#but i feel like i have to make content SPECIFICALLY for tiktok so its under a minute long

[phoenixyfriend]

Feb. 26, 2024 - Status of the Colourpop New Moon Collection argument

Hi! No idea if you're a follower who's been following me and my decision to try to cyberbully a multimillion dollar company into doing the right thing. If you're not, you may be confused! I explain under the cut, including a timeline of actions so far.

If you're not new, then the latest is that they do appear to be deleting some comments on this issue, and possibly shadow-banning.

So... maybe it's working? Here are the links to the six places where they can be contacted. Pick one and have at it. Use one of my past posts (post one, post two) if you need suggested phrasing.

Email contact form: private, and slow response times, but this is the place where we can make the longest arguments/explanations of the issue and why we care. This is something you do once or twice, and keep polite, then go over to the social medias to grind them down.

Instagram: The one I've been haunting. They post several times a day, but often about specific products that I don't feel give me a segue option.

TikTok: I don't have TikTok but given its presence in the marketing world, I assume they post there as often as they do on Instagram, and with pretty much the same content as their reels. I feel like TikTok is wild enough for me to tell you to give 'em hell.

YouTube: exists, but they haven't used it in nine months, so not really on top of things. That said, if it's your ONLY social media, go for it. Can't hurt.

Facebook: I can't actually access this one so I don't know what's going on there, and the link appears to be broken. If you can find their page, go for it.

X/Twitter: Like Facebook, I can't really access this one (I'm using xcancel to see it in chronological form), but it looks like they're bragging about Chappell Roan approving of their makeup. So uh. If you follow her on any platform, ask her if she approves of the situation (also of the Harry Potter collaboration, which is directing money through merch royalties to JKR's transphobic lobbying, something I'm sure Chappell Roan would also be unhappy with).

The short explanation version: Colourpop is a cosmetics company known for fun colors and cool collaborations. At the start of 2024, they started releasing a collaboration with Twilight.* January of 2025, they dropped a New Moon collection. Given that the Quileute people have not seen a cent of the Twilight money despite the massive role their people and culture played in it, much of the fandom has decided that the best approach to any Twilight merchandise is to send a portion of the profits to the Quileute "Move to Higher Ground" fundraiser, meant to relocate their town away from the danger posed by higher sea levels. Colourpop has made no statements on donating to the fundraiser, and it's a topic I care about enough to try and galvanize people into making it happen.

The long version: here. And here. And here.

* I wasn't paying attention at the time, as I'd last purchased from them in 2020 (the Safiya Nygaard collaboration), and I'd only come back because they were having a massive sale back in early January. The New Moon collection hadn't dropped yet so I didn't see it, and the first Twilight collection was in colors I don't wear much, so I was more focused on being mad at the Harry Potter stuff.

I am not the first person to have expressed frustration about this to Colourpop, and it's not the first problematic collab they've done. However, they are smaller than many make-up companies, so it feels possible to actually move the needle here, which is what I'm hoping to do.

To be very clear: My goal is not to get the makeup pulled from shelves or to get a public apology. My goal is to get money directed to the fundraiser. That is what's important here, not any virtue signalling or grandstanding. If there is no donation, then we want a statement as to why. Those are the demands: donate, or explain why you won't. We focus on this.

Timeline:

I sent my first email on January 19th, posted about it here the same day, and then started commenting on their New Moon Instagram posts on February 3rd.

I sent a second email on February 9th, as the promised "3-5 business days to respond" had come and gone.

I was temporarily blocked from commenting on anything by instagram on suspicions of being a bot due to suspicious activity, lasting a week. During that time, I continued updating tumblr posts with links to instagram posts that I thought posed an opening (being about the New Moon collection, about sales that weren't content-specific, or that had some phrasing that I thought invited response, like 'what do you want to see?').

Feb. 10: In response to one comment where I admittedly baited them by being ambiguous enough for them to think I had a problem with an order instead of my usual comments, they deleted said comment and DMed me directly. I responded, explaining my actual issue, and they left me on read.

On February 14th, they responded to my Feb. 9th email, likely spurred by the DM conversation. I assume the folded whatever case file the Jan. 19th email had opened into that one. The response was very canned, but it was at least some response.

Since then, I tried sending another email through the contact form, and it failed to go through since I already have 'open threads,' which I'm guessing is an automatic filter and not targeted.

I have continued to comment on their Instagram posts, and have also encouraged others to do the same. One of those posts was taken down after a day, but I don't think it had to do with us; rather, they were getting a lot of flack for perceived violations of some kind of health and safety thing (iirc people were arguing over what length of beard required a net).

Today, February 26th, we have confirmation from @rairii that comments on this topic are being deleted. Not all, possibly for plausible deniability of 'see, we're not trying to hide the problem!' while still making it harder for the layperson to see, but at least one of theirs. This tumblr user also appears to have been shadow-blocked in some way, as they are unable to access colourpop's page at all on mobile.

So. That's where we're at now.

Let's hope we're getting a little closer to them making a statement on this issue.

[uhohmichio]

WARNING: MILD SPOILERS from YAKUZA SERIES [mainly Y6 and gaiden]

Poem: I've Never Wanted Kids —Ethan Jewell Games: Yakuza 3, Yakuza 6, Like a Dragon Gaiden: The Man Who Erased His Name

[puc-puggy]

really fascinated with deadpool & wolverine less as a movie and more as a corporate response to the growing insecurity in relating to and creating meaningful art. like, never have we been more aware of the impact that the relationship between art and artist is oppressively mediated by Corporation than right now with marvel, whose movies grow continually worse and more forgettable under growing corporate control, and this movie bears the weight of a particularly complicated and contentious merger. what they decided to do about it is just. fascinating. disturbing, but fascinating.

the movie is incredibly aware that it is a Product and seems to have completely sidestepped any attempt at meaningful storyline in lieu of packing as much Content into 2.5 hours as possible. and I mean Content. they broke him up with his girl & separated him from all his meaningful character connections, then sent him through a very funny but disjointed and lackluster plot, putting all the meat in nostalgic character interactions or gratuitous fan-pleaser match-ups that can work as tiktok clips. don't get me wrong, i'm a basic x-men bitch. wolverine is one of my all time favorites, especially early angry fucked up alcoholic logan. i gasped at elektra and straight up screamed when wesley snipes came into frame. I laughed out loud at the list of cocaine slang terms disney apparently has. it was fun! it succeeded in making me not mind that it was barely a movie.

and that's the rub, isn't it? it was barely a movie, and it knows it’s barely a movie. but it still has to connect with its audience somehow. and that, i think, is what's really fascinating. it forges its connection with the audience not by building characters or stakes and giving any of them genuinely grounded emotional arcs but by using a fourth-wall breaking character to commiserate with the audience about the impact of corporate ownership & profit on their relationship and access to the stories we love. while being the impact of corporate consolidation on stories you love.

deadpool makes jokes about his stupid villain and mcguffin machine, but the plot is still motivated by a stupid villain and a mcguffin machine. he jokes about being banned from doing cocaine on screen & does not do cocaine on screen because he can't. the corporation that now owns his IP has deemed it against their values. he jokes about what things "have to happen" in the movie because there is actually a list that they were given. as a friend pointed out, “the climax was exactly as contrived as it needed to be to make it a statement: ‘you see how this barely-fleshed-out villain character is just gonna kinda stand there in front of the macguffin machine for as long as we need her to so that we can have the conversations and tropes and results we want? yeah we're just gonna do that. we're gonna keep cutting back to her just standing there going Mmmmm mwah haha to specifically highlight how dumb it is. On purpose.’”

by embedding it in the plot with a character that breaks the fourth wall, the movie stops being “about” the plot on screen and starts being “about” the collective relationship to the characters, embodied by ryan reynolds, whose personal desire for a good deadpool & wolverine movie motivated by his pure love for deadpool is the mythological origin of the movie, and who was allowed to break character and say as himself to hugh jackman as wolverine “you have no idea how long i’ve been waiting for this.” he’s turned into a sort of avatar of the pure fan, who’s there to love the character and have fun and isn’t too bothered by logistics and legalities. it wants you to feel like deadpool also hates it when stories get shuffled because of corporate stockowners, like this extremely expensive bullshit is his personal protest and he's going to give them a proper sendoff & ryan reynolds was around to hold everyone up to standard. the corporation soothing the audience and fan that people who love the stories are ‘in charge’ enough to create a good time, lowering your standards and expectations of a story to what’s profitable for them to create.

kind of genius.

[aclassitag]

Announcing Krem Week!

#kremweek2024 — 22-28 July 2024

background art credit: @xfreischutz [link to original post]

*text prompt list under the readmore

This year will mark 10 years since the release of Dragon Age: Inquisition! In celebration of that anniversary and the game that gave us our first trans character, here is a prompt list - and dates - for any who would like to participate! All sorts of creative content is accepted so long as they are not A/I generated. (See examples below)

*If you want to portray Maevaris Tilani instead, that is also fine!

Please read the guidelines!

If you have any questions, reply to this post and I will do my best to answer :)

Prompt list:

1 — Anniversary 2 — Euphoria / Expression 3 — Casual / Formal 4 — Family / Love 5 — Respite / Fight 6 — Play / Satiate 7 — (Free space!)

Guidelines:

Use the tag: #kremweek2024 (@ this blog is fine too) — If you want to portray Maevaris Tilani instead of Krem, that is also welcome! Please @ me so I can rb :) For non-Tumblr folks that somehow got here: You may post submissions, please link your socials. You may choose one of two prompts in a day or do both. You may also combine as many prompts as you want from any or all of the days into a single work, just mention it somewhere.

Types of content allowed:

Illustration and writing are the most obvious forms of art allowed, but they're not the only ones! Literary arts fanfics, drabbles, poetry, plays, lengthy headcanon/meta posts (for headcanon and meta posts, minimum of 100 words+) Visual arts doodles, paintings, graphic design, photoshop memes, photography, animation, tiktok skits, abstract, fiber arts (embroidery, knitting, etc), ceramics Audio art fanmixes(curated playlists), original or cover songs Other crafts are also welcome! e.g. culinary, resin, woodworking, etc etc ..essentially, whatever type of art it is, I'll accept it so long as it falls within rules and is related to Krem or Maevaris :) For things that are more abstract, do include an explanation of your thought process on how it relates to Krem. E.g. you made Krem's Seheron Fish Wrap or Rice Pudding, take photos of your cooking, and post that (with the explanation that it is Krem's recipes) - that's an acceptable submission! You're allowed to explore different mediums everyday! You don't have to stick to one form of art for the whole week. I will be attempting to schedule reblogs in the 'prime time' for engagement, and in the interest of fairness, things like headcanon posts, fanmixes, and WIPs will not take priority in that time slot over fully rendered illustrations or complete fanfics. They will still be reblogged, but scheduled for other time slots.

Content Rules:

No A/I generated content. (Specifically GenAI content) As above, any and all forms of art is welcome. It must be human made, and by you. The whole point of working off a prompt is to explore a creative process, anyway - do yourself a favour and just enjoy making something! It doesn't have to be pretty! No reposting of other people's works. This must be your own creation. Obviously, no transphobic content. No harrassing others over their specific headcanons - be it in regards to any trait or quirks that come with being a person. People come in all sorts of wonderful variety, please respect that. In addition to above: No whitewashing, racism etc. Please note that Krem is not pale-skinned in canon, and I will not be reblogging content of him being portrayed as pale. 18+ works need to be labelled. On this blog, its tagged as "#adult art". Please add content warnings as appropriate. (E.g. portrayal of binding with bandages should have a warning label of "cw: unsafe binding", etc.) If your post/submission is lengthy, please insert a read more. This helps readability on the dashboard. Progress / WIPs are fine too!

General tips:

First and foremost, do what you are able to! Don't feel pressured to complete a full week if you need to take care of yourself first. Some people work on the prompts before the week even begins, and only post it day of. You are not required to do this, but if you really want to fill something for each day, this helps reduce stress day of.

Mod things:

The mod isn't from the Americas, so due to timezone differences, there may be a delay in reblogging people's works. Either way I will not reblog the moment that it's posted in order to screen properly. Posts will be queued between 30mins-1hr apart, if there are multiple entries being submitted at the same time. All submissions will also be requeued after a week for later perusal :)

[forestdeath1]

So you're saying a person cannot love someone without having sexual feelings towards them?

Listen, I understand it might not be immediately clear what I mean, but I definitely didn't mean THAT. Many people don't experience sexual attraction yet still love others. Attraction is diverse and comes in many forms — I don't even know all of them.

My dislike of the term “platonic love” stems from how it now carries nothing but homophobic stereotypes and has shifted from its original meaning in an attempt to present sexual attraction as something dirty while portraying non-sexual friendship as the highest form of relationship. Platonic love according to Plato actually meant this. Today it's been reduced to just “friendship” where people are FRIENDS (like the Greeks lmao) which is supposed to automatically exclude any form of sexual or other attraction.

This leads us to a situation where this “pure love” is viewed as the highest form, while sexual attraction is treated as something dirty and wrong. This is already a big problem with Prongsfoot — literally under any Tiktok or Twitter post where James and Sirius have something, people comment “ew that's disgusting, they were above that”

All of this makes it sound like wanting someone, loving them, while being okay with not marrying them, not having kids with them, being fine with your love having another family etc — is some kind of unheard-of disgust. Or that friendship is such a sacred cow that we dare not “taint” it with something as base and pathetic as sex.

There's no pure romantic content in my blog. I honestly don't really understand romantic attraction well since I don't experience it myself. That's why my headcanons and content have a specific focus. But in my metas I explore all possible interpretations of what could have actually happened in canon — and yes, your beloved “platonic” Prongsfoot aka friendship is included there too, because that's exactly how JKR wanted you to see their relationship. Enjoy.

[physalian]

Ok but somebody just sent me one of those Gary Vee videos (and I have very mixed feelings about motivational speakers in general) specifically about underperforming content.

In the clip the bulk of Gary’s argument is: Stop blaming the algorithm, your content sucks. The algorithm is your customer, figure out how to appease it and make it work for you, because “blaming the algorithm” makes you sound like one of those “well it’s not *me* people are just too basic for my content”.

And. Yes. I fully appreciate and acknowledge that my content sucks… on platforms where I have to pretend to be something I’m not to appease the algorithm.

And yes it is its own thing, not simply the will of the people. If it were the will of the people, I wouldn’t have my Instagram infested with scam accounts every time I so much as hint at marketing. The “will of the people,” Mr. Vee, is this hellsite right here.

“Shut up and figure out how to enjoy the process” some comment said.

Friendo, I will never enjoy the process of being on social media, as social media continues to grind inevitably toward the brain-rotting content generation machine to satisfy diminishing attention spans.

I’m not mad that “the algorithm” doesn’t like my content. I’m pissed that there’s an algorithm at all and that because it exists, people are encouraged to saturate the market with unoriginality and play it safe, over being experimental and unique. I can’t tell you how many times on YouTube alone I’ve seen videos by some of my favorite creators that didn’t perform well and say “I know this won’t do well, but I had fun” and it’s some of the best content they’ve made in part because they know they’re not under pressure to perform and can be so much more human.

I don’t want to appease the algorithm because I don’t want there to be a goddamn algorithm. When you have a robot deciding what videos to show you based on numbers and not soul, you have a game you can rig. Which is great! If your goal is to encourage a bunch of people desperate for audiences to play that game and over-produce the exact same content.

Booktok is a shining example.

It encourages people to put on acts and adopt attitudes and arguments that they might not agree with because that’s what’s trending and they’ve made their livelihood dependent on clicks and ad revenue. Or am I imagining the deluge of rage bait out there on TikTok?

I could mindlessly and spitefully pinch out artificial enthusiasm (or rage) for things I don’t care about for attention. I could have ChatGPT write me a month’s worth of cheap tweets. I could make an assembly line for Instagram reels with all the depth and uniqueness of a gutter puddle. I could write “what sells” and glue it together in a Canva AI-generated cover to add to the steaming pile of romantacy.

But I’m an artist, and for fuck’s sake, if this is what I have to do to reach people, the people that I’m reaching won’t enjoy my work anyway. I have a day job, I’m not doing this for money. If I end up with a cult following, I’d rather have a loyal few than sell my soul to feeding the algorithm. Fuck the algorithm.

[anabdaniels]

The time for being sad is over

Paring: Agent Whiskey x Female reader

Summary: Convinced that there's no better future for you, Jack turns out to be your light in a life of darkness.

Word counting: 2.5k

Rating: +18

Warnings: Mentions of domestic violence and abusive relationships, cheating, mentions of sex.

Divider from: @saradika-graphics

Masterlist

Silently in front of the kitchen window, you observed Charles leaving the house before focusing again on the breakfast dishes on the sink. Just another usual boring Monday, doing dishes, collecting your husband’s clothes thrown around the house, making a grocery list, cooking something for dinner, and hoping that Charles’ day at work would be good enough for him to not turn the way you chopped the vegetables into a reason to start a bickering.

Most times, you would end up getting distracted by the house chores, but that was one of those days when you simply couldn’t focus on anything other than your insistent thoughts. Before the middle of the morning, you gave up on trying to do anything and grabbed your phone, telling yourself that you would just scroll some random videos on TikTok to distract your mind, but your finger was already touching the messages app and opening that specific conversation.

Not even ten messages were exchanged and you were already feeling the butterflies on your stomach, waiting anxiously and unconsciously walking around the house. The moment you heard the doorbell, you ran to the front door to open it, not giving the man in front of you time to think before you pulled him inside the house and slammed the door closed as you sank between his arms and kissed him.

All that caught Jack off guard. He was used to your warm welcomes, but you didn’t used to be so straight to business like that, what didn’t prevent him from wrapping his arms around your waist and kissing you deeply, smirking against your lips when he saw himself stuck between your body and the wall, taking a look of your face when you leaned back to catch your breath.

“Not ever a good morning, sugar?” Jack teased rubbing your bottom lip with his thumb.

“We both know that our chats work better after sex.” You said with a playful tone, making him chuckle and grab you in his arms, carrying you bridal style to the bedroom.

“I can’t with you sometimes.” He joked kissing the tip of your nose while kicking the bedroom door closed. Carefully, Jack placed you on the bed, leaning over you and resting his hands on the mattress, taking a moment to look at you with a wide smile, still not believing how such a beautiful woman had given him a chance. “You’re the prettiest lil’ thing in this world, sweetie.” You could feel the burning moving up your cheeks and you wanted so badly to look away, but at the same time, his big brown eyes were the most recomforting thing you could ask for.

“You don’t miss a chance to be flirty.” You chuckled and shook your head.

“I was serious about planning to steal you from that asshole.” He raised both eyebrows softly, approaching his face from yours, letting his lips hover next to your mouth.

“A wink of yours and I leave without looking behind.” Despite the joking tone, you meant it; if Jack ever decided to take you away, he’d need no effort to realize such prowess.

With that cocky grin you loved so much, he leaned to kiss you, letting the weight of his body subtly fall over yours, taking a content sight of you. Allowing your brain to turn off its rational thoughts, you hooked your arms around his neck and followed the moment, wondering what would be his next move.

Realizing instantly what you needed, Jack moved further, caressing the sides of your body while kissing you slowly, savoring every crumb of the moment as he felt you melting so graciously under his touch.

And it wasn’t doing any good to your composure.

You were more than conscious that your relationship with Jack was wrong from one end to the other; yes, you shouldn’t have started to flirt with him while being married, you should’ve dismissed him since the first moment, you should’ve gotten divorced long ago. You knew all of that, but the things weren’t that simple.

If it was such a big mistake, why did it always feel so right?

You used to be convinced that something was wrong with your libido, until the first time you were with Jack and he left you boneless on the bed, wondering how you would live without the feeling of every inch of him filling your body. You were sure that sex wasn’t a big deal until you realized that three of Jack’s fingers were enough to make you contort, get noisy, and wet everything around. You believed firmly that there wasn’t such an appreciation feeling as you have read in some books, until you felt like the most beautiful woman in the world while having Jack on his knees in front of you, holding your hips and planting kisses on your skin while mumbling and whispering how you looked like the most breathtaking thing he had ever seen.

You were convicted that you would never know how it felt to truly and deeply love and desire someone until you realized that you felt exactly like that about Jack.

The most you felt his hands sneaking under your clothes and taking them off, the most your miserable life and aggressive husband seemed to be a simple nightmare. At each move of Jack’s body over yours, you felt more at ease and relaxed, as if your stress levels had never been at that height. Every time Jack took a moment to look deep into your eyes with so much passion you finally got to understand how it felt to be truly desired and appreciated. When he moved to cuddle you after sex, you got a comforting reminder of how good it was to be treated as a human being and not only as a tool to someone to relieve himself.

“You’ll tell me what’s going on, sugar?” Jack questioned while caressing your hair. You frowned and looked up at him.

“You mean?” you asked trying to pretend you didn’t know exactly what was the matter.

“C’mon, darlin’. It’s stamped in your face that something is wrong.” Despite de insistence, his voice was gentle.

“I suppose I’m just tired these days, nothing serious.” You forced a smile and shifted slightly to rest better on his chest. Jack was about to give up on asking, realizing that you didn’t want to talk about it if it wasn’t for what he saw as you moved and the sheet uncovered a part of your lower back. For a second, he questioned himself if he could’ve gotten distracted to the point of grope you way too hard to leave a bruise like that, but it wasn’t a possibility; he had kept you comfortably lying on your back the whole time and his hands busy with other parts of you, and even on the times things got rougher between the two of you, the most Jack would ever mark you would be a slight love bite in your shoulder or butt or an almost imperceptible mark on the soft flesh of your hips. That had surely come from someone else, and he hoped for it to not be what he thought.

“What’s that?” he asked the calmest he could, moving the sheet further to see how bad it was. You froze as you realized what he was asking about, wondering how you could have forgotten about it.

“I… I was… playing with my dog, he was running around and his head hit me.” You hoped your dubious answer in a vacillating voice would suffice, but the chances were low.

“We both know better than this. My hyperactive Bernese never gave me a bruise like this, you expect me to believe that your beagle did this?” despite his total disbelief, Jack kept his calm manner, aware that making a scene wouldn’t make you talk.

“Believe what you want.” You answered harshly and moved away from Jack, getting sitting on the bed. He sighed exasperated and got sit either.

“Sugar…” Jack pulled you back to him before you could complain, letting you on his lap “Y’know you matter a lot to me, darlin’. Tell me the truth, is this what I think it is?”

You remained silent for a moment, wanting to give him another dry answer so he would forget about it; you weren’t mad at Jack for asking about it, you were just too ashamed of the obvious truth, ashamed to admit that things had got that far. Giving up on trying to pretend everything was fine, you simply nodded, sighing when Jack tightened his arms around you.

“Darlin’, why haven’t you told me before?” he sounded sincerely worried while caressing your back and kissing the top of your head.

“Because it ain’t that big of a deal, I’m used to it at this point.” You said looking to a random spot on the floor, not having the nerve to face him.

“You’re telling me that this ain’t the first time?” Jack sounded shocked and his brain started to put his memory to use; yes, it wasn’t the first time you showed up with a bruise, but it was always some little bruises that could be justified by your excuses, just at that moment he realized the painful truth. “You need to go to the police.”

“No.” you refused without flinching “I don’t want to deal with this like that, the last thing I need is to be discredited by a bunch of old men in a police station.”

“Then, at least, you have to leave him.” Jack started to get slightly agitated but kept talking calmly with you.

“And how am I supposed to do that? My family would rather give shelter to the devil than me, all acquittances I ever had, were on the other side of the country because Charles knew what he was doing bringing me here, I have no money, no graduation on anything. I have nowhere to go, Jack.” You said both frustrated and conformed.

“That’s not true, darlin’.” Jack grabbed your face between his hands, making you look at him “You know damn well that I sincerely care about you. You’re much more than just an affair to me, sweetheart, I can’t simply let you at your luck here.” Seeing that you still seemed resistant to the idea, Jack made sure to clarify what he thought could be the problem for you. “For the records, if you accept my help and come live with me, this doesn’t put you in any commitment. I have no other intention than to help you.”

“I don’t know.” You said after a few moments of silence “Charles can have quite a temper; I don’t want to put you in trouble.”

“Don’t worry ‘bout that, his type is only brave until he gets to fight a man. Furthermore, he’s a city boy, I can deal with him if happens to be necessary.” Jack affirmed with no worries at all.

“This is complete madness.” You sighed and rubbed both hands on your face, thinking about what to do. You were scared to death with the idea of simply disappearing, worrying about how bad it could end up, but at the same time neither your body nor mind could handle that torturous marriage anymore and you knew that your best and safest option was to go with Jack. “Alright.” You agreed making Jack sigh relieved “We have a few hours until he’s back.”

In a jump of adrenaline, you and Jack got out of bed, got dressed, and started to pack your things. Bob, your dog, followed you excitedly around the house, as if he knew something good was going on.

A couple of hours later, everything was packed and placed on Jack’s truck; you took advantage of the plenty of time and, after grabbing the essentials, you started to pick non-vital stuff, like all of your books and the handmade teddy bear Charles’ late grandmother gave you a few years ago for your future baby that never happened, she was probably the only good thing that happened to you during all those years and, even having no hope left of ever have a baby, since you never even got pregnant during all the years of your marriage, you didn’t had the heart of left such a lovely gift behind.

With your dog in your arms, you walked around the whole house to make sure nothing had been forgotten, still not completely believing you were leaving that nightmare behind. Jack entered the kitchen to meet you, petting Bob’s head when he got close enough.

“Do we have everything?” Jack questioned looking at you.

“Just one last thing I have to do.” You said calmly and approached the fridge, grabbing the sharpie pen you always had handy to do the groceries list and writing on the appliance’s surface with your best calligraphy “fuck you, bitch”. You could already imagine the scene, Charles would come home and go straight to the kitchen, would see your note, and would go hunt you through the house only to discover that you had left him. You turned your head when you listened to Jack’s chuckles, smiling and walking back to him.

“You’re way too polite, sugar. I’d do worse.” He joked as both of you walked out of the house.

You didn’t bother about locking the front door or closing the windows, whatever happened from there wasn’t your problem anymore. You got in the car with Jack and Bob, feeling your heartbeat faster than normal, still not believing what you were doing. While Jack started the car, you realized you still had your wedding rings and promptly took them off, throwing them on the sidewalk as the car started to move, more than ready to leave all those bad days behind.

One year later

Comfortably sitting on the porch sofa with a mug of hot chocolate in hands, you peacefully observed the horses and cows pasturing in the distance, on times like that you used to wonder how you had lived in the city for so long, dealing with that unending noise.

You smiled as you heard the dogs’ paws making those little noises towards their bowls of water and not much later, you felt the warm calloused hands of your husband resting on your shoulders and his lips planting a kiss at the top of your head.

“How’s my beloved lady doing?”

“Tired.” You answered with a chuckle, resting one hand on your 7-months-pregnant belly to emphasize what you meant. Jack chuckled and walked around the sofa, sitting by your side and caressing your belly.

“You’re giving a hard time to momma, hum, little one?” he said in a tender tone, feeling like he could melt when the baby started to move inside your womb.

“You’re not kidding.” You confirmed with a smile and leaned to rest your head on his shoulder.

“Good thing you have your helpful husband to take care of you.” Jack said with his smug manner and smirked, turning his head slightly and kissing your forehead.

Tagging: @missladym1981

[autistic-katara]

ok i might get blocked by a couple ppl for saying this but the Jackson’s Diary fandom is seriously making me wanna become a proshipper out of spite (read the post before blocking me or whatever please)

like idk if u guys have checked the fandom tag on ao3 recently but theres been a bit of drama surrounding the fact that someone posted a smut-fic of Exer (an 18yo) and David (an almost 18yo, who was aged up A FEW MONTHS for the fic) and they were harassed into taking it down and making a fucking apology post ON AO3, THE PROBLEMATIC FANWORKS WEBSITE.

and this fic was tagged 100% correctly like it was very explicitly tagged as smut n stuff yet there were still a bunch of comments being like “uhm what did i just read 🤨” and when i made a comment defending the authors right to yk, not be harassed for making not even rlly problematic content someone who clearly would suffer withdrawal symptoms if they turned twitter off for too long started arguing with me abt how “erm ackhtually we should be allowed to comment harassment under ppls harmless and explicitly tagged fics cause theres no smut in this fandom and it shocked us” and u could just rlly tell they felt they were more righteous than God in their opinions and yeah so cut to tonight when i’m scrolling through the tag and i see a post titled “i’m so sorry” in which the author made a post basically being like “i’m so sorry for posting that ik it was disgusting it has been permanently deleted” which in the comments a few ppl were telling them that what happened sucked n stuff (myself included // judging by their reply they only did this to stop the harassment which yk, completely fair) and i went back to scrolling since i wanted an actual fic not fandom drama but like 2 posts down there was another post titled “please stop” or smthn like that where someone else made a post basically being like “guyssss can we please not write smut of these characters this fandom is so wholesome i dont wanna ruin it 🥺 anyways sorry this isnt a fic this just needed to be said lol” and like dude, my guy, WHAT THE FUCK?!

this is AO3, this is a fanwork archive that as far as i know was created (at least partially) due to the fact that ppl kept getting their “problematic” works taken down from other sites and the creators wanted to yk archive all fanworks. this is NOT a social media site where u can make callout posts abt how what someone else posted disturbed ur pure wholesome chaste scrolling by daring to uploaded something with *gasp* consensual sex between 2 consenting adults?! (or canonically 1 consenting adult and 1 consenting gonna-be-an-adult-in-a-few-months-but-isnt-much-younger-than-the-first-guy but u get the idea)

like guys, ao3 is not twitter. it is not tiktok, it is not tumblr, its not youtube, its not even wattpad. it is not a social media platform, it is a fanwork archive, specifically one that lets u post whatever kinda content u want (yes, even smthn depicting 2 consenting adult/almost adult participates that are in no way related having sex, ik its crazy what they allow online these days).

and look honestly the callout post wouldn’tve annoyed me this much if it was posted on yk an actual social media. like if it was posted on twitter or tiktok or on youtube as a video essay or even on here, like sure if i saw it id be annoyed that this fandom cant handle the tiniest bit of non-puritanicalism and fuck, maybe if it was on here id even drag myself into a pointless days-long argument that causes me suicidal levels of stress but on archive of our fucking own itself?! for the millionth time, IT IS NOT A SOCIAL MEDIA! u dont make posts like that that u want the rest of the fandom to read or whatever on there because its not that kinda website!

anyways yeah i hope i explained the situation ok, u might be able to check it out urself if u feel like it and yeah idk this whole thing just kinda felt like a wake-up call for me like yes i find incest and pedophilia disgusting OBVIOUSLY and i dont like ppl romanticising it in fiction but idk i’ve seen ppl talk abt toxic antis before and show screenshots of conversations where theyve acted super shitty but idk seeing this all unfold in person and having to argue with these hardcore antis just- i dont wanna be associated with these ppl, if these are what alotta antis r like i dont want anyone to assume i agree with them like at all, whether its other antis, proshippers, or ppl like me who have a super complicated opinion on it. like they harassed a person into taking down their smut and made call-out posts on ARCHIVE OF OUR OWN abt how they dont want their wholesome pure fandom corrupted by gross dirty irredeemable sex. and just yeah hope no mutuals i seriously care abt unmoot or even block me over this since ik a few of u r antis but yeah srry for this i just kinda seriously hate this fandom right now :)

also incase anyone is typing out a “kill yourself pedo” reply/rb rn; i turn 15 on Friday, i am 2+ years younger than ur innocent bb minor boy David and his definitely not already a legal adult boyfriend Exer so yk

[exhaustedpirate]

love scare

the beginning of my silly tiktok prompt series starts with a tiktok by @itspierreboo and @nickychampa that I found silly and adorable which makes this fic just as silly so enjoy! it's a little canon-compliant one-shot that i place during the six weeks of peace, more specifically, like a day or so before 4B

rated G | 922 words also on ao3

Maybe it was fate, maybe it was luck, maybe she was just too damn hot under the covers. No matter the reason, Emma woke up early. Although, early was a bit of a misconception, since it was very clearly mid-morning and she could hear her parents puttering about in the kitchen and her baby brother was already fussing.

Who cares? Sunday was a day to sleep in and clearly, Killian took that seriously.

That was another reason she was so damn hot, there was a naked pirate with his head firmly burrowed on her neck and an arm wrapped around her. But really, she’d much rather burn than get out of this bed.

For a moment, she wondered if something was wrong, Killian was usually the first to wake up but it could have something to do with the vigorous work-out the night before - really, finding positions and places to fuck that delicacy of a man while sharing a house with her parents and a baby was a task of its own. But they figured it out, oh they figured it out. And last night? Last night she found out how much pain tolerance Killian actually has.

If she looks down, she’ll definitely see her bite mark on his shoulders. But right now, she’s more focused on the way the hair of his arms brushes her nipples with every breath or how his hand is holding her waist possessively. Well, who is she to complain? His back definitely has some new scars and not just from the night before.

In any case, she is not ready to watch him leave out the window or for him to put clothes on. She’s not ready to move even an inch and that’s not just because of how sore she feels. No, she’s more than content to wile away the day in bed with a pirate. 

In a dream world, she would and that should really scare her. Or it should scare her how much it actually doesn’t.

Emma closes her eyes, her hand finding his and relaxing. Five more minutes.

Not a minute later, she feels him stir but stays still, maybe he’ll do what he did last time she slept in and try to wake her with his head between her legs. Hmm, that was a great Sunday morning.

She feels Killian sigh in contentment, his hand clenching around hers and pulling her closer. She feels his eyes on her, on her lips, on her nose, on her cheeks, on her hair, at the same time, his legs hooks (ha!) around hers. 

“Good morning, my love.” His whisper is barely audible, the addition of the “my” causing her heart to stutter in her chest.

She knew how he felt about her, it was clear in his eyes, most predominantly, every morning they woke up in the same bed. If only she would let herself-

His lips found her jaw in a barely-there kiss, something she wouldn’t have felt if she wasn’t already awake and she wondered if he had done this before. Then his lips whispered over her cheek and her brow in the same way.

“I could spend centuries here with you,” He spoke in the same whisper close to her nose before he kissed its bridge and then the tip. 

Her heart was bound to explode if he carried on, so full of affection, care and, dare she say it? L- His lips found her chin and she couldn’t handle anymore. If she didn’t do anything, she was bound to confess it all to him and it was too soon, too early.

With his breath over her lips, she opened her eyes and let out a quiet ‘boo’, loud enough for him to hear but not too loud for her parents to hear from the floor below. 

However, her plan had a major flaw - she didn’t account for a startled pirate. For all that he was a ruthless pirate who likely slept with an eye open, he had probably gone soft sleeping with her because he let out a loud curse and fell from the other side of the bed. It was probably her fault for sleeping like a starfish and giving him very little room.

She probably didn’t help either by laughing out loud at his reaction, especially when he sat up on the floor to look at her with what could only be called a fond glare.

“Emma, are you alright?” Even David’s purposeful steps and panicked voice couldn’t quiet her laughter, only exacerbating it as Killian’s eyes widened and he froze in panic.

She really wished she could know what was going on in her father’s mind as he arrived at her room to find his daughter wrapped with a blanket on the bed and a pirate hiding his naked body behind the bed. She would probably see his brain short circuit.

“Charming, what happened?”

Her mother’s voice seemed to break David out of whatever shock he was in because his glare was deadly on Killian while Emma’s laughter dimmed to giggles. Really, who could blame her?

“I think we need an upgrade on our anti-pirate alarm system!”

“What are y- Oh!” 

And really, Emma shouldn’t be the target of her dad and her boyfriend’s glare when it was her mother who went into a fit of giggles. She hid her face in her hands and shook her head.

“I really need to get my own place.”

Especially if she was going to keep falling for sneaky pirates.

[radiocity]

honestly, what's your take on the l word? atp i can't tell if it's just shit but i'm too far along to stop. the 5th and 6th seasons seem to be done in a complete different tone too and there's so many problematic aspects just slapped in for unecessary drama. still.. i like the main characters a lot and it is representation at the end of the day. Maybe it would've been cooler if they just did more of a 'slice of life' thing instead of 'drama rama cheating on people is like a slip of the hand thing due to the strong nuclear force'

anyway interested in your take, what do you think are the well- and badly- handled aspects of the show, how do you reflect on the story and character building?

stay cool out there (◕‿◕)♡

MY TAKE ON THE L WORD? getting this ask made me so excited you have no idea how much I love talking about the l word. So excited in fact that I wrote 6165 words about it, sorry, I am so severely unemployed right now. here, I talk about my thoughts, some theory, and then break down some of the intrinsic problems with the show, specifically how it thinks about gender and nonconformity, race, and transgender identities, within the scaffolding of it being a show concerned with women who have relationships with other women, rather than necessarily a truth of lesbianism. i’m citing various linked sources and very loosely using an academic approach, but it’s more like a messy collage of sources than it is a fully fleshed out argument and narrative! if you want the tl;dr, I’d recommend scrolling to the final 3 paragraphs

tbh I haven’t watched it in a while but I really want to rewatch the whole thing and go back to my gif series instead of just making random sets (don’t be put off by my absence its bc I was doing my master’s degree and then I got really sick) and maybe thinking so intensely about tlw these past 3 days will inspire me into it .

I’d be really interested in hearing any thoughts on response to any of this, even though it’s not particularly well written or formulated, so feel free to drop a message/reply/response anywhere if u or anyone else is compelled to. anyway response under the cut ->

so, my opening thoughts on the l word revolve around two things: there is nothing about this show that makes it an inherently lesbian show, and that it functions as a product of its time, not in culture but in Hollywood and show running. the imagined audience of TLW isn’t necessarily the modern ‘sapphic’ audience watching things like First Kill (2022), Do Revenge (2022), or Crush (2022) which are all, generally, pointed towards a younger audience seeking things like validation and romantic projection (from what I understand, and I’ll admit I haven’t watched any of these! But I have read synopsis and seen clips, so I’ll watch soon I promise). I do think this conversation has re-emerged a little in the growing conversations about wanting sexy lesbians having sex, which is a conversation that surrounded Love Lies Bleeding (LLB, 2024) for quite a while, repeating this argument that what lesbians want isn’t romance or tension, but sex, real sex, sex on screen and sex on TV. of course, it’s a little difficult for showrunners to ‘do’ sex or sexual content without it being so brazenly for men – and here I’ll step out and say when, in this context, I discuss women being looked at and ‘male gaze’, it’s more under the original theory of laura mulvey that women are objectified by the camera as men are in control of production, and here I’ll link the article (it’s very short, but I refer largely here to section B) – and to equally appeal to women looking at women but who are, equally not free from patriarchal understandings of the ‘correct’ and ‘incorrect’ ways of being attracted to women. I feel a good example of how we saw this was the big tiktok-wide discussion about sapphic cottage-core as an equally white endeavour, a sort of softcore launching of racist white American ideals of frolicking on a plantation. For showrunners to produce sexual lesbian content now, it needs to contend with who will be doing its marketing for them, i.e. a lot of people on tiktok talking about how LLB is for the ‘lesbian gaze’, whatever that means, or that these things are perhaps attractive to men in general, but are specifically geared to being attractive to lesbians specifically. Actually candace Moore, in a really brilliant article (and if u want access and don’t have it… just let me know) describes, through gaze theory, the notion of the straight viewer as a “tourist” and the “traveller”. Here:

Problematizing a distinction between the tourist, who "gladly or unknowingly accepts Disneyland's versions of the world's wonders," and the traveler, who "seeks and knows how to recognize authenticity," Strain argues that perhaps these archetypes are, if not one and the same, both victims to the notion that there is an "authenticity" available to be misrecognized, or grasped, in the first place. (10) But what of the lesbian viewer? (11) At first glance it would seem that the lesbian viewer falls outside of the already-tenuous tourist and traveler distinction, being a "local" intimately familiar with this culture. However, insofar as lesbian spectators are consuming mediated images of themselves, I argue that not only do straight audiences engage in a form of tourism when viewing the The L Word, but lesbian audiences, even those from Southern California, do too. The distinction between the tourist, the traveler, and, in this case, the local-as-consumer becomes blurred. Locals drawn to the latest "lesbian attraction," lesbians enjoy The L Word's eye candy along with straight "tourists." Like straight "travelers," they seek to identify albeit illusory "authentic" elements of the representation. However, for the queer viewer, the mediated reality of the show will never match up to reality. While the tourist and the traveler of The L Word are at base one and the same, the distinction between them lies not in what they are, but what they think they are; how they conceive of their own intentions, levels of "expertise," relationships to the local culture, and the "gains" that they take away--whether they travel for pleasure or for knowledge. It is through the enticement of lesbian sex (a spectacle of attraction for straight and queer viewers alike) and through the wonderment of either "understanding" the other or "recognizing" oneself (fantasy of authenticity), through both "watching from a remove" and "being there," that The L Word captivates its straight and queer tourists.

Pulling away from the academic angle, I don’t agree with the idea of LLB being for a lesbian gaze, nor do I think that TLW was ‘for’ lesbians more than it was ‘enjoyed’ by lesbians – a show that can hit as many audiences at once is a good thing. dennis cass for the slade in 2004 wrote that the L word “often feels like it’s not about being gay at all” and that a lot of what the show presents is pretty removed from any lesbian experience as we know it, additionally writing on bette and tina’s marriage counselling that they “aren’t merely in couples therapy, they’re seeing one of L.A.’s hottest personal gurus—that you not only forget they’re lesbians, but that they live on Earth.” A pretty accurate read for how removed a lot of TLW is from anything, and, to me, sort of bypasses any notion of ‘representation’ by just how fantastical it is. ginia bellafante also wrote in 2009, after s6 aired, that “’The L Word’ is a Sapphic Playboy fantasia in which women with wrinkles or squishy thighs or an aversion to lingerie appear to have been flagged down on the freeway with urgent instructions to move to Seattle”. basically, yeah

TLW itself is very clearly appealing to its heterosexual audiences at the same time it appeals to lesbians, even through the same mechanisms – the character’s conventional attractiveness, their skinniness, their lack of bras and how you can 9/10 times see their nipples through their shirts, and all the lesbian sex shown in as much detail as they could get away with – and that is the core driving force of the show in a lot of ways. we can’t really have another TLW today for the same reasons that all media from the early 2000s has shifted to give women more complex characters, arcs, appearances, and functions – and that’s a good thing, obviously – which in turn demonstrates the lack of these things the characters in TLW actually had. At its core, it’s sexy and men are the people behind the companies getting it on TV, not necessarily specific men but the shadow of patriarchy and how women exist on the screen. This isn’t to say media creation and output has become a liberal utopia for women’s rights, but rather there has definitely been a shift in how women exist on screen and what roles they were given before – think easy fast and furious, or megan fox in transformers, or even how very popular musicians styled themselves and appeared to the massive; Shakira, Jennifer lopez, Britney spears, etc – which, to me, reflects a way in which TLW capitalises off the straight heteropatriarchy in its desire to show sexy women at all times, always available to be ogled. in a way, this sorta aligns with bellafante’s observation that the show had ‘never aligned itself with the traditionalist ambitions of a large faction of the gay rights movement’ (written in 2009, 6 years before gay marriage was legalised in the us) – the liberator in the l word is sex, and that’s what all the characters are constantly aiming for, nothing else. Similarly, the show gets so obsessed with defining who or what a lesbian is (throughout the whole of s1 as they look for signs of lesbianism in jenny, with jenny at that party, or with dana talking about her ‘gaydar’, and so by doing this it turns lesbianism into a visual brand, something that be hidden in plain sight, appeasing both the hetrosexual viewer and the lesbian seeker - Martina Ladendorf describes a branding of lesbian identities through TLW in a form of “thingification”, and so “the representations of lesbian identities are discursively displaced and the identity position “lesbian” is partially filled with new meanings in the televised text of The L-word.”  Ladendorf offers a far more generous reading than I do – to me, a lot of TLW needs to extrapolate lesbians from their womanhood and vice versa, creating a sort of woman who is a lesbian, rather than, simply, a lesbian

naturally, the l word is inherently a misogynist show , and in a lot of ways I think it’s unavoidable to think about when it comes to discussing schematics or opinions of the show, it’s a show full of, in the words of liz feldman in this interview, ‘beautiful lesbians with just nothing but time on their hands… and just somehow also money’. Obviously, the stereotypes the show puts forwards make it feel pretty cheap at time, and when the show ventures out into attempting to either tackle or just include plotlines about poverty, racism, transphobia, infidelity, (or plotlines it totally avoids, like conversations on butchness, gender non-conformity, or transfemininity), it honestly just gets stranger and stranger, not to mention the very active racism present in the show, via how pam grier’s character was written, handled, and expanded upon when she was by far one of the most skilled and seasoned actors on the show. a lot of issues I and other people have are through this lens, and hence why a lot of the pushback focuses on how little was understood about trans people in mainstream media back then, or how the show was just such a landmark moment that it was purely reflective of the times so it’s just nit-picking to be pointing out all its negative parts, which isn’t a sentiment I agree with at all, and instead I think of the l word as being both progressive and problematic for these reasons. Even as an addition, I feel like TLW is why we just don’t really need more tv shows like the L word… because we have the L word, and it’d be nice if we could have something different

so, when I talk about and recommend the l word I usually put it in these terms: season 1 is a phenomenal piece of storytelling and such a compelling way to create and introduce a show all about lesbianism to a world that is not filled with parallel lesbians, but rather is the only show on air in the world doing that exactly, and, following that, season 4 gets a little art deco and experimental as it pushes its characters through new, meaningful struggle, like tasha working in the military under ‘don’t ask don’t tell’ (fuck the army though), max living his new reality as a trans man (yeah it was dealt with horribly), bette dating jodi and this inviting so much conversation about art, disability, and deafness into the mix, and, in other ways, jenny and tina working together on her show, helena’s… gambling addiction or whatever, kit’s nonsense relationship shane’s nonsensical relationship. Imo these two seasons show the best of what the L word has to offer, which is, in S1, a sensitive introduction that pushes jenny through the wringer as she really becomes herself and takes hold of her destiny, and then in S4, these characters all essentially performing at their apex, in love, making mistakes, trying again, to the best of the l word’s ability to show any of this (relatively speaking, it’s the best TLW ever gets)

with all this in mind, I do think the show thrives in really profound ways at times. The real hook of it is, and always has been, season 1, which is just this ferociously strong exploration in television about such a serious sensitive topic, jenny’s coming out. a lot of criticism sort of facetiously responds to jenny’s character by focusing on her writing quality (which I honestly thought was fine lol!), and will ignore sincerely engaging with her in favour of laughing at how bad her character became as the writer’s lost the plot more and more, but I really do think that jenny in the first two seasons was just phenomenal, and mia kirshner’s fantastic meditative performance just stole the entire show for me. In season 1 as we are introduced to the show and their world through jenny’s process of coming out and ripping her life apart at the seams to live her ideal life (even if it was very explosive with marina and didn’t end well), which I just thought was such captivating writing about that moment of choice, where a character has to decide whether or not they’ll live their easy life or do the difficult thing. one of the scenes I have always come back to is in s1 where jenny has sex with tim and cries afterwards because that moment for her is the one where she realises she just can’t do it anymore, and seeing that in the show was just really otherworldly for me, I loved it and I thought it was amazing, and then later on in season 2 where jenny asks shane to cut her hair for her – a real splitting off from her regular, comfortable life, to ‘become’ a lesbian in heart and soul, was again just another moment where the writing and directing teams could really show some muscle in just how good the show could be, before dropping all presences and going back to whatever drivel they’d been doing. As a more technical note on the show, the inconsistent directors and writing is really hilarious, and sometimes the drop in quality between episodes is… staggering, to say the least

tbh s1 functions well as a drama-comedy mix because those scenes, as well as tina and bette’s fertility journey, is spliced within the rest of the nonsense going on, which I felt crafted this really enjoyable diametric swing throughout . arguably more than anything, jenny’s coming out was the best and most meaningful part of the show, and I really haven’t seen much other lesbian media hold a candle to it (though I could name a few). What they did with jenny as the show went on was disappointing to say the least, but s2 had a lot of heart in it as they attempted to have her coming to terms with her abuse (naturally, having finally discovered herself in s1) and focus more on what makes her happy – her writing. As the show continued to develop and jenny’s character just morphed into this unrecognisable thing, I even still think mia kirshner could perform such a charming take on it that I never really aligned myself to a lot of the jenny hate people joke about

other drama aspects in mind, like bette and tina’s marriage falling apart, bette’s other relationships (bette always seems to be the one facing the ‘serious problems), and even dana’s cancer and subsequent death, I thought were generally handled… ‘well’. Dana’s cancer worked interestingly within this as, while it was kind of bizarre, I think the relationship between alice and dana was a real life force on the show for a  while, and that whole situation meant that alice could go through some real, meaningful growth in her character which she’d been a little starved of to that point. perhaps my thoughts are that when the show focuses on cheating as the only method of things falling apart, that’s when it really starts to fumble, because cheating at that level is such a sitcom-only esque plotline that removes a lot of reality you might be looking for and finding charming in these shows. Equally, I just think cheating can be quite an alienating plotline!

But, to talk about writing alone, my god it gets shit. Various parts of the writing I remember disliking off the top of my head are dana’s season 2 girlfriend which turns into a weird trope of the pretty girls vs the ‘uglier’ one (her then-gf), when the max arc is in full swing (though I’ll be clear as well and say I loved Daniel Sea’s acting within the role, however bad the writing was), papi and the racism that guided the writers in constructing her character, the random plotline of the guy living with shane and jenny in season 2 (though I thought it could have been really interesting, almost a meta comment on men watching lesbians, men watching the l word, men watching lesbians in media).  Helena’s entire character was a little baffling to me, and while I did enjoy her at times and thought she was a hilarious addition to the cast, I just had no clue exactly what she was doing. Parts of the shows ideology itself is equally harmful, like alice and dana shopping for strap-ons (bc alice is bisexual and therefore loves penetrative sex, and dana is a lesbian and therefore doesn’t), or just that the shows ensemble cast reflects the background, and everyone is cis white thin feminine, etc.  until they’re not, like ivan or papi, or Dylan..? (or a character’s non-whiteness function as a sort of ethnic flair to them, say papi and carmen being Latina and that being their exciting ‘exotic’ traits), that floods the show with a very recognisable sort of white Hollywood liberalism, and if we can understand and comprehend that, we get a good working frame for the rest of what’s going on. as alice and tasha were arguing about the military it was, of course, them trying to suggest that alice is this very liberal character who disagrees with the war and tasha’s politics, but not enough to…. Break things off with her. Instead (fashion tumblr user steps in) she even joins in this roleplay and dresses more femininely around her, growing out her hair a little and everything – and alice in general usually had a pretty fluid sense of style, so it was an… interesting choice. And then Jamie shows up for some reason (and is similarly one of the very few reoccurring Asian characters on the show – her, Catherine (one of helena’s stupid love interests) and adele (who is not serious); actually to make a side note on how this show was received, there was even a petition to get the character’s from alice wu’s Saving Face (which is a brilliant movie, and you should watch it) to be on the show and bring more Asian representation, from autumn 2008)

One episode I think is pretty good for reading the ethos of how TLW engages with women who aren’t their ‘ideals’ is shown is, imo, episode 3? 4? of season 1, where lacey is harassing shane for moving on from her. Lacey is one of the very few characters who leans a little more into being gender nonconforming, yes still with the full face of makeup, but with heavy punk-ish eye makeup, short hair, leather jacket, a demanding attitude, (and she’s not fat, but definietely has more weight on her than any of the verrrrry skinny main cast), and all-in-all embodies a kind of paltry attempt at TLW at bringing in someone with more of an edge, perhaps a modern day masc we might imagine – she’s really one of the only women I can think of on the show, let alone women that shane gets with, who isn’t an ultra-feminine character with long hair, tall, skinny, petite frame, etc. devoid of reality, the show really pushes on her as this over-demanding woman who reactedly badly to shane using her and moving on, and of course the show is trying to show us that shane uses people without much care for them, but doing so through lacey lets you sympathise more with shane than it would if they’d brought in a far more feminine woman who could play that damsel in distress role through looks alone. Lacey’s problems are like a pet or a child’s wherein you do what they want (in this case, another 1 night stand) to appease them, and then you get them off your back. The writing itself is very bizarre, but the fact that they used a woman who was just a little left of centre from the standard the show had set of these beautiful women in Hollywood, demonstrates enough

likewise, to go from here and talk about gender non-conformity, one of the strangest lines on the show was always kit in season 3 episode 9 saying “It just saddens me to see so many of our strong butch girls giving up their womanhood to be a man” – why she said that, I don’t know, some sort of meditation on her bizarre relationship with ivan perhaps? But that relationship fell apart because ivan was… not a man… and couldn’t be a man… whereas max is a man and could be a man, so I just don’t know.

Kit: Why can't you be the butchest butch in the world... and keep your body? Max: Because I wanna feel whole.

and he is so punished for that split away from butchness into transness, even by the woman who is notably placed outside of the lesbianism of the show – which is arguably worse than having one of the lesbians come at him for it, as kit is more or less representative of “the rest of the world” in these types of conversations, pushing max away from transition while the lesbians of the show, the ones who, you would imagine, have had some sort of intersection with transness once before (again, notably shane, who, as part of her traumatic backstory, was mistaken for a boy when she was a teenager and was paid by men to give them a handjobs) . instead the show curiously places kit there as some voice of reason, and the rest of the lesbian cast are kind of fast and loose with the whole thing. when they do talk about butchness in s3e3, it’s just bizarre. Pre-transition max pulls shane with him to unpack the car as “us butches”, and carmen giggles and jokingly calls shane a “big butch” even though, again, she’s the closest thing the show gets to reoccurring butchism, and is likely seen and imagined as butch by a lot of the people watching . at dinner later on in the episode, they make a joke about him not being “stone butch”… as if that’s a way of measuring masculinity rather than a sexual identity, before shane interrupts the conversation to say “You know what, what difference does it make whether someone is butch or femme?”. again, she is the butchest one at the table, and very notable not butch, but has gone up so close to the border before, you really wonder… why. Why there is such intense resolution to not make her butch, but really it’s because TLW functions in the absence of the butch – alice eler puts it succinctly: “The L-Word asserts that a “femme” lesbian woman is more desirable than a “butch” lesbian.”

In tlw, butch and femme are always roles played rather than realities lived, so it defaults to femininity being ‘standard’  - and this is where, imo, a lot of reaction to max’s transition hinges on. If the show can’t allow any character to firmly be ‘butch’, so when a character takes on butchness as a passage to realising his truth, that he is a trans man, it pulls out all the ugly thoughts and feelings held by certain lesbians about trans men who were, previously, identifying as lesbians/butch lesbians. Here, it really creates a perfect storm for TLW to uphold dangerous ideology (how they showed max’s transition was horrible), and justifying their cis lesbian audience’s response (they got angry that the only character who transgressed gender went ‘too far’ with it, essentially, living his truth in a way they didn’t like). I imagine, if TLW had functioning butch characters on the show, this all might’ve played out differently, but if TLW let go of its standard of femininity, then it… isn’t sexy, becoming too lesbian and too trans and alienates its non-lesbian audience, getting too deeply invested in its lesbianism than it is with its glamour. An interview with Ilene chiaken that gets thrown around a lot is here: on max, “She’s our first real butch on the show — a fabulously attractive butch, but nonetheless a real butch,” Chaiken said. “And we deal with the issue of gender. We wanted to tell that story, a big story in the gay community and, in the last couple years, a huge story in the lesbian community.” it’s an interesting statement for sure– gender transgression has always been a part of lesbianism (read any book ever), and with the advent of the internet and online communities – afterellen being founded in 2002 – more conversations could be had by lesbians from all walks of life, from any economic background or lived reality of race, ability, anything.  jack halberstam writes interestingly in Transgender Butch about butch/ftm borders that,

The distinction that some butches need to make between lesbianism and butchness hinges on a distinction between sexual and gender identities. Lesbian, obviously, refers to sexual preference and to some version of the “woman-loving woman.” Butch, on the other hand, bears a complex relation of disidentification with femininity and femaleness and, in terms of sexual orientation, could refer to “woman-loving butch” or “butch-loving butch.

butchness, and max’s ex-butchness, is never truly interacted or responded to in the show – ivan states he doesn’t mind being referred to as a he, shane half-heartedly defends butchism by asking her friends to stop talking about it, and max finds himself as a man through a meaningful identification with butchism and ‘disidentification’ with femininity to then finding a reidentification with not just masculinity, but manhood, which lends way to him truly discovering himself. Curiously, in response to this, this reidentification is one step too far, and suddenly its actually ok to be butch on the l word. The rest of the cast seems to ask him over and over again, why by a man? Why not be butch? But in the world of TLW, to be butch and to be trans are both radical acts of nonconformity, to disidentify is to no longer be the thing that sells, so you very fundamentally cannot do any of it – lisa the male lesbian in s1 is played for laughs as a transmisogynist  punchline, and carmen giggling at the idea of shane being butch (and thus disidentifying) demonstrates that this is equally hilarious.

from this angle, i feel that TLW functions primarily as a show about women attracted to women, not lesbians attracted to lesbians (lesbian as gender, as identifier, as being). Immovable womanhood is the centre of everything, constructing familiarity, and to stray is to exit safe perimeters that TLW establishes within unradical, conformist, cisgendered white femininity. candace Moore, again, writes that TLW “positions lesbianism as a sensibility, not a sexuality. This is particularly important because as a sensibility, lesbianism can potentially be co-opted by straight viewers.”

of course, it would be remiss to fail in mentioning that much of this discussion about tlw’s association to butchness is very much within whiteness as well – we can argue that tasha is a stud even if she never says the word herself, her specific attraction being to “girly girls” and her riding a motorbike, always with a more masculine wardrobe, and being in the……. Army………. Really aligns her with this sentiment. I do think she’s a stud, but this being off the back of the show’s depiction of max sits so strangely, and we can’t ignore that her blackness is so instinctually connected to how they wrote her – in a world where no one else can be a butch, why then is the only dark skinned black lesbian more masculine leaning than the rest of them? yes, racism, and all tied in to her nationalism and dedication to the army. It’s certainly an interesting choice for the writers to make and, while she is one of my favourites in the whole show, I definitely have a lot of pause with why she was written and created the way she was, and what she offers the show politically – she holds space as a particularly vulnerable body, a dark skin black stud lesbian, but maintains the status quo of the country and of American imperialism. What’s the message? Even the most unavailable of lesbians can still be patriots??? the individual's physical unfuckable body is still acessible through american aligience?

As later seasons continued to get worse, parts I did really enjoy were tasha’s entire character, molly’s entire character, seeing tina ‘get her life back’ as it were and return to painting, jodi’s entire character, all the music featured, and bette and tina getting back together was really well written and laurel holloman and Jennifer beals are just two very strong actors steering that ship, and random moments throughout I really enjoyed (specifically bette’s professional life gave a lot of breathing room for the show to have other funny little characters, like her office assistants etc) that I’m struggling to remember here rn tbh but generally even as the show was getting bad, the more ridiculous things got the more fun I was having, but the later seasons ‘drama’ was a little painful. If it had started as a drama and then shifted into something more palatable, I think it would’ve been great, but really anything that wasn’t season 6 would have been fine.. just such an unforgiving and cruel way to end the show, and I thought adding jenny to the mix of toxic sad relationships after leaving her straight life and coming to terms with her abuse was such a mean-spirited and cruel way to end it IDK! And this is why the l word FAILS as a sitcom, bc at least usually (to my knowledge) the  idea is that at the end… they’re kinda happy and stepping into another new life with some stability and lifelong friends!!! But instead TLW said fuck you and I hate you

anyway yeah closing thoughts… if you watch TLW without even thinking about representation I think it’s an easy watch, bc what I was watching it for is psycho lesbians who don’t act normally and that’s what I got. All caricatures of themselves or whatever they’re performing in the shadows of, and, in a way – and maybe this is a little weird to say – but I think the lesbians in the show are, to me, like watching a species of lesbian that I myself am not. Which is a shame because, if I recall correctly, a lot of those musical performances in the show were about exposing the world to lesbian music that broke the norm and went against the stereotype of music people associated with lesbians at the time, showing them on the cutting edge of new sound, which somehow did not cross into the actual meat of the show at all. And I haven’t spoken at all about it here, but a lot of those musical features are my favourite parts of the show and made some of those scenes just electric, magical parts of storytelling on tv

to address the “you”/I in what “I think”, and this one actually is TMI, when I first watched the L word, it was when I had really just finished coming to terms with my own lesbianism back in late 2021, early 2022 (I was gay and trans before this, but hiding from myself and my sexuality and my gender in complex ways, living a sort of double life online and offline – this was more an unforgiving reckoning with who I was vs what the life I was leading looked like). i was finally letting myself think about it holistically, reflecting on conversion therapy and how I navigated my desires and my identity. I wrote a lot of melodramatic diary entries and was trying to figure out how to handle a 3 year long semi-formed, confusing, and impressively undefined ‘situation’ship I was in with a guy while I was living alone during a gap year. all I really did in this time was go to the gym, go on walks, go to therapy, and think… a lot. by the time I started watching TLW I had come to terms with my lesbianism (and its inextricable relationship to my gender), but watching jenny go through something I had basically been in the thick of myself (just without all the sex and the cheating and the sex and the sex and the sex), and was, at that point, yet to experience the real horror of, meant a lot to me, and, just from some reading online, I’ve understood too how the early seasons of TLW really helped a lot of other lesbians come out to themselves or start thinking about where they might sit in relation to lesbianism. again, TLW fails time and time again at any sort of political radicalism, but when you’re so, so painfully alone and you don’t really have anyone to talk to about these desires, or even have the strength to talk about these things out loud, I do think somehow the unabashed desire flung around the screen of TLW does one thing, and that is to declare that lesbianism doesn’t have to be in your head, and that even good change can be really difficult when it’s something like this, and that, to me, was the best thing TLW added to the conversation about lesbian TV and reflects, for a lot of lesbians who find themselves trying to navigate repression and abuse, the experience that we’re still moving through: taking hold of our lives with our own hands

beyond that, beyond being a story about transformation – which I do think really permeates the first season (dana coming out to the world and to her parents; shane learning how to love or whatever the fuck genuinely; tina and bette trying and failing and trying to live the life they’d always dreamt of; marina navigating her own bad relationship through a sort of uncaring outwards desire;  bette ‘choosing’ the wrong path from her married life and cheating; kit re-entering the world of professional music and working hard to get into that music video thing situation – I think s1 is just such a rare gem of tv, that had so many flaws in it and so much was mishandled, but it came to it all with a lot of heart. But still that same angle is what alienates it from reality and sets it up as this fantasy land of woman-who-engage-in-lesbianism and abstractifies lesbian reality to make way for lesbian (or straight) fantasies of standard hegemony with a little zest. As it goes on however, it falls so hard to the more difficult aspects already clear at its start, and dramatizes their sexual escapades and relationships endlessly in a way that gives, says, and does nothing. jill dolan describes it well, albeit more positively than I have here: “part of the fun has become to simply go with it, to enjoy its excesses of character and plot and to tolerate its rather sweetly absurd attempts at relevance and authenticity.” and you really can ‘go with it’ for a while, but to put it shortly, TLW is not a show worth following to the end of the earth

[runwayrunway]

No. 27 - Airline Alliances (oneworld, SkyTeam, and Star Alliance)

@imjustanobsessedjew asked me to follow up on my thoughts on airline alliance liveries, so I'm here to do that.

I struggle to find a good way to describe airline alliances. Examples I've pondered over and ultimately rejected on some or other technicality include fraternities, record labels, and TikToker content houses. But maybe it doesn't matter. I'm not here to talk about how they function broadly. It's not important to this post that you can use American Airlines miles to get tickets on flights operated by British Airways.

Generally, member airlines will have a symbol from their alliance painted on their planes. I showed an example in my SAS post of the Star Alliance logo on an airframe (center), but here are examples for the other two: an Aeroflot plane wearing the SkyTeam symbol (left) and an Iberia plane with a very, very small oneworld logo (right).

But sometimes this isn't enough for them. The three major airline alliances have a habit of painting planes in special alliance liveries. Because who cares if you're flying on Delta, XiamenAir, Kenya Airways, or TAROM - what's important is that they're part of SkyTeam.

I sort of just don't understand the purpose. I don't think anyone is going to see a Star Alliance livery and think "wow, I am reminded to specifically spend my money with these 26 otherwise completely unrelated airlines!" because that's...that's just really silly. While airline alliances can make it a lot easier to use frequent flier miles and neatly book multi-leg trips on the passenger's end, I've always been under the impression that these must do more for the airlines than they do for the end consumer, because otherwise they probably wouldn't exist. I'm not sure what the need is to advertise them to someone who has no say in their existence and probably picks their flights based on what Google tells them is cheapest anyway. Nobody has, like, brand loyalty to alliances, and there's no reason they should, since their member airlines will offer wildly different qualities of service and cover entirely different regions of the world.

So why the special liveries? Is it a hazing ritual? I can't really imagine what benefit they might offer over just putting your symbol somewhere else on the plane. Some kid sitting in the window seat of a plane that's delayed by an hour at a massive airport isn't even going to notice or care about a SkyTeam livery, and I honestly really should have put airline alliances on the questionnaire in some form because I'm not sure how many people know or care that they exist. I don't understand the point, and the only thing I do understand, really, is that I hate it when airlines which have gone through the trouble of designing their own livery, even if that livery is terrible, would then paint a plane in a way which makes it interchangeable with everything else on the tarmac. But they're fully developed (mostly) liveries, so they're the sort of thing I'm here to talk about. Without further ado: SkyTeam, oneworld, and Star Alliance.

oneworld goes first because it's a bit different from the others. (Yes, the correct way to write it, as seen in all company literature, is with the first half bolded.) oneworld was founded in February of 1999 and is the third-largest of the major alliances.

Currently, there are thirteen active oneworld members, shown above, plus their regional subsidiaries; S7 Airlines is currently suspended, as is the case for all Russia-based airlines in major alliances, and Oman Air will be joining the alliance by the end of 2024. Fiji Airways is also nominally involved as a 'connect partner', which as far as I can tell means situational benefits from the alliance when working with its member airlines. It feels like they're scrambling for a foothold a little despite having some absolute powerhouses among their ranks because they keep getting their members bought out by other alliances and/or merged into each other. I think I prefer it that way.

To begin with, the logo is atrocious. Blue-to-white airhrush gradient circle with big yucky sans serif lettering, half of which is bold and half of which is standard width, which leaves you unable to tell which half you hate more. This logo is really painfully early '00s website and not in the cute nostalgic way. It's not stylized in a way that provokes nostalgia, it's just so inept that it could fit in during the era where web design wasn't really a field that had been fully invented yet.

But as a livery, it's sort of hard to review. A oneworld paint job changes less than the average logojet.

I'm not entirely sure if I can even consider this a special livery. It's just an extra line of text. Ugly text, sure, but I wouldn't call it a different design. This doesn't change the fact that you can immediately recognize these as an S7 plane and a Cathay Pacific plane because none of their livery is fundamentally changed.

There's just a limited amount I can say about what's a glorified sticker. RAM gets to keep its nice little swirlies, all is right with the world, they get to keep the normal text on their other planes, this is not a big deal. Maybe they keep losing members because they can't tell them apart from other planes in the airport without a big, all-encompassing custom livery to make a select few unlucky planes airline-ambiguous. oneworld, more like...dumbworld.

Moving on in alphabetical order, SkyTeam is the second largest of the alliances.

SkyTeam has 20 members: the above pictured, plus Aeroflot, which is temporarily suspended for the aforementioned Russian reasons. It also has its own elaborate system of 'associates' and 'affiliates', and a dedicated cargo alliance, SkyTeam Cargo.

I actually enjoy the SkyTeam logo. The wordmark is just a yucky thin monospace sans serif, but they have that nice flourishy design that's aesthetically pleasing and easy to recognize, and I can't knock that.

Still, this is where we get into proper airline alliance liveries. You have to zoom in pretty close to tell that the above planes are TAROM on the right and Korean Air on the left. I didn't have to specify, when covering oneworld, that the logo was framed by Iberia and Royal Air Maroc, because their branding was left intact. This is not so for SkyTeam, which takes over its hosts in full, creating SkyTeam planes with a tiny mark denoting their actual airline instead of the other way around.

This could be a lot worse. It's got recognizable logos, legible text, and I think most crucially the main fuselage body is painted a mid-light grey. The opposite of something like the SAS belly stripes, which are cheapened by the proliferation of Eurowhite, SkyTeam sort of gets a free boost from the fact that their non-white fuselage is a rarity. I do really like the relatively lowered contrast between the main body and the logo, because this shade of blue is usually paired with stark white. The SkyTeam curlicue is big and visible on the fuselage. I would have made it bigger, but it's not terrible as is. The airline's logo is placed below the window line while SkyTeam's wordmark is above it, hypothetically giving them equal weight (though in reality I think people obviously read SkyTeam's first).

It certainly has Detached Tail Syndrome, but for my tastes the lower contrast and placement of the curlicue make it far more tolerable. Northing here is ostentatious or overdesigned, and while it falls short of true minimal elegance I truly can't say it's ugly and I don't think it's lazy, either. This is one of the few times the detached tail does feel at least slightly deliberate, given the non-blankness of the rest of the fuselage. The bits feel a bit separate sometimes, but it's nowhere near as bad as that effect can get.

I'm going to give SkyTeam a B-.

I sincerely, earnestly, emphatically do not dislike the way the SkyTeam livery looks. But I still think it should not exist. Airlines should wear their own liveries. If you have 20 airlines, you should have 20 distinct fleets. I would rather have a bunch of mediocre or even bad liveries than one decent livery which doesn't belong to anyone at all.

Regardless, I do have to leave off on a fitting note. SkyTeam...more like WhyTeam.

Star Alliance is the largest of the three alliances, with 26 member airlines.

In my SAS post, I introduced the Star Alliance Test, a metric by which I judge the the absolute worst designs which end up on this blog. The test consists of one question: would I prefer that all instances of this livery be replaced with a Star Alliance paint job? As I mentioned there, I chose Star Alliance because, like SkyTeam, it entirely overwrites the original airline's livery. Not only do I like it less than SkyTeam, it is also more prolific, with an entire six more airlines with planes begging to be ruined.

It is inoffensive nearly to the degree that it becomes offensive again. Big, ugly sans serif wordmark, though it at least has the decency to occupy the majority of the fuselage to prevent it from just being a white expanse. Detached tail. Teeny tiny airline logo that you have to squint to see.

Star Alliance liveries are both functionally identical to blank planes and dangerously close to actually being them. But they have just enough design that to me they avoid being nothing and graduate to minimalist. I think it's the large text and the fact that the actual logo is actually decently designed, but it doesn't evoke the sheer dread in me that something like Lufthansa does. It's not uninterrupted, unbalanced white, it's just...really, really boring.

I...honestly think it's a C-.

Air New Zealand and Singapore Airlines both have a variant livery, all black and all white respectively. I would rate them the same, I think. Maybe Singapore's is a little more boring while also feeling like more of a statement, while Air New Zealand's makes me very happy by being a primarily black plane (I am one of the few Airplane People who is also a consummate goth) but suffers from thin white-on-black text being fairly eyestrainy. In general, the Star Alliance wordmark is somewhat difficult to read. These two belong with the rest of the liveries, even though I think I ultimately like Singapore's a bit less than the default and Air New Zealand's a bit more.

While not a vehement condemnation, C- is not exactly a shining endorsement. When I devised my scale I did envision it as something of a normal distribution. Most liveries are going to be somewhere in the C range. This is cromulent. This is satisfactory. This does not make me angry.

It just makes me sad, thinking about all these airplanes wearing identical liveries. Sure, Copa and United already match, but this is an extremely varied set. It ranges from the painfully boring to the somewhat ugly to the actively nice, and all of them get replaced with identical stock liveries...an inter-fleet Scar Alliance.

While I rate these as competent liveries in terms of their appearance, I cannot pretend I do not hate everything they stand for. In my opinion, to paint your airplanes in a livery which makes it impossible to tell that the planes flanking the logo fly for Croatia Airlines and Continental respectively without zooming all the way in is the very definition of failure.

[thueenz]

have any of u guys seen that cheeseball cat on tiktok/insta?? idk i dont use instagram. this one

i saw them months ago but they popped up again last night on my fyp and i want to talk about them so bad because theyre an occupied object as i like to call them (object with some kind of spirit in them, not to say haunted, just an object with some kind of 'being' or soul to it) and i find it endearing that a cheeseball cat i randomly saw one day is occupied. now we go under readmore

im pulling most of the screenshots from this video because its the one i saw last night so go watch if youre curious and to show the creator some love for their art!

if you have no idea who cheddar is they were not always a cheeseball, the creator bought them and painted them like this originally they looked like THIS

the being in them was present from the time of buying, they stick out like a sore thumb in this image specifically (likely because this is the day of buying and they havent settled into their surroundings at all)

luckily they dont seem to mind the fact that they were painted like a giant cheeseball at all. i cant say every being would take well to that, but if anything, they seem to like it. even if op and the fans on tiktok arent aware theyre 'there', they seem to enjoy the attention they get, and the individual love they have been given in the paint job. to be loved is to be changed or whateva. in all seriousness though they are fine with it, more than fine, which im glad lmao

theres plenty of beings in objects that are discontent with their situation, where the person theyre with either is not aware of them at all, or is misguided in their views towards beings in objects/uncaring/ even scared, but cheddar here seems perfectly happy. while others might shy away from attention, they seem to like the attention tiktok gets them.

i mean, they have their own little pedestal, special gift like baby cats that are custom painted, theyre special and named to the person theyre with, and people on tiktok love them. not a bad life if thats something you like! im really happy they feel so content, i get sad seeing beings that are unhappy on the internet but i cant rlly do anything about those cases so 😭

they really seem to like the person theyre with too, in this frame of them being picked up, their energy softens and brightens and makes my chest feel giddy and affectionate. theyre very cute i adore this cat i would give them a hug if theyd have me

i think they likely have a purpose or magical skill, but i cant pinpoint it further than 'they want to bring good into this persons life', which could cover a raaange of things.

theyre not malicious at all, they seem very content and friendly and i wouldnt feel uncomfortable around them at all in person so no worry of that. a bit intense before settling into their new life, but not bad. sometimes beings are just a bit intense lol. theyre not haunted by any human spirit, i can't say where they came from, or when, but i don't think they were ever 'alive' either animal or human.

i ♥️ cheddar and their sweet little cheese throne

[fans4wga]

"Are Influencers On Strike Too?" from the New York Times

By Madison Malone Kircher

"Hollywood’s actors are on strike. Many social media influencers have joined them. So what happens now?

SAG-AFTRA, the actors’ union, has allowed select content creators to join since 2021 under its influencer program. And many influencers work directly with movie studios and other Hollywood entities, who pay them to promote shows and movies, whether it’s on TikTok, YouTube or the red carpet.

Well, not anymore.

This week, SAG-AFTRA announced specific guidelines for influencers during the strike. The rules are broad. Influencers are advised to “not accept any new work for promotion of struck companies or their content.” That means no TikToks about Barbenheimer or red carpet walks for “Meg 2: The Trench.”

And SAG doesn’t care if influencers are being paid for those posts or not. Any posts about struck work are considered to be crossing the picket line. An influencer who films a “Get Ready With Me” video by putting on a pink dress and heading out to the theater to see “Barbie” could be in violation — and anyone deemed to have crossed the picket line will be barred from joining SAG in the future.

A number of creators I talked to this week see joining the union as a goal, one they don’t want to jeopardize.

Creators are divided. Some have gone full Norma Rae, vocally turning down lucrative deals and encouraging their viewers to support the strike. Others have no interest in joining SAG and will probably be continuing business as usual, or they are dubious that the consequences will ever arrive.

“I just think that’s an empty threat,” Jessy Grossman, founder of the networking group Women in Influencer Marketing, told me. “Enforcement of that is going to be impossible.”

Erin Orsi, a self-described “tiny content creator,” went a little bit viral on TikTok after announcing she had turned down a potential $5,000 sponsored partnership from a company working with a major superhero franchise. For Orsi, who has just under 20,000 followers, that’s a lot more money than she usually gets paid to post. Still, she took a pass.

“I’m trying to push this to be my full-time thing,” Orsi said. “I don’t know what the future holds. I would not want to close the door on an opportunity like joining the guild.”

Darcy Michael, one half of the comedy duo Darcy and Jer, told me a network offered him a $25,000 sponsored deal in the days leading up to the strike. He was initially interested, particularly given that the rate was higher than usual for such work, but he ultimately declined to pursue it further after realizing the impending strike was probably what was driving up the rate. (Michael lives in Vancouver and is in ACTRA, the Canadian equivalent of SAG-AFTRA.)

“I told my team, I was like, ‘in no uncertain terms until the strike is over. We’re not crossing picket lines,’” Michael said.

“I also just feel like this strike in particular is monumental for all industries,” he added. “I think we’re leading the pack in making sure that workers are protected, especially from A.I. intervention. If it means that we’re going to pinch our pennies for a few months, we’re going to pinch our pennies.”

Influencers who indicated in videos that they planned to ignore the guidelines have found the online reaction to be swift and sharp. At least two entertainment creators, including @collinnurrmom and @straw_hat_goofy, have already deleted such videos. The latter now has a “SAG-AFTRA Strong” image as his TikTok profile picture.

“I spoke way too soon on my page and upset a lot of people,” Collin Everett, a.k.a. @collinnurrmom, wrote in an email when I asked about the now-deleted videos. “I do not believe that I am scabbing,” he added.

Some small creators are just plain confused. Rosa Romero runs a TikTok page of memes about TV shows including “The Bear” and “Succession.” “It’s really hard for me to categorize myself as an influencer in this sphere,” Romero said. “It’s really just my personal page that accidentally ended up having 11,000 followers.”

Romero sent SAG-AFTRA an email asking whether it was still OK to post about movies produced before the strike went into effect (specifically, “Barbie”). Still, Romero worries that doing so might generate backlash online. “Any questions or clarification is treated like someone’s trying to cross the picket line,” Romero said. “It’s just unfortunate.”

John Monterubio, a senior counsel at Loeb & Loeb LLP who advises influencers and advertisers, said the firm had fielded questions from influencers and brands about how the strike would affect them.

People who are not in the union and don’t have their hearts set on joining have a decision to make, Monterubio said. “They’re not legally bound one way or another,” he said, “but they have to think about how their decision will impact them in the future.”

Influencers are not the only ones confused, he added: "The different agreements are quite complicated, even for attorneys to figure out.'"

[xlii-60]

The Miscellaneous Bin - Will Paquin

Welcome to another type of review I'm looking to do on this blog- the miscellaneous bin! Named after the bin in record stores where some of the more random things go, this specific type of review will be dedicated to things that aren't exactly albums. Songs that only exist as singles, EPs, and maybe even general artist reviews will be filed under this, and so I'm starting out with an artist I've liked for a little while now, Will Paquin! I'm going to be talking about 3 of his songs, Circles, In Two, and Now You Know, but I genuinely adore every song he's put out so far.

Like a lot of people who listen to Will Paquin, I found him through TikTok, before I ended up deleting the app some time in 2021. The reason I included Now You Know rather than Chandelier, which was Paquin's first release after a TikTok of the initial guitar riff went viral, is because Now You Know is the song I found him through!

Immediately, the most recognizable aspect of Paquin's music, and what drew me to looking at his page just beyond the first clip I heard, is the style he plays guitar with. Starting from Samba guitar (and inspired by Baden Powell, Toquinho, and Luiz Bonfa), he uses a spiderwebby, delicate finger-picking that adds both a thrumming heartbeat and a lacy membrane to his music. Now You Know, released in February of 2021, takes a moment or two to get to that fingerpicking, and the lyrical content of the song is angry, frustrated, exploring the themes of making mistakes and having to learn the hard way. The opening lines of the song were all I heard at first, as I had managed to find the song just before its release, and I found it constantly stuck in my head, with the backdrop of that delicate, hypnotic guitar.

I've been following his music since then, though not directly through TikTok anymore, since I haven't had the app in years now. Of these three, the next to release would be Circles, in August of 2022. Circles jumps almost instantly into that familiar guitar, though unlike Now You Know's anger and frustration, Circles carries a sort of longing sadness, a feeling of searching and missing something. There's a piece somewhere that's dislodged, and it's beginning to drift away, but there's a grounding nature to the idea of someone in particular, keeping them in your mind, maybe to the point of obsession. It's a very beautiful song. I've included two of his newer tracks here because I enjoy all of his stuff but particularly enjoy the way his vocal style and musical style have developed alongside each other in the recent releases. Not mentioned in this post is his newest, Lightning, which is really incredible as well.

The last track I'll talk about in this post might be my favorite of the three, released in November of 2022, In Two. The track is more gentle than circles, almost feeling like you're being told some sort of secret. Paquin's vocals on the track are ginger, nearly whispered at times, creating a quiet, delicate bubble, as if you're being let in on something only a select few get to know. The lyrics of In Two seem to detail a somewhat codependent relationship as it begins to fall apart, especially with the chorus, "Half of me is half of you now, I'll have to cut myself in two." It's a heartbreakingly beautiful song, that feels as emotionally tender as the delivery of its lyrics.

Overall, I'd say, like I'm sure a lot of others would, that Paquin's finger-picking is one of the main things that drew me to his music, but the development of his style and his vocals, as well as his lyrical content, are the things that keep me coming back to listen again and again.

Here's some links if you'd like to check him out yourself:

Youtube

Spotify

Soundcloud

[vasfasan]

content creator vent

i'm tired of my all edits getting under 10 notes while a stupid fucking joke with a screenshot i haphazardly made in ten seconds can get like over 50 sometimes.

i get that on tumblr video is a format that isnt welcome or appreciated but I already explained before that this is the only place right now where I can share the specific edits I make (without having to build a completely new social média présence on other platforms). and on other platforms, video-oriented ones, I barely get any clout either. On tiktok it's usually around 30 likes with the exception of two virals, and on youtube its even less than that.

And honestly this situation discourages me from continuing to create edits. I LOVE my craft and I have been editing videos for eight years now, but that is exactly what pains me. I have been doing this work in an artform for so long, yet I am barely recognized for it. I look at other people who create stuff in fandom like fanfics or fanart, and subjectively i feel like they're so much more appreciated. Am I just that shit? Is editing a dead end? Or is it just the algorithm being against me? I'm tired of asking myself these questions. I've tried a lot of different approaches in the past, but it all seems to lead nowhere, and I'm frankly just tired.

Ffs, I'm literally studying to make video editing my full time gig rn. I love doing it.

But I just feel like I will stop doing it for fun in fandom in the future, if the situation remains.

[kaisfoxhoard]

artwork by me

i wanted to make my first post something cool but all i came up with was this rant about the social media platform i called my home for 6 years.

**a rant**

im finding dark patterns on instagram that dont appeal to me and that i cant support. the entire platform is geared towards shortform content and keeping you on the platform for as long as possible. thus the platform drives away small artists and does not give them a chance to grow

1. dark patterns consist of things such as: updating the app and making small changes that nobody asked for, removing the ability to see every post under a hashtag, and reels taking you down unintentional rabbit holes.

ive always been annoyed by recommended reels on your home page taking you off of your home page and sending you into the reels page. i am in belief that your home page should be a static area that is full of things you’d expect to see there such as posts from people you follow. when a reel takes you out of your home page, its very intrusive and i often find myself getting lost down this rabbit hole for 30 minutes and feeling annoyed after realizing what had happened.

when i recently found out that you cant view recent posts under a hashtag, i was absolutely pissed. its a direct attack against small artists and people who want to look for commissions of maybe an artist with a not-so-popular style. or even cheap coms. if i cant find these smaller artists and support them, how can we expect a community to grow and prosper. how can i expect to grow from a hashtag directly. at that point why even bother with putting a hashtag.

2.with the rise of short form content, artists have had to find new ways to gain reach from their posts. naturally, art in of itself doesnt have great video content, as its a picture. while one could argue this creates competitive creativity and drives someone to think outside the box, it ultimately harms and deters new artists from giving it a go, because it requires more time devoted to the entertaining part of the content than the actual artwork being created. most short form content is designed to generate a quick laugh and maybe a like and follow. when artists cant do that, because they want a specific aesthetic to their art, lack of interaction between community and artist may drive their passion dry.

with the fact that instagram is now more geared towards short videos and not photos like it once used to be, the chances of success as an artist is becoming scarce. theres a loss of close knit community that was once present.

thats what i hope to achieve here. i want to bring back that community feeling that we all once felt. i dont make art all too often anymore because instagram has killed my desire to make and create. i want to see awesome art. thats about it. when i create stuff i want atleast a little bit of attention. i dont want to feel like something i spent hours of my time making, flopped.

if ur still reading this…. thanks

i hope its made you realize that, wow. we all waste so much time on reels, and tiktoks too. to me, the short form content just doesnt sit well with me. i want to be enthralled in whatever im engaged with. lets make a cool community together! thankyou artists!