this is just my opinion but i think any good media needs obsession behind it. it needs passion, the kind of passion that's no longer "gentle scented candle" and is now "oh shit the house caught on fire". it needs a creator that's biting the floorboards and gnawing the story off their skin. creators are supposed to be wild animals. they are supposed to want to tell a story with the ferocity of eating a good stone fruit while standing over the sink. the same protective, strange instinct as being 7 and making mud potions in pink teacups: you gotta get weird with it.
good media needs unhinged, googling-at-midnight kind of energy. it needs "what kind of seams are invented on this planet" energy and "im just gonna trust the audience to roll with me about this" energy. it needs one person (at least) screaming into the void with so much drive and energy that it forces the story to be real.
sometimes people are baffled when fanfic has some stunning jaw-dropping tattoo-it-on-you lines. and i'm like - well, i don't go here, but that makes sense to me. of fucking course people who have this amount of passion are going to create something good. they moved from a place of genuine love and enjoyment.
so yeah, duh! saturday cartoons have banger lines. random street art is sometimes the most precious heart-wrenching shit you've ever seen. someone singing on tiktok ends up creating your next favorite song. youtubers are giving us 5 hours of carefully researched content. all of this is the impossible equation to latestage capitalism. like, you can't force something to be good. AI cannot make it good. no amount of focus-group testing or market research. what makes a story worth listening to is that someone cares so much about telling it - through dance, art, music, whatever it takes - that they are just a little unhinged about it.
one time my friend told me he stayed up all night researching how many ways there are to peel an orange. he wrote me a poem that made me cry on public transportation. the love came through it like pith, you know? the words all came apart in my hands. it tasted like breakfast.
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you know what boils my blood.
over the last 2 weeks, i've seen countless patients walk into my urgent care center, symptomatic for so many things, refusing to get tested for covid and flu, citing that they don't want to knowingly bring it to their holiday tables. i had a patient tell me, verbatim, "i don't want to test for covid, because i don't want to be the asshole who brings it on a plane."
i understand that - i understand that holidays are times where people look forward to meeting loved ones that they might only see once a year, or where they get a break from the hectic back and forth of their lives.
but here's the thing - whether they get tested or not, they will bring whatever they have to their holiday tables. it's pure recklessness to know that you're sick, and walk into someone else's house spreading the disease.
today, january 2, i saw 91 patients, many of them who have tested positive for covid and flu. many of these patients are the same ones who didn't want testing 3 days ago, until their events were over, and now, they will have to reach out to everyone they know to let them know that they were positive because they were showing symptoms well before their event.
the next week or two? we're going to see many, many more, all people with symptoms that started around christmas. these are the only two viruses we test for rapidly in our office, but they are potent and can be fatal in many people.
so here's why i wrote this post, and maybe it's a little late, but - if you care about your loved ones, please get tested if you know you're sick. it doesn't have to be at a clinic if you don't want it to, because the over-the-counter tests work just fine too (if you test within 5-7 days of symptom onset). just...please don't try to run from the knowledge that you might have covid, because immunocompromised people, elderly people, people with co-morbidities like asthma, pregnancy, diabetes, etc...many of them may not recover. and they may not be sitting at your holiday table in the future because of it.
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I picture Ming Fan as the perfect teacher's pet, not in an ass kisser way, but in a was-born-for-this kind of way. If the authority figure is a cruel sneering villain, he is a cruel little minion hunched over rubbing his hands on the corner. If the authority figure is an old man with mommydaddy vibes, he's the neighborhood's unattainable MILF's son who clearly wants the cool Martial Arts champion to be his new dad and not you, I'm going to tell mom you hit me you little shit.
Unfortunately in the last scenario his aspiring stepdad is his little shit of pseudo (martial) brother, who wrote a poem titled something that Ming Fan interpreted as "Shixiong's mom has got it going on" which thankfully flew right above Shizun's head. Ming Fan just KNOWS that if Luo Binghe asked Shizun if they could marry pretty please Shizun would sigh and accept but only because Binghe has been such a diligent and filial disciple and he deserves a reward. And Ming Fan is not unaware of how incestuous he makes it sound, but you don't live here you don't know what he's going through.
He tried to keep Luo Binghe's grubby paws away from his shimei, but he focused so much on guarding the cabbage patch he didn't see Luo Binghe sneak past and towards the farmer's house!
Thank Heavens the farmer is so far removed from mortal issues he doesn't notice the beast he collared wants to be his house wife.
So Ming Fan, instead of a little henchman, becomes an anxiety riddled teenager, seeing gold diggers hiding in every corner. Ning Ying Ying tuts and tells him he's being ridiculous, to which Luo Binghe shakes his head and says:
"No, no. I see them too."
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So I had another idea come at me while making lunch (I'm starting to sense a pattern with myself, lmao)
What if when Jazz sends out letters to the colleges she wants to get into, she gets sent rejection letters from every single one... except the local community college. She's absolutely devastated about it. She thought that she did everything she could to be chosen. How could every single one reject her?
Danny, of course, hears about it and asks Tucker to check and see if something happened digitally. Surely, Technus or Vlad or someone messed with something to sabotage her. But when Tucker checks, there's absolutely nothing wrong. She still has her perfect grades and attendance record all set with no marks. Her community service hours are all there. It's only when he looks at the letters themselves that he finds the problem...
After looking online to see what the letters look like, he comes to a puzzling realization... the letters were fake. It's a good fake, but it's not the real thing. The signatures were off, and the writing had been changed.
This is what leads him down the rabbit hole.
He tries to ask about it online to ask others who've also been rejected. Except nobody is answering him.
Sam tries to call the numbers listed on the websites of the colleges... but the person who answers is strangely unknowledgeable about the college they represent.
The only college that seems normal about it was the nearby community college. And that somehow feels the least normal about everything.
It was only when he heard his mom complaining that they never heard from family anymore after they moved to Amity that he figured it out.
Containment. Nothing is leaving Amity. No emails, texts, letters, or posts online. Everything was being blocked.
Of course, this sends him on a mission as to why and how. He spends weeks on it. Sam and Danny actually began to become concerned for him. No, this isn't a pride thing, Sam. And yes, he is taking care of himself, Danny.
Technus is the one who gives him the answer. It was just a passing comment about how he needed to funnel through the GIW in order to infect the world. It didn't make sense to any of them because surely that's the last place you would want to do that. But then it dawned on Tucker. That's who has the power needed to do it! That's where he needed to look!
So he hacks into the GIW and is astonished by what he finds.
The anti ecto acts aren't real. There's no laws even acknowledging ghosts.
There's a file on Phantom, marked as 'candidate for X'.
And all he can find on the containment is a name he's seen described as the creator of the GIW and the main supplier of funds.
Amanda Waller.
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the thing is that martin thinks it took "two years of crisis and trauma" just to make him and jon compatible and the reason jon doesn't know how to rebut that wildly incorrect fact is because he's barely aware that he had a stick so far up his ass in season one that it grew roots in his brain before he stubbornly and meticulously and with gritted teeth plucked them all out. jon could've plucked those roots out before all the trauma and crises if he simply chose to. and he would. in so many universes. because martin (and friendship and love and connection) is worth it. mic drop
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