#but also at the same time social media exists and reality tv has been dying pretty significantly - | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

astrothdied · 3 years ago

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Me ig

this was supposed to be things i do that i find aesthetics pleasing but halfway through i ended up wanted off track a bit

Only writing in pen and in all caps

a terrible sleep schedule but functioning fully on 3 hours of sleep

simply existing in the same room as any cat

mitski

debates, not arguments cause those are when you personally attack someone. debates are facts over feeling, arguments are feeling over fact. no yelling or insulting just simply stating why the other is wrong.

dying my hair while listening to mother mother at 2 in the morning on a wednesday when i have to wake up for school in 3 hours

i hate people, but love the individuals

going to a bookstore and museum in the same day

redbull

girl in red >>>

12 year old boy humor & dad jokes but ironically

too distant from people to be able to fall in love

is an astrology bitch but doesn’t actually judge anyone by their sun sign because i get along with all of them

books half way annotated because i started hyperfixating on something else completely and forgot about it

dissociating when someone is talking to me and them thinking i’m not interested in what they have to say

thrifting because you can find cute and comfortable clothes for so incredibly cheap

credit card fraud <3

kinder buenos

tumblr, pinterest, and musi keep me alive

wanting to die but being too lazy to actually commit

music that makes me feel like i’m in a fairy tale

J.R.R. Tolkien and C. S. Lewis being besties is it’s own thing

can literally be put in any type of social situation and be fine. like i can be around people for hours on end if i have to, yet has also stayed in my room for 6 days and only left to shower and didn’t have any complaints just me and netflix

doing shrooms in the woods

bo burnham my beloved

wants to be a writer but literally can not put thoughts down onto paper for the life of me

shifting realities <3

sleeping through a thunderstorm

long car rides (7+ hours) and going into a gas station and seeing who can find the weirdest thing between my mom and i

i leave my phone on do not disturb and when i see the cluttered notification screen i delete em all without looking at them so i won’t know what anyone said if i haven’t opened that app

the arctic monkeys

tea rooms are elite

i don’t care what people identify as or their political party as long as they aren’t unnecessarily rude i’m fine

hedgehogs & cows <333

babies freak me out

i couldn’t tell you why if i wanted to but i LOVE maps so much like not just the roadmaps but the little ones you can find printed at malls or amusement parks. i have a shoebox full that i’ve had since i was like 9 but it’s starting to overcrowd

arguing with old white republican men

any tv show or movie category you would consider nerdy i am slightly a part of: anime, star wars, 60s - 90’s movies, lord of the rings and the hobbit, narnia, the old disney movies, etc…

old printed pictures make me feel a fuzzy warm feeling inside

i want to collect tea

i make hearts for my friends out of candy wrappers (my favorite to do is dumdums)

i actually only started giving them to my friends cause i would use them for bookmarks but then people started complimenting them so i decided to make a few more

mylifeisayolk (egg) covers and original songs>>

comfortable silence >>>

going over conspiracy theories with my friends when high on shrooms and drinking wine

walking around at night talking about everything and nothing at the same time

is a fire sign

cloudy days have my heart

honestly i’ve never struggled with math it’s always been easy for me, i’m not interested in it it’s just easy

grey and green >>>

grilled cheeses <3

i live for crime related media and for no reason in particular

#aesthetic but not really #aesthetic #if i was a post #i want some fries rn #honestly i still have my grippy socks and i wear them on a regular based as regular socks and when i was in the 11th grade a girl #in the locker room saw them and asked me what trampoline park i got them from and i replied with the nuthouse and she said she’s never been

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appstorysm · 3 years ago

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'Squid Game' sets off a new game, trying to figure out why it took off on Netflix

(CNN) - "Squid Game" has set off its own Hollywood-centric game -- trying to explain how (or really, guess why) a South Korean drama that arrived with virtually no fanfare has become what Netflix is billing as possibly its "biggest show ever."

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After bingeing through the nine episodes, the answers likely can't be traced to any one factor, but rather a multi-legged array of them. They include the thrill of audiences discovering a concept on their own, without needing pointy-headed critics to direct them; the "Black Mirror"-style dystopia of familiar children's games turning deadly; and a greater appetite in the US for internationally produced content, already evident in the South Korean film "Parasite's" Oscar breakthrough in 2020 and the popularity of other Netflix shows from overseas, such as "Lupin."

As for the series itself, there's nothing so novel about "Squid Game" that would necessarily account for its assault on social media, having become the kind of trending item that media outlets, frankly, can't afford to ignore.

Instead, what writer-director Hwang Dong-hyuk has done principally involves serving old wine in a new bottle. Seen that way, "Squid Game" presents a visually arresting variation on themes seen plenty of times before, which include tapping into the class divide -- and the rich essentially preying on the poor and destitute -- at a moment when the audience might be more receptive to that message.

As is so often the case, timing, packaging and platform (that is, Netflix's 200-million-plus subscribers) have combined to create what one executive described to NBC News as "an organic fandom." As Vulture noted, the show nevertheless took off with few advance reviews and "hardly any marketing in the US."

Despite comparisons to "Parasite," which also examined the issue of economic inequality, there's no shortage of fare in the "You might like" column when it comes to "Squid Game's" beyond-dark vision of the rich making the poor risk dying for their amusement.

Contestants fight to stay alive in the Netflix series 'Squid Game.'

The concept has frequently been tied to spectacle, from "The Hunger Games" to "The Running Man" to the independent movie "Series 7," which focused on a fictional reality TV show that forced contestants into an elimination game that meant battling to the death.

A more recent example released just before the pandemic, the Universal movie "The Hunt," provoked controversy with its premise about wealthy liberals creating an elaborate apparatus to hunt "deplorables."

In its brief life, the streaming service Quibi also offered "Most Dangerous Game," in which a terminally-ill man sought to win money by allowing himself to become prey for one-percenters represented by Christoph Waltz. The plot largely mirrored the 1994 movie "Surviving the Game," which cast Ice-T as a homeless man abducted and chased by wealthy hunters seeking the ultimate thrill.

Despite its gruesome violence, the social commentary in "Squid Game" comes through loud and clear, establishing just how desperate the players are, and how cheaply their lives are valued by the "VIP's" behind their suffering.

At the same time, that element involving the VIP's might be the show's weakest link, or at least its most obvious and thuddingly over the top when they arrive in the later episodes.

Still, by the time those wrinkles come into play viewers are no doubt already invested in the fates of key players, as well as curious about when and whether the game's origins and secrets will be disgorged.

Another interesting underpinning of "Squid Game" is the idea that no matter how vicious and brutal it is, the poor cash-strapped souls taking part are supposed to have a fair and equal chance. In a way, that egalitarian streak also runs through the show's popularity, cutting through cultural barriers and the streaming clutter to become an unexpected sensation.

Of course, one of the aforementioned factors -- the audience's feeling of discovery -- is also the hardest to sustain in the proverbial bottle. As with any success, speculation has already turned what can be done as an encore, and imitators won't be far behind.

Watching something burst into the public consciousness demonstrates how unpredictable hits can be, especially in this age of dizzying abundance. But when such a program suddenly emerges, and a "fandom" exists, the one certainty is that it won't be long before "Squid Game" begins sprouting new arms.

#squid game #film #movies #2021 #netflix

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route22ny · 4 years ago

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We’re Never Going Back to the 1950s

The year 2020 shattered America’s shared reality.

by DEREK THOMPSON

DECEMBER 16, 2020

***

Twenty years ago, the sociologist Robert Putnam in Bowling Alone used the decline of bowling leagues since the middle of the 20th century to symbolize America’s declining social engagement. This year, he published a sequel of sorts, The Upswing, in which he identified more stray threads of our social unraveling: in lower marriage rates, church attendance, and trust in government; in falling membership in all chapter-based associations; collapsing social trust among young adults; and even a decrease in mentions of community versus identity in novels and nonfiction books.

But no measure of communitarian pessimism could have prepared Putnam for the circumstances of the past nine months. America’s bowling alleys haven’t just depopulated; they’ve gone dark, along with thousands of churches, restaurants, bars, cafés, gyms, theaters, and almost every other physical space that could preserve or nurture a physical community.

Mirroring this civic fragmentation, America’s media and entertainment industry has spun apart, and the spinning is accelerating. On December 3, the film studio Warner Bros. announced that subscribers of the company’s digital streaming service HBO Max will be able to watch all of its 2021 film releases at home, on the same day that they’re released in theaters. The movies affected by this decision aren’t humble indies. We’re talking Dune and The Matrix 4—the sort of films that, if they were released exclusively in theaters next year, might earn a domestic box office roughly equal to the GDP of Micronesia.

Like Putnam’s beloved bowling alleys, cinemas are an example of the decline of semiweekly gatherings in the United States—even if they’re less chatty establishments. In the 1940s, the average American bought more than 30 movie tickets a year, regularly packing into theaters with scores of strangers. In the past few years, that figure fell below four. In 2020, movie tickets sold per-person will fall below one—possibly for the first time since the late 1800s. The decision by Warner Bros. will likely encourage other entertainment companies, such as Disney, to funnel more of their marquee content to streaming services in the next few years. And the result could be a death spiral for movie theaters as we know them, as the film industry continues its shift from a public, ticketed affair to a private, living-room experience.

Home entertainment is fracturing as well, and along with it the communal-while-alone possibility of a shared popular culture. Since 2010, 33 million households have either cut the cord or never signed up for cable TV in the first place. The traditional cable bundle is slowly dying, and its death is fertilizing new subscription-only streaming services, such as HBO Max, Disney+, Peacock from NBCUniversal, and Quibi (RIP), which join a landscape crowded with Netflix, Amazon Prime Video, and Hulu, not to mention user-generated video platforms including YouTube and TikTok.

It would be hackish to accuse Netflix or Warner Bros. of being the main accelerants of American loneliness. But the fact is that cinematic entertainment, which was born as the ultimate communal ritual, an experience whose technology required simultaneity and togetherness, has become the ultimate personal activity, an incomprehensibly long spectrum of different stories mostly consumed in a state of solitude.

This media shift—from the scarce and communal to the abundant and privatized—also describes the evolution of the news industry. In the past 20 years, newspaper circulation, advertising revenue, and employment have cratered. But overall, news—that is, sources of new information, of varying truthiness—didn’t decline; it exploded. The web created a phalanx of news publishers, not just websites but also Facebook pages, Instagram personalities, newsletters, podcasts, and so on; at the same time, Google and Facebook duopolized digital advertising, creating a situation where publishers were multiplying as advertising declined.

In ecology, the term niche partitioning describes the way that competing species become hyper-specialized in an attempt to co-exist in an environment with scarce resources. I think that’s what’s happening in the news industry. As the number of competing publishers increases, it makes sense for each of them to carve out an ecological niche. This niches-get-riches race leads logically to a set of more outlets that embrace a more unabashedly partisan perspective—just as they did in the late 1800s.

One might assume that polarization is what happens to people cut off from information. But the truth is closer to the opposite: More information means more polarization. Research shows that access to broadband internet in the U.S. has in many cases increased various measures of polarization, as the web introduces voters to a bigger menu of partisan news from which voters select the sites that match their political tastes.

We’ve seen this phenomenon accelerate in 2020. Four years ago, most people would have said there were three major cable news networks: the center-left one (CNN), the liberal alternative (MSNBC), and the conservative juggernaut (Fox News). But in the past few months, the conservative-news monolith has shattered. Since the election, Newsmax TV and the One America News Network have stepped up to backfill President Donald Trump’s election-fraud lies with programming from an alternate reality. And behold, niche partitioning works: Last week, Newsmax rode the election-conspiracy story to its first-ever ratings win over Fox. Because Trump devotees are going to buy tickets to whatever media universe offers the best narrative, networks are competing to tell the Trumpiest tale.

With weekly religious attendance at low ebb and live TV in structural decline, national elections are arguably the only activity that Americans do together in shared time. But shared time is not shared reality. Led by the president, Republican lawmakers have petitioned to sabotage the results of the election, based on fantastic conspiracy theories. The GOP fever dream, which is credulously reproduced across Trump-friendly media, is clearly contagious: More than 80 percent of Trump voters believe that Biden’s win is illegitimate, a figure corresponding to about 60 million people. There is nothing unique about reality and fantasy blending together in politics. But the speed and severity with which Trump’s “Stop the Steal!” mind virus has infected the GOP is the sign of a compromised civic immune system. A far-right cohort has been effectively quarantined from reality in one corner of our honeycombed media landscape.

There is no going back to the 1950s. We will never again be enfolded by those bespoke mid-century circumstances, the scarce broadcasts and broadsheets. The dividing forces are too strong and too many. The film experience pushed out across millions of flatscreens; the live-television networks splintering into millions of digital entertainment queues; the news dissolving into innumerable political realities: One by one, these are not evil trends. But they add up. Or, more aptly, they divide. They individuate.

People ask me if I’m optimistic about 2021, and the answer is that, in a way, I’m ecstatically optimistic. The economy will reopen, and life will reopen. People will come out of their homes; they will send their kids to school; they will hug and kiss and live. But underneath the high tide of economic growth and social normalization, I think we’ll feel something else, an eerie undertow of isolation and anxiety.

“The definition of community is ‘where you keep showing up,’” said someone I met, whose name I’ve forgotten, back in the days when it was normal to meet new people whose names you could forget. I haven’t forgotten that line, though: Community is where you keep showing up. What a lovely idea. But where do people keep showing up, these days? Nowhere. Not the office, not the COVID-aerosolized bars and gyms. A lot of people have spent a year finding community via a glowing screen in a room they never leave.

The empty bowling alleys and movie theaters; the infinity buffet of entertainment and partisan media; the dissolution of a shared American reality—these are distinct yet connected phenomena. Digital technology has spawned a choose-your-own-adventure mediascape, which has flooded the electorate with alternate realities, at the same time that its community ties wither. America is coming apart, and these pieces will not be easily reassembled.

***

DEREK THOMPSON is a staff writer at The Atlantic, where he writes about economics, technology, and the media. He is the author of Hit Makers and the host of the podcast Crazy/Genius.

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/12/how-2020-shattered-shared-reality/617398/

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maybemaybemartian · 4 years ago

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Bio

Everything you ever wanted to know (but were afraid to ask) about Sokovia Rising’s M’gann M’orzz.

CHARACTER NAME/ALIAS: M’gann M’orzz alias Miss Martian FACECLAIM: Jane Levy AFFILIATIONS: Nomads, formerly Justice League AGE (physical age as well, if different): 25 SPECIES (human, metahuman, alien, etc): White Martian, appears human IS YOUR CHARACTER’S IDENTITY SECRET OR PUBLIC? Public IF SECRET, OR YOUR CHARACTER IS A CIVILIAN, DO THEY HAVE A CIVILIAN OCCUPATION? Librarian at the Matchak Library IF YOUR CHARACTER LIVES IN THE FORTRESS, WHAT ARE THEIR DUTIES? Yes. Cooking, food preparation, and pigeon keeping in the dovecote DESCRIBE SIX TRAITS (3 positive, 3 negative) YOUR CHARACTER HAS AND HOW THESE AFFECT THEM:

-Naïve

+Hardworking

-Lonely

+Kind

-Sensitive

+Empathetic

POWERS AND/OR ABILITIES: Shapeshifting, telekinesis, telepathy and telepathic empathy, camouflage (nearing invisibility now), intangibility (becoming more reliable now), Martian vision (energy blasts fired from the eyes, by far M’gann’s most exhausting ability), and flight. These abilities are rooted in Martian physiology, but, much like the Martian Manhunter’s abilities, M’gann’s have far, far surpassed their expected boundaries.

Sound does not travel efficiently through the thin, dust-heavy atmosphere of Mars. Instead of evolving to speak as humans do, Martians evolved to communicate telepathically. M’gann learned to silence surface thoughts within four months of arriving on Earth. However, she is unable to stop detecting people’s emotions and telepathic signatures. She also uses it as a universal translator. M’gann’s own telepathy is dangerously powerful and can be used in many ways, but she has a strict ethical code for how to use it and to whom it may be applied. M’gann does not use telepathy, her native language, to hurt people. She does not enter minds without consent, does not steal, alter, insert, or erase memories.

M’gann can shapeshift on a molecular level, but she needs to have at least a basic understanding of what she is shapeshifting into if she wants the form to be more than surface level. For example, M’gann can fly innately. But, if she wanted to shift into a sparrow with functioning wings, she would need to know a little about aerodynamics and birds. Luckily, she’s a quick study and she’s between practicing for a long time.

It is very, very important to note that M’gann started hiding her powers after the Chitauri Invasion in 2014. A character who has not worked with Miss Martian or the Martian Manhunter would find video footage of these powers through a quick Google search: M’gann telekinetically lifting a car, flying, and doing a bit of shapeshifting, J’onn using energy beams, using superstrength without visibly shifting, shifting into a massive dragon to save an airplane in 2006, and a video of J’onn communicating telepathically with an off-world ambassador.

WEAKNESSES: All Martians have a big problem with fire and excessive heat. M’gann is unable to use her powers near open flames and becomes heavily weakened during heat waves. She is also negatively affected by certain things which would pose little or no threat to humans, including caffeine (makes her molecules buzz like static on an old TV set), alcohol (unpredictable results), cigarette smoke (gunks up her cells and makes her feel physically ill), and many human medicines.

WHAT BROUGHT YOUR CHARACTER TO SOKOVIA? M'gann attended the riots in DC as a civilian. When things got dicey, she initially helped calm the crowd through telepathic signals. Shortly after, at the behest of Wonder Woman and Batman, M’gann joined the two of them at the Fortress of Solitude where she carefully used her detail telekinesis removed shards of Kryptonite from Clark.

DID THEY SIGN THE ACCORDS? WHY OR WHY NOT? No. Neither M’gann nor her uncle, J’onn J’onzz, signed the Accords. At first, they were able to avoid legal repercussions on the grounds of diplomat status and discontinuing visible hero-work. J’onn retired to the Watchtower a short time later and the ISA began to focus more pressure on M’gann, but as Miss Martian had disappeared from the public eye there was little they could do but monitor her closely and wait for her to slip up. PROVIDE 3-5 HEADCANONS RELATED TO YOUR CHARACTER:

Martians families use telepathy to connect with each other. During sleeping hours, they share dreams psychically. M’gann hasn’t had anyone to dream with since leaving Mars, but she still creates a dream for herself every night.

M’gann has never eaten an Oreo. M’gann’s uncle, J’onn, warned her of ‘Choco Madness’ when she was new to Earth. She genuinely believes that Chocos, or Oreos, are cripplingly addictive to Martians and that withdrawal symptoms include loss faculties and hulk-like rage. In reality, Oreos are essentially Martian catnip.

Mars is a dying world. It has been in decline for hundreds of years and the end is certainly close at hand. Outbreaks of fire plague still decimate entire households and villages of Martians sharing the same thought-stream. Rain is virtually non-existent. The people depend on dwindling supplies of groundwater. Increasingly common dust storms ravage the fields. Food is scarce. People are angry and frightened enough to take desperate, even irrational action. All this profoundly affected M’gann’s early life. She and her family worked long hours on their homestead and still often failed to make ends meet. M’gann’s natural form is fragile and short from childhood malnourishment. Technically, she is still promised by contract to a wealthy White Martian family seeking genetic diversity in exchange for food and supplies they gave to her family.

Green and White Martians, as well as Red and Yellow Martians, have been at odds throughout Martian history. Despite long perpetuated stereotypes and misconceptions, the only real difference between these people is the color of their skin at birth. M’gann is the White Martian daughter of a male White Martian and a female Green Martian. Between her coloring, her hardworking nature, and her rapidly advancing powers, M’gann spent much of her childhood being viewed by non-family members as either a monster or a potential weapon.

CHARACTER BIO —

M'gann came to Earth in 2009 to be protegee to her maternal uncle, J'onn J'onzz. She lived with him in a Chicago suburb and fully intended to be a public superhero with ties to the Martian Manhunter as well as Wonder Woman. As such she did not attempt to hide the fact that M'gann M'orzz and Miss Martian were one and the same. Unfortunately, that openness made her an easy target of anti-alien sentiment after the Chitauri Invasion in 2014. She withdrew from social media and stopped using her powers publicly as a way to mitigate the damage.

When the Accords were passed, J'onn and M’gann both declined to sign. J’onn retired to the Watchtower while M'gann stayed in Chicago to finish her undergraduate degree and then a Master of Library and Information Science from the University of Illinois.

The exact nature and extent of her abilities is known to only a handful of people, but the ISA does know that M'gann is a powerful telepath because of a video recording of J'onn using his telepathy to communicate with an off-world ally. The ISA made their interest known with repeated attempts to have her sign the Accords as well as an increasingly aggressive surveillance campaign.

M'gann attended the riots in DC as a civilian. When the situation went south, she initially helped calm the crowd with telepathic signals. Shortly after, at the behest of Wonder Woman and Batman, M’gann joined the two of them at the Fortress of Solitude where she carefully used her detail telekinesis removed shards of Kryptonite from Clark. Knowing that the ISA would be after her, M’gann hastily resigned from her library in Chicago, withdrew her life savings from the bank, packed a pair of suitcases, and flew to join Diana.

Here in Sokovia, M'gann is rebuilding the Matchak library and preparing to open to the public. She does most of the cooking in the Mousehole and takes care of the pigeons and most food preparation. She is absolutely, unequivocally overworking herself.

During the Ghost in the Machine event, the communicators were taken out by the disembodied code of Arnim Zola and M’gann revealed her telepathy to all present Nomads in the form of a mind link.

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baddieromanova · 6 years ago

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Why do you attack and hate people just because they don’t like Falice?

This is my first ever anon message? Okay, I normally dismiss questions like these but since it’s my first I’ll oblige:

Anon, I don’t hate and attack people for disliking Falice. I mean, if my rants and posts on social media come off that way then all I can do is apologise I guess because that’s not my intention at all but honestly I don’t give a fuck if people don’t like Falice or don’t ship them, I follow plenty of people in the fandom who don’t, we all have our likes and dislikes and ship preferences and that’s fine, what matter’s is that we’re all part of this wacky fandom together for a show we watch and simultaneously wish to get cancelled.

Now onto my actual issues; I have an issue with Falice anti’s who’s reasons for hating Falice are beyond transparent, problematic or utter bullshit, because one thing in fandoms I absolutely hate is people going out of their way to sound deep and intellectual and listing off reasons (Which isn’t a problem, we all do it) to explain why they hate a ship when in actuality, it’s really a vague, shallow or simple reason behind their disdain and if it’s not that, they’re bordering into blatant hypocrisy or just being all around fake. Allow me to explain some examples of this I’ve seen in the fandom;

1) Suddenly Gladys, a character we knew very little about for 2 whole seasons, other than the fact that she was Jughead’s mother and left her alcoholic husband because he wouldn’t get his shit together, all of a sudden has tonnes of stans and she hasn’t even appeared on screen yet. She had stans before we even knew who was playing her, and who are the very people stanning her? Take a wild guess. Only the very sub section of the fandom who spent the whole of last season bashing her for neglecting Jughead. But of course, now that Falice is happening they’ve jumped aboard the team Gladys train, not because they genuinely like her, but in the hopes that she’ll get in between Alice and FP. I mean, if they wanna stan her then great but I don’t wanna see complaints when she’s written out or killed off, seeing as she’s only being introduced to start up some Falice angst, just saying. These same people have also started a campaign against FP and Alice calling them out as bad parents. This makes me laugh because where was this energy back in early season one when FP and Alice’s parenting skills should have been questioned? That season was definitely not their peak but I think we can all agree they’ve improved vastly in the parenting department since then but back to my point. It’s almost like the lack of Falice back then had something to do with their silence on parenting skills, but maybe that’s just a coincidence

2) A lot of Falice anti’s genuinely see Hal/ Halice as a better alternative, which it isn’t. Falice has it’s problems, with FP’s alcoholism and both of their marriages still being legal and all, but honestly what fictional ship doesn’t? And fandoms are always gonna find something problematic in a ship they don’t like, but Falice are by far miles better than H/lice, this isn’t even an opinion it’s a fact. First there’s the obvious, Hal is a serial killer who tried to kill Alice and their daughter which kind of trumps every problem with Falice, but even if you take the ridiculous Black Hood scenario out of the equation and pretend that plot never happened, Hal and his marriage to Alice was/is still very problematic. There was never any chemistry between them, not much love either, they always just stuck out to me as that one lame middle aged white couple in TV dramas who seem “perfect” to everybody in town but behind closed doors it’s a different story and have spent so much time being more concerned with keeping up their white picket fence facade that they have yet to realise they don’t actually love each other, mainly because the woman knows she should have married somebody else and is still in love with somebody else, which is exactly the case for H/lice and Falice

On top of that, Hal is kind of a scumbag, even before the Black Hood plot he was a dick and radiated small dick energy 24/7. I’m not going to list all the reasons here, this post is already much longer than I intended so I’m just going to add a link to one of my anti Hal posts (X). Do I think Hal and Alice cared for each other at one point? Of course but do I ever think they were in love? Hell no. Alice saw him as a ticket out of the Southside to a better life for herself and Hal saw her as a bad girl he had a hard on for, that he could tame. If people see that as love, then I don’t know what to tell them. I mean if you hate Falice then whatever but to continue to ship Alice with Hal? Come on, at least ship her with Fred or Hermione before jumping aboard the H/lice ship

3) I’ve actually seen people who spent the whole of season two wishing for Josie and Sierra to be killed off or written out and have attacked them for breathing, conveniently stan Josie this season and demand for Josie/Ashleigh to get more screen time “because she deserves it more than Falice” (She does deserve more screen time and better treatment in general but that’s another argument for another day) and make stupid Falice and Tierra comparisons as if only one Parentdale couple can exist. And they’ve done this all just to have a dig at Falice not because they care about the Tierra ship or are tired of the only dark skin black girl being used as a prop for a bunch of white character’s storylines, never having any storylines of her own and being relegated to a human radio almost every episode. How pathetic can you get? Like, don’t piss in my ear and tell me it’s rain. Fuck outta here with your faux concern

4) I’ve seen multiple lengthy posts highlighting how “damaging” the Falice coupling is FP and Alice’s characterisation and development in general which is bullshit. The minute Alice removed Hal out of her life she became a better mother and a decent person, she was more caring and began putting her daughter’s first, over keeping up a facade for the town, she was no longer the cold heartless cow she was in earlier episodes who was putting on the perfect Stepford wife with the perfect suburban family performance and prioritising how the town saw her and her family over her daughter’s needs. As for FP’s character development and characterisation, he changed his life around for the better for his son because he wanted to do right by him. He quit drinking, got a job, attended AA, quit the Serpents and sternly said he was done with gang life (Yes we all know how that actually turned out but it’s the attempt that matters here and take the circumstances into consideration) and actually began to parent Jughead. It was a far cry from what we were introduced to in season one where we he was drinking his breakfast, lunch and dinner, deep into gang life and appeared to not give a rat’s ass that his son was sleeping on the streets.

There’s nothing wrong with having a simple or vague reason for not liking a ship, absolutely nothing at all, there’s no need to type out utter bullshit to defend your hatred for a couple. For instance, I don’t like B/ghead because they’re overrated and Roberto’s obsession with them is slowly but surely damaging the show. That’s it! You won’t see me writing lengthy think piece’s on why I hate that ship despite all the problematic aspects within the couple that I do see because I could honestly forgive and dismiss all of it if B/ghead was not constantly shoved down our throats. They would just be a ship I didn’t care about. FP and Alice’s relationship had nothing to do with their development as people/parents or their characterisation, it hasn’t regressed them in any way, shape or form seeing as they changed for the better and became much better characters before their relationship began to blossom. So all of this talk of how their relationship has ruined them as people makes me laugh. Unless I’m mistaken, FP is still showing clear character progression. Alice was also showing clear character progression towards the end of season two, we’re going to exclude the cult story line from this discussion because while it has changed Alice’s character, the Alice we know and love will return to us soon and the Falice relationship still had nothing to do with that, but if these same individuals want someone or some ship to blame for Alice’s involvement with this cult, they should actually look closer to home.

5) Linked to #2 and #4. They also claim to dislike Falice for a myriad of reasons they think are deep when in reality they just hate Falice because it interrupted their already on the verge of dying ship or crackships that involve Alice and FP and won’t (and never will) happen. I don’t like to shit on people’s shipping preferences, I’ve been on the receiving end of that shitty behaviour in fandoms and even the people working on the show before and you really can’t help who you ship at the end of the day but one thing I’ve learnt from that experience is when to give up, admit defeat and accept that your favoured ship isn’t, never will be and never was a priority to the writing crew and show runner and move the hell on. Granted I moved on from that show a little too late but what matters is I did it. I abandoned the show, fandom, cast and never looked back and felt better already because trust me, that shit takes a toll on your mental and emotional state and I was going off the deep end so it’s a good thing I left that show and fandom for good. This would’ve been the case if I shipped H/lice, the minute I fell for them would’ve been the minute I told myself not to get too invested and prepare for heartbreak because it was clear from the get go that H/lice was not a couple the writers had interest in developing or writing well. Like I said prior, they were another typical suburban couple keeping up a facade for their neighbours but deep down didn’t actually love each other and they would’ve divorced eventually and had Lochlyn written out of the show, not only because Hal and Alice didn’t love each other but also because it’s clear that for each of the teens, the writers for some reason only want one parent around for each of them, for the boys it’s their father’s and for the girls it’s their mothers (Hiram’s a different case because he’s a villain but he’ll be killed off eventually). People say the Black Hood story line was only introduced to get Hal out of the way to make room for Falice but I guarantee you, if he wasn’t the Black Hood he would’ve definitely been one of his victims. The Riverdale writers would have gone down the route of having Hal killed off because it would’ve allowed them to put Betty at the centre of the story line, something they like to do constantly but that’s also another argument for another day. If H/lice shippers had realised that and accepted it, they wouldn’t be in the predicament they’re in right now

6) People re write canon and the established history on the show and between the parents to fit their delusions and beliefs and it’s just creepy. I get coming up with theories and trying to make sense of something but there’s a fine line between theories, head-canons and refusing to accept the truth or facts. Take Charles’ paternity for instance, that’s caused up quite a stir within the fandom in general. For some reason, for the longest time people struggled with the fact that FP was the father of the baby Alice had in high school, some people still struggle with this unfortunately.

Now, I’d understand refusal to accept FP as the father or seeing this plot being a retcon or rushed or even being a little thrown off by it, IF IT WASN’T FUCKING ESTABLISHED IN SEASON ONE, WHICH IT WAS. This is why don’t understand all the debates on Charles’ paternity. The very first Falice interaction had clear implications that the two had a sexual/romantic history and we found out two episodes prior that Alice fell pregnant as a teenager, yet people can’t do the math.

#falice #anti halice #anonymous

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mindsage-blog · 6 years ago

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Con-spiracies // #1: Mandela Effects

Most internet users have recently been troubled by the question, “do you remember it being Berenstein or Berenstain Bears?” Majority of people who grew up with those stories remember it as being Berenstein Bears, even though it has always been Berenstain. This predicament has recently been given a name – the Mandela effect.

The name was made popular by Fiona Broome, who claimed to remember Nelson Mandela dying in prison in the 1980s, even though he didn’t die until 2013. She found other people who remembered similar details, some even going as far as “remembering” news coverage of the funeral and riots in Africa. Broome started a website discussing the Mandela effect and had many responses from other internet users who listed other “memories” that may be considered Mandela effects. These include:

Sex IN the City or Sex AND the City?

Mirror, mirror or magic mirror?

Looney Tunes or Looney Toons?

“Luke, I am your father” or “No, I am your father”?

There are a few theories that have arisen with the popularity of this topic. The first, and probably the most discussed, is that these confusions stem from the multiverse theory. It is believed that people “slip” between different universes, where perhaps Nelson Mandela did die in prison, and then end up in a universe where he didn’t. Although scientists believe in the possibility of the existence of multiverses, in relation to the Mandela effect it doesn’t really make sense. If multiverses were real and we were able to slip between them, how do multiple people slip between the same universes to remember the same details? And why would something as insignificant as a letter in the name of a children’s book be changed?

Another theory is that we live in a simulation similar to the “Holodeck” in StarTrek. The Holodeck is an entertainment device that is similar to virtual reality devices. This theory claims that due to glitches in the software, we may misremember details, and that’s why multiple people remember certain things being different. Obviously, this theory is outrageous, but some people believe it to be valid.

There are countless other theories that have been thrown around relating to why these inconsistencies in memory occur. These include time travellers changing things in the past that result in tiny detail changes today, changes occurring due to Satan or black magic, and theories similar to that of the Matrix.

Although many people have been given logical explanations to these memory inconsistencies, those who believe in these bizarre theories often refuse to acknowledge them. This may be because people have a need to believe that something bigger than us exists out there that is mysterious and more exciting than life actually is. There’s nothing wrong with believing in multiverses or time travelling, but it implies that our brains work perfectly 100% of the time. In reality, memory is actually more complicated than it seems.

Memory is constructive, not reproductive, meaning that rather than playing back like a recording, memories are built from various pieces of information. Therefore, our memories may be influenced by other factors that happened during the time of the memory that distract us from the focus, our current knowledge of situations that have changed since the event, or outside influence (such as someone telling us that an event occurred a certain way). Many logical theories about the Mandela effect revolve around false memories (in which we create memories either unconsciously or subconsciously), to which there are many different factors.

Misinformation effect involves having your memory influenced by another person if you don’t have any solid memories or connections with the topic. For example, you may not have actually read the Berenstain Bears before, but your best friend as a kid loved them, so when someone claims they remember it as Berenstein Bears books you truly believe you do too. This is an example of how memories are constructive – you have bits and pieces of information in your memory but you don’t entirely remember the story so you have to fabricate some of it. The act of fabricating memories is known as confabulation.

Confirmation bias comes into play when people search for or remember information a particular way so that the memory coincides with their beliefs. This means that people who read about Mandela effects will be more likely to have their memories influenced by other people’s memories.

Another common memory fault is that of Cryptomnesia, which is when a person confuses imagination with a memory. This may occur when someone experiences a vivid dream and years later they recall it being an actual memory. For example, Fiona Broome may have had a dream that Nelson Mandela died in prison, and when she started talking about it, other people may have experienced a misinformation effect, resulting in a fabrication of Nelson Mandela’s death.

Jim Coan, a US professor of psychology, explains how Cryptomnesia exists using the “lost in the mall” procedure. Coan gave his family descriptions of memories from his childhood, one of which was fabricated. He told them that he remembered his brother getting lost in the mall when they were younger, which his brother actually claimed to remember. He even went as far as to make up details about the event in particular, even though it never actually happened. This describes Cryptomnesia, as well as the misinformation effect.

As mentioned before, the reason people believe in the Mandela effect is because they feel the need to believe that something exists out there bigger than themselves. This is referred to as a social reinforcement of beliefs. It involves feeling the need to have control over our lives and the world we live in as well as the desire to believe that we’re a part of something bigger. While believing in the Holodeck theory doesn’t hold much in terms of logic, it’s fun and interesting to believe in because it implies that there is a fascinating explanation behind simple memory failures.

Mandela effects are fun to discuss, especially when someone remembers something different to you, but there’s a very likely chance that it can all be pinned down to false memories. Multiverses and time travelling is a fun idea, but extremely unlikely, and even if these things existed, they don’t make much sense in terms of the Mandela effect. Below are a few theories for the reasons why we misremember certain things collectively.

Berenstein vs Berenstain: looking at the books, it’s easy to see why children may get the words confused. The title is written in almost cursive writing, and if you weren’t paying much attention to it, you could confuse the a with an e. Also, names ending with “stein” are far more common than those ending in “stain”, so the brain is bound to confuse the two due to assumption.

Mirror, mirror vs magic mirror: contrary to what most people believe, both of these sayings are actually correct. In Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, the evil queen says “Mirror, mirror, on the wall.” However, the original story as told in the Grimm Brothers fairy tale, the evil queen says “Magic mirror on the wall.” Most Disney stories were inspired by fairy tales, obviously tweaking them to make them appropriate for children, and this is another example of how Disney has made the fairy tale their own. Even if Snow White is the only reason you know of the saying, many other things around us, such as toys or media, use the original saying.

Looney Tunes vs Looney Toons: most people remember this famous children’s show as being Looney Toons. This one is easily explained by the fact that the first word is spelled Looney, so it would make sense for the second word to use double o’s as well for similarity. Also, the show is a cartoon, so it would make more sense for it to be Toons. Alas, it is actually Looney Tunes.

Sex in the City vs Sex and the City: another easily explained Mandela effect. Most people use the unofficial “Sex in the City” perfumes as evidence that the word has been changed, when in fact the perfume had to be named something different to the show for copyright reasons. Also, to reference Captain Holt from Brooklyn Nine-Nine, the city is the fifth character in the series, so it has to be sex and the city.

“Luke, I am your father” vs “No, I am your father”: when referencing a movie or TV show, context is everything. For lengthy quotes, it would make sense to directly quote from the movie because someone who has seen it would make the connection. However, for something as short as “No, I am your father”, it doesn’t really make sense and few people would make the connection. Similar to “Houston, we have a problem”. Many people reference this and understand where the reference is from, but it wouldn’t hold the same context if it was just “We have a problem”. Therefore, more people relate to the quote if a name is mentioned in the quote.

References:

http://theconversation.com/the-mandela-effect-and-how-your-mind-is-playing-tricks-on-you-89544

https://www.snopes.com/news/2016/07/24/the-mandela-effect/

https://www.psychologytoday.com/au/articles/200105/the-seven-sins-memory

http://www.debunkingmandelaeffects.com/common-explanations/

http://www.debunkingmandelaeffects.com/mirror-mirror-on-the-wall/

https://www.skeptic.com/insight/the-mandela-effect/

https://www.express.co.uk/news/science/814701/multiverse-proof-evidence-parallel-universe (photo)

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thinkveganworld · 7 years ago

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This is long, but I thought I’d post just on the outside chance anybody might find it worth reading. It’s part three of a series of articles I wrote years ago, and it includes information on modern day politicians’ use of political propaganda. I might post the other parts later.

Goebbels and mass mind control: Part Three

How PR opinion-shapers undermine the people's political power

In parts one and two, we compared the methods of Hitler's propagandist, Joseph Goebbels, with the PR techniques of today's corporate spin doctors. We also looked at the ways in which corporate PR spin works against the public interest regarding health care and the environment. Now we'll explore the ways that corporate propaganda undermines the political power of ordinary citizens.

Journalist Frank Rich wrote in a recent New York Times opinion piece that he felt he was living through a Twilight Zone episode when he read the Palm Beach Post's scoop saying that Palm Beach's butterfly ballot cost Al Gore "about 6,600 votes, more than 10 times what he needed to overcome George W. Bush's slim lead in Florida." Rich said the reason it felt as if he had entered the Twilight Zone, was because, beyond Palm Beach, he could find no sign such a thing had happened.

"I turned on my TV," writes Rich, "and had to search to find a mention of the Post's story. It might as well have been a hallucination."

In an article entitled "The Invisible People," (The Progressive, March 2001) June Jordan writes about Election 2000's disenfranchised African-American voters and the corporate-owned news media's neglect of the story. Jordan, a noted author and professor of African-American Studies at the University of California-Berkeley, says, "We have moved from The Invisible Man to The Invisible People. It's a raging and a sorrow at the terrible meaning of that discount - for us, and for democracy itself."

The corporate-owned news media "invents reality," as author and educator Michael Parenti has said, by instructing the American people on which news stories are real, and which facts to ignore. Parenti has also written (Land of Idols, St. Martin's Press, 1994) that our political system can be seen in one of three ways:

1. "A conservative celebration of the wonders of our free-market society, coupled with an insistence that capitalism would be still more wonderful were it not for meddlesome government regulations and the demands of undeserving, low-income people who feed out of the public trough."

2. A liberal complaint about "aberrant problems that remain in an otherwise basically good System."

3. A radical analysis "that sees ecological crisis, military interventions, the national security State, homelessness, poverty, an inequitable tax system, and undemocratic social institutions, such as the corporate-owned media, not as irrational outcomes of a basically rational system, but as rational results of a system whose central goal is the accumulation of wealth and power for the few."

Parenti adds that if you take the radical analysis perspective, you "cross an invisible line and will be labeled in mainstream circles a 'conspiracy theorist.'" He notes that Abraham Lincoln might today be dismissed as a conspiracy theorist, because Lincoln once observed in a speech, "These capitalists generally act harmoniously, and in concert, to fleece the people."

However, Parenti adds that the corporation/ruling class's mode of operation is systemic and institutional rather than conspiratorial. The fact that corporate domination is built into our existing political system, and into many of our institutions, makes it a more daunting problem than a grand and aberrant conspiracy might be.

In a brilliant article for Online Journal (4/24/01), Scott Morschhauser took up the same issue, pointing out that the label "conspiracy theory' is used by those defending corporate interests the same way they use the label 'communist.' If you are successful at pinning a person or idea with a negative label, then the public will ignore the message. It doesn't matter whether or not the label fits. The facts don't matter. All that you have to do is accuse."

When corporate PR teams are able to confuse the public by spinning citizen dissenters as "conspiracy theorists" or as "wacko, tree-hugging environmentalists" or as "extremist fringe," they are able to marginalize activists and dilute their political effectiveness. Journalist Norman Solomon once suggested that rather than succumbing to media manipulation, we can "tune up our personal and collective 'radar screens' to track unidentified flying propaganda."

In False Hope, (Common Courage Press, 1994) Solomon also discusses the subject of public confusion. He writes about the various ways in which corporate PR spin and media "illusion-making" confuse the public. Solomon quotes Anne Wilson Schaef on the results of this kind of confusion:

"First, it keeps us powerless and controllable. No one is more controllable than a confused person; no society is more controllable than a confused society. Politicians know this better than anyone, and that is why they use innuendo, veiled references, and out-and-out lies instead of speaking clearly and truthfully.

"Second, it keeps us ignorant. Professionals give their clients confusing information cloaked in intimidating language that lay-people cannot understand. They preserve their one-up status while preventing us from learning about our own bodies, our legal rights, and our psychology.

"Third, it keeps us from taking responsibility for our own lives. No one expects confused people to own up to the things they think, say, or do . . Fourth, it keeps us busy. When we must spend all our time and energy trying to figure out what is going on, we have none left over for reflecting on the system, challenging it, or exploring alternatives to it."

A confused person will stay stuck within the corporate-dominated system, because creating new options requires mental clarity. Confusion also causes numbness and political passivity.

Frank Rich's "Twilight Zone" experience of the media's ignoring the butterfly ballot story, and June Jordan's sense that African-Americans have become invisible, are normal, healthy responses to the corporate media's lying about reality. When the people see one reality with their own eyes, and simultaneously the corporate media denies that reality, the effect is gas-lighting.

People need truthfulness about politics in order to operate powerfully in the world. Truth is one of psychologist Abraham Maslow's "meta-needs." It has always been a high priority for the world's spiritual and philosophical thinkers. Factual information is a necessary foundation in order for ordinary Americans to set priorities for political action and organize accordingly.

A high priority concern might be weighing corporate interests against the public interest. Another priority might be clearly deciding what our values are. Corporate spokespeople sometimes try to blur the distinction between, for example, good-versus-harmful effects on the environment, or good-versus-harmful health care proposals.

Some corporate spokespeople claim terms such as "good" or "truth" or "justice" can only be vague, misleading "weasel words," despite the fact that philosophers from Aristotle, to the various Enlightenment-era philosophers, to today's best political thinkers have used such terms freely, and have helped clarify their meaning.

For example, the dialogues of Plato explore the meaning of the word "justice." Harvard Professor John Rawls has said, "A just basic structure will be one which produces a proper distribution of prospects of obtaining primary goods, such as income and health care."

How do we define "good" or "harmful" for purposes of the subject at hand? Let's just play with possible working definitions, for the sake of argument. Those options which are "good" could be defined as options that promote health, safety and well-being for the largest number of people, in a kind, egalitarian manner, without discrimination against race, sexual orientation, religion or lack of religion.

Those options which are "harmful" might be defined as ones that destroy health, safety and well-being for large numbers of people in order that corporations can increase their profits, without regard for kindness, egalitarianism, and with (at times) discrimination based on race (as during the Florida election debacle, racial profiling, etc.), sexual orientation, religion or lack of religion.

Are there gray areas within those definitions? Yes. Are there complexities, and is there room for debate? Of course. However, the lines between good and harmful; right and wrong; public health and public detriment are not as blurry as many corporate spokespeople would have us think . . . or, more precisely, would "confuse" us to think.

Thomas Jefferson said repeatedly that democracy could work only if the electorate were "fully informed." He said, "I know of no safe depository of the ultimate power of the society but the people themselves; and if we think them not enlightened enough to exercise their control with a wholesome direction, the remedy is not to take it from them, but to inform their discretion."

Thomas Paine, in "The Rights of Man," urged "education for one million and thirty thousand children," saying that "the poor laws, those instruments of civil torture will be superceded" by an informed public given a modicum of "comfortable provision" by government.

Paine also wrote that as a result of a better informed and educated public, and of government's providing some assistance for the poor, "The hearts of the humane will not be shocked by ragged and hungry children, and persons of seventy and eighty years of age begging for bread. The dying poor will not be dragged from place to place to breathe their last . . . The poor as well as the rich, will then be interested in the support of government, and the cause and apprehension of riots and tumults will cease."

Some media propagandists such as Rush Limbaugh and his many clones often say, in their usual Orwellian style, that government assistance for the poor actually hurts the poor. Never mind that the Limbaugh types also generally claim to be of the Judeo-Christian tradition. It's interesting to contrast their "screw-the-poor" comments with those attributed to Christ, such as, "What you do for the least of these, you do for me," or with a typical Hebrew proverb, such as, "When a needy man stands at your door, God stands at his side." And, of course, to corporate mouthpieces such as Limbaugh, agnostic or "pagan" humanists (such as Thomas Paine) who might suggest assisting the poor don't count at all.

Former radio talk show host, Neal Boortz, has said, "That bum sitting on a heating grate, smelling like a wharf, is there by choice. He is there because of the sum total of the choices he has made in his life." ("The Terrible Truth About Liberals," Longstreet Press, 1998.) Boortz implies people are never poor due to being laid off from a job by a corporation that moved offshore in order to pay slave wages; or due to sudden overwhelming medical bills; or, least of all, due to flaws within the corporate-dominated system itself.

Boortz also says this country is a republic rather than a democracy. He claims that the view that this country is meant to be a democracy is an "insidious idea planted by the Left, by liberals anxious to expand the role of government and their own power." Limbaugh often says the same about democracy, and such antidemocratic views have been popular among many right-wing groups in recent years, just they were in Nazi Germany.

The fact is, America is not merely a republic, but a democratic republic. This country has a strong democratic lineage. The above comments by Jefferson and Paine have to do with enhancing American democracy. Activists who worked toward civil rights, women's rights, labor rights and many other social causes, have helped strengthen democracy within the nation.

In parts one and two, we showed that Hitler and his propagandist, Goebbels, worked to dismantle democracy. They accomplished their goal in part by using PR spin, in order to confuse the people and convince them that democracy wasn't good for them. Through propaganda, Goebbels created a national "Twilight Zone," making the Jewish people invisible, marginalizing dissenters and rendering potential activists powerless.

Somehow, it has turned out that corporate America's PR spin has also taken aim against democracy, confused the people, created a national "Twilight Zone," made ordinary Americans (especially Jewish and African-Americans) invisible, marginalized dissenters and rendered potential activists powerless.

Ordinary Americans have been rendered at least so powerless that we have not yet found a way to persuade our elected representatives to enforce laws that would curb corporate excesses when it comes to polluting the environment; to create legislation that would give this country affordable pharmaceutical drugs or a good health care system; or to bring back the Fairness Doctrine or create similar new legislation, so that our nation's news media is not entirely corporate-controlled.

In a Showtime movie aired this week, Varian's War, the lead character (played by William Hurt) helped bring around 2,000 artists and intellectuals to America, to escape the Nazi Holocaust. A character played by the actor Alan Arkin described the Nazis as "destroying everything they do not understand, which is everything that makes life beautiful and sweet and pure."

Corporate polluters, health care opponents, and illusion-makers, probably don't understand that they are contributing to the destruction of (almost) everything that makes life beautiful, sweet and pure. However, it is up to ordinary Americans with clear vision to toss a little light on the subject. In our proposed working definition of "good," working to preserve the beautiful, sweet and pure things in life has to figure in somewhere. It is a better way to spend a life than screwing the poor, plundering the earth and grubbing for corporate profit.

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wolfprintsinthesnow · 7 years ago

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I’m not dead yet....

I've been terrible about updating social media over the last few months with con and cosplay photos, but life has been more than a handful. My world has been turned on its end and I feel like I've been running trying to catch the pieces as they fall.

I've had to come to the realization that, some family members are no longer family by their actions. For whatever reason, they are no longer the same people, including one who I looked up to and trusted implicitly. It is something I cannot change, but I have to accept, cut my losses, and move on. I feel betrayed and kicked in the face, but I also I feel like I have let some people down for walking away. It has been a very hard pill to swallow, but it is for the best. My health has suffered greatly from the mental and emotional turmoil of this whole situation and it's worse than I'll ever admit. Though I'm doing everything I can to mitigate, moving is imperative. I do have autoimmune issues and, if my immune system crashes, which it is very close to doing, as became evident last month, it won't be good and I'd really not like to try my chances if it should. I've tried to keep a lot of the details private about the situation, so as to not worry others. Perhaps I'm a little selfish in doing so.

Coming to terms with my gender identity (genderfluid - I'm indifferent about the pronouns) and sexuality (ace), labels that didn't exist years ago, has certainly been a trip and one I'm still working to be comfortable with. It's a matter that I've pushed to the back of my mind for years as unimportant, possibly in part to avoiding addressing it at all on purpose, perhaps a bit of fear in doing so. While I'm out in some manner to most of my friends (college or later), I am not with most, including my family and choose not to be until sometime after I move away. I live in a small town and I don't need more chaos in the few remaining months I have in this location.

It's hard for me to verbalize or discuss certain things with other people and I tend to keep everyone at some level of arms length, even friends, due to deep rooted fears and trust issues, especially after the last two years, not to mention my past growing up. I hate to feel like I'm bothering people or being a burden to others, not helped by being made to feel that way by some individuals who I am leaving behind. I throw up walls in defense to the point of feeling numb and don't express certain emotions well, preferring to avoid some emotions altogether in front of others. I've been held to higher standards and expectations than my peers from the time I was small. Double standards. Succeed or the wolves circling and staring you down will gladly tear you apart in delight at your failure. While it has helped push me to success in many ways and I have few, if any regrets, it has come at a cost with many sacrifices, not to mention it's exhausting and I'm just very tired of having to live that way. It's been a lot to process and work through in a short period of time. It’s going to take time, but I'm trying.

Thankfully, things have been falling together as of late. My finances are looking to be in better shape to allow me to move sooner than I thought possible. I've met some amazing friends in the past year and have had other friends reach out to assist me in moving or offering their support in other ways. I am incredibly grateful for their love and support more than I can express. My dog has been a steady comfort and I'm glad to still have him with me. The family members who matter and my neighbors have been supportive and helpful and cheer me on when I've had doubts that I'm doing the right thing. I've had an amazing year cosplaying and the trips away for conventions have truly been respites away from the the craziness. I've started writing and working on art again, which I hope to do more of once I am moved. Perhaps I will post some of it as I feel confident in doing so. I hope to get back to my very neglected piano, flute playing, and language studies. I started figure skating, which apparently one does when their Aikido dojo closes. Heh. It quiets my mind that is constantly running at 100 mph and allows me a bit of peace while out in the cold on the ice; I wish I had started skating earlier. I'm trying to get back into running when I don't feel like I'm dying from anxiety and getting more than a few hours of sleep. Compared to even two months ago, I feel like there is an end in sight to what feels like a nightmare of some crazy reality TV show, that I'm finally moving in a more positive direction to a more positive outcome, not stuck in quicksand, grasping endlessly to get out.

A year ago, I took a trip away and realized how bad my living situation was. A year ago, I never would have thought that I'd consider moving outside of the Northeast, let alone to the opposite side of the continent and all the new doubts and fears that brought. I no longer have those reservations and for the first time in a very long time, I'm looking forward to the adventure ahead of me.

#I almost did not post this #I am not dead yet #things I can't say but can write down #feeling more positive for once #grateful for the good in my life #moving forward

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hunty-booboo · 4 years ago

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How to Avoid These 7 Common Social Media Marketing Mistakes

What has always been the handiest Buy 500 likes Instagram manner to generate new business? Referrals from present customers to their friends and families.

Creating raving fans who sing your praises to others is both the least luxurious and most productive shape of advertising. Most human beings track out traditional way of advertising. Only 1 in 6 tv advertisements genuinely generate a advantageous return on investment. No one below 70 makes use of Yellow Pages for whatever. But over 80% of customers will make a purchasing decision based totally at the enter of friends and family.

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stormhavenmedia · 4 years ago

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It is hard now for some to remember that short months ago we were free peoples living in Democratic countries. We have been locked in our houses and muzzled over a Virus with an Actual morbidity rate possibly less than the seasonal flu once the deceptive accounting is removed. Lets take a non exhaustive look at how we got here because in that understanding lies Key to our freedom.

Before we dive into the opening act of our global paranoia play, let us set the stage with a series of simple facts.

At 8 p.m. on Sunday, October 30, 1938 an enterprising young radio jockey named Orson Welles managed to convince a huge segment of the population that Martians were landing at Grovers Mill New Jersey. He accomplished this with a single broadcast on one radio station of a the adaptation of a book that had been in print for 40 years. Our entertainment media has churned out a literally endless series of movies and TV based on Viral outbreaks, the sheer volume of the zombie genre alone is stupefying. One random example example of the type;

In the film a Virus emanating from China and threatening the world is confronted by a heroic team from the World Health Organization led by Lawrence Fishburn. he almost looks familiar..but I digress.

(L-r) LAURENCE FISHBURNE as Dr. Ellis Cheever and SANJAY GUPTA, MD as himself in the thriller CONTAGION a Warner Bros. Pictures release.

Our education system has replaced critical thinking with critical race theory. A basic understanding of science is pushed aside in favor of an ideological program broadly refereed to as Identity Politics. Gender Theory advances the idea that government approved “human health” dogma should take precedence at all times over objective reality. And that to fail to strictly adhere to the ideological norms in any way “endangers marginalized people” and is indeed a form of”violence”. Privilege theory advances the idea that the basic rights we have fought for generations are a unearned “privilege” that we should be prepared to surrender for what our technocratic betters tell us is the greater good.

When coupled with the new electronic public square these concepts were used to advance the idea that anyone who disagrees or questions should be demonized and “cancelled”. Any group or individual that questions is “alt right” Nazi” “racist” “something phobic”. Speakers are banned from public venues if their ideas are deemed “problematic”. Only certain facts are permissible. Any deviation from the accepted ideology can result in loss of everything, job social standing. A University of Alberta was recently fired for stating that “People should be able to express their gender in whatever manner they wish (but) I don’t agree with biological sex being irrelevant,” she said. “I think treating biological sex as irrelevant has some really serious policy implications. As an example, housing trans-identified men in women’s prisons is not fair to women prisoners and I think it puts women at risk.”

A UBC Board member was forced to resign for simply “liking” a tweet condemning massive random violence and murder being committed by the self designated Antifa

https://twitter.com/ubc_students/status/1273663974735675393?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1273663977021562880%7Ctwgr%5E&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.ubyssey.ca%2Fnews%2Fubc-board-chair-backlash-tweets%2F

Objective reality no longer exists , everything is partisan narrative relative to the position of the observer. This has all been completely normalized in the last decade and by design or happy accident it made whats happening around you now now possible.

Scene one, China

The First rumors and fragmentary reports of a Virus outbreak in China surfaced in the first days of January. We were told a seafood market had been closed. The messaging at that time in the West and from the WHO was, Don’t worry, and if you are worried your probably a racist.

Within days a WECHAT video message from a Chinese doctor, Li Wenliang reportedly an Ophthalmologist working in Wuhan Central Hospital surfaced in the West. The message discuses a dangerous SARS type Virus that was capable of human to human transmission. Reports then circulated through the West that the Doctor had been punished by the draconian CCP for being the worlds “whistle-blower”. These reports were strangely detailed given the absolute control of information exercised by the CCP. Li Wenliang is reported to have died, variously on either the 5th 6th or 7th of February 2020 bravely fighting the SARS-Cov2 Virus, he thoughtfully gave us one last picture helpfully confirming his identity.

It is alleged that 5 of his colleagues died as well. Now this in itself is strange. Li is reported to have been 34 and in excellent health. So he would be a massive statistical anomaly. Why 5 of his colleagues would also die given that their are few credible reports of health care workers dying in other jurisdictions.It is also strange that all of this would be know in the West given that posting the wrong comment on the CCP controlled version of Facebook can land you in Jail or restrict your ability to work or travel.

What this act did was loose the idea that there was a highly contagious Virus and that the Chinese Government was lying about it.

At around the same time videos started surfacing all over social media purporting to show the swift and deadly action of this mystery Virus. People dropping in their tracks was a popular theme. This is of course not at all what happens to those afflicted with SARS-COV2, but it was brilliant at nurturing the Viral dread spreading in the West.

Next we were treated to film of the Chinese regime building huge emergency hospitals working day and night desperately trying to beat the massive outbreak we were told was inevitably coming. It is unclear weather these buildings were actually completed after they had fulfilled there propaganda purpose there is no evidence that they were used.

Scene 2 Iran

At this point Iran had recorded 429 deaths from Covid. Mass graves for 429 people in a country with daily mortality in the country in the thousands. Mass graves in a country that 4 decades ago managed to individually bury thousands of soldiers killed in a single day on the battle field during its brutal war with Iraq. But do put a pin in this , mass graves will pop up later in our play, in the context of Iran they were never mentioned again, the purpose having been served.

Strangely there exists online a report from a website called Iran News dated December 3rd 2019, one month before the supposed patient zero in China “A senior Iranian Health Ministry official said that an ongoing flu epidemic has claimed the lives of 56 people since its outbreak more than a couple of months ago….Due to influenza, 273 individuals have been hospitalized and 19 have lost their lives” in the past week alone, said Alireza Raisi, the deputy health minister as reported by Press TV.”..

https://irannewsdaily.com/2019/12/flu-epidemic-claims-lives-in-iran/

According to the CDC itself with an average annual Influenza mortality rate of 17.23 for every 100k Iran has about 14 000 influenza deaths at time of posting the total deaths from corona stand at 18 000. Like many jurisdictions Iran has recorded a record low number of deaths from Tuberculosis and all other respiratory diseases this year.

Scene 3 Europe

Next up was the outbreaks in the West. Italy and Spain were the main protagonists. We were treated to tales of overflowing hospitals with bodies in the corridors

Hundreds of matching headlines appeared daily across the MSM spectrum. Repeated 10 times a day on the cable news channels.

The message was reinforced on social media by a Viral Facebook Post from an account purportedly of an American woman living in Bergamo Italy, epicenter of the apocalypse

This post was then used to spin of a hundred msm articles

So lets pause and have a look at Ms Christina Higgins. Despite her happy family photo banner and profile pics you will find not one candid family photo, no photos of her apparent children not one photo of work, or dinner, or jokes or any of the other things most FB profiles contain. After the viral post of March 10th the profile posts again regularly about the apocalypse until the 23rd of March when it shares one more dire prediction about Bergamo. The account then goes completely silent until June 3rd, right after career criminal George Floyd is killed by apparent police misconduct in Minneapolis with a rambling post about Anti Black racism being the new pandemic, sound familiar. Since then it has posted BLM agit-prop.

None of the dire warning from Italy and Spain was ever true. Not the overflowing hospitals with patients left to die

“The system is holding up, I absolutely deny a selection of patients to be treated», says the regional health councilor Giulio Gallera interviewed by Radio 24 answering the question about a possible choice of patients to be treated during triage .

“We have many hospitals in situations of extraordinary pressure – he explains – but the system is holding up”. “If in some hospitals there are no places available – the Councilor underlines – the regional system intervenes and the choice is made on who to intubate first and who to move and intubate in another hospital”. «Ours is a race against daily time – he adds – which so far fortunately we are winning. The number of places we make available manages to be greater than needs, but it is increasingly difficult ».

Giulio Gallera Regional Health Director

Not the staggering death count

“The way Italy registers deaths explains their increased coronavirus case/fatality ratio, according to one expert and a report from Italy’s National Institute of Health (ISS).

Citing this report (in English here), Professor Walter Ricciardi, scientific adviser to Italy’s minister of health said:

“The way in which we code deaths in our country is very generous in the sense that all the people who die in hospitals with the coronavirus are deemed to be dying of the coronavirus […] On re-evaluation by the National Institute of Health, only 12 per cent of death certificates have shown a direct causality from coronavirus, while 88 per cent of patients who have died have at least one pre-morbidity – many had two or three,”

https://off-guardian.org/2020/03/23/italy-only-12-of-covid19-deaths-list-covid19-as-cause/?fbclid=IwAR34LheKR8UYx7PTNFCdO0bAk3Q1QvlEziLMK_lkaIwL-X6ex-iNym8-Xg8

The other fact the media went out of its way not to cover was the massive physical connection of these countries and Iran to China through the Belt and Road

What is notable from this exact time period in March is the fact that we were already being sold the “Great Reset”

Scene 3 North America

So we had a replay of our Iranian Mass Graves in New York

“The city has used the location as a public cemetery for over 150 years, burying unclaimed people and those whose loved ones can’t afford private burials. ”

Politifact

Then we had some more Hospital scenes,

It was actually reused footage from Italy, now that’s environmentally conscious

We had more sweaty videos of serious faced medical personal talking about swamped hospitals and the doom to come

“Some hospitals in the biggest city in New York state have been so overrun with dying patients that they’ve brought in refrigerated trucks to handle the bodies.”

Well that is worrying so RT set up live feeds outside these devastated Hospitals, prepare yourself for the worlds most stunningly boring disaster movies ever made

youtube

The deception is ongoing.

Many “Public Health” agencies have already admitted to grossly inflating the actual numbers of people that have died from Covid by using what could euphemistically be called creative accounting

Scientists raised the alarm after discovering anyone who tests positive and later dies is currently included in the Public Health England numbers – even if they are hit by a bus months later.

Every time you hear of a the rise in New Cases of Covid19 you are being deceived. The number you are being given is the number of people who have tested positive, using questionable tests, for the presence of the Virus, this is not a Case of anything. You can have the Virus without having the disease. All of us would test positive for the presence of many and varied Viruses, we would not be said to have a case of the diseases associated with them

Case Epidemiology; A countable instance in the population or study group of a particular disease Disease [dĭ-zēz´] a definite pathological process having a characteristic set of signs and symptoms.

Asymptomatic people are not Cases.

Resistance to the draconian lockdowns is demonized and minimized, although they cant even seem to agree with themselves any more

actual number +50k

They will not stop until we stop them. This is an information war so lets inform our fellow citizens in a calm rational matter. Many of the patently unreasonable and unconstitutional and unscientific restrictions they have placed on us cannot be legally upheld so get into the courts and defeat them. REFUSE to wear a mask, boycott any merchant that enforces their own mask policy and support all who refuse to comply with the government mandated ones.

Free your mind and your ass will follow

William Ray

Manufacturing COVID-19, How Fear Conquered the West It is hard now for some to remember that short months ago we were free peoples living in Democratic countries.

#lockdowncanada #Controla virus #Covid pandemic #covid-19 Canada #End the lockdowns #lockdowns Masks #NoMask

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eldritchsurveys · 4 years ago

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874.

5k Survey II

51. Make up a definition for the following silly words… Fruitgoogle: Not really into these kinds of games. Ambytime: Asscactus: 52. What was the last thing you made with your own hands? >> I think the last craft I did was knitting. I didn’t make anything complete, though. 53. What was your favorite toy as a child? >> A Macintosh Performa. 54. How many TV’s are in your house? >> One. 55. What is your favorite thing to do outside? >> Sit in a hammock chair with a beverage and do crosswords or read.

56. How do you feel when you see a rainbow? >> I don’t feel anything. But I did see an extremely bright cinema-quality rainbow a few weeks ago and I have to admit that was something else.

57. Have you ever dreamt a dream that came true? >> Nah. None of my dreams operate by the rules of consensus reality well enough for them to happen here. 58. Have you ever been to a psychic/tarot reader? >> No. I can read my own cards, thanks. 59. What is your idea of paradise? >> I don’t have a concept for this. 60. Do you believe in god and if so what is he/she/it like? >> I’m sure the god being implied by this question exists for someone (a lot of someones, I’d gather). I’ve just never met him, and I’m not entirely sure we’d get along, if the various things that humans have said about him are at all true. 61. Do you believe in Hell? >> See, that’s one of the concepts that I just can’t jive with. The idea that some god wants all of humanity to believe that 1) their consciousness is somehow persistent for eternity and 2) he’s going to leave them in a fiery pit (imagery may vary) for that eternity if they don’t do what he says? That pisses me off. And if that god somehow doesn’t want people to believe that, then he’d better use that divine influence and do something about all these false prophets, huh. :| 62. What one thing have you done that most people haven’t? >> I don’t know what defines “most people”, but I guess I could gather that most people haven’t changed their legal name three times. (I like telling people that because for some reason, people do treat name-changing as like... this very Dramatic and Serious thing, when really, it’s mostly just annoying paperwork, one court appearance, and then more paperwork. But no one bats as much of an eyelash as you’re afraid they will. It’s fine. Go ahead and try it. You might like it.) 63. What is the kindest thing you have ever done? >> Who the fuck knows. 64. Are you a patient person? >> I have the capacity to be patient. Whether that capacity is always realised or not depends on a lot of factors. 65. What holiday should exist but doesn’t? >> Way too many holidays exist as it is. 66. What holiday shouldn’t exist but does? >> I think those random presidential “holidays” in the beginning of the year can go. They’re just flimsy excuses to have days off. 67. What’s the best joke you ever heard? >> *shrug* 68. Where is the most fun place you have EVER been? >> *shrug* 69. Is your hair natural or dyed? >> My hair is not dyed. 70. Do you have any deep dark secrets or are you pretty much up front? >> I don’t have any deep, dark secrets, but I’m also variable about how much I share about myself and where/when. 71. What is under your bed right now? >> Nothing. 72. If you were in the Land of Oz would you want to live there or go home? >> I’d want to go home. I don’t find the Land of Oz all that interesting, and plus, my life is here. 73. If you drive do you frequently speed? >> I don’t drive. 74. What is the world’s best song to dance to? >> There are a lot of songs that are good to dance to. I hate superlative questions and I have a feeling there’s going to be a metric ton of them in this survey. 75. What song was on the last time you danced with someone? >> --- 76. Do you prefer Disney or Warner Brothers? >> I don’t have a preference between media conglomerates. 77. What is the first animal you would run to see if you went to the zoo? >> I just take the logical route through the park. 78. Would you consider yourself to be romantic? >> No. Romantic with a capital R sometimes, but not... romantic. 79. If the earth stopped rotating would we all fly off? >> Heh. 80. What is the one thing that you love to do so much that you would make sacrifices to be able to do it? >> I’m not sure. 81. If you (and everyone) had to lose one right or freedom, but you could pick which one everyone had to lose, what would you pick? >> Oh, fuck no, what the fuck? 82. If you had to choose would you live on the equator or at the North Pole? >> Probably closer to the equator. I have no interest in any of the lands near the North Pole (except maybe a passing one, enough for a visit but not enough to emigrate), but I have a lot of interest in places that are near the middle of the planet. 83. Would you rather give up listening to music or watching television? >> Fuck off. 84. What do you think makes someone a hero? >> I don’t have a personal definition for “hero”. Literally the only time I use this word is when I’m talking about a video game protagonist -- the “Hero of Ferelden”, for example. Otherwise, it means nothing to me. 85. What cartoon would you like to be a character in? >> --- 86. Name one thing that turns your stomach: >> Thinking about the dishwasher food trap. 87. What was the last thing you paid for? >> Uh... groceries, I think. 88. Are you a coupon clipper? >> Not especially, but if presented with some I’ll use them. 89. Get anything good in the mail recently? >> Yeah, my order from an Etsy seller finally came recently. It came from Sweden and the delay was intense. 90. Which would you rather take as a gym class…dancing, sailing, karate, or bowling? >> Dancing. 91. In Star Trek people ‘beam’ back and forth between different places. What this means is they stand in a little tube and their molecules are deconstructed and sent to another tube somewhere else where they are reassembled. Only problem is when the molecules are deconstructed the person is dead. When they are put back together it is only a clone that has all the dead person’s memories. So… Is the person who gets beamed the same person on both ends? >> Socially, yes. Physically, probably not. But does it really matter, in the end? It’s the same thing with us when we aren’t being teleported places -- our cells are always dying and being replaced. We’re all just ships of Theseus at the end of the day, pretending to be constant and enduring. (It is a fun thought experiment, though.) 92. What insects are you afraid of? >> The kind that sting, mainly. Also, cockroaches in all their variety, unless they’re outdoors or in a tank. (The outdoors rule goes out the window when the roach hits a certain size, though... but at least I can avoid it better in an open space.) 93. If you could print any phrase on a T-shirt, what would it say? >> I did that once, at one of those mall kiosks. The shirt said “where is John Galt?” I have no idea what I’d put on a shirt now, though. 94. What’s the most eccentric thing you have ever worn? >> I dunno, a wizard robe or something. 95. If you could pick one food that you could eat all you wanted but it would have no effect on how much you weigh, what food would it be? >> I don’t really care about this. 96. What are your parents interested in? >> --- 97. Have you ever caught an insect and kept it as a pet? >> No. Have you ever caught and tamed a wild animal? >> No. 98. What is more helpful to you, wishes or plans? >> Plans, obviously. 99. When do you feel your life energy the strongest? >> I don’t know what this means. 100. You are spending the night alone in the woods and may bring only 3 items with you. What do you bring? >> Is there any logical way to answer this question except with the obvious “things needed to survive a night in the woods” objects...

#surveys #survey #5000 question survey

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machetelanding · 7 years ago

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NEW YORK—There’s this moment in every production meeting—I don’t care if you’re making a movie, a TV show, a YouTube video, a reality show about shark hunters, or a 30-second promo for the cat shelter—when somebody blurts out, “We need a strong female character for this.”

I’m not sure why this happens.

I’m not sure why little synapse explosions occur in the brains of otherwise intelligent writers, actors, media executives, and directors who, five seconds before, were talking about production design, or cinematography, or marketing. It’s probably something deep within the DNA of Homo sapiens, dating from Neanderthal times, that caused an error message in the left prefrontal cortex, which contains the mechanism responsible for logic.

Because after the random person blurts out randomly, “We need a strong female character for this,” seven or eight additional people will then blurt out various forms of agreement, as though it’s the most natural thing in the world to be ordering a Double Western Bacon Cheeseburger at the Carl’s Jr. drive-through window and say, “And, oh yeah, give me some of those Jalapeño Poppers and also, we need a strong female character for this.”

Sometimes, I am prone to point out, we don’t need a strong female character for this.

We might, in fact, need a weak female character for this particular story. Or, more likely, we’ll need a complex person for whom the words “strong” and “weak” are relative or irrelevant because she’s, you know, a human being.

“Yeah, we need a young Jodie Foster.”

“Or maybe a young Meryl Streep.”

One thing you never hear is “We need a young Marilyn Monroe.”

And yet I could go scene by scene through the complete works of Jodie Foster, Meryl Streep, and Marilyn Monroe and make notes in the margins of their scripts that would read something like this:

strong moment weak moment neither-strong-nor-weak moment strong weak moderately strong moderately weak

...on and on, ad infinitum, because all three of those women have played multiple roles with multiple points of view that can’t ever be summed up by the words “strong female character” or “weak female character.” You could do the same with male characters. Superman is not interesting unless Kryptonite exists.

Anyhow, I’m gonna take a stab at explaining why this ritual occurs.

A. Ignorance of the basic principles of screenwriting, especially the part dealing with, ahem, characterization.

B. Posturing for the jury in the speaker’s brain. (Harvey Weinstein Syndrome.)

C. So they can talk about the meeting on Facebook.

D. Member of the Politburo.

I’m only half joking about that last one. The Soviet Union actually did have script readers who had to approve every film produced by Mosfilm or Lenfilm. They would provide lengthy notes saying things like “The character of Svetlana must be altered to remove all evidence that she was derisive toward the five-year plan of the tractor factory in Novosibirsk,” or “The writers are directed to make Olga more representative of the Soviet woman described by Bebel, Engels, Marx, Kollontai, and Lenin as economically independent and empowered by her participation in the social advancement made possible by the Antifascist Women’s Committee.”

And, of course, the Russian screenwriters would slap their foreheads and say, “Of course! That’s the key that unlocks the whole character! It was that tractor-factory subtext all along!”

We don’t need Communist Writer’s Committees in the United States because we do all the work in the production meeting.

It started in the ’90s, I think, with the whole “Go Black” movement. I remember going to an audition for the role of a police captain in a TV movie, and when I got to the waiting room, the receptionist said, “Oh, I’m sorry, you didn’t hear? Somebody should have called you. We’re going black with this role.”

It was the first time I’d ever heard the phrase, so I said, “Would you repeat that?”

“We’re hiring an African-American for this part.”

What I wanted to say was: Wait, is this the same female casting director who is notorious in New York City for bringing actresses to tears by telling them that they’re too short, too fat, too blond, too perky, too old, too young, too chubby, too Jewish, too ethnic, too whatever—in other words, pointing out things they have no control over—because the script is written this way and the script is sacred?

Yes, it was the same woman. Apparently skin color was the only thing that wasn’t sacred in a shooting script.

I’m guessing, but I would imagine there was a production meeting, and at some point someone said, “What we need for this is a strong black character.”

And seven other people immediately agreed.

And so the director said, “Tell the casting director we’re Going Black with that police captain.”

I understand the whole multicultural, multiethnic universe of certain stories that are rooted in diverse environments—Star Trek comes to mind—but lately there’s been an aggressive effort to use actors as agitprop signboards even in stories about mountain men set in rural Montana.

“Well, no,” says the director or the producer, “the mayor of Thornton, Colorado, is not transgender in this script.”

“Why not? Why wouldn’t it be a BETTER STORY if the mayor were transgender?”

I mean, these conversations actually take place, and they take place long after the screenwriter has lost control of his work. He may have a three-inch-thick bible of backstory on that Colorado mayor, and he may have spent nine months perfecting that characterization, but it won’t matter because somebody with a sickle to grind at a production meeting started daydreaming about a transgender plot twist.

Fortunately these things have a way of self-correcting. People who make movies in order to transform society end up dying of brain aneurysms when the Monday-morning box office results come out and Transformers 8 has outperformed their socially relevant stick figures by 9,000 percent. Watch all those Lenfilm and Mosfilm movies from the 1950s and you’ll know what I mean. Better yet, watch Detroit. Because…nobody else did.

I think we’ll know this is over on some future day when they’re having a production meeting at the Public Theater, and the director of Shakespeare in the Park says, “Okay, we’re doing Othello this year, but listen to this…we’re gonna Go White with it.”

That’s when they’ll finally decide fake symbolism has run its course.

#joe bob briggs #article #men #women #strong female character #diversity #strength #weakness #fake symbolism #virtue signaling #movies #fiction #hollywood

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itsbenedict · 7 years ago

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so, i’ve been thinking about Bullet Proof, reworking the cast and switching up the murders and culprits so the adventure won’t spoil the game. i hit on a pretty good setup for one of the trials- and it involved lesbian characters dying. and, at first, i figured, well, it’s Danganronpa, the majority of the cast dies and everyone knows that going in, so it’s not a big deal. but in the wake of recent discourse around A/tomic B/londe, wherein the “it’s not a big deal” side is saying “seriously? love interests almost always die in this genre” and the other side is loudly proclaiming who cares, you’ve still done the thing... i am of course less confident that such an excuse would fly.

not to beat around the bush: the backlash against the “bury your gays” trope initially struck me as kinda bizarre. like, characters in media dying isn’t the same as real people dying- unlike in real life, death in fiction is a role for a character in a story, and you can hit rewind and they’re alive again.

but then of course i saw lots of posts with lists and infographics and statistics explaining that lesbians die way more than other characters, and that this revealed something or other about what writers secretly think of LGBT people. one particular statistic i saw said that- out of shows featuring lesbian/bi characters- 35% of them had one or more of those lesbian/bi characters die. that number stuck with me. it seemed like a lot!

since then, i’ve remembered an important insight: that lists and infographics and statistics that go viral on social media are sensationalized and misleading upwards of 90% of the time.

backing up, i notice that the culture of backlash against the trope would exist whether or not it was grounded in a real phenomenon. we’re living in a world where lots of people are powerless, and want to believe that they’re somehow powerful, and so reframe the act of consuming media and tweeting about it as fighting for justice. they see their favorite characters die on TV, get sad or angry about it, feel like it shouldn’t have happened, and construct elaborate systems of media analysis to explain why their feelings are objectively correct. the creators of entertainment products are the real power behind the system, responsible for every bad thing that happens by using their godlike power to shape the culture. if a screenwriter makes a decision you don��t like, it’s not just something that bugs you in a movie- it’s an act of violence that is killing people. regardless of whether too many gay characters were dying, there would be some reason why killing off gay characters would be a morally blameworthy offense.

i realize how that whole last paragraph comes off. like, pretty badly. sounds like some real craven anti-sjw shit. i’m not blind to what website this post is going up on.

but that paragraph wasn’t an argument for why the Bury Your Gays trope is not a real thing. it has nothing to do with that question.

in fact, it’s obviously been a real thing for a while- until pretty recently, networks wouldn’t allow gays on TV at all, unless they were being killed off as some kind of moral lesson. that was the world we were living in. and it didn’t end overnight! there was no point where it was suddenly decided that gays could be on TV, and then all representation issues were fixed. it’s not some lie made up by euuuuh social justice warriors euuungh to stroke their heroic egos or whatever.

the question that paragraph is getting at is: how do we tell if we’ve won?

there’s clearly some point at which we’ve reached parity. where LGBT characters are at least as common in media as LGBT people are in reality- where they’re not dying any more often than non-LGBT characters. it’s not an endless unwinnable fight to correct for unconscious bigotry. there exists a point at which the campaigning has succeeded and that specific issue is, for the moment, solved.

but when we reach that point, there isn’t a chance in hell that anyone will notice. people are too invested in fighting the good fight! people score brownie points, social capital, by pointing out how problematic media is. it’s practically impossible to lose social capital by doing this incorrectly- when was the last time you saw someone in social justice circles make some shit up, say “this thing is bad for a new reason i just noticed” and then be roundly dismissed by other social justice people saying “no, you’re making a mountain out of a molehill”? that doesn’t happen. saying “no, things are fine, actually” is a great way to paint a target on your back- whereas if you make up some totally bullshit new outrage, the worst that happens is that after some long and bitter discourse, level heads conclude “this bullshit new outrage is definitely a serious concern we should watch for, but it shouldn’t prevent you from supporting this specific show because it does other things right.”

the incentives line up to make it impossible to ever collectively notice that a problem has been solved. consequently, viral infographics will always claim that the injustice is still at large. when something behaves the same way no matter what’s actually true, it fails to function as evidence for discerning what the truth is.

all that junk said, it still seems intuitively pretty likely that we’re not totally past the issue in this specific case. quite probably, lesbians are still being killed off at a rate suspiciously higher than that of other types of characters.

what i want to know- and what i actually want to know, as opposed to what i want to darkly hint at an answer to- is how we measure to what degree this is still a problem, and whether socially-conscious people need to be deliberately avoiding killing off gay characters no matter how important it is to the story, in order to balance the scales.

like, let’s take that statistic i heard earlier (or we could just make one up for the example, but that’s basically the same thing as recalling a statistic from a viral tumblr post i remember reading a while back.) let’s say 35% of lesbians on TV get killed off.

do 35% of non-lesbians on TV also get killed off?

do 35% of non-lesbians on shows featuring lesbians also get killed off?

how does this break down by genre? are some genres innocent where others are Dead Gays Georg?

are shows featuring lesbians more likely to be the kind of shows that kill characters off, since both killing characters and having lesbians are Bold Edgy Moves in today’s climate for some asinine reason? if this effect exists, how much of the difference does it account for?

how do we get these numbers? what’s our sample, how is it decided on? are we just counting TV shows? what about books? movies? video games with multiple endings where the deaths only happen in some of them? who are we paying to analyze all these works?

there are enough questions here to do a background study for a meaty thesis in Media Studies or whatever. in fact, probably someone’s already conducted such a study. probably a lot of people have conducted such studies. i’m not sure if enough people have conducted such studies to overcome the whole “most social science experimenters think the word “methodology” means that thing Walter White got his degree in” effect, though. a good chunk of those studies admit up front that they were deliberately constructed to prove their hypothesis, which is not how you science.

but maybe there is something good on the subject! if anyone knows any decent resources, i would really like to know one way or the other, so i can stop stressing over whether to scrap my really good plot.

#where ''decent resources'' here means ''not journalism''#science journalism is a garbage fire and social science journalism is a garbage fire in my living room

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ktbensondc · 6 years ago

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Post Modernity & Visual Culture

Post-modernism can be difficult, slippery, and infuriating to define. It dates roughly from the 1980′s to present day (therefore making everyone living through this age Post-Modernists). To say something is ‘post-modern’ is to say that it is trendy or fashionable. However, because we are living through this period, it is difficult to step outside the now to truly understand it. For example, some theorists say it does not exist.

Post-modernism is defined by what it isn’t: modernism. It can be:

anti-modernism

after-modernism

hyper-modernism

Modernism roughly dates from the 1850′s to the 1970′s. It was a sustained period of innovation in the arts. Science and art worked together during this time of overarching political power structures and two world wars. The Second World War disrupted Modernism in Europe and saw it move to America. Modernism is rationalism - the combining of science and art (scientific industrial determinism - what happens in science and industry influenced art).

Key themes in visual culture:

Crisis of representation. Taking an image and correlating it with something to change/give it meaning.

Foregrounding of high (elitist) culture

Belief in grand naratives - modernism is about telling a great story

Modernism as determinism:

Charles Darwin - Origin of the Species

Theory of Relativity - Einstein

The idea of God is scientifically challenged during this time.

1889 Paris Universal Exposition saw the union of science and art

Any account of history is always biased. Within Modernism, we know about cubism because key note collectors pushed up the price. People from different time periods will push for certain trends and tastes, thus leaving us with a certain idea of that time, but we are seeing it through very specific lenses.

After-Modernism Post-modernity reacts to all of this. In Robert Hughes’ The Shock of the New (1980), he announced Modernism was finished. The idea at the time, was that there was nothing left to be ‘modernized’.

Today, we are living in a post-industrial, post-Fordian economic age.

Computerisation - the digital age

Global markets (liberalisation) - You can work for anyone, anywhere

Turbo capitalism vs Post capitalism - we’re in the dying stages of capitalism

No more over-arching story, no grand narrative - are we living through fragmentation? Now there’s no story as Post-modernism displaces it all. There are now individual stories that can be followed through the rise of the Vlogger on social media platforms such as Youtube, or the rise of the Instagram Model. Instead of an overarching story, we see smaller narratives and tune into the day-to-day life of particular people

When we look back, will this time period be a mess? Or will it have structure?

Artists have begun to promote the idea of the ‘individual narrative’. Simon Patterson’s The Great Bear saw him turn the infamous London Underground Tube Map into a map of his interests, thus creating his own personal narrative. Tracy Emin’s My Bed saw her turn the private public. She was promoting the individual in that moment. TV shows like Love Island promote this individual narrative too.

Are we anti-modernist? Lyotard expressed that “Reason has been shaped by a dishonest pursuit of certainty”. Life is too complicated and has a multitude of outcomes. It’s a complex reaction to the failures of Modernism: the holocaust, ecological disasters, for example. How can we look back on this time and think it good?

Anti-foundational - no universal truth, rejection of rationalism

All history is a story, History is written by the victors

Scepticism

Contradictory attitudes to modern media. Trust in correspondents to tell the truth but the news is packaged for entertainment value so there will always be slippage

Feminists put forward anti-patriarchal perspectives. People who write and promote particular Modernist artists, do so with ideology. Feminists aim to trace back on that time period and write back in artists who were written out

No more rules & Post-truth politics - Emotion is now more reliable than expert opinion, Trump is a key example of how the truth can be denied - Brett Kavanaugh’s recent scandal is another example of how the truth can be denied

Institutional Patriarchy

Modernism Rational (Rules, targeting an audience)

Post-Modernism Experimental/ Iconoclastic (All about the look, the text, being an artist)

Hyper-Modernism Is modernism really dead? Or are we living in an age of accelerating modernism? Is it still constant? A natural unfolding of modernism.:

Modernism is incomplete

Cyclical

Technological advancements

Cyber-Culture

Post internet -> Cultural Hybridity

Technological determinism -> Apple company.

Post internet is a potential name for our time period. Dealing with the ramifications of the post-internet age. Other names include: Post modernism, post capitalism, post structuralism.

Cultural hybridity - In the 50′s you are influenced by what is directly around you, but now you can look all over the world. Global and local ideas come together to make something new.

Cult of technology i.e. Apple products became a symbol for wealth and high-earners in society. Regardless of the news stories coming out that Apple does purposefully make their products to break them around the time of new releases, people are willing to ignore this for having something deemed trendy and is acts as an icon for their worth.

Where is post-modernism? Merging of high and low cultural forms. High culture:

depth

high value

elitist

long lasting

politically motivated

Low culture:

surface

low value

gimmicky

mass-produced

politically influenced

They merge into one thing

Mutations of public space: Urban or fantasy architectural spaces - sampling of different historical period styles.

Global/cultural hybridity

Turbo consumerism

Hyper Reality

Nostalgia

Mutation of public space in shopping malls built to look the same all the way around. It is false and creates facades. Theme parks such as Disneyland mutate the vast public landscape and build a fictional reality. This is the ‘hyper-real’ in between fiction and reality.

The Unstable Image:

Hyper-real (semiotic overload)

Order of the simulacra

Bricolage

Parody + Pastiche

Intertextuality + Decoding

Hybrid genres and form

Irony

Retrovision

We are now living in the age of images, where there are more images now than ever before. Can this be defined as semiotic overload? What happens when you have so many images?

Proliferation of images - we can no longer trust them as a result of the advancements of technology- namely, Photoshop which digitally alters an image. We can only look at the surface of the photograph and not dig deeper. The photograph used to mean reality and truth but now it is something to be questioned.

The degradation of the image- the more you copy, a copy, a copy, the further you get from the original. You are manipulating the image. The real is produced and the hyper-real is reproduced.

Reality television is a form of the real being retouched. It is formulaic and offer a falsified version of real life. American reality TV is often faked.

Andy Warhol was interested in celebrity culture and found that by repeating an image of famous actress Marilyn Monroe, he was able to get further away from her image being a photograph of her to something else entirely. The more you copy, the further away you get from the original.

Stage 1 - Reflection of reality Stage 2 - Masks and perverts reality Stage 3 - absence of reality Stage 4 - no relation to reality

Bricoalge - Sampling of images and ideas from the past (design, pop music etc) to create something new. Clash cover deliberately sampled Presley’s first album cover.

Parody - Referring to the original text and making fun of it. Putting new meaning to the original.

Pastiche - Images presented without reality or meaning. Taking the original but do not shine any new light. There’s no meaning, thus it is totally blank.

Intertextuality & Double coding - A text that refers to another text. References to other cultural sites/texts and appeals to different audience demographics i.e. The Simpsons - looking at 2 audiences, in this case, children and adults.

Hybridity & Irony - (Within film) Crushing genres together to create something new. Irony plays with the familiar models.

Retrovision - Nostalgic culture. Reinterpreting or repackaging the past in our own image. Taking all the hits of a previous time to look back on, but also stripping it of its original meaning as a side effect.

Society of the Spectacle:

Mediation - life lived on or through the screen

Multi-medialtiy

Complexity and simulation is the new reality

News is mediated.

Post-modernism - Why bother diffing for the truth? New media technologies means intense personal narratives. The general public are constantly over-dramatising and self editing what they share online, digitally altering the memory of the real life event.

However, in the end, post-modernism is a contested term. It could mean anything.

#session 9

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floridamining · 6 years ago

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Interview with Matt Allison and Matthew Usinowicz

January 19, 2019

Artists of Slamdance Cosmopolis

About the artists:

Matt Allison

Matt Allison is a collector and (re)arranger of objects. In a culture increasingly driven by immaterial content and virtual realities, he remains dedicated to uncovering the stories contained within stuff. His practice is particularly informed by the unexpected object pairings that come from “DIY” repurposing projects and homegrown interventions.

He was a co-manager of the experimental art space OPAQ in Jacksonville, FL, and is the co-founder of Sea Farm City and MNK Studio which operate in Downtown Los Angeles. Matt received his BFA from Ringling College of Art and Design in 2004, and his MFA from the University of California, Santa Barbara in 2015.

www.mattallisonprojects.com @mattallisonprojects

Matthew Usinowicz

Conceptually drawn to social politics and the physical accumulation of stuff, with a specific interest in the relationship between humans and objects, Matthew works in a process- based mode of production using materialism – the physical and psychological elements of materials – to visually communicate. The results are fabricated objects, using an interdisciplinary practice to create; these objects are used as a humorous, allegorical means of telling a story.

Last time Matthew was in Jacksonville, it was the last stop aboard a US Navy vessel before heading to the Persian Gulf in 2001. 17 years later, he finds himself making and exhibiting artwork that critiques the very system he swore to protect and defend. Some things never change, just the vessel you choose to arrive in.

Matthew received his BFA from San Francisco Art Institute and his MFA from the University of California, Santa Barbara.

www.matthewusinowicz.com @matthew_usinowicz

Where are you from and where are you now working?

Matt: I was born in South Florida, and slowly moved my way North to Jacksonville. I lived in Brooklyn for a few years, before coming out to California. I currently live and work in Los Angeles.

Matthew: I was born in Salt Lake City, but I’ve lived most my life either floating somewhere on the water, or in the San Francisco Bay Area. Currently I live and work in San Francisco.

How did you meet each other and what sparked your collaboration?

Matt: Matthew and I were in the same Graduate Program. I could tell from his work that we had common influences... So I invited him over for dinner. He brought two bottles of wine and several blocks of cheese. We've been working together ever since.

Matthew: We met in graduate school in Southern California. We naturally gravitated towards each other through similar interests: cooking, good food, music, politics, fighting common childhood conformities, grafitti, and of course art making.

How is your work similar? How is your work different?

Matt: We each have our own odd take on formalism with very strong affinities for color. Our reference points overlap a lot: Music, graffiti, providing food for loved ones... We're different in the way we approach materials. Matthew is a butcher so he breaks a material down to its "rawest form." He then refines the material and rebuilds it into something new. I'm a collector, so I'm more concerned with preservation, and transformation through association.

Matthew: We both focus on materials and objects how they exist, how they operate in spaces, and how we can activate (or disrupt) their state. We deconstruct these objects and materials differently. Matt is more of a “arranger or re-arranger” of objects. I intend to break down the objects/ materials formally and manufacture a new, different objects from my deconstruction.

What inspired the show Slamdance Cosmopolis?

Matt: My inspiration for Slamdance Cosmopolis is how “everyday” the process of dehumanization has become. While political leaders are talking about fellow human beings as if they're some alien invasion, the corporate world is looking for prospective employees to be a minimum wage version of Siri. Meanwhile, we’re all sacrificing lived experience in favor of being documentarians for our own fictitious "social" media empire. Everyone is either a super villain or a super hero - No one is just a complex and flawed individual that knows they have no business throwing the first stone.

Matthew: Shitty people in government and shitty people in general.

Why did you choose to do a show in Jacksonville?

Matt: I lived in Jacksonville for during a very formidable time in my life, and consider it my home (even though I didn't get there until I was 23. I love the city's strengths, and wanted to be a small part of the growth that'll overcome its weaknesses. Working with the ACLU of North Florida on a show that opened a few days before midterm elections seemed like a good way to do it.

Matthew: Matt has a strong connection with Jacksonville; working and living there and being involved in the food and art scenes. I heard nothing but good things about Florida Mining Gallery and intriguing nostalgia about Jacksonville. I’ve never been (with exception of a pit stop while cruising with the US Navy) and I love shrimp, grits, and beer! It has been a pleasure making work for Jacksonville, staying in Jacksonville, and eating my fair share of Mayport shrimp in Jacksonville.

What does the title Slamdance Cosmopolis mean?

Matt: It’s a coupling from the poem that Allen Ginsburg recites in the song “Ghetto Defendant” that closes out the A side of Combat Rock.

Matthew: The urge (and possible need) to break out in full mosh (slam dance) mode in a crowded metro car because the crazy shit that’s happening now, the dehumanization and government corruption and pettiness, is absurd. And we all need a good mosh pit now and then.

How would you summarize Slamdance Cosmopolis?

Matt: A visual conversation between two friends, trying to figure out how to retain one’s connection to humanity amid the economic disparity, language barriers, gentrification, emotional isolation, crime and pollution that permeate our respective cityscapes.

Matthew: A dialogue from the past, is the dialogue of the present. Generation after generation, this recurrence of very little change creates anxiety, and progress is moving too damn slow. As a visual artist these are our/ my modes of expression in hope to inspire others to being more active in a push to sustained progress for the human race.

What about Combat Rock by the Clash motivated you to create the series of posters featured in the show?

Matt: It's a record that naturally gets put on the turntable every time Matthew, my wife Katie and I are hanging out in our living room. After several years, we had so many conversations with it playing in the background that it became, in my mind, a sort of conduit for a lot of our best ideas. The Clash are the perfect jumping off point for anyone who want’s to make critical thinking seem like the coolest thing on the planet.

Matthew: Song titles and overall theme. 

What is your favorite piece from Slamdance Cosmopolis?

Matt: The "Straight to Hell" poster. Aside from being my favorite song on the album, the lyrics are eerily (and depressingly) relevant to our current administration’s tactic of reducing human life to political capital. I picked the image of Elian Gonzalez as a stand in for the abandoned Vietnamese child from the song, and the very next morning news breaks of families being separated at the Southern Border. Check in as I’m writing this, and those children are now dying in American custody. This is not a partisan issue- Children shouldn’t be victims of our own fabricated conflicts. It doesn’t matter if the president’s last name is Clinton or Trump. Or if you don’t want to give up your assault rifle. Or if you still believe in the doctrine of the Catholic Church. Or if you think frozen concentrate is more convenient then peeling an orange.

Matthew: Straight to Hell. The layers of content are deep and visually it kicks ass!

Do you have plans for your next collaboration?

Matt: Yes, always. Contrary to the artist myth, I got (and stay) in this game to work with others.

Matthew: Yes. Cooking more food together in L.A. or S.F.

Who are some of your biggest influences? Artists or otherwise?

Matt: Currently the list is as follows: My wife Katie and daughter my Clementine, the ACLU, Philip Glass, Chef Dan Giusti's work transforming public school cafeterias, Bell Hooks, the novel Alas Babylon, Defend Boyle Heights, and the Spiritual Jazz scene of the late 1960’s.

Matthew: Traveling. Food. Music. People I meet (formally, through shared experience, eye contact, or otherwise.) when traveling.

How do you navigate the creative process? What helps you develop a piece from beginning to end?

Matt: My creativity is my primary problem solving tool, I’d truly be lost with out it. I’m also extremely restless when it comes to my art practice, so I have this sort of natural catalyst constantly pushing me forward. I’ve never been one to chase the “finish line” when it comes to making work. I’m interested in work that allows for any number of variations, and that grows and evolves over time. Especially when an exhibition is usually the first time you have different people interacting with the work. In a lot of ways, that’s when things are just getting started.

Matthew: Watching/ listening to S.F. Giants baseball, watching “The Wire”, “The Sopranos”, “Fargo” (TV), “Breaking Bad”, or “Better Call Saul”, over again...

Do you have a preferred medium?

Matt: Some small found object that that stirs my soul for reasons unknown me.

Matthew: Never, ever. Always changing. Never limit yourself to medium.

What are your hobbies outside of art? 

Matt: Trying not to worry.

Matthew: Travel, eating/ drinking, cooking, music, baseball.

#artist #interview

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