#i read a guys article

[justnoodlefishthings]

The way people demonize seagulls is actually unreal. Almost all of their natural habitat has been destroyed (almost all coastal areas have been developed, destroying natural sand dune ecosystems) and they're doing their best to adapt. They're literally just trying to survive. You're in their home. The vitriol some people have for these gorgeous sea birds just because they're not shy about snatching food if you're not cautious is insane

[inkskinned]

you know, you know. no gods, no masters, no kings on pedestals. everyone is fallible. death of the author. you know! you are balanced about your intake of media - you allow the wiggle room, the grace, the gratitude, the skepticism. nobody above criticism.

but still. a weird gut-punch feeling, something akin to betrayal. you read the article. surprise! an author you love is actually: a serial fucking predator.

well, shit. what now. no, you knew he was a person (all people are), but now you're wondering - what have i overlooked by accident? what messages have i internalized that are strange and cruel? and also, like, what the fuck?

his actions lay a thick glaze on top of everything. like each place is now ruined, opaque in a new way. but okay, fine, you've done this before. you knew better, right? you've been betrayed by many a cherished childhood author.

still, this stickiness. fuck. can you pick up that book again. will you read it to your children. you've recommended it to others - will you ever do that again? and of course, of course, no parasocial relationships. you were theoretically above this kind of sentiment. but the artist informs the art, right.

so it's not something as clear-cut as feeling he owed you, specifically (a stranger) better behavior - just that you kind of, in a distant and odd way... sort of trusted him to do better. it's not like a real trust or something speakable, just the faint hope that the product (good books) was a thin representation of the soul. now it feels like the product (good? books?) was a mask. in some small or insignificant way, your previous support of this person lent them power. your money and your time and your laughter.

and the thing is - you have this terrible, echoing sensation. how many times will this happen? over and over. you find out that the singer you love is actually a predator. you learn over drinks that your favorite high school english teacher is in jail for what he did to her. you listen to the news idly and suddenly discover that a woman you used to idolize has been abusing her kids for an actual eon.

what can you touch without the static melting off. you can't even really complain about it too much (you were supposed to know better, and besides, you don't want the same re-split "it's not your fault, love what you love" basic advice), but now it's here. somehow, it feels like - you let him into your life.

it's not that things need to be pure or an artist has to be like, endlessly perfect, mindful. demure. it's more just this terrible truth that has been replayed through your veins so often it feels criminally vain. power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely. did you want any one person to be worth that power?

it's just that he wrote books where he seemed to understand that. he seemed to know about hierarchies and unfair systems and bigotry and privilege. you thought they were books about what it means to struggle. you thought they were about having power and still using it for good rather than for control. he spooned you a narrative of being a good guy, a kind soul. you fucking bought what that fucking monster sold.

maybe that's why they were fantasies, after all.

[akajustmerry]

READ THE FULL ARTICLE HERE

‘Killers Of The Flower Moon’ Can’t Escape Its Own White Gaze by Merryana Salem / Killers Of The Flower Moon (2023). Dir. Martin Scorsese

[lunapegasus]

[foolsocracy]

What could he have meant by this

[ohgollythatsuh]

My fellow fandom frequenters!!!!!!

This feels kind of weird to do because I literally use this blog to talk about gay people and reblog pretty fan art but ya gotta do what ya gotta do:

I am a student journalist and I'm writing an article for class about the way that fandom spaces have changed over the years (especially over the pandemic) and the effects of the popularization of fandoms. I'm looking for people who are willing to talk about their experiences in fandoms, the communities and relationships that they've built, how they feel about the shift in fandom culture (or if they've even noticed a shift), etc!

Some things to note: this is not going anywhere besides to my professor (unless all participants actively want me to share it on Tumblr or something, in case anyone is interested in reading it -- it's really up to everyone's comfortability levels). The mode of interview is, once again, up to comfortability: we can do zoom calls, conversations over DMs, in-person meetups (this is obviously going to depend on where we live) -- once again, this is up to your comfortability!!!

My DMS are open and I would reallllyyy really appreciate any and all participants! Your voices are CENTRAL to this story because fandom is based solely off of the real conversations between community members!!! I'm really passionate about fandoms because it's been like. My whole life since childhood. So I'm really dedicated to making a beautifully authentic story out of this!!

Feel free to DM with any questions :) Or if you know someone who'd be interested, or have some suggestions on things you'd like me to write about or have any leads that I could research, look at, etc. -- just dm or even comment or reblog this and put it in the tags!!!

Reblogs are appreciated! I'll be tagging some popular fandoms in order to get some more traction

Edit: so many people dm’d thank you guys for helping a poor undergrad get a good mark on their paper :’) sorry if it takes a second for me to respond to your dm I’ll get to you I promise!! My dms are still open so if someone is reading this, you can still participate!

[pianokantzart]

Hey this is kinda silly but can you convince me to get Brothership?

The art style and animation is so beautiful and bouncy! (I'm a particularly big fan of the Luigi Logic moments in the boss fights.)

You can make a few decisions that will effect what happens in the plot going forward, which is WILD for a Mario game and definitely enhances the replayability aspect.

Speaking of replayability, there are a lot of side quests and new routes that open up as you discover and explore islands. There are so many different little corners to investigate outside of the main game that Brothership is no doubt going to take me a good deal longer than the alleged 30 hour runtime. I want to see everything.

The gameplay runs smoothly and is a ton of fun, and when things begins to get repetitive it throws in some new tool or ability to switch things up and keep things interesting. Fights are pretty easy at the beginning, but as you go along the game slowly ramps up the difficulty in ways that feel both challenging and fair.

It's a Mario and Luigi game, so of course almost all the characters are brimming with charm. Mario and Luigi's characterization in particular is A+. They are so sweet and wholesome.

I'm only partway into the plot and it slaps. I hear word it's got one of the most intense stories out of any Mario game, so I am super excited to see how things play out.

I say, if you're considering getting this game, go get it! Ever since I got my copy I've been waking up in the morning with my first instinct being to get on my switch to see what happens and what else I can discover.

[sickfreaksirkay]

Sir Kay, Seneschal of King Arthur's Court, Harold J. Herman / Illustration from the Mabinogion / The Quest for Olwen, trans. Gwyn Thomas and Kevin Crossley-Holland / The Story of Merlin, trans. Rupert T. Pickens / Illustration from The Quest for Olwen, Margaret Jones / Wace's Roman de Brut, trans. Eugene Mason / The Mabinogion, trans. Lady Charlotte Guest

a collection of sir kay and sir bedivere: companions/lovers/worse, for @queer-ragnelle's may day parade

[the-love-witch-roleplays]

[steveyockey]

While some of both Davis and Crawford’s work could arguably be described as camp (for the former, King Vidor’s Beyond the Forest; for the latter, later-era films such as Strait-Jacket and aspects of the wondrous Nicholas Ray film Johnny Guitar), that their entire careers and places within film history are defined as such does a disservice to their artistry. But they aren’t alone in representing what has become a troubling trend when it comes to women’s work. As camp entered the mainstream lexicon, especially after Susan Sontag’s landmark 1964 essay, “Notes on ‘Camp,’” the term has been increasingly tied to work featuring women who disregard societal norms. Camp is often improperly and broadly applied to pop culture that features highly emotional, bold, complex, cold, and so-called “unlikable” female characters. I’ve seen films and TV shows such as the witty masterwork All About Eve; the beguiling Mulholland Drive; the stylized yet heartwarming Jane the Virgin; Todd Haynes’s Patricia Highsmith adaptation Carol; the blistering biopic Jackie; the deliciously malevolent horror film Black Swan; Joss Whedon’s exploration of girlhood and horror, Buffy the Vampire Slayer; the landmark documentary Grey Gardens (which inspired the 2009 HBO film starring Jessica Lange and Drew Barrymore); and even icons such as Beyoncé and Rihanna be described as camp. Look at any list of the best camp films and you’ll see an overwhelming number of works that feature women and don’t actually fit the label. Usually, What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?, the film whose behind-the-scenes story provides Murphy’s launching pad for Feud, will be at the top of the list.

While camp need not be a pejorative, that hasn’t stopped it from being widely used as such. In effect, being labeled as camp can turn the boldest works about the interior lives of complex women into a curiosity, a joke, a punch line. The ease with which camp is applied to female-led films and shows of this ilk demonstrates that for all the (still-paltry) gains Hollywood has made for women in the decades since Davis and Crawford worked, our culture is still uncomfortable respecting women’s stories.

That major Hollywood icons such as Marlene Dietrich, Bette Davis, Joan Crawford (and, more recently, Natalie Portman, thanks to Jackie) have been roped into this lineage isn’t surprising. Society doesn’t know what to do with women of this ilk without discrediting their very womanhood. Take artist and filmmaker Bruce LaBruce’s offensive description of Mae West in an essay on camp: “[She] played with androgyny to the degree that her final performance — her autopsy — was necessary to prove her biological femaleness.” In his 2013 essay “Why Is Camp So Obsessed with Women?”, J. Bryan Lowder expands on Sontag’s most well-known line: “It’s not a lamp, but a ‘lamp’; not a woman, but a ‘woman.’ To perceive Camp in objects and persons is to understand Being-as-Playing-a-Role.” Lowder writes, “‘Woman,’ the concept within the quotation marks, is not the same thing, at all, as a real woman; the former is a mythology, a style, a set of conventions, taboos, and references, while the latter is a shifting, changeable, and ultimately indefinable living being. Of course, there may be some overlap.” But if all gender is a performance, where does the “real” woman begin? And why does the presence of camp hold more importance than the actual work and voices of actresses such as Crawford, who have come to be defined by it?

At times, camp can feel like a suffocating label. Its proponents often misconstrue the fact that recreating oneself as a character is not merely an aesthetic for women, but rather, for many, a matter of survival. Living in a culture that profoundly scorns ambition, autonomy, and independence in women, girls learn quickly the narrow parameters of femininity available to them. When they transcend these parameters, life can get even more difficult. Women often pick up and drop various forms of presentation in order to move through the world more easily. Performance as a woman — in terms of how one speaks, walks, talks, acts — can be a means of controlling one’s own narrative. Camp often limits this part of the discussion, focusing instead on the sheer thrill of watching larger-than-life female characters cut and snark their way across the screen. How these works speak to women, past and present, becomes a tertiary concern at best, and the work loses a bit of its importance in the process; it either comes to be regarded as niche or, if it still has mainstream prominence, as abject spectacle. In turn, the conversations around these works become less about the women at their centers and more about how those women are presented.

Much of Baby Jane’s camp legacy comes down to how more recent audiences have interpreted Davis’s performance. She’s ferocious, frightening, and grotesque. But framing Davis’s performance as camp, as Murphy does, doesn’t take into account how dramatically acting has shifted over the course of film history. In some ways, camp has become a label used when modern audiences don’t quite understand older styles of acting. Modern actors privilege the remote, the cold, the detached. The more scenery-chewing performances that make the labor of acting visible — such as the transformative work that Jake Gyllenhaal did in Nightcrawler, or most of Christian Bale’s career — is typically the domain of men. (Or, at least, it’s only men who can get away with it without being called campy.) As Shonni Enelow writes in a marvelous piece for Film Comment, “[Jennifer] Lawrence’s characters in Winter’s Bone and The Hunger Games don’t arrive at emotional release or revelation; rather than fight to express themselves, her characters fight not to. We can see the same kind of emotional retrenchment and wariness in a number of performances by the most popular young actors of the last several years.” Davis’s work as an actor was the antithesis of that; she painted in bold colors. Even her quietest moments brim with an intensity that cannot be denied.

[mossyflowers]

bro what

[catilinas]

trying to explain to my mother that the number three is not actually requirement for a throuple because two people can be three people. four people can be three people. a guy can contain any number of additional guys what’s so hard to understand. and she’s like What’s wrong with you

[ratatatastic]

"Playing against a guy like Barkov too? It's gonna be a nightmare too, you know... so big and strong on the puck so... it'll be fun." when your beloved captain is such a defensive nightmare that you do celebrate extensively when you manage to get the puck away from him in practise but this isnt practise but a patriotic circus and he will collect his dues and also you have to be homoerotic about it too

"Any chance Tkachuk takes it easy on you?" "Absolutely no chance. He'll be running me over and chirping me. It'll be hilarious." once again... buddy dont look too excited about it we have to have decorum around these parts...

4 nations face off team sweden media availability | 2.11.25

and also on things that haunt me personally...

finnish reporter using this interview, attributing the comment about maffhew ("Absolutely no chance. He'll be running me over and chirping me."→"There is absolutely no chance that [Sasha] will play looser against me. He will come and roll me over and throw a punch.") to sasha

and now we can't say for certain who is being referred to in "I know his tricks to get under your skin and he knows mine. I won't tell you about them though." because the TSN video cuts off before he can say it (unless they collected quotes afterwards which also happens) so im gonna lose my mind at schrodinger's maffhew/sasha if you need me 👍

[tanjir0se]

You know what the Giyuu bath scene Aniplex was too much of a coward to give us really needed? A gay awakening. So sayeth the lord (me in my google docs)

[moregraceful]

anyway before i got extremo derailed tonight, i was reading neon's curated collection of quotes from a russian interview with klim kostin and it got me wondering if any nhl teams keep chaplains on staff. considering this is the league where they will not even provide translators or language teachers like 95% of the time, i wasn't expecting them to, but cursory research turned up hockey ministries international which appears to pair local christian church pastors with junior, minor, and major leagues and call it chaplaincy even though everything on their website feels like youth pastor jock version. also found this very interesting if christian-focused athletic article from 2019 about the roles of faith in the nhl which mentions 23 nhl teams having a chaplain on staff. but the entire framing around the hmi program and chaplains in the nhl seemed to be around christianity? which admittedly i have only experienced chaplaincy in relation to hospice or extreme crisis situations so maybe single-faith focused chaplaincy is more standard when people aren't like imminently dying.

all of which of course gave me one million more questions while i was doing the dishes. like -- inclusitivity 101 but if they hired chaplains with interfaith training at all levels would they start seeing more religiously and culturally diverse players. and was also wondering if, even though hmi claims to be non-denominational, what kinds of outreach they do for orthodox players like kostin (i assume) or vasilevskiy (mentioned in the article) because none of the language on their website felt ecumenical. and also what kind of spiritual care they offer players in player assistance -- i feel like it's not uncommon to hear about goalies finding religion and coming out of player assistance concurrently. and also the number of goalies themselves who are christian, which was particularly interesting to me, as in the article, most of the ones who self-identified didn't come to faith until adulthood or were deeply on the pro-league career track. i also think about like--like what are the ahl (or echl/sphl) chaplains doing for the players who were raised with prosperity gospel and the various threads associated with that

and these are all very fascinating trains of thought for me to chase bc i love thinking about how faith impacts our lives broadly and in my little hobbies specifically but what i kept getting stuck on is if the framing around spiritual care in the nhl is all christianity, who is providing spiritual care at each stop for nazem kadri, who is a practicing muslim

[colorsinautumn]

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