news article" and "if this shift is genuinely real, it's reflective of broad curriculum changes in lower education levels, probably at least in part due to remote schooling during COVID, and doesn't mean the new generation is being willfully Stupid and Vapid" and "when reading for personal pleasure people should read whatever they like without shame" and "reading from a broad variety of genres, styles, and authorial backgrounds will improve your understanding of both literature and the real world" and "actively mocking people for their tastes in books does not encourage them to become more adventurous you're just being mean" and also "but seriously adult books are not just boringly pretentious nothingburgers padded with pointless sex scenes, and claiming they are just shows how little you've read" all can and should co-exist.

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So I just watched Ready or Not, late to the party I know. Loved it, had so much fun, clearly well thought out. Full spoilers, from here.

I kept thinking about Alex’s betrayal to Grace. He spends almost the entire movie doing what he can to help Grace. He gives her an Out before the wedding, he tries to not scare her by not telling her about Hide and Seek since she could have gotten a different game, and he actively fights his family to give Grace a shot at escape. And he does all of this because Grace is Good and he says that she taught him how to be good. But at the climax, he chooses to capture Grace and help his family sacrifice her, he even wields the blade to kill her. So why did he do that? Did he change?

His perspective of her definitely did. Up until Alex finds Daniel dying on the floor, Alex perceives himself as Grace’s savior, her knight. Because while she’s smart, Grace will still need him to do the hard work because she is Good. And while Alex wants to be Good, he is Bad but he will be Bad so she can be Good. Alex helps her move through the house undetected, he breaks the security system so Grace can get outside, he rebels against his family and is captured for it. He then spends probably a few hours trapped in handcuffs, slowly trying to get out.

What he doesn’t know is in that time, Grace will go through multiple harrowing and traumatic experiences, increasingly needing to be violent herself to survive. Grace gets shot in her hand by Alex’s nephew, falls into a body pit, wounds herself getting past the fence, is chased down by the butler, survives a car crash, escapes the first attempt to sacrifice her, and has to leave dying Daniel behind because she won’t waste the chance he got her. By the time they reunite, Grace is like a feral cat, not trusting anyone, even Alex, since that trust has been broken. And most crucially, Alex finds her right after Grace killed his mother, a self-defense act, but still a deeply personal loss.

At first it seems that Alex’s betrayal is due to this, Alex could understand everything else Grace did to survive except this. But then he observes that Grace will not be with him even if they both survive this, which alludes back to their earlier conversation about how Alex wanted to be with Grace no matter what and marriage seemed to be the only way he would not lose her, something the audience would sympathize with. This made it seem like Alex was all in no matter what at the time but at this climax, we realize that isn’t true. If he can’t have Good Grace’s fidelity then not only does he not want to be with her, but he’s willing to kill her himself. And this change in Alex happens because he no longer perceives Grace as Good. Grace clearly killed his mother, she does not want to be with him anymore, and he may even suspect that Grace killed Daniel, the one family member he really loved, or she at least is to blame for his death because of fighting the sacrifice. Grace moves from Good to Bad in Alex’s eyes. And he may have been able to overlook this Badness if she stayed committed to him, but since she won’t then he will no longer hesitate in sacrificing her for the family.

This ultimately condemns him because after Grace survives to dawn, he is the last member of the family left, everyone else has been exploded by Le Bail. Saving Alex for last and waiting for Grace’s reaction to his begging is clearly Le Bail letting her decide if Alex gets to live. Had Alex not captured her and try to sacrifice her, Grace may have let him live. And I think Le Bail would have let that happen, she won the game so she could keep her husband if she wanted. But Alex is just like his family, he isn’t a black sheep, he’s a wolf who finally joins the pack. Grace rightly rejects his begging, seeing through how he doesn’t really mean what he says, and did he ever?

Awesome film, highly recommended.

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Finished season 3 of The Bear. This season felt harder, and I don’t mean that as a criticism, but I think that was a feeling the showrunner wanted the audience to be left with and it was achieved, at least for me. 

Carm blew up his life at the end of season 2 and this season is the repercussions of that, how it affects him personally and how it affects his team around him. This is the most tense Carm’s and Syd’s relationship has ever been, he and Richie can’t speak to each other without actual hurt underpinning it, and Carm has barely been a mentor to the rest of the chefs like he has been in the past. The whole season we’ve been shown how Carm’s past is on his mind and how what was sown in his past is growing now, how his experience at the Empire with that asshole chef is dragging him down now, how he is unfortunately emulating that horrible chef with his own team. For Carm, it has been a season of reflection on his past and a slow reconsidering of what he wants, what he dreams of. Cooking is his thing, it’s something that let him connect to Michael and it's something that helped Carm distinguish himself as someone truly skilled and talented, but as noticed last season, he also seems to seek these high-level kitchens because it gives him a rush of stress that feels normal to him because of what his childhood was like. But also last season Carm got to discover peace and love with Claire, he got to see a calmer life outside of that high-level stress and he liked it. When Claire understandably left, Carm couldn’t deal with it so he went back to what he knew, intense perfection that causes high stress. He can’t think about anything else because he has to think about getting that star and the only way he knows how to get a star is to replicate the environment at the Empire, under that asshole. By the end of the season, with the Ever shutting down and his old mentor readjusting her priorities, Carm has reached the point of his reflection where I think he’s reached an inner crossroads; does he choose a path of peace, represented by Claire, or does he choose a path of intense perfectionist stress, represented by the asshole. And in a way, I think whichever path he picks also represents the type of person Carm would evolve into. 

However, Carm has spent so much time inward, that he’s been blind to his business partner and friend, Sydney. She’s fully aware that he’s going through it, and she’s not his therapist so she’s not opening that Pandora's box of trauma, especially considering she’s got her own shit to deal with, but Carm isn’t seeing how this affects her. Last season, they had a set menu that was both of theirs but now the menu belongs to Carm only and it changes daily, if Sydney tries to set it even within his bounds Carm ignores it. The restaurant was supposed to be both of theirs, but from the initial reviews that Syd was looking at, even she can tell everyone is considering this project as purely Carm’s, and that hurts because it’s like she’s invisible to the larger cooking world when this was supposed to be her introduction. And she doesn't even get the work environment she wanted. It seems like most nights, Carm isn’t speaking to his team respectfully (often being an asshole) and Syd can occasionally reign him back in but she’s not his babysitter, he’s putting more work on her plate by losing control of his emotions. We saw how during the party at her place, Syd has a panic attack similar to how the asshole caused panic attacks for Carm, being at The Bear isn’t good for her. Carm is so focused on his trauma, that he can’t see that he’s making an unfulfilling if not outright awful working environment for her, it’s not even on his radar that Syd might want to leave, and it’s going to bite him in the ass no matter what Syd decides to do. 

I think this season was so hard because they actually took their time to depict what stress, depression, and trauma can do to a person and their relationships after a blow-up-your-life moment like Carm had. And even with all that, Carm had to go through that this season, I don’t think he’s going to be a perfect person at the start of next season, but he imploded in on himself and exploded at everyone else that opening night, it was going to take time to recover back to a semblance of the person he was and try to heal toward becoming a better one. It would be nice if Carm had paid more attention to Syd and tried to mend his relationship to Richie, but if he’d done that in the first couple episodes then that night would have had no impact. Carm needed to be awful, and sour, and a general asshole or it would’ve meant nothing, and now the growth he will hopefully be on will mean something. As hard as it was, this season was good.

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made a uquiz

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What’s a stereotypical food from ur culture that u absolutely love.

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I hope one day I can stop believing that I’m hard to love

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by feanne on ig ˚. ✦. ˳·˖✶ ⋆.✧̣̇˚.

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Do you ever watch a show or a movie or any piece of media meant for kids and just think about how the story or character or that one scene or whatever just spoke to your heart and soul, or just how profound it made you happy or break your heart. And just sit their thinking that this is for literal children, who probably still couldn't 100% understand the gravity of what they are consuming or probably couldn't articulate how they felt about it other than say they liked it or they dont, or it made them happy or sad, and you, a grown ass person is just thinking about how this thing meant for kids is just so simple yet complex with so many layers of emotions and plot and etc. That explores themes and subject better than media meant for your age, in a way that is simple yet incredible done.

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