#i love my disabled friends we r the funniest people on earth

[iinryer]

i keep thinking about chris’s “i tried complaining once, it didn’t work” line and also how he’s super witty and funny and perceptive and also A Teenager and how that all would influence the way he navigates a world that isn’t always accessible to him…

just imagining post-ladder-truck-crush-injury buck and chris both using crutches while buck is still getting used to things suddenly being inaccessible to him and getting like, little zingers of insights and life lessons from his best friend’s kid while out and about. chris showing him how he gets up and down the tall curbs when a sidewalk is blocked off unexpectedly, and very loudly and often proclaiming his distain for the “fuck-you” steps (the 1-2 tiny steps at the front doors of houses and buildings that immediately make that entrance no longer accessible)

like buck researches a couple of easy activities for them to try while he’s is still healing and tired and is looking into the establishment’s accessibility accommodations, and hey! the place says on the website that they’re wheelchair friendly! that usually covers his and chris’s bases, so they should be good to go. but when they get there it turns out that, while there IS an accessible entrance with a “ramp”, it’s actually the cargo loading zone that’s literally on the other side of the building which would require them to walk a couple of extra blocks up and back down the street on the other side. obviously they can still get in, but buck feels awful because that’s not what he wanted out of his preparedness. chris just tells him “it’s okay, it happens a lot actually”, and buck is even MORE sad about it, but chris just conspiratorially adds “this is my favorite kind” and starts making his way towards the set of like, idk eight stairs at the front of this building. buck is obviously confused and looks at eddie who just shakes his head fondly, sighs and says “yeah, he does this sometimes” before encouraging buck to follow. when buck finally reaches chris, he’s balancing his crutches on the first stair and turns to buck to whisper “now we get to make them feel bad about it” and proceeds to very feebly, very slowly—and buck has seen chris rough and tumble and rocket his way through things that could (and do) trip him up, this is the most dramatic act of put-upon helplessness buck has EVER seen from this kid—make his way up the stairs. he even sticks his bottom lip out into a little pout for good measure. one of the staff sees them through the glass doors and comes out to tell them about the “ramp” in the back of the building, and before buck can even think of what to say in response, chris is just telling them, very sadly, that he “wouldn’t be able to walk that far without getting too tired 😔😔😔” and continues his hammed-up, sad, slow trek up the stairs while a very harried staff member kind of hovers, not knowing what to do.

buck has to bite his cheek to keep himself from laughing at chris’ act, and then again at the face the staff member makes when they catch sight of buck too, as he begins very dutifully following chris’s lead, eddie in their wake.

[davidmann95]

How about those JL storyboards?

In case you haven’t heard, Zack Snyder is putting on display the ‘storyboards’ - i.e. a rough plot summary accompanied by some Jim Lee sketches - for what would have been Justice League 2 and 3, or as this puts it 2 and ‘2A’. You can see them here (I imagine better-quality versions will soon be released), and read a transcript here. This is evidently a very early version: this was apparently pitched prior to the release of BvS and Justice League being rewritten in the wake of it, with numerous plot details that now don’t line up with what we know about the Snyder Cut, plus it outright mentions it builds on the originally planned versions of the Batman and Flash movies. But it’s a broad outline of what was gonna go down, and while I initially thought it was Snyder throwing in the towel, the timing - paired with the ambiguity left by the necessity for changes, including that this doesn’t factor whatever that “massive cliffhanger” at the end of the Cut is - says to me he’s hoping this’ll be a force multiplier behind efforts to will sequel/s into existence. He’s probably right.

I’ll be discussing spoilers below, but in short: with this Zack Snyder has finally lived up to Alan Moore, in that like Twilight of the Superheroes I wouldn’t believe this was real as opposed to a shockingly on-point parody if not for direct, irrefutable evidence.

Doing some rapid-fire bullet points for this baby to kick us off:

* Folks who know the subject say a lot of this is a yet further continuation of Snyder doing Arthuriana fanfic with the League reskinned over those major players, and I’ll take their word for it.

* I don’t know whether I love or hate that in Justice League 2 the Justice League are only an extant thing for the first scene, and then it’s Snyder giving everybody their own mini-movies. It’s compressing the entire MCU “loosely interconnected solo stories leading to a single big movie later” strategy into a single movie!

*  Funniest line in the whole thing: "Even Lantern has heard of the Kryptonian, worried that he's under the control of Darkseid. He heard his spirit was unbreakable." Hal what fuckin' Superman movie did YOU watch? Second funniest being “IT WILL GIVE HIM POWER OVER ALL LIVING LIFE”

* 90% of the plot I have nothing to say about, it’s generic stage-setting crap. That to be clear is the ‘shocked it’s Snyder’ element, it feels so crassly commercial in a way I can’t believe is coming from the BvS guy.

* Most of what I have to say is unsurprisingly gonna be about a handful of characters but Cyborg’s happy ending being “he isn’t visibly disabled anymore!” is not great!

* The Goddess of War battle with Superman...never pays off? No clue why it’s there.

* What I’d originally heard was that the Codex in Superman’s blood was the last key to the Anti-Life Equation and that’s why Darkseid was coming to Earth. It’s not like all of this wouldn’t have already been averted by Kal-El’s pod smacking into an asteroid on the way to Earth so it’s not as if this makes it any more Superman’s fault, and it would have at least tied all this back to the beginning of the movies, but I suppose that was either fake or from a later draft.

* I have NO idea how this was reimagined without the ‘love triangle’, it’s the central character thing and the entire climax flows directly out of it!

* Darkseid’s kinda a chump in this, huh

Anonymous said: So: Does Zack Snyder hate Superman?

Look: the hilarity of this when Cuck Kent has been a go-to Snyder cult insult towards ‘inferior’ takes on Superman for years cannot be understated, yet at the same time I can almost wrap my brain around where Snyder’s coming from with that as the end for his take on the character. He talked in that Variety piece on how his interest in Superman is informed by having adopted children himself, and Deborah Snyder is the stepmother to his kids by previous relationships, so I can see where he’d be coming from, and I can even imagine how he’d see this as ‘rhyming’ in the sense of “the series begins with Kal-El being adopted by Earth, it ends with him adopting a child of Earth!” In the same way as MARTHA, I can envision how he would put these pieces together in his head thematically without registering or caring what the end result would actually look like. In this case, Superman raising the kid of the man who beat the shit out of him who Batman had with Clark’s wife, who earlier told Bruce she was staying with Clark because he ‘needed her’, suggesting if inadvertently that this really honest to god was a “she’s only staying with Superman out of pity, she really loved Batman more” thing.

But Clark is nothing in this. He’s sad and existential because of coming back from the dead I guess, then he’s corrupted, then time’s undone and he woo-rah rallies the collective armies of the world (interesting angle for the ‘anti-military/anti-establishment’ Superman he’s talked up as) as his big heroic moment in the finale, and then he stops being sad because he’s adopting a kid. So his big much-ballyhooed, extremely necessary five-movie character arc towards truly becoming Superman was:

Sad weird kid -> sad weird kid learns he’s an alien, is still weird and sad, maybe he shouldn’t save people because things could go really wrong? -> his dad is so convinced it could go wrong he lets himself die -> ????? -> Clark is saving people anyway -> learns his origin, gets an inspiring speech about being a bridge between worlds and a costume -> becomes superman (not Superman, that’s later) to save the world, albeit a very property-damagey version, rejects his heritage he just learned about and space dad’s bridge idea -> folks hate him being superman and that sucks though at least he’s got a girlfriend now -> things go so wrong he considers not being superman but his ghost dad reminds him shit always goes wrong so he should be good anyway, which sorta feels like it contradicts his previous advice -> immediate renewed goodness is out the window as he’s blackmailed into having to try and kill a dude but the dude happens to coincidentally have some things in common so they don’t kill each other after all -> big monster now but superman keeps supermaning at it because he loves his girlfriend and he dies -> he’s brought back, wears black which apparently means now he likes Krypton again? -> he has work friends now but he’s still sad because he was dead -> evil now! -> wait nevermind time travel -> rallies the troops -> his wife’s having a kid so he’s not sad anymore -> Superman! Who gives way to more Batman.

Do I think Zack Snyder is lying when he says he likes Superman? No. I think he sincerely finds much of the basic conceits and imagery engaging. But I don’t think he meaningfully gives shit about Clark as a character, just a vessel for Big Iconic Beats he wants to hit. Whereas while for instance he’s critical of Batman as an idea (at least up to a point), he’s much more passionately, directly enamored with him as a presence and personality. So while Superman may be the character whose ostensible myth cycle or arc or however it’s spun might be propelling a lot of events here, it’s a distant appreciation - of course the other guy takes over and subsumes him into his own narrative. Of course Batman is the savior, the past and the future (though if he’s supposed to be Batman’s kid raised by Superman there’s no excuse for him not to be Nightwing), the tragic martyr to our potential. Admittedly the implication here is also that Batman can apparently only REALLY with his whole heart be willing to sacrifice his life to save an innocent, for that matter apparently his great love, once said innocent is a receptacle for his Bat-brood, but he and Clark are both already irredeemable pieces of shit by the end of BvS so it’s not like this even registers by comparison.

Anonymous said: That “plan” Snyder had was utter dogshit. Picture proof that DC & WB hate Superman. Also I love how you’re like Jor-El: Every single idealistic take you had about Snyder, his fandom, and BvS was wrong. Snyder’s an edgy hack, his fanbase just wants to jerk off to their edgy self-insert Batgod as he screams FUCK while mowing people down with machine guns, and the idea that BvS said Superman was better than Bats was completely wrong. You know what comes next SuperMann: Either you die or I do.

In the final analysis, beyond that mother of god is there sure no conceivable excuse for the treatment of Lois in this? The temptation is to join that anon and say as I originally tweeted that these were “built entirely to disabuse every single redemptive reading of the previous work and any notion of these movies as nuanced, artistic, self-reflective, or meaningful”.

...

...

...yeah, okay, that’s mostly right. Zack Snyder’s vision really was the vision of an edgelord idiot with bad ideas who was never going to build up to anything that would reframe it all as a sensible whole. He’s a sincere edgelord genuinely trying really hard with his bad ideas who put some of them together quite cleverly! But they’re fucking bad and the endgame was never anything more than ramping up into smashing the action figures together as big as he could, the political overtones and moral sketchiness of BvS while trying to say something in that movie reverberated through the grand scheme of his pentalogy in no way beyond giving his boys a big sad pit to rise out of so when they kicked ass later it’d rule harder, and all the gods among men questions and horror and trappings were only that: trappings. Apparently he’s really pleasant and well-meaning in person, but at his core his art as embodied in a couple weeks in his 4-hour R-rated Justice League movie meant to be seen in black-and-white all comes down to that time he yelled at someone on Twitter that he couldn’t appreciate Snyder’s work because it’s for grown-ups. He made half-clever, occasionally exciting shit cape movies for a bunch of corny pseudo-intellectual douchebags, folks latching onto and justifying blockbusters that at least acknowledge how horrifying the world is right now even if the superheroes are basically useless in the face of it if not outright part of the problem until a convenient alien invasion shows up to justify them, and a handful of non-asshole smart people who vibe with it but...well. ‘Suckered’ is a harsh word, and definitely doesn’t apply to all of them re: what they’ve gotten out of it up to this point and would (somehow) get out of this. But it doesn’t apply to none of them, either.

[fashioneditswebsite]

AT NEW YORK FASHION WEEK THE EVOLVING STANDARD OF BEAUTY

NEW YORK FASHION WEEK THE EVOLVING STANDARD OF BEAUTY Who can better broach the subject of `The Evolving Standard of Beauty' than the iconic Black Beauty Queens who are making history as the women who reign supreme, celebrating this crowning achievement for beauty and culture? Never before have all the major Beauty titles are held by Black women. So the Queens gathered for a chat at the start of New York Fashion Week - ZOZIBINI TUNZI "Miss Universe" CHELSIE KRYST "Miss USA" KALIEGH GARRIS "Miss Teen USA" and the outgoing NIA FRANKLIN "Miss America" (Miss World, the newly crowned TONI ANN SINGH of Jamaica was not present).

BOZOMA ST JOHN

The Queens got real during "The Talks" part of a conversation series in the cozy Sunken Living Room, tucked away on the sixth floor of Spring Studios in Tribeca, New York. This specific `Conversation' was presented by The Miss Universe Organization and moderated by BOZOMA ST JOHN, Chief Marketing Officer of Endeavor, the umbrella company that owns IMG (among others) who runs New York Fashion Week. PAULA SHUGART, President of the Miss Universe Organization, in welcoming attendees said it was a very special moment for the organization in terms of inclusivity and diversity in selecting the best contestant to wear the crown. She introduced moderator Bozoma St John, emphasizing that the Miss Universe Organization had been trying to get Bozoma to be a judge at Miss Universe for years, "We were so happy to finally get her as a judge at the recent pageant." Bozoma, before beginning the conversation remarked; "I am extremely happy about this moment in history."

"MISS AMERICA" - NIA FRANKLIN

Here are some of the highlights of the conversation. Nia Franklin started off by saying that she just passed her "Miss America" crown to her successor. A holder of two Music degrees - one in music composition, Nia has written over 100 songs, wrote her first song when she was 5 years old. "I never thought I could be "Miss America" I never dreamt of that, now little boys and girls can be inspired." She revealed that her first single will be released next month "It's titled `Earth Sun.' I am super passionate about singing, music education. and women in music. I am a trained opera singer, but I also sing R&B. I will be working with more women behind the scenes in music, as composers." Nia also revealed that she knew Cheslie Kryst way before Cheslie started competing in pageants. "As a matter of fact, the first pageant I entered, I was wearing one of Cheslie's gowns I'd burrowed." Another fact revealed was that after Nia won the "Miss America" title, she reached out to Chelsie, an attorney, to go over the contract she had with the "Miss America Organization".  "MISS USA" CHELSIE KRYST  Chelsie did negotiate her friend's Nia contract, and according to Moderator Bozoma St John "She's a tough negotiator, Nia had a fabulous contract because of Cheslie." Bozoma asked the panel what inspired all of them to go into pageantry. Chelsie said she remembers as a kid, that her Mother was crowned "Mrs. North Carolina USA" in her home state. "I remember seeing my Mom coming down the street leading a parade in a white horse-drawn carriage - no joke, and she was waving in all this grandeur. I wanted to be that. She embodied it for me. The idea of wanting to be my Mom did it for me....people listened when she opened her mouth, and I wanted that." For the future, Chelsie, who is the newest correspondent on Extra TV, said she'll continue doing that. "I'll expand on that and maybe I'll be the next Oprah, and that would be very dope." On Bozoma's question: `When was the first moment you realized that you were beautiful?' Chelsie answered: "It started with my father, he always told me I was. Also in class when I was in Law school, the Professor stopped the class and said I looked like Chaka Khan...or Dianna Ross, I don't remember which one, but it was said as a compliment." Chelsie also revealed that her career as an attorney brought several challenges that she had to overcome at an early stage, which gave her a certain amount of confidence that she carries to this day. "Being in court, I was usually the only woman, the only Black person and the youngest one in the room, they never recognized me as the attorney." ZOZOBINI TUNZI "MISS UNIVERSE" Zozibini Tunzi, just less than two months after her crowning in Atlanta, Georgia, seemed to be still glowing in her victory. She spoke on her journey that began in 2017 when she entered the "Miss South Africa" pageant and did not even make the semi-finals. She came back in 2019 stronger than ever and not only made the finals but won the crown and title. That gave her the right to represent her home nation at the "Miss Universe" pageant which she won. She became the first Black South African to win "Miss Universe" and the first Black woman with a short, natural Afro hairstyle to win "Miss Universe." That brought up the controversial subject of Black women's hair. Just looking at all of the Queens, yes, obviously all Black - all-natural hair is various styles - but all so beautifully different. "My journey started with the "Miss South Africa" pageant and when I told people I was entering, the first thing they asked was about my hair. It became such a continuous conversation...I made a conscious decision to go with my natural hair. I felt it was important to say it. It's the beauty of being a woman. We're all brilliant, we can do our hair in different ways, our beauty goes way beyond that (hair)."  BEAUTY On the question of first realizing her beauty, Zozi (as she is familiarly called) said: "I saw myself through my Mom, my sisters, and Grandma. When I grew up, my system had been the women in my family. I saw and read about some extraordinarily powerful women who fought for our freedom - I see the beauty in them. Beauty is an aura, it's what you present to the world. I see myself in them because I came from them." She talked about being born in an apartheid South Africa and the social programming that came with it. "We become so scared of our power. When you walk in a room, you should not be scared of your power, claim it, use your voice - Be heard! Be seen and NOT heard is the dumbest thing I've ever heard. I believe in Diversity in action, not just in looks." Asked about what's in the future for Miss Universe? Zozi beamed; "Whatever my future is, it will be bright. I truly believe whatever I touch it will be great. I'm waiting to see what will happen." How is Zozi handling everything that has been bestowed upon her as the Queen of the Universe? "I looked at it as a Leadership position, not just a Beauty pageant winner, because I had a lot to say, and a lot of people were listening and following."  KALIEGH GARRIS "MISS TEEN U.S.A." The youngest of the group, Kaleigh Garris said she's still figuring out what her future will be. "I am in college. I'm studying communications, want to get into media with a concentration on film, television and media production. I also want to grow my Social Movement into a 501 K Foundation. Kaleigh talked about having a sister with special needs and started a Social Movement inspired by her titled `We are People First.' "I want to highlight and showcase who they are, and not what they look like or the fact that they are disabled. My sister is one of the funniest persons you'd ever met. She's the most loving and caring person I know." Kaleigh said she still looks in the mirror and says "Wow!" realizing that she's "Miss Teen USA" and uses positive affirmations on herself as a form of staying grounded - "...Even now, sitting here with my pageant sisters is a Wow moment. I am still thrilled at the whole thing, like, this is real, I saw this on TV. I'm thrilled, happy and proud to be a part of history." At the end of the conversation, designer Kaleila Wright presented all of the Queens, including Bozama and Paula Shugart with specially designed jackets, featuring the slogan "Queen - Don't be afraid to Rule as a King." Got it, thanks!Thank you!Love it! Read the full article