#employee sleep

[morganbritton132]

17 year old, CEO Tim Drake canceling a press conference and then putting out a statement like, “Sorry for canceling last min, Alfred said that he was going to run my laptop through the dishwasher if I didn’t clean my room. I think he’d do it :/. Also, wasn’t really in the mood. Cya -Tim.”

[teshiee]

hi yes it's Agent Walker and Agent Smith yet again..!! continuation to this post. i cant come up with anything new LOL

Aaand before i make myself think i mischaracterised my fav characters again, i'll point out that Agent Smith doesn't really do Agent Walker's paperwork all by himself. He actually gives most of it to his department's employees. Why is he like this.

...another thing i forgot to point out in the last post prequeling this one, Agent Walker's videogames got confiscated and won't be returned until he finishes his current paperwork!! (They found out he was making his employees do his paperwork. like Agent Smith over here...)

+ the last image text says, *(Agent Walker) doesn't notice the slight reduction in paperwork nor the fact that it's TIDIED because he's too woozy

[midoriiya]

I'm your good looking teacher...Satoru Gojo...

[panlight]

The other funny thing I just realized about the Tent Scene is that Mike Newton's family owned the outdoor gear store.

Mike Newton would have been prepared for a camping trip.

Mike Newton would have known what gear they might need.

Mike Newton would have brought a sleeping bag with the correct temperature rating for mountain camping where it might get cold.

I mean, Bella worked there so you'd think she'd have picked up a few things, too, but it was pretty clear she did not care about that job at all, so.

[shitpostingkats]

In retrospect Braig's whole everything in Birth By Sleep is hilarious. Local bodysnatching immortal with a secret agenda is working a minimum wage security gig at a home depot near YOU! Also he will help you fake your own kidnapping for only 300 munny.

[fatehbaz]

patience being tested. being forced by a bizarre unfortunate situation to adhere to university requirement technicality by taking this simple basic elementary "introduction to environmental history" class.

this class is from facilitators/program which do, like, "history of the American frontier" or "history of fishing and hunting" and still basically subscribe to that old-school twentieth-century idealization and celebration of characters like Teddy Roosevelt and reverence for a mythical arc-of-history-bent-towards-justice narrative of the often-clumsy but ultimately-benevolent US federal government and its mission to "save nature" through the miracle of "sustained yield," while heroic federal land management agencies and "heritage" institutions lead to way, staffed by exceptional individuals (appeals to nostalgia for the frontier and an imagined landscape of the American West; ego-stroking appeals to flattering self-image that center the environmentalist or academic). where they invoke, y'know, ideas like "ecology is important because don't you enjoy cross-country skiing in The Woods with your niece and nephew? don't you like hunting and fishing?" which makes it feel like a time capsule of appeals and discourses from the 1970s. and it invokes concept of "untouched wilderness" (while eliding scale of historical Indigenous environmental relationships and current ongoing colonial violence/extractivism). but just ever-so-slightly updated with a little bit of chic twenty-first-century flair like a superficial land acknowledgement or a reference to "labor histories" or "history from below," which is extra aggravating when the old ideologies/institutions are still in power but they're muddying the water and diluting the language/frameworks (it's been strange, watching words like "multispecies" and "Anthropocene" over the years slowly but surely show-up on the posters, fliers, course descriptions, by now even appearing adjacent to the agri-business and resource extraction feeder programs, like a recuperation or appropriation.) even from a humanities angle, it's still, they're talking at me like "You probably didn't know this, but environmental history is actually pretty entangled with political and social events. In fact, we can synthesize sources and glean environmental info from wacky places like workers' rolls in factories, ship's logs, and poetry from the era." and i'm nodding like YEP.

the first homework assignment is respond to this: "Define and describe 'the Anthropocene'. Do you think 'the Anthropocene' is a useful concept? Why or why not?" Respond in 300 words.

so for fun, right now in class, going to see how fast i can pull up discussion of Anthropocene-as-concept solely from my old posts on this microblogging site.

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ok, found some

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I think that the danger in any universal narrative or epoch or principle is exactly that it can itself become a colonizing force. [...] I’m suspicious of the Anthropocene as concept for the very reason that it subsumes so many peoples, nations, histories, geographies, political orders. For that reason, I think ideas like the Anthropocene can be a useful short-hand for a cluster of tangible things going on with the Earth at the moment, but we have to be very careful about how fluid and dynamic ideas become concretized into hegemonic principles in the hands of researchers, policymakers, and politicians. There’s so much diversity in histories and experiences and environmental realities even between relatively linked geographies here in Canada [...]. Imagine what happens when we try to do that on a global scale - and a lot of euro-western Anthropocene, climate change and resilience research risks doing that - eliding local specificities and appropriating knowledge to serve a broader euro-western narrative without attending to the inherent colonial and imperial realities of science and policy processes, or even attending to the ways that colonial capitalist expansion has created these environmental crises to begin with. While we, as a collective humanity, are struggling with the realities of the Anthropocene, it is dangerous to erase the specific histories, power-relations, political orders that created the crisis to begin with. So, I’m glad that a robust critique of the Anthropocene as a concept is emerging.

Text by: Words of Zoe Todd, as interviewed and transcribed by Caroline Picard. “The Future is Elastic (But it Depends): An Interview with Zoe Todd.” 23 August 2016.

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The Great Acceleration is the latest in a series of human-driven planetary changes that constitute what a rising chorus of scientists, social scientists, and humanists have labeled the Anthropocene - a new Age of Humans. [...] But what the Anthropocene label masks, and what the litany of graphs documenting the Great Acceleration hide, is a history of racial oppression and violence, along with wealth inequality, that has built and sustained engines of economic growth and consumption over the last four centuries. [...] The plantation, Sidney Mintz long ago observed, was a “synthesis of field and factory,” an agro-industrial system of enterprise [...]. Plantation legacies, along with accompanying strategies of survival and resistance, dwell in the racialized geographies of the United States’ and Brazil’s prison systems. They surface in the inequitable toxic burdens experienced by impoverished communities of color in places like Cancer Alley, an industrial corridor of petrochemical plants running along the Mississippi River from New Orleans to Baton Rouge, where cotton was once king. And they appear in patterns of foreign direct investment and debt servitude that structure many land deals in the Caribbean, Brazil, and sub-Saharan Africa [...]. [C]limatologists and global change scientists from the University of London, propose instead 1610 as a date for the golden spike of the Anthropocene. The date marked a detectable global dip in carbon dioxide concentrations, precipitated, they argue, by the death of nearly 50 million indigenous human inhabitants [...]. The degradation of soils in the tobacco and cotton-growing regions in the American South, or in the sugarcane growing fields of many Caribbean islands, for example, was a consequence of an economic and social system that inflicted violence upon the land and the people enslaved to work it. Such violent histories are not so readily evident in genealogies that date the Anthropocene’s emergence to the Neolithic Revolution 12,000 years ago, the onset of Europe’s industrial revolution circa 1800, or the Trinity nuclear test of 1945. Sugarcane plantations were already prevalent throughout the Mediterranean basin during the late middle ages. But it was during the early modern era, and specifically in the Caribbean, where the intersection of emerging proto-capitalist economic models based on migratory forced labor (first indentured servitude, and later slavery), intensive land usage, globalized commerce, and colonial regimes sustained on the basis of relentless racialized violence, gave rise to the transformative models of plantations that reshaped the lives and livelihoods of human and non-human beings on a planetary scale. [...] We might, following the lead of science studies scholar Donna Haraway and anthropologist Anna Tsing, more aptly designate this era the Plantationocene. [...] It is also an invitation to see, in the words of geographer Laura Pulido, “the Anthropocene as a racial process,” one that has and will continue to produce “racially uneven vulnerability and death." [...] And how have such material transformations sustained global flows of knowledge and capital that continue to reproduce the plantation in enduring ways?

Text by: Sophie Sapp Moore, Monique Allewaert, Pablo F. Gomez, and Gregg Mitman. "Plantation Legacies." Edge Effects. 22 January 2019. Updated 15 May 2021. [Bold emphasis added by me.]

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Geologists and other scientists will fight over [the definition of the beginning start-date of the Anthropocene] in scientific language, seeking traces of carbon dioxide that index the worst offenses of European empire which rent and violated the flesh, bodies, and governance structures of Indigenous and other sovereign peoples in the name of gold, lumber, trade, land, and power. [...] The stories we tell about the origins of the Anthropocene implicate how we understand the relations we have with our surrounds. In other words, the naming of the Anthropocene epoch and its start date have implications not just for how we understand the world, but this understanding will have material consequences, consequences that affect body and land.

Text by: Heather Davis and Zoe Todd. On the Importance of a Date, or Decolonizing the Anthropocene. ACME An International Journal for Critical Geographies. December 2017. [Bold emphasis added by me.]

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From Aime and Suzanne Cesaire, C. L. R. James, Claudia Jones, Eduoard Glissant, through Sylvia Wynter, Christina Sharpe, and so many others, critical anticolonial and race theory has been written from the specific histories that marked the Black Atlantic. [...] Glissant also reminds us, secondly, of how cunning the absorptive powers of [...] liberal capitalism are - how quickly specific relations are remade as relations-erasing universal abstractions. [...] This absorptive, relations-erasing universalism is especially apparent in some contemporary discourses of […] liberalism and climate collapse - what some call the Anthropocene - especially those that anchor the crisis in a general Human calamity which, as Sylvia Wynter has noted, is merely the name of an overdetermined and specific [White] European man. […] [T]he condition of creating this new common European world was the destruction of a multitude of existing black and brown worlds. The tsunami of colonialism was not seen as affecting humanity, but [...] these specific people. They were specific - what happened to them may have been necessary, regrettable, intentional, accidental - but it is always them. It is only when these ancestral histories became present for some, for those who had long benefitted from the dispossession [...], that suddenly the problem is all of us, as human catastrophe.

Text by: Elizabeth Povinelli. “The Ancestral Present of Oceanic Illusions: Connected and Differentiated in Late Toxic Liberalism.” e-flux Journal Issue #112. October 2020.

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The narrative arc [of White "liberal humanism"] [...] is often told as a kind of European coming-of-age story. […] The Anthropocene discourse follows the same coming-of-age [...] script, searching for a material origin story that would explain the newly identified trajectory of the Anthropos […]. Sylvia Wynter, W.E.B. DuBois, and Achille Mbembe all showed how that genealogy of [White subjecthood] was [...] articulated through sixteenth- through nineteenth-century [historiographies and discourses] in the context of colonialism, [...] as well as forming the material praxis of their rearrangement (through mining, ecological rearrangements and extractions, and forms of geologic displacements such as plantations, dams, fertilizers, crops, and introduction of “alien” animals). […] As Wynter (2000) commented, “The degradation of concrete humans, that was/is the price of empire, of the kind of [Eurocentric epistemology] that underlies it” (154).

Text by: Kathryn Yusoff. “The Inhumanities.” Annals of the American Association of Geographers, Volume 11, Issue 3. November 2020.

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As Yarimar Bonilla suggests in regard to post-Irma-and-Maria Puerto Rico, “vulnerability is not simply a product of natural conditions; it is a political state and a colonial condition.” Many in the Caribbean therefore speak about the coloniality of disaster, and the unnaturalness of these “natural” disasters [...]. Others describe this temporality by shifting [...] toward an idea of the Plantationocene [...]. As Moore and her colleagues write, “Plantation worlds, both past and present, offer a powerful reminder that environmental problems cannot be decoupled from histories of colonialism, capitalism, and racism that have made some human beings more vulnerable [...].” [W]e see that contemporary uneven socioecologies associated with the rise of the industrial world ["the Anthropocene"] are based [...] also on the racialized denial and foreshortening of life for the sacrificial majority of black, brown, and Indigenous people and their relegation to the “sacrifice zones” of extractive industry. [...] [A]ny appropriate response to the contemporary climate emergency must first appreciate its foundations in the past history of the violent, coercive, transatlantic system of plantation slavery; in the present global uneven development, antiblackness, and border regimes that shape human vulnerability [...] that continues to influence who has access to resources, safety, and preferable ecologies [...] and who will be relegated to the “plantation archipelagoes” (as Sylvia Wynter called them) [...].

Text by: Mimi Sheller. “Thinking Beyond Coloniality: Toward Radical Caribbean Futures.” Small Axe (2021), 25 (2 (65)), pages 169-170. Published 1 July 2021. [Bold emphasis added by me.]

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Indigenous genocide and removal from land and enslavement are prerequisites for power becoming operationalized in premodernity [...]; it was/is a means to operationalize extraction (therefore race should be considered as foundational rather than as periphery to the production of those structures and of global space). [...] Wynter suggests that we […] consider 1452 as the beginning of the New World, as African slaves are put to work on the first plantations on the Portuguese island of Madeira, initiating the “sugar-slave” complex - a massive replantation of ecologies and forced relocation of people […]. Wynter argues that the invention of the figure of Man in 1492 as the Portuguese [and Spanish] travel to the Americas instigates at the same time “a refiguring of humanness” in the idea of race. [...] The natal moment of the 1800 Industrial Revolution, […] [apparently] locates Anthropocene origination in […] the "new" metabolisms of technology and matter enabled by the combination of fossil fuels, new engines, and the world as market. […] The racialization of epistemologies of life and nonlife is important to note here […]. While [this industrialization in the nineteenth century] […] undoubtedly transformed the atmosphere with […] coal, the creation of another kind of weather had already established its salient forms in the mine and on the plantation. Paying attention to the prehistory of capital and its bodily labor, both within coal cultures and on plantations that literally put “sugar in the bowl” (as Nina Simone sings) […]. The new modes of material accumulation and production in the Industrial Revolution are relational to and dependent on their preproductive forms in slavery […]. In 1833, Parliament finally abolished slavery in the British Caribbean, and the taxpayer payout of £20 million in “compensation” [paid by the government to slave owners for their lost "property"] built the material, geophysical (railways, mines, factories), and imperial infrastructures of Britain and its colonial enterprises and empire. [...] A significant proportion of funds were invested in the railway system connecting London and Birmingham (home of cotton production and […] manufacturing for plantations), Cambridge and Oxford, and Wales and the Midlands (for coal). Insurance companies flourished [...]. The slave-sugar-coal nexus both substantially enriched Britain and made it possible for it to transition into a colonial industrialized power […]. The slave trade […] fashioned the economic conditions (and institutions, such as the insurance and finance industries) for industrialization.

Text by: Kathryn Yusoff. "White Utopia/Black Inferno: Life on a Geologic Spike". e-flux Journal Issue #97. February 2019. [Bold emphasis added by me.]

[why-the-heck-not]

fighting against the urge to take a nap is a full-time job

[r0semultiverse]

Y’all are aware we probably have to keep it in the top 10 overall into at least the 19th right? One business day after initial intended marketed advertised release supposedly. Then we should be good unless Mark says otherwise.

[vikdec4i]

AWAKE AT 5 AM AND THOUGHT HOLY SHIT THEY PARALLEL EACH OTHER 😭😭😭 every lacy/mitzi needs their rocky/wick

[mulders-too-large-shirt]

s4 episode 13 thoughts

before we begin: i’m gonna be upfront with you. this is another episode i did not like. this was scully’s 3, if you catch my meaning.

but i made a post announcing that i did not like this episode after a mere 10 minutes of viewing, and received some comments saying that others were big fans. as always, this is a place where i welcome discussion! PLEASE tell me what you think. you can try to talk me into liking it! tell me how you see it, and how it makes sense to you, and why you enjoyed it; maybe you’ll sway me. maybe not. maybe i’m cool and different for not liking things other people like, or maybe i’m basic because other people don’t like it as well. i have no frame of reference, which makes this blog so fun!

frankly, there are some things that i as a viewer just don’t want to see. i am not a fan of misogyny or watching THE hetbait of all time kiss other people.

here we are! so, i have been informed that in the timeline of canon, this episode i’m about to watch actually takes place BEFORE the last one. which i have noted. although it will be hard to distract myself from knowing what i do know now, i’ll do my best. 

(author's note: yeah i see why that clarification is important)

okay, the episode description. mulder? vacationing? i don’t believe it for a second. 

oh god, i don’t wanna see scully pine for some random guy. maybe there will just be an intellectual attraction here. i just don’t want to see it. i’m not sorry!!!!

okay. let’s go. still not believing in vacation mulder, but i’ll give it my best. 

some guy named jerse is getting divorced. wait. wait no. i recognize that name from a fanfic i read. NO.

i couldn’t remember what the hell this dude’s name was (jerve? juss?) because he only popped up BRIEFLY in a fanfic i read that had no seasoning relevant warnings. but because of this, i know what he is here to do. DAMN IT. let this be a lesson: read fic that is marked by the season!!!!

jerse is getting divorced. he is kinda handsome, i won’t lie. but he looks like a sick freak and he’s being weird to this bartender 

oh god, he has kids. scully STAY AWAY FROM THIS MAN- I’M NOT GONNA ASK AGAIN. pulling out a photo of him and the kids at the bar. a pathetic individual.

he burned himself out of the picture with a cigarette?? this is clearly well-adjusted behavior 

now he’s drunk outside a tattoo shop. in the rain. looking at a tattoo of a cartoon woman. and now he’s home? he has a tattoo he doesn’t seem to remember. ah. the cartoon woman. drink can do this to a man.

now he’s crawling on all fours? what do you want me to do about that. 

gooood, i know what’s coming because of that fanfic that accidentally spoiled me, and i’m gonna be so pissed. has my hater energy been distracting you lately? is this blog still enjoyable? be honest. but not too honest. i will cry.

mulder and scully are talking to someone about a UFO sighting, someone who is talking about explosions but no sound. she’s busy looking at the vietnam war memorial. NO there’s a little car that someone left for their dead brother :( she picks up a leaf and takes it with her…. i bet she is thinking about her own brothers and the sister she lost

back to jerse. he’s on the phone trying to sell stocks to a random woman who is fighting with her kids. 

oh. a disembodied voice calls him a loser. well, do it again for me. so he’s hearing things, including laughter.

OH no….. he’s blaming some random woman in the office for calling him a loser and confronting her. she was LITERALLY BUSY! leave her alone. he’s throwing stuff around. very professional (heavy on the /s). and he gets sent home which is good because i was scared, they were scared, we were all scared. 

scully is in mulder’s office, holding his name tag. awwww.

oh, my suspicions about mulder were correct- he did not want to go on vacation, but he was forced to! he is taking piles of x files with him. and he’s suspicious that they’re trying to get rid of him.

“gotta pay the rent” <- your dad had like 3 fucking houses i do not believe that for a SECOND you need this job to put food on the table mulder

“why don’t i have a desk?” she asks <- LMAOOO... i miss you s1 scully desk we saw that singular time that i always assumed still existed but i guess no longer does

(this seemed like a funny throwaway line to me at first, hence my lmao, but i later understood that this line was said with a Seriousness. however, i like to leave things as they were so you can really get a feel for my mind, all the wrong conclusions included)

AWWW he says we can get a desk and they can be really close and we can play battleship... LMAOOO i think….? i can’t tell if he’s being genuine and wants to help, or catty because he’s pissed he has to take a vacation 

OH! he’s pissed. what does he want her to keep an eye on? “that contact that we met last night at the wall, who had the distinction of being present for a first- that being you abandoning me during questioning” OHHHH he went there!!! damn! slim to no empathy when he is in alien mode.

“in the future, i’ll make sure that all those people being interviewed provide you with a multimedia laser show to keep your interest maintained” <- WHAT THE FUCK MULDER? DO I LAUGH OR WANT TO SLAP YOU? she looks so gagged. clearly something is on her MIND, you insensitive dolt.

so this guy they were talking to is named pudovkin, he’s from russia, and he has a doctorate in astronautical engineering, which is a term i have never heard before.

scully still seems distracted… but she asks if pudovkin’s reports on UFO crashes are for sale. which mulder confirms, but they are at a high price.

mulder tries to give her the assignment, and he made all these arrangements, but she says NO!!! LMAO (?) she says that russian guy they spoke with was recounting the plot of a cartoon. okay, queen is well-versed in her cartoons! i see you

oh my god, what is the tone of this episode…?

“so you’re refusing an assignment based on the adventures of moose and squirrel” “refusing an assignment? that makes it sound like you’re my superior”

oh, that pissed him off… “do what you want, don’t go to philadelphia, but let me remind you that i worked my ass off to get these files reopened. you were just assigned. this work is my life” <- HEY BUCKO. let us take a deep and calming breath. let us choose our words with kindness when talking to our friends.

“and it’s become mine” <- oh my GOD... that motif.... her getting pulled further and further into this...

so i can tell you right now, with confidence: i do not like this episode. why is he being mean? she is clearly thinking about something. i thought he was teasing at first, but clearly now he isn’t. if i were him i would say “hey, you seem distracted. is everything alright?” IS THAT HARD? IS THAT SO FUCKING HARD TO DO?

and it would still make for compelling TV!!! hey listen, i hear you saying "if they didn't have problems, there would be no plot" to which i say: there has been plenty of plot in the past when they have treated each other with kindness, no?

she says she is losing sense of her life- “this isn’t about you, mulder, or maybe it is in an indirect way”- and he says “maybe it’s good that we get away from each other for a while” <- WHAT IS GOING ON???

he seems so shocked to hear that the x files aren’t her whole life……… baby boy, let’s use context clues... yes, he is in ahab mode....

he says he’s going on a spiritual journey to discover something about himself…. and she sets the leaf she found from before on his desk. hmm. hmmmm.

back to jerse. he’s on the phone again. begging for his job back. doesn’t seem to be going well. oh my gosh, he just beat the phone. smashed it over and over again. i am frightened.

the evil tattoo is taunting him. so he is crawling on all fours to see if it’s coming from the floor below, which simply has a lady and some birds! those poor birds! 

(is this tattoo supposed to be a representation of mental illness? if so, which one? is it supposed to be insecurity? placed upon him by society? toxic masculinity?)

he’s talking to some missionaries who are trying to tell him that his downstairs neighbor is not involved in a plot to drive him insane…..

oh my god he broke into the bird lady’s apartment. OH MY GOD???????????

soundtrack this episode is killer though, i’ll give it that. put more music in my monster of the week content.

oh my god he’s like. dragging something. hard to tell because the screen is almost ENTIRELY BLACK. yes. he is putting a box in an incinerator. that presumably contains bird lady. real charming fellow, this jerse. 

(this is kinda like if little shop of horrors involved a tattoo instead of a plant. the tattoo says no one will hurt him again. sure, man. i’ve seen how that musical ends)

mulder is wet. on the road, outside his car. very wet. calling to see how scully is doing. he wants to know where she is!!!! but there is no answer.

scully is in philly, looking at the files about the russian space guy, watching him. she’s tailing him now into some convenience store. he is fighting loudly in russian and exchanging money……. hmm. that’s not promising. 

is he going into the tattoo shop? so goes the scully, in that case.

oh no. jerse is in there. he’s asking a separate russian guy who is the tattoo artist to cover up the cartoon tattoo…. 

oh god, he gets scully involved. “you like this, on his arm?” and now it’s winking. it has changed its design.

she says the coloring is nice (very thoughtful response to being sucked into a strange situation), and the russian tattoo guy is talking about how he learned how to tattoo in prison, while the creepy voice in jerse’s head is commenting on his new undying love for scully. but the actual russian space guy is in the back!!!

god, i don’t want to watch thiiiiiiis. but i must. i am a journalist, after all. she lies and says she’s visiting her aunt. and that she wishes she was impulsive sometimes. 

she says she’s leaving- but he gives her his number. god, is this gonna be a multi-episode thing???

OH MY GOD, MULDER IS CALLING FROM GRACELAND “i’m at that special place and i wanted to share it with you…. did you know elvis bought all of his furniture in just thirty minutes?”

wait. hold on. that’s cute. he wanted to share it with her. but also how DID he know where she was? it’s their usual spot… “i knew you wouldn’t abandon me” <- AWWW why were you mean earlier!!!!! you are being sweet now :(

(again, i ask: what IS the tone of this episode?)

she says there’s no case, no x file, the russian guy is involved in gangs and fraud and whatnot. she's handing it over to the philly bureau and that is that.

she is very pissed that he is ordering her around as always (well, i support that!) and he pulls his “what, do you have a date or something?” card. and then CONSPICUOUS SILENCE.

oh my god he’s STUTTERING “you’re-you’re kidding” (he sadly returns to graceland and makes some elvis moves) (we can hear the sound of his heart breaking)

jerse’s tattoo is still talking to him while scully looks at his business card. she says her flight is cancelled and that she can pick him up!!! oh my god. oh my gooood.

jerse is huffing his cigarette and also trying to burn out the tattoo with it. more concerning behavior. it's like when seymour throws the rat poison in audrey ii.

the jehovah’s witnesses are strategically knocking on the door of the now dead bird lady. and scully is here with jerse. she’s entering his apartment. 

you know what? this motherfucker looks like jeremy jordan. just an observation. sing, newsie boy.

she’s saying she doesn’t go out much…. but she noticed he’s bleeding. and also she says she’s a doctor. feels like that is relevant information to reveal before a date. don’t you want to know what a potential date does before you go out with them? well, i guess that is highlighting her desire to be impulsive.

oh god, she also finds the photo of him and the kids…. while he’s in the bathroom bandaging his wounds. 

she wants to go to the crummy bar??? okay. get out your inner rebellion i guess.

he says that this is a good place to go when you’re down, because everyone here looks like they have worse problems than him. fair enough. except for also NOT fair enough... because he killed a woman!

scully says she goes around in a circle when an authority figure comes into her life, and part of her wants it, needs the approval, but then… 

(it seems she is making a pointed reference to mulder here...? is that what he is to her? an authority figure?)

now she’s talking about her dad….  she would sneak out of the house and smoke the cigarettes. yes, i remember this from beyond the sea!!!! she did this because she knew that if he found out he would kill her.

he says the tattoo marked him never going back. SHE TRIES TO SEE IT AND HE GRABS HER???????

what the fuck what the FUCK. are we going to witness violence.

SO NOW SHE’S GONNA GET ONE TOO?? on her back???? the ouroboros she was looking at before! yes, the never ending cycle.

what the hell… i am deeply uncomfy. he’s watching her get a tattoo and it’s like erotic or something??? to him. and she’s breathing all weird. and then. there is a tattoo.

(this scene only reinforced my previous conclusions from earlier today looking up "am i asexual" quizzes)

god, is she gonna stay here with him? he says the weather is bad and he wants her to be safe and that he’ll sleep on the couch.

she says she feels different now after the tattoo. and he’s taking off the bandage. says it looks alright. but he’s bleeding again. and she’s taking off his shirt…..

the tattoo starts TALKING??? “you kiss her, and she’s dead” HEY WHAT

oh god……………………. the door shuts

pause. y’all. i don’t think i’m cut out for this.

okay, back to the FBI. mulder is here. trying to find scully. and he cannot reach her!!!

he sees the leaf she left on his desk…. and these two are waking up the next morning. his tattoo is still bleeding. dude, you should probably make some sort of appointment about that. 

scully’s in his giant shirt as she shows the detectives at the door (!!!) her badge. they want to talk about the disappearance of the bird lady. they are not taking her seriously, because she is in some random guy’s shirt in some random guy’s house. but she’s jotting some stuff down. 

things are clicking in her mind, about the disappearance. oh my god dial up noises! wow, that’s loud and annoying. shoutout to people who had to deal with that in the 90's.

she seems to be realizing that she has made a grave mistake. 

THE STUFF THE RUSSIAN GUY MADE THE TATTOO INK OUT OF WAS IN THE KILLER’S BLOOD????!!!

she grabs her tattoo because like. now it’s in HER blood too. oh my god the tattoo ink had DRUGS in it????

scully is trying to call mulder…. who runs to his phone. but she hangs up on him!!!! now why would you do all that? oh, because jerse approaches.

she tells him to sit down. very seriously. and she straight up says she thinks the blood the detectives found was his. well i guess honesty is sometimes a good policy.

so they might hallucinate stuff now from the ergot. and they might be dangerous. they need to get to the hospital now. 

he confesses to hearing things now…. “she talks to me. she hates women. my wife, my boss, you” ohhhh my god. i wonder how she is feeling....

she says they need to go to the hospital now. together. 

the tattoo's voice is talking to him about who she called…. and he presses the redial button…. and….

HOLY FUCK, HE’S ATTACKING HER. i mean, i knew it was going to happen eventually, but like. doesn't make it any more enjoyable to watch.

oh man, they are really going at it…. he knocks her out….. and he wraps her up to take her to the incinerator……………. ???????

but she stabs him with the scissors… and she’s trying to tell him to take control. so he BURNS HIS ARM OFF???!? to get the tattoo to shut up. 

BUT NOW THE MUSIC FLOURISHES OVER HER TATTOO???

girl if she has a demon in her now............. i need a cigarette

she’s coming back to the office with bruises on her face. “congratulations for making a personal appearance in the x files for a second time” says mulder. well, that’s gotta be a record. and that is exactly what he brings up next!

he’s trying to make a joke, but she’s grabbing the leaf on his desk………

he thinks this is his fault…… “not everything is about you, mulder. this is my life” “yes, but it….” (sighs)

end episode.

okay. so. what am i thinking. 

well. i am thinking many things. first of all- what is that tattoo supposed to represent? was it supposed to represent how misogyny poisons men’s minds? and turns them into people they aren’t deep down? is it about male insecurity, and how it turns into violence? and if we are taking that interpretation- doesn't that kinda just blame women for the scourge that is misogyny? like "look how you divorced that guy, guess you can't blame men for hating half of the population" because if that was what they were going for. i find issues with that.

second. i’m glad scully had her growth moment. if i were her, i would have told off mulder a long time ago for being too domineering. i don't think he intends to do it- i think he gets too caught up in his own quest for answers- but intention does not make his actions any less hurtful. and she clearly needed to have that rebellion moment. i’m glad she had it, even if it went terribly, at least she survived.

but the agents' dynamic felt… mean-spirited. i couldn’t tell what was joking and what was below the belt, and i’m not sure i’m supposed to be able to. he does take advantage of her, and i certainly don't oppose her pointing that out. i oppose him being mean to her- or at least, i find it hard to watch. i understand that the whole project does mean the world to him because maybe, just maybe, it will bring his sister back- but still. it is an infuriating characteristic of his, how little attention he pays to others.

and i don't necessarily think that aspect of him is written consistently, either. what about that time they were so incredibly close to answers and he let them go because he wanted scully to be able to see her sister again? what about every single time he's risked his neck for her?

i guess what i'm saying is, his fury at the start of the episode felt like it came out of nowhere, and was directed at her questioning his authority- and was over nothing beyond her tuning out one time. i find that idea of mulder as this authority figure that scully is chasing approval from in a manner akin to her own father (!!!) hard to reconcile with the mulder who held her in irresistible, who pummeled the doctor who maybe possibly might have hurt her in one breath, who runs every theory by her, and so on. you see what i'm saying? it felt as if this episode cast the whole series in the retrospective light of him only wanting her around so he can have a loyal henchman, and not that he valued her as an actual person- which we know he does. she zones out one day and he snaps on her? she goes on a rant about how she is always chasing authority's approval shortly after? i'm just not buying it. it felt like the rift era again. you could argue that it is scully's grief that is distorting her view of him, but even entertaining that possibility from a narrative perspective made me feel like i needed a bath. so... sleazy.

bullying aside- for an episode about breaking free from mulder’s influence, he seemed to really care for her and try and reach her, if we ignore the terrible things he said and just focus on his actions. on vacation and at work, he wanted to make sure she was okay. and it was sweet, but when cast in the light i mentioned earlier- in comparison to her father- it felt, like, paternalistic, which made my skin crawl. which is an understatement.

she needed to have that important character development, don’t get me wrong. it seems she’s worked so hard her whole life and has never made time to break some rules, except for when she was a kid. she needs to rebel at some point- but it was the framing of their dynamic that icked me out. and maybe i'm interpreting something in a different way than everyone else does. honestly, i hope i'm misunderstanding something. please feel free to correct me.

there was clearly something on her mind that distracted her from one interview, and the episode is trying to show us that her life isn’t just the x files like mulder's is. they’re different. maybe they spend too much time together. maybe they needed time apart, and maybe she needed to do the things she never let herself in the past. but… you can tell from reading this post that while i agree with some of the character choices- scully confronting him for being too controlling, letting herself let loose for once- i think they made sense in theory but less so in this particular execution. 

and yeah, there’s me the viewer who doesn’t want to see that shit happen, be it scully being attacked or sex outside the slowburn that gave us the term "ship". you can’t blame me there. i am a mere mortal. but also…… damn. something about the way jerse said he hated women and grabbed scully made me feel sick. 

i think that scully has a lot of grief and anger, and i think she reached a boiling point in this episode. and i think she won’t do the things she did ever again. but it still felt so out of character to see her do those things. and was she implying, with her whole speech about her father, that she seems mulder as this controlling force in her life? that their dynamic has been entirely unequal from the beginning? that he acts like a boss to her, and whatever the fuck it is they have going on (because it can’t be described in words, we both know that) has been an imbalance of power this whole time? that makes things feel…….. less warm and fuzzy, in retrospect, don’t you think? the idea that mulder only keeps her around as a foot soldier and doesn't really give a damn about her?

(again. it could be her grief talking. grief is not rational. but i had never seen it like that before, and it casts everything in a different light)

i think this episode had clear commentary on misogyny. the way that jerse’s thoughts were poisoned to hate women, how we explore mulder inadvertently taking the upper hand throughout their relationship, the way the detectives wouldn’t believe scully at her word when questioning her about the blood. i think it explored scully's frustration in being in a male-dominated field, and feeling like she always has to be perfect. but other than that, i'm not sure what i'm supposed to take away from the whole thing, unless i am to think that whatever relationship it is they do have is nothing more than one of uneven control. because that's the vibe i was getting from this one.

it felt out of character, and not just in the purposeful subversion of how we normally see scully- their whole fight felt off. and the tone was all over the place. first we're joking, then we're arguing nasty style, then we're joking, then sexy, then fight time violence against women, then joke? unresolved ending feeling i cannot explain? what do i make of this?!

idk. i don't feel like i'm wording my points well, but i'm not sure i want to really keep trying either. and i feel that if i did my usual thing, which is watch an episode, take notes, think it over for a day, and THEN edit the notes, i might be able to have a more coherent thought process- but given potential controversy, i want to get this out tonight.

i want to really hear your thoughts- if you ride or die for this episode, walk me through it! did you also not like it? is it mid to you? i'm listening. i want to know. i have no ill-intent, and i feel bad that i've been a bit harsh lately. let us discuss. it is all peace and love over here.

[nemmet]

a while ago at work i made a tiny fnaf movie zine using only what we had at the till (receipt paper, a stapler, various pens and highlighters). i consider it my magnum opus

[thinkingofausername]

mouthwashing has truly showed me that we haven't evolved from the fucking witch trials. people can only ever point fingers, judge, hate, condemn, root for damnation. how the fuck do you look at a game about capitalism, psychological instability, complex characters, endless nuance and get out of the experience with the braindead take "curly horrible. anya, daisuke and swansea wonderful. jimmy bad." too many people haven't moved on from the reasoning of five year olds and disney - hero good and villain bad. people aren't fucking cartoon characters. we're not only good or bad. media literacy is truly dead and gone.

[purpleskelet0n]

"Ah...It sure is good to be back!"

"Turns out that whole oc thing didn't quite work out...what a shame! Wesley has been crying about it but I'm being a grown up and moving on. And what a blog to come back to! that fat orange bastard and some new content! But someone isn't working on their supposed 'passion project' , so like the good friend I am, I decided to take over while that purple loser works on their dumb comic! The worm is here and the line is open. The clock is ticking, mortals! better make it count!"

(ASK EVENT!)

[megaawkwardhuman]

HOLD THE FUCK UP

I know we're well past the "that's his boss bs"

HOWEVER I WOULD LIKE TO NOTE THAT WITHIN THE SHOW ITSELF BASICALLY SAID THAT DOESN'T MATTER BACK IN SEASON 3

like in this scene the whole joke isn't oh it's weird that nandor likes guillermo cuz he works for him

nah nah nah

that part gets brushed aside very quick cuz of the actual joke being nandor being confused that the apparently was talking about guillermo

SO YEAH EVEN THO AGAIN WE'RE PAST IT THE BOSS SHIT REALLY DOESN'T FUCKING MATTER

thank you and good whatever time it is for you

[baconcolacan]

I honestly sweat a little when people come over from my not shippy Eddsworld art, just to see I’m a basic bitch guy who likes when the blue one kisses the red one, and also likes TO kiss the eyebrows guy

[spacemothes]

I'm so funny guys, trust.