#that's for the nadir bullshit

[asleepinawell]

my aunt just dosed february lolol and lmao

[advancedlupineurology]

everybody talks about abeds face during the troy and abed hug in geothermal escapism but when are we going to start talking about abeds face during the jeff and abed hug in intro to recycled cinema

[bingsucks]

*kicks in your door, knocks a cup of water out of your hand* Troy and Abed still sleep in a bunk bed when they're married because they couldn't find a king-sized race car bed they could afford, and a loft bed makes troy anxious that it's gonna fall apart if he breathes too hard (even though it's the exact same thing as a bunk bed with no extra bed). of course Troy refuses to admit that, he just says he doesn't want Abed hitting his head on the ceiling (partially true-- he does hit his head, he's very tall). fight me bitch I can't die *beats the shit out of you*

[safert0fu]

and in between us, we create the definition of heat.

.

i've not a lot of energy to draw anything more than sketchy scribbles these days but the brainrot is still going strong. praise be.

[number-of-the-beast-is-666]

hey. don't cry. so much good black metal in the world yeah?

[hammill-goes-fogwalking]

Jazz Rock ≠ Fusion (then where’s the option?)

2. Blues ≠ Blues Rock

3. Proto metal

4. Neoclassical metal

@rocknrollappreciator art rock is great

some of these i don't know, but man was this hard

[mean-scarlet-deceiver]

Wilbert's Worst

Right, so I really was open to having my mind changed on The Worst One but nobody’s argument has budged me.

I was going to write a complete, balanced essay on The Worst W. Awdry Book, but I’m a) mired in the research phase (hey if anyone knows someone with an encyclopedic knowledge of Tom and Jerry hit me up, for real) and b) right now I wanna talk about the characters and their Beloved Dynamics instead. 

So I'm just gonna get this out of the way so I can post the poll and move on to answering fun asks and watching Tom and Jerry in peace. Behold: a salty and unbalanced review.

Wilbert’s biggest failure of a children’s storybook? 

Henry the Green Engine 

Ohhh… because of the, uh, ra —?

Because of the racism, yes!

Oh. You do know that since 1972 they’ve republished it without the n-slur? 

Good for them. Two things: 

1. I know it used to be there, I’m never able to read it without knowing it was there in the first edition.

2. I consistently try, when ranking the books, to consider them in the context in which they came out. Because of this, I don’t like using “things that happened later” (like a new character never being properly used again or whatever) against the book. This helps me evaluate the author’s successes and failures against what they were trying to achieve when they wrote it vs what I would most want (blorbo content). It helps me not bring to bear the whole weight of fanon and fandom on a text that should be able to stand or fall on its own. Tl;dr I try to read the books like a guy who picked it up in 1951, or whatever. 

And yeah, if I’d bought this when it came out it would have had the slur. I’m going to judge it accordingly. 

Look, racism is bad, no argument, but does that mean the book as a whole must be condemned? 

Yeah, I think the slur and the “aaaand suddenly, blackface! heeheehee” bullshit fuck over the entire book, game over. Go directly to jail, do not collect $200. 

The Railway Series is not a work of high art or deep thorny complex literature. The books are meant for children — small children, at that. Children small enough to get bedtime stories read to them. The main goal of each book (especially this early on — you do have to manage secondary priorities like “pleasing the long-time fanbase” the longer you go, but right now we’re only 6 books into the series) is to create a happy imaginary world to enhance childhoods and family lives… to impart to other parents and kids a similar cosy happiness to that the author and his own kids enjoyed when he was workshopping/drafting the stories for them. When we say “children’s book” we really do mean little’uns — these average 1.25 full-color illustrations per page!

And these books sold in large numbers. This means it’s a certainty that somewhere in 1951 there was a Black family who owned the whole series, who went out to the shops, whose kid was like “ooh! Henry gets a book, neat…,” who like everyone else enjoyed the wild ride of Henry’s inspection and coal and wreck and rebuild… only to get verbally spat on one page from the end. 

Real mood-killer there. Epic fail, as the cool kids used to say in my youth. 

All right, fine, cool kids never said that. Anyway, statistically speaking there was certainly even more than one family that got that experience. Not to mention the non-Black families who even in 1951 were like “... wtf? i’d smack my kid if they ever said a word like that around me, geez. no.” Just a lot of people who had the light the book was kindling in them snuffed out all at once. 

You can actually be totally racist and your book not commit creative suicide on the penultimate page! Awdry flubbed his job of 'bestselling books-for-six-year-olds' here. Creative failure. Unforced error. Automatic zero. 

But times were different then, you have to consider it in the context of the time. 

1951 U.K. was not the nadir of multiracial equality or Black power, but jfc. I can assure you that over 99% of children’s books published that year in the Anglosphere managed to not use the n-slur. 

All right, all right. That was bad. But this feels off-topic. If you had never known about what used to be “Henry’s Sneeze,” would you still rank the entire book as dead last in the Wilbert Awdry corpus? 

Not dead last, but it is not a strong book. “Coal” and “The Flying Kipper” are super-interesting as material for Henry, but after that the book kind of falls off a cliff; the intrigue drops dramatically. The railway incidents chosen to make stories of are all solid choices, but it was not only “Sneeze” where Awdry’s handling of the material feels clumsy and weird. (And I’m not even talking here of the “heehee blackface — ain’t i a stinker?” gag in “Sneeze.”) 

But… “The Flying Kipper”? C’mon. It’s a superb story and no book that contains it can be the absolute worst in the series. 

“TFK” remains easily the best single TVS episode ever – but a lot of that is down to Britt and David’s artistry and judgment. 

Don’t get me wrong, a full-on railway wreck makes interesting material. But I don’t think the book does nearly as much with it as it could (and I’m trying sooooo hard here to forget about the amazing TVS adaptation, as I think it REALLY shows Awdry up. Even so, the storytelling here is surprisingly tepid and low-stakes). I get that Awdry probably wanted to lean into the comic angle and not make Henry’s condition afterwards seem too grave, in order to ensure the material wasn’t too dark for his young audience? (*mutters* again, a level of tender consideration for his readers’ youth that went right out the window when it came to small Black kids, evidently coz he couldn’t imagine that they read) Understandable, laudable — but if he outright refuses* to make the wreck too dramatic or scary then, well, then the wreck isn’t real scary or dramatic. And it can’t save the rest of the book from its flaws. 

*For all I know it could have been the publishers who insisted that the wreck be made preschooler-safe, that’s possible (although it’s also consistent with Awdry’s brand of humor and his overall low degree of emotionalism in his writing). Either way, though, the end result book is what it is and it will be judged accordingly. 

In addition to not being as exciting as many remember... @trainsupessandhuntresses asked me once if I thought some of Awdry's stories were "mean-spirited." I had to assent vigorously. And a surprisingly high proportion of those "mean" moments are in Henry the Green Engine? For some reason? It’s not just the racism. Awdry was not in the game to give Henry a deserved happy ending, he’d wanted to kill him off (the fuck?) and when his publishers prevented him (I don’t say this often, especially since I love how salty the Awdrys get about their publishers, but this in case good job, publishers!!) he wrote “TFK” with the primary motivation of giving Henry a new engine basis. Any soft or hearty emotions we get out of the deal are a side-effect — the only emotion that was fueling Awdry as he wrote this was spite, spite and a weird resentment towards his poor, long-suffering, invaluable illustrator. (I don’t blame Awdry for being frustrated that the engine illustrations were continually inaccurate or confusing, but I do think it’s weird to read all this great Henry material knowing that it was written with such poor grace.) 

So his ‘happy Henry’ stuff feels perfunctory; his Percy interlude is just brutal (why did you have to drag Percy into Henry’s book purely to give him a fuck-up, a scolding, and a messy dunce cap?); Gordon’s savaging of Henry for being too happy after recovering from a near-death experience is such an incredibly low point for Gordon that it’s hard for me to accept it as canon (there’s being proud, boastful, and self-absorbed, and then there’s being the straight-up raccoon dumpster fire Gordon is in that scene). Oh, and I think ��call the police [local constabulary, doesn’t bear firearms]” woulda probably a less reckless way of dealing with the rock-throwing youths than the sneeze of hot locomotive ashes, which of course the Fat Controller doesn’t like, that shit coulda been real dangerous! Mind, there are small rays of kindness throughout that do get me (the interactions between Henry and his crew feeling to me the least perfunctory and most heartfelt), but this is overall such a mean-spirited book. God. It starts off with such a gentle story (almost a non-story, if you’re in it purely for the “railway incidents” game and not character drama), but in short order the vibes just sorta suck. At least in other RWS books, when the vibes are off, they’re usually off near the beginning and then improve by the end. This one gets worse as it goes on. Oof. Don’t like that. 

Also, the last page is sooooo lame. I suspect the publisher strong-armed Awdry into writing most of it so that at least the slur wasn’t on the last page of the book... and if Awdry had any idea of how much he’d just empowered Henry and all his fans in this book he shouldn’t have found it hard to find 50 extra words to sum things up. As it was, he’s just filling space and running out the clock, lol. Lame wrap-up. Boring. As usual when it comes to every little thing about this book, Britt and David closed this up better (mind, their closer – “He had taught Gordon and silly boys a lesson, with a whistle and a sneeze” – also sucked. But at least it was blessedly short.)

Didn’t you once list HtGE on a list of your favorite Wilbert Awdry books? 

I did list it as one of the books that “at one time or another” have been my favorite in the series. Unfortunately in the case of HtGE, that was back when I really couldn’t read a story that I knew from the TVS without mentally substituting the adaptation into my brain as I read… largely overriding the actual text. Plus, everything I knew from TVS as a kid kind of automatically got a halo effect. Plus, I was super into Henry’s arc. 

The first time I read HtGE after calming down and actually reading all the books as books... massive disappointment. There is such a gap there between what I'd thought the book said (all our incredible fanon work overanalyzing and headcanoning Henry and building this beautiful fantasy arc about disability!) vs. what it actually said (limp and careless writing, mean vibes, airbrushed n-slur, bad aftertaste). 

I do think there is some stuff about the development of Awdry’s storytelling technique here that is interesting (again, Tom and Jerry superfans reading this, please shoot me a message!) but it doesn’t counteract everything else. 

At least we’re over the racism stuff? 

Nah, I’m not over it, actually. 

[backyardflames]

Are people really just so livid about Garcia having a relationship with someone that’s not Luke that they’re trashing her character in the most extreme ways? She’s acting no worse than the entirety of the cast has acted at multiple points. The JJ/Reid bullshit from last season was the absolute nadir in terms of character behaviour on this show, but Garcia’s a monster for getting her head turned by a hot dude? Eh.

[motherhenna]

In a town full of monsters, the lesser of all evils may still bear fangs. There are no angels in Nadir.

Back on my Twilight AU bullshit--it's sort of just turned into it's own thing, at this point. So here's another piece of my re-imagination of Edward Cullen: Caleb Alkaine, the mysterious son of the local veterinarian. Though he volunteers as a photographer for the school paper, Caleb has become a bit too invested in the string of unsolved murders tormenting the small town of Nadir, Alaska. The darkest time of year is right around the corner, and who knows what else could lurk in the endless winter nights to come.

[fanonical]

look, i know ranting about bioshock infinite is old hat at this point, but i was thinking about this lately and wanted to get this off my chest

there's a point in the game where the game's 'both sides' approach to racism reaches its nadir, and it's the end of the finkton level

fink is a character running a company town, horribly exploiting his workers (all minorities) and creating shanty towns for them to live in. at the end of this level, black revolutionary leader daisy fitzroy wants to murder him to stop all of that from happening. she does! and she also threatens a kid

this kid comes right the fuck out of nowhere. there's no indication of who this kid is, where he came from - he doesn't even have a unique character model. daisy says he's fink's son, which isn't something that's ever established all through this level which serves the purpose of telling you about fink, and that's why she wants to kill this kid. she then gets unceremoniously killed by elizabeth as a coming of age thing. the kid vanishes

this kid literally only exists because otherwise, daisy would seem too sympathetic. the entire level exists to tell you how evil fink is, then at the end pulls this 'but daisy wants to kill this kid for no reason BOTH SIDES ARE BAD' bullshit. because otherwise, any non-fascist player will be on daisy's side in an instant. it's shitty, shitty writing and it's so transparently racist

[borisbubbles]

Eurovision 2023: Last Place

34. 37. ISRAEL Noa Kirel - “Unicorn” Third place

Decade Rank: 109/116 [Above Theodor, below Nadir] Edit: As per the update of 30 December 2023, this ranking has been revised. Noa now ranks between Brividi (#113) and Victor Vernicos (#111)

People complain about the jury vote hither and yon, and how it denied Käärijä his rightful crown, but the truly VILE result was Israel’s third place. This song? THIRD? REALLY?? DisGUSting.

Let’s not waste time here: “Unicorn” is a horrible, disheveled mess of a song. It has an orchestral start, a downbeat beginning, a weaksauce blackpink chorus and then an utterly SCUFFED dance break. None of its many parts work, standalone or put together. Everything about it is a shameless honeytrap for the undescerning gay or gay ally. It’s the absolute culmination of Israel’s Pinkwashing dream. I DESPISE it.

and don't get me started on this bullshit.

So um yeah, of course there were folk out there who saw a queer-coded party song they could unleash ~their inner fag~ towards (which I honestly get - i ranked SloMo second for the EXACT same reason!) and not a mercenary, insincere, off-puttingly cunning trainwreck with a horrendous meme choreography. Good on you, if you’re one of those easily satisfied people I guess. I am not one of them.

Israel have always had a tendency to weaponize LGBT rights and current woke trends (see also: Toy and #MeToo) for their own politcial purposes, and “Unicorn” is perhaps the most shameless example of that at ESC yet? This might ultimately be what offends me the most. Noa's top five was planned since the beginning, in the form of the most obsequious fan service imaginable and they were rewarded for it! How is Unicorn different from any Azerbaijani attempt to game the system during their top five streak at the start of the 2010s?

Its journey honestly feels very similar to “Tattoo’s” victory rly. Noa was immediately fawned over because of who she is even before her song’s release and it just sorta snowballed from there. However, unlike Sweden who fully lucked into Loreen's comeback, Israel have deliberately exploited both the televote and jury voting quirks for their benefit. That Rest of the World 12 points? Not a coincidence. 🙂 (my opinion on RotW: bin it immediately.) You may not like Loreen's victory, but thank fuck she was there to prevent this tomfoolery from getting EVEN MORE points.

In conclusion

THE RANKING

[number-of-the-beast-is-666]

petja&nadir snippet under the cut, slight sexual line and self harm

Watching him there, on stage... Felt like a form of worship. Like mercy and wrath all mixed up into one, when he sang of eternal absolution and damnation, and lust just as bright when he sang of rot and come.

Shadowed by the dim yellow light from behind him, he looked inhuman; beyond human. Like maybe he'd burst into flame or fall away into dust if he just sang right.

Watching Petja on stage, cutting with an almost tender deliberacy that seemed altogether unfitting of the brutal and vulgar reality of what he was doing, getting hard whilst his hot blood ran down his elbows, letting his soul bleed out his mouth like his wrists to the screaming crowd.

Him up there, glass catching on old scars and carving jaggedly into his skin, getting off on the pain as blood tracked down his arms and chest, rivulets soaking into the top of his faded jeans.

[got-into-worm-by-mistake]

“It’s all been a ploy from the start,” the Eidolon-clone said, his aerokinesis carrying his words to our ears, “Every single one of you were deceived.  For every one of you that bought your powers, there were innocents who died or became monsters for the sake of that formula’s research.  No matter what good you might do, it will never make up for that.  And the rest of you?  Conned, brought in with promises of ideals and saving the world.  You’re fools.”

I mean, *gestures at Scion*

Fucking christ Echidna is just such a contrived and absurd package of bullshit powers, cheat abilities and then plot armor.

Strictly speaking, it's not the same sort of slog that Arcs 12-13 are, but Arcs 18 and 19 definitely are the nadir of the work for me so far. Jesus christ I hope this gets better.

[racefortheironthrone]

What are your thoughts on Woodrow Wilson? It seems like depending on who you ask, he’s either the intellectual father of the current international system, or the man who brought American race relations to their post Civil War nadir by segregating the federal government.

As someone who primarily studies U.S domestic policy, I don't hugely care about Wilsonian foreign policy.

Yes, yes, international law and the roots of the U.N, but at the end of the day the League of Nations wouldn't have been fit for purpose even if Wilson had managed to get the U.S to participate, he got massively steamrolled at the Paris Peace Conference by Clemenceau and Lloyd George on everything from imperialism to anti-German revanchism, and you can't get away from the fact that his liberal pronouncements on national self-determination were sharply limited by his racism when it came to the self-determination of insufficiently white people.

When it comes to domestic policy, it gets harder for me because a lot of important and good stuff happened in his Administration - the income tax, the Federal Reserve, the Federal Trade Commission, the Clayton Anti-Trust Act ("labor's Magna Carta" according to Samuel Gompers), the Commission on Industrial Relations, the passage of the Suffrage Amendment for women, etc. - but most of that happened thanks to other people. Wilson was more of a cheerleader and promoter than a policy wonk, so I think any Progressive would have done as good a job.

On the issue of "American race relations," I think Wilson's impact was largely symbolic, but his impact was absolutely on behalf of segregation. The Jim Crow agenda of black disenfranchisement and discrimination had mostly been completed between 1890 and 1910 - by the southern wing of the Democratic Party that he came out of, I should add - and Wilson's personal contribution was to extend the latter principle into the Federal government as a final thumb in the eye to lingering Republican sentiment on civil rights. At the same time, between McKinley and Theodore Roosevelt, the leadership of the Republican Party had basically already surrendered on black representation in Federal employment (just as at least the Executive had on anti-lynching laws, civil rights, and voting rights), so the damage had mostly been done.

His public support for Birth of a Nation - whether or not he actually said it, the tagline "like history writ with lighning" was a useful boost to the film's marketing - was probably more impactful in the long run. His Administration's inaction during the Red Summer of 1919 was most impacful of all, and even if you buy the bullshit argument that the Federal government didn't have the power to do anything in most cases, Wilson absolutely had the power when it came to Washington D.C and it somehow took him four days to send in the Army to stop white mobs from making war on the black community.

[swearyshera]

Reliving this is a trip. I was an interesting feeling the first time thru, and I'm not saying that to humorously downplay a horrific situation. It drew out a little bit of sympathy for Catra I really thought I'd used up by that point, if only cuz what Prime does is really that vile. That's super unusual for me. I went in rooting for Adora to take back someone she cared about, not necessarily cuz it was Catra specifically if you know what I mean, but this got me to want Catra rescued weirdly well. I almost never feel for villains at their nadir like this.

Twisted how empathetic paragon heroes like Adora are among my most treasured characters in fiction, yet I suck at extending the same sympathy they can. You're supposed to see characters like Catra (or Azula or Bakugou or whoever you please) going thru awful things as flawed people with interior lives and subject to exterior circumstances that the heroes are kind/strong/savvy enough to see and incorporate into their responses and my knee jerk is still "fuck off with the pity party, get to the atonement." Or in a lot of cases to laugh while they're down. I always sabotage myself by seeing the author making horrible things happen to the rival/villains, and contrasting them with worse villains, as a cynical tactic to get me and the heroes to sympathize before they've started changing for the better.

It helped that Catra already saved Glimmer at her own peril, and Adora already would've saved Catra no matter what, but still. This is a big reason why villain mind control is one of my least fave tropes. Manipulation and coercion are all good because meaningful agency and responsibility are still there even if characters can't see it, and that is everything in my eyes. To me mind control is the writer hitting pause on a character's growth til a more convenient time in the plot. Or just forever. *cough*🌊🦂🧙‍♂️.

Most of my appreciation for pre-s5 Catra only built up in retrospect through meta-posts and following fanworks like this. So seriously thank you for this series; it's like experiencing the series as it was intended for the first time, weird as that sounds.

You're version of this sequence is as skin-crawling as I think we all could've hoped/feared. Prime is the worst kind of living scum. Great work. Now I can start counting down to the "you miscalculated." scene. Aimee Carrero crushed that line. Can't wait for your version. Positively dancing with anticipation.

It is - at least to me - a really interesting point for Catra to be at, narratively speaking, because it shows the dialectic in her journey. She both did and didn't "bring it upon herself" - yes, she tried to get in Prime's good books, but no, she didn't ask to be chipped. Yes, she saved Glimmer against his instruction, but no, she didn't know the full consequences of what that would do. And when you get people on different sides of the argument, some saying "poor meowmeow didn't deserve this" and others saying, "She's reaping what she's sown", actually they're both right, in this way.

I don't think it would have worked going straight to the atonement, anyway. We don't have these scenes to revel in the depth of her lowest point, we have them to show how bad, how inescapable it was - and then we set up to escape them!

The whole story with Prime has been an interesting writing journey, too. Every time I review the lines, I tweak them to make them that little bit more realistic, that little bit more uncomfortable. I'm painfully aware that we're seeing a lot of similar rhetoric flying around from real people in the media these days (particularly with anti-trans bullshit), and it's no coincidence that Prime is a reflection of this. But my focus isn't on "Oh look, doesn't this character sound like the person trying to destroy our lives", it's on "This character, like the people you've seen on the news, might think they're right but they will never win. They will never defeat us."

Indeed, the Save the Cat books (yes, this episode did remind me of them... It's probably where the name is from) talk about the 'All is Lost' point and the 'Dark Night of the Soul' - this is where we're at right now. It's bad, it's the worst - but it's going to get better.