#context is everything

[gammija]

after listening to the new night vale episode i have to come to terms with the fact that i too, with the right context, am not immune to creepy man covered in blood with an edgy cold-blooded demeanor and a smile full of too many sharp teeth

[spop-romanticizes-abuse]

catra:

also catra, 5 minutes earlier:

“you will never get your hands on adora” my brother in christ you are the one who gave him the coordinates to track her.

[meraarts]

Nikkie telling them to give her their deepest fears in the most casual voice ever gave me violent Sophomore Year flashbacks

[bipunkharrington]

Please don't use colours to tell people who to vote for without any additional context guys, we're just over two days away from a general election in the UK and I forget that tumblr is USA centric and seeing "PLEASE VOTE BLUE!!" on my dash is essentially a jump scare

[i-am-trans-gwender]

It's really annoying when people bring up one thing they like by putting down another. I don't mean to show the right and wrong way to do something but instead "Less popular thing is way better than more popular thing. Ain't I so smart."

Extra annoyance points if they have little to nothing in common.

Like people saying "Hazbin Hotel is better than Disney" even though one is a line of kid friendly movies while the other is a single adult animated series. The only similarity is that it's a musical about a princess. (which isn't even true for all Disney movies).

On the other hand you have people saying shit like "Hazbin is mid, Lackadaisy is better." even though the one thing they have in common is being adult animated series.

It be like saying "The Aquabats Super Show is better than The Sopranos." even though the only similarity is that there medium.

[victusinveritas]

[thearchaeologicalwitch]

So my daughter is due this weekend.

I had a revelation. According to a childs mind -and the mind of adults lbr-

Archaeologists = Scuttlebutts

Thank you, that is all. @archaeologysucks @archaeologistproblems @archaeologymemes @chaotic-archaeologist

[ariadne-mouse]

Raphaniel's visions are just of someone making one of those hideous green juice power smoothies

[uwmspeccoll]

It’s Fine Press Black Friday!

Last Wednesday we presented a few understated wood engravings by the noted upper-Midwestern engraver and fine-press printer Gaylord Schanilec from a portfolio of literary broadsides documenting the 1998 Hungry Midnight reading series at The Hungry Mind bookstore in St. Paul, Minnesota. For this #Fine Press Friday after Thanksgiving, we present the broadside portfolio documenting the previous year’s Hungry Midnight series featuring the work of Sherman Alexie, John Dufresne, Paul Metcalf, Margaret Atwood, Charles Baxter, and Jonathan Lethem.

Entitled Context is Everything, after a prose piece by Lethem, the portfolio was printed by Schanilec, with his original wood engravings, in an edition of 20 copies (with variously editioned broadsides) at his Stockholm, Wisconsin farmstead studio Midnight Paper Sales in 1997, with each broadside signed by its respective author. 

View other posts on the work of Gaylord Schanilec.

View more Fine Press Friday posts.

View more posts with wood engravings!

[sebastianshaw]

Much like how 90s Shinobi looks really ripped until you put him next to all the other dudes in the 90s and realize oh he’s actually kinda to quite slender comparatively so if he was in the real world he’d probably be a twink

He is likewise average to tall at 5’10 til you realize every other male X-character (plus Haven) created in the 1990s was 6’0 or over.! I’m serious that’s an actual pattern I’ve noticed. So Shin is like… real world tall but comics world short.

[the-empress-7]

We are playing the semantics game again are we?

Why you'll see Wednesday in the rankings but not Harry & Meghan

Shows and movies need sustained popularity in many countries to crack into the all-time most watched charts. That means you can see titles with "Top 10" badges in Netflix's app for days, but they still may not be generating enough hours of viewing to make the all-time rankings.  

For example, Harry & Meghan, a docuseries about the Duke and Duchess of Sussex, has generated 81.6 million hours in the first four days since its release Thursday. It still has lots more time in its 28-day window to generate watch-time, but TV shows need nearly half a billion hours watched to make it onto the all-time list, and even the most popular shows and movies need multiple weeks and enduring attention to accumulate enough. 

By comparison, Wednesday, the teen supernatural dark comedy series based on the character Wednesday Addams, has accumulated more than 1 billion hours watched in its first 19 days, making it the service No. 3 most popular series yet, with more than a week left to keep adding up more hours. 

Netflix's most watched TV series, ranked

The following are Netflix's most watched series, based on Netflix's own reporting of total hours viewed in the first 28 days of each titles' release. Again, if a new season releases its episodes in two volumes on different dates, Netflix counts the watch time of the first volume's episodes for their first 28 days, then it counts the watch time of the second volume's episodes for their first 28 days.  

Any changes in the rankings from the previous week are in bold text.  

Squid Game (season 1), a Korean survival thriller -- 1.65 billion hours.

Stranger Things (season 4), a retro sci-fi series -- 1.35 billion hours. 

Wednesday, a coming-of-age supernatural dark comedy -- 1.02 billion hours

Dahmer, a true-crime serial killer series -- 856.2 million hours.

Money Heist (part 5), a Spanish-language thriller -- 792.2 million hours. 

Bridgerton (season 2), a period romance -- 656.3 million hours.  >

Bridgerton (season 1) -- 625.5 million hours.

Money Heist (part 4) -- 619 million hours.

Stranger Things (season 3), a retro sci-fi series -- 582.1 million hours.

Lucifer (season 5), a fantasy police procedural -- 569.5 million hours. 

All of Us Are Dead, a Korean zombie thriller taking place in a high school -- 560.8 million hours.

The Witcher (season 1), a fantasy show -- 541 million hours.

Inventing Anna, a true-crime limited series about a fake socialite -- 511.9 million hours

13 Reasons Why (season 2), a controversial teen drama -- 496.1 million hours.

[treluna4]

🌹

Hi! Because I’m me, you get 2 sentences!!

“At any point, someone somewhere will decide to do terrible things for all the wrong reasons, but today, the good guys won. That calls for a celebration.”

[starrbar]

"Personal Red Flags": A weird conflict that arises when I as an anti-anti still judge people when they engage with fiction in specific ways.

(I have to name my essays okay? xD)

I had recently started thinking about this topic again, and I was curious about what other people in my "neighborhood" thought. So I wrote this as a discussion for other anti-antis basically, and posted it in a majority anti-anti/proship space.

CONTENT WARNINGS: Brief descriptions of noncon/rape rps and irl creepy/predatory behavior, discussion of kinks

We're all some flavor of "pro-fiction" or such here, as in we don't think liking something in fiction means you support/condone it irl, which extends to wanting a space like ours that is built around allowing us to host the kind of artwork that gets us weird looks (or worse) in more general places like Twitter.

With that said, I've never been of the opinion that red flags just don't exist? because that's just silly. Of course there are things that kind of tip my eyebrow up in suspicion sometimes, but when I've asked people in proship spaces what their general idea of those red flags are, they almost seemed afraid to provide anything. As if having some level of personal standards would make them as bad as antis or something.

I feel like a lot of anti-anti/proship people cling to the idea that there's NEVER a reason to be concerned about the way someone engages with fiction, because we've gotten so used to feeling attacked when people question our moral character over fiction. And I understand that! But I think the more measured stance, rather than "no, never" is the simple fact that it's important to look at ALL relevant factors when trying to judge whether somebody has malicious intent or is a danger to others... unless the factor in question is "they've literally already hurt someone", ofc.

That's such a basic thing that probably applies to almost everything, and I don't imagine that even the average person would disagree with the idea that you can't know everything about a situation from just one detail on its own.

I guess the issue here is that antis treat taboo kinks the way they treat homophobia, transphobia, racism, etc. The kinks themselves are seen as inherently evil, just like bigotry certainly is, and thus they see no use in looking any deeper into it. When you find out someone is a TERF, for example, you don't go "yeah, but they're nice to their dog and they gave to charity!" You... condemn them for being a TERF, which is an inherently harmful thing, period. Doesn't matter at that point.

But it's wrong to treat kinks the same way. I've never seen solid evidence that any kink does INHERENT harm the way bigotry does. Another factor has to combine with the kink to make it harmful or malicious.

Like, for example... having a foot fetish is fine, yeah? Giving a foot rub to a friend is also fine. Hell, giving a foot rub to a friend who consented, knowing that you have a foot fetish, is fine too! You were both honest and communicated your boundaries. Now, offering a "foot rub" while you're secretly getting off to what your friend thinks is an innocent gesture is... creepy... at best. The kink provides context that changes things, but only because the behavior mixes with the kink in an unsavory way. If the person instead had a spanking fetish or something, that wouldn't really be relevant to a foot rub, so both the spanking kink and the foot rub would be neutral things in that scenario.

With that said, my go-to thing that I find to be kinda suspicious has to do with the way some of my past roleplay partners have reacted to me commenting on their character's behavior. And ofc I don't mean that I scolded them for writing the character that way. It's not like I didn't ASK for the character to be like that haha.

But okay, so I once did a roleplay where my OC was kidnapped and raped by the other person's OC, and whenever I would go into the ooc chat and say, "Damn, that sure is fucked up!" or "Ahahaa it felt good to have my OC punch him after what he did!", the other writer would... get defensive?? Like, they would start arguing stuff like, "Well, he's really lonely, and your OC was just so beautiful and nice to him, and he didn't think she would say yes if he asked her out!" or they would be extremely averse to the rapist OC not getting a happy ending?? Not that you can't have the villain win in a story ofc, but this person talked about it as if her rapist OC deserved to get away with what he did, not just that it's what would happen in the story realistically. And... idk! Just... the way they talked about our roleplays was really uncomfortable and came off like they were mixing up reality and fiction.

In another roleplay I did with someone else, we wrote a scenario in which my OC was "punished" with gang rape for fighting back against their coworker. Which, yeah, I like "noncon as punishment" roleplays! But then the other writer would be in ooc chat trying to say that my character was being unruly or "well, she shouldn't have broken the rules", and like, never at any point was this presented as a "haha ikr she got what she asked for -wink wink nudge nudge" like kinky egging me on or anything. It was like he actually got offended when I said his OC was being harsh and twisted.

I come to these dark-as-fuck roleplays to revel in how twisted they are! So when my writing partner starts acting as if they don't realize that's what we're writing about, it's so fucky to me. The CHARACTER is supposed to make all these excuses and twist the narrative and gaslight my character, but the writer should have their damn head on straight!

And I probably wouldn't even go so far as to say that's a red flag that the person is literally dangerous, but at the very least, they sure are failing to read the room and it JUST FREAKING BOTHERS ME. It freaks me out when someone is unwilling or unable to step back out of the fantasy and talk to me in plain terms about what we're writing about.

When you can't even admit that you're writing abuse even when you blatantly are, I hate that. And come to think of it, I also hate seeing that attitude in media that I still love, because it makes the stories so much worse. (Heavily side-eyeing two of my favorite anime rn)

Anyway—

That's my personal "oh god, what the hell is wrong with you?" factor that I certainly don't consider worthy of like, a witch-hunt or anything of the sort, but it simply... drives me away from people who exhibit those traits.

It is NOT an "oh yeah, for SURE, this person is dangerous and needs to be silenced/deplatformed/jailed", it's literally just "bro, I'm kind of proshippy over here and even I think you sound nuts. Bye I guess". That's all! And it's okay to have those.

But I think we've gotten stuck in an environment where we feel like we have to morally justify why we dislike literally anything, which leads to people constantly doing that, which leads to me getting anxious just because someone said they don't like noncon—but they never said that they think people with that kink are horrible. I always ask for that clarification these days, before I go any further with someone. And it really, REALLY sucks that everyone feels so pressured to be in an all-or-nothing position on this whole proship vs. antiship thing.

Nuance is so important, but it's also scary because a lot of people will ignore it so that they can demonize you. And I hope I worded this post in a way that doesn't make anybody feel demonized if they truly are just enjoying a story or something. Honestly, if you and whoever you indulge in your kinks with are consenting adults and you're vibing about it and you're not hurting anyone, who am I to judge? Ya know?

BTW, with my above example, I'm not talking about people who just "stan" villain characters and say they did nothing wrong as a meme and say stuff like "I would protect them, idc!" I also don't see a problem with someone feeling bad for an awful character; feeling a pang of sorrow for them because they're suffering; feeling happy for them when they reach a goal that, in itself, isn't heinous; understanding them; getting into their head; etc. etc. there are so many ways to deeply connect with a nasty character that doesn't come off as genuinely DEFENDING them for real and making the same excuses their ilk would make for themselves irl.

I do all those other things I mentioned. Haha I think my recent post about Ellen would show as much. My friends do that stuff too, it's all good. Because it's very clearly just people enjoying fiction AS fiction and just, ya know, being overjoyed about their special little meow meows, or being fascinated with what makes them tick, or just enjoying a funny crack AU. I feel like the icky encounters I tried to describe above were just... a step past that, but they happened a long time ago, so I wouldn't be able to get like, screenshots or anything.

I just hope this made sense! I thought it was interesting, but I know it could have easily come off like I was being an asshole towards things I don't vibe with if I didn't make some clarifications.

I'm really interested in what other people may think of this or if other profic/antihara people also have these experiences.

[opservations]

When you leave your Friday afternoon "standup" (that always turned into a full-on meeting and PagerDuty goes off 5 seconds later... There are probably more than a few things you wish you knew but most of all you want to know who you to go to for solution-critical information. If only you had... OpenContext.

[loustyleshtommo]

For those who find a quick kiss between L and F shocking, I feel you. SO MUCH.

It’s a cultural difference thing. My very first kiss on the lips was from an American four-year-old I was babysitting. My own family is quite affectionate. We do loads of hugs and kisses on cheeks. So, I was expecting a goodnight kiss on my cheek. But nope. It was very similar to what we saw in AOTV. I was stunted for a few second before I kissed him on the forehead. Because I did not want a toddler to feel unloved but I also was not comfortable with his family tradition.

That’s why there’s a thing called ‘culture shock’. Your gut reaction is valid. Your understanding of a different culture is appreciated. Your boundaries are yours to set and keep.

[xtrablak674]

I Never Made It About Race, America Did

“You seem to see the world from the perspective of your race”

It’s such a shame that “race” is a construction of man, and nothing really scientifically proven. Curiously the media likes to paint people of color as the ones who are first to play the 'race card', when and if they actually looked at our individual circumstances, many of us just wanted to be ourselves, not our skin color. Interestingly enough this comment came from a Black man, who mind you is fairer complected than me (and possibly on most days can ‘pass’ for other things), but I am not going to partake in colorism.

As a child I thought there was something “better” about my lighter hued younger brothers. Their lighter hues were obviously more lovable than my darker hue because, like the old adage "The darker the berry, the sweeter the juice, but if the berry is too dark it ain't no use". This instinctual feeling was of course validated by my own Black peers who referred to me as “charcoal”, “tar baby”, and “ape lips” denoting there was something wrong with my cacao bean complexion. Which made my friendship to my favorite cousin at this age Fee Fee so important our radiant complexions matched as did our ages, and I knew there was nothing wrong with my cousin Fee so there mustn't be anything wrong with me right? Wrong!

In kindergarten I was sort of a Lothario cultivating reports home about how I was "kissing all the girls in class", it would take a couple of more grades before I discovered that even though kissing the girls was fun, playing with the boys was even more fun! As an adult it's a sweet thought of a five year old innocuously kissing his female classmates on the cheek (playing into the appropriate gender roles of society), add a racial context and it appears predatory a Black boy kissing little white girls, doesn't he know that not even 20 years before he was born that a Black boy could get lynched for even looking at a white girl, less deem himself worth of placing his disease-ridden darky lips on her fair cheek was a calling for a castration. 

Adding this racial notion shows the inorganic nature of the construction of racial groups, and when left to their own wishes children do not act on their own to be racially intolerant. As children we are human beings before anything else, as we grow up we learn to identify with something of cultural significance or geographic locations, these things are taught to us either verbally or through societal cues. We are taught to disregard our humanity for flags, borders, money or status.

Like my caramel colored 16yo nephew I used to be so clueless about racial identity, and since my “friends” (mostly Caucasian) weren’t interested why should I be, there were more important things like Voltron, scratch and sniff stickers, Transformers and G.I. Joe figures to talk about. My best friend at the time Kelsy Carrington (Black) would always abandon me for playing with his cousin Tré, if he had the option because I was also know around the neighborhood as a “sissy”, and no one wants to publicly acknowledge a relationship with a sissy even though I was one of the fastest kids on my childhood block, which meant I was recruited for street football. I had little interest in organized sports and little to no idea about the rules, but could catch a ball and run very fast toward a goal dodging those in pursuit of me.

These early interactions with my own brown peers told me that I was 'less than', that relationships or friendships with me were tentative and would always be tossed aside for something 'straighter' or 'lighter'. My own people began the development of my low self esteem, and low self worth. At that young age I learned I could out run most of my problems, including bullies who wanted to beat me up after school or the white boys who chased me out of their neighborhood shouting “n*gger” at me. I pedaled that banana seat Huffy like my life depended on it. Run n*gger run!

What is a “n*gger”? You would think these were lessons you weren’t learning in elementary school, but obviously the society I was growing up in needed to let me know my place, and it wasn’t in certain neighborhoods with certain kids all because of something I had no control over. Even with things like ROOTS & Shaka Zulu playing on television in more rural places, these lessons took longer to learn. But how is a young Black child supposed to react to a word that carries centuries of venom and hatred built into it, knowing that something is wrong, but the thing that is wrong is beyond his control.

With my mothers death I was uprooted from living in Westchester to live with my paternal grandparents, now separated from my siblings and my many cousins I could try to recreate myself and I was sort of successful in this creating an identity around my love of comic book and trying to develop my own characters with some of my six grade friends, and develop my own graphic novels. 

The group of bullies in the NYCHA projects where my grandparents lived didn’t get the memo that I was “cool” now, and had no problem ‘jumping’ me on my way home from school, in my school uniform some dirt grey slacks and an ugly maroon blazer and grey clip-on tie. There were at least ten of them to one me, and I had no brothers or cousins around to protect me and the projects weren’t like the house I was raised in where I could simply run into the always unlocked side door. There were intercoms and elevators to navigate before getting safely inside my grandparents apartment. So I took the punches in the face as I kept walking toward our building attempting to deaden the pain of the blows not only to my ego but to my battered body. I never mentioned the assault to my grandparents, understanding that this was just a part of my taking on a new role of being perceived as upper-class in a neighborhood where the children who looked like me would never aspire to greater than what they were born into.

Later I would learn that even though my grandparents lived quite frugally they were upper middle class, and instilled their well to do values upon my impressionable self. I don’t look at this this as a bad thing, it was the shedding of a “ghetto” mentality that I unlike my younger siblings was able to avoid and in turn left me open to opportunities that I wouldn’t have had if my mother was still living. I learned that if I worked hard and focused I could do anything that I wanted to do, my grandmother kept me so busy with extracurricular activities that there was no time for gangs or getting in with bad crowds, I had also become very withdrawn after losing my mother preferring creating my own little world in my room in my grandparents home as opposed to going outside to play with the other kids. Besides who would want to play with a n*gga and a fa**ot?

I was running away from the pain of losing a parent so young and as opposed to deal with the non-acceptance of the new community I was in I decided to create my own world. I did befriend a white Latino Puerto Rican at my new now public school, (after being kicked out of my Lutheran school) and we bonded over things like wresting, super heroes and toys that were more than meet the eyes, but now there were new challenges. We were chased for being perceived as a Black (true for me) and a white boy (not true for him), he just happened to be a blue eyed Puerto Rican, not that unusual if you know that the Caribbean goes from my complexion to even fairer then him. But he couldn’t out run his last name Vazquez, so now the shouts were “sp*ck” and “n*gger”. Run n*gger run!

My next friend was just as dark as me but a bit overweight for his age something that obviously made him an easy target for “fat jokes”. There was a change with my grandmother that I hadn’t noticed with my Puerto Rican friend, she allowed me to stay the night over this Black friends house and would always ask about him even decades later after the friendship was clearly over. This coupled with that she wouldn’t let me visit my best friend back in Westchester for an overnight because he was Caucasian, but would let stay over an acquaintance from the same period because his parents were Black led me to question my grandmother and ask her if she was “racist”? She would avoid answering the question with saying the broad thing parental figures like to say like “my house my rules”, but it was very clear to me that she more readily accepted my darker hued friends and wasn’t as readily accepting of my lighter colored friends. Even though I was supposed to be enjoying the “cluelessness” my nephew now enjoys my parental unit was polarizing my relationships and attempting to bias them to her own well meaning but dated beliefs.

This would continue into high school where I joined some of my junior high school friends where we were a United Nations or jokingly 3-2-1 Contact friends, a Costa Rican girl, an Irish girl and me made an interesting crew traveling on the train to our performing arts high school in Manhattan, where I was to start learning about class differences as I begin to meet an entirely different kind of people one of them being my Jewish high school friend who lived in the mystical place called Brooklyn, and had his own room that his mother let him spray paint all over the walls while he listened to ska music. His parents were divorced and his father had a home in New Jersey, and like this red headed friend of mine in junior high school he had a home full of such nice things, I felt a bit inadequate and ashamed about my grandparents very humble home. 

Once again trying to just be a teenager like my nephew I wanted to embody everything this new friend was about, hanging out with him and his friend listening to the Ramones and buying my first pair of Doc Martin’s, just attempting to exist and be a teenager in New York City. Once again my grandmother wouldn’t let me be like the other teenagers who seemed to have sleepovers all the time at each others house, but I could invite this friend and “his friends” to my house for a sleepover. Of course I was sort of humiliated because I knew I didn’t have the physical riches that my new friends had and it would be so much more apparent with them staying over my house. Somehow I made it through, later “breaking up” with this friend, something at the time I thought was odd, because how do two cis-gendered males break up with each other in a plutonic relationship? I was now struggling with my burgeoning sexuality and had very strong feelings for this friend, that it felt like a break up.

On to college where I thought here I can once again recreate myself into someone new and different and due to my relationship with my Dominican best friend who came out as gay very publicly in People magazine, I was embraced as an expert of all things queer at my private college in upstate New York, but I was also dealing with something else very new class and racial differences on a level that I hadn’t encountered at my culturally and class diverse high school. 

On this new campus I would clearly always count the other brown faces appearing either in the lunch hall or in the classroom where a clearly European based idea of education was being taught. At this time I was introduced to Marlon Riggs, Essex Hemphill and Tongues Untied, Color Adjustments and Ethnic Notions all from a Caucasian friend who had taken Africana classes at his ivy league school that shared that town with my private university. Slowly my racial consciousness was awakening, it seemed I couldn’t afford to be oblivious anymore. Which one of these thing is not like the others...