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randomclam24 · 1 year ago

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8/29 night Taking the article with the title claiming that complex infrastructure won't survive the competency crisis into account, which calls into consideration that high-precision white people are generally what keeps the most complex machinery online in the first place, which is a very high-maintenance thing - How do I say this? Japan even has narratives like Midna at the end of the game saying, if there were a lot more people like you, the world wouldn't have these problems - something to that overall effect - but that doesn't make Japan a non-racist country. It takes high maintenance. And I'm one to believe in the potential of artificial intelligence taking over for that purpose. It still takes a minority at the very least of incredibly high-maintenance to keep these machines in peak condition.

For this first time, I've seen a reply saying that the belief in A.I. taking over every responsibility will ultimately just absolve currency of its inherent value, meaning that the elite can just reassign the values required for basic things like bread as they will it. But, that's the first time I've ever heard of that. It is what it is.

Update So yeah, persecutest thou as much as thou will the article that complex infrastructure won't survive the competency crisis, there's a cheeky opportunity for a reference to the Statue of Liberty's poem right now, "Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, the wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door!"

Update I wish we had something better to talk about. Is that too racist? Heh heh heh heh heh

Frankly, a lot of anons are already banking on the collapse of the economy.

Update Yeah, my younger cousin's in the tech field, but the best I've personally seen of him is a weird Python game program, so I'm not particularly impressed, yet

I don't know what I want to pursue out of my own life

Update A lot of this gameplay is goofy bullshit - if anyone takes the quip about Cuphead seriously, they're a dumbass - unless of course you catch my drift - then that's different

I'm feeling like this is bullshit within bullshit

Update It's not like I can't go at this kind of thing, per se. It's just that I figured virtually 100% of people can't do this kind of thing, so that would make doing so "antisocial".

Update I wish I could get *half* mean enough for Cuphead in all seriousness

I beat all the bosses of Kirby, minus some of the boss rushes - I'm not even able to lick the bootstraps of some of these Cuphead bosses

Update Okay, so I don't have much purpose in my life.

Update I'm giving up on getting drunk in the way that normal people experience. By the time I'm even approaching that, I feel like either just craving actual food or just throwing the stuff up. Basically, it's impossible without it getting to the point of being like food poisoning with me.

8/29 After writing out the parts I was searching for for the purpose of understanding better his core philosophy, I don't think The Portable Nietzsche is actually definitive at all. But for an introduction at a glance, it wasn't bad. We're going to have to find these texts online.

Update Okay, so in reviewing the two actual full texts at a glance, we're going to do A Genealogy of Morals. in Beyond Good and Evil is a focus on the utter falling-throughs of his times and reflects that pessimism that I've been told about him. It focuses on what *not* to do, which I suppose is less of what his core beliefs actually are.

Update Okay. It's been a lot of going back and forth, but here we have Essay 3:

"11 Only now, after having gained sight of the ascetic priest, we attack seriously our problem: what does the ascetic ideal mean?--Only now matters are growing "earnest.""

Good so we're getting somewhere

This is page 159 in-book

8/30 I wrote out the rest of that essay, which led me to another split between The Joyful Science and The Will to Power. We're not there yet, but that was a solid introduction.

Don't stop

Update Well, after short review, I've concluded that the new dawn seen by Nietzsche over the "death of God" as it might concern what he has called the ascetic priest is altogether a misconception. First of all, as I've already noted, there's no historical account of miracles like in the post-Gospels New Testament that is regarded seriously in the modern day, which is what that kind of lifestyle was largely contingent upon, leaving the only moral foundation viable left the exact described castrated mindfulness of the herd.

But let's be realistic as to the actual social forces at play in the modern day: either way, you're getting at some form of globohomo in and of itself, because the Christian lifestyle of sharing resources clearly amounts to Communism, and the death of God is clearly a nu-atheist sentiment exclusively.

What he calls the ascetic priest as an attempt to cast his own narrative about it going away finally could just as quickly be dismissed with the obvious of repeating that one article about how the deep state implicated by Trump is alive and well and how it's just a - something really stinky about it being relatable and how we need to give credence to it, but not like that, because it intended for something very stinky and - jewish

Update There's still nothing to do even though it's morning by now

Oh well, life is just a hopeless meaningless void, let's go kill ourselves

Update after sleeping Just like "ironic shitposting is still shitposting", even if its conveyed through irony in memes, being of the ascetic ideal is being of the ascetic ideal. I'm pretty sure no one knows what that means. But I don't think there's a person on this earth who isn't of the ascetic ideal. That's how I know there's no hope. There's no future.

At the end of the day, people taking it in the ass in life is just icing on the shit cake. That's why trannies for example will always and perpetually be "coming correct" in fact, when they say the right wing is "obsessed" with them: the ascetic ideal which is what is truly represented in the propaganda supporting them at the highest echelons of all of our societies parasitically is undisputed, to the degree of sheer absurdity. You're not even *looking* (something something liberal exasperation - I don't care.)

So correction: the ascetic ideal of "the Nothing" is all we culminate to as *mankind.* *Thus* is our continued pining that the deep state is to be cast out unnatural as obsession

This is the reason even 4channers trying to shitpost ironically with doge memes and the like can't even break out of the mindset that, to fix the world as it is, you would have to end up with absolutely no one left on the planet, because unconsciously, we have it absolutely established even without knowing it that there is truly "no separation between jew and Gentile" but merely more members of the ascetic ideal which culminates in the anal worship of "the Nothing". So, in that are we expected to give the "little guy" who's just trying to get by following orders from his higher-ups a little bit more of *respect* in that their ideology of herd-collectivism is, for better or for worse, the predominantly prevailing social order of human consciousness in itself. Even so, that comes off like "kiss the ring".

Update I can't deal. So, to the effect expressed by the cuckold who said it, "don't talk to me or my wife's son ever again"

Update I've been reclusive for several months because all these retards taking it collectively in the ass have long concluded based on my example that anyone who wants to fight the government is a (something I don't know or care about it) retard, making any further assertion of this mess a pure act of chutzpah that subsides as soon as it's passed. (That's not true and you take it up the ass every day - every single one of these people calling me a retard as in I'm fucking up the game has been the obvious retard the entire time, and nothing has stepped forward to even give an exception to that)

I have to go so far out of my way to even detect what wavelength you're even on making statements and memetics like that, it's like having to drive out into the middle of bumfuck nowhere every single fucking time. I want to die.

Update When my detractors that I used to frequent reach the point that they feel like they've convinced themselves so that there's nothing left to be said, what am I supposed to do when it gets beyond the extremity that I can't impose on that consensus anymore without it being such an extreme that they feel the need to impose the government on me? Because all the kinds of detraction that I take personally also happen to get along swimmingly with the new-world government. I'm then just supposed to go in there and set off all their alarms that I'm their enemy in a mortalistic sense.

So with all that out of my system, I can say I'm generally more easygoing than all them. But I know from hard experience that it's never a good thing to walk on eggshells with them, because things like that get set off.

Update I beat Rage on the highest difficulty today. My review overall is that both aesthetically and thematically, it feels like an introduction to the new Doom and Doom Eternal. Good gameplay, but frankly the ending, once you figure out the damage required to beat the new enemies introduced at the last second, all they're doing is spamming more of them, and there's no real final boss at all, and they kind of pamper you with new ammo leading in to that final mission.

Also, of course, there's some personal level to my liking this game rather than wanting to play Doom Eternal first. From renting - actually renting Doom 2016 from a video store before it closed shop - the way the new demons set the tone for the new games, it just seemed unrelatable the way everyone's jumping around like a complete retard. Rage actually seemed to have a premise (at least looming off in the distance - which resolves with the conclusion of the game itself with no further actual story) - and then the new Doom story-wise seems like what it looks like - chaos for its own sake - but I haven't played it yet

I haven't even heard the good things about Doom Eternal per se - I've heard people say they've heard good things about Doom Eternal. Actually, that summarizes the kind of review that I see of modern games anymore.

Update The gripes I thought were minor actually constitute an unironic rant: Halo gameplay, especially past Normal difficulty, where it stands out

In Project Brutality, they have ammo that starts to feel like Halo and kind of reminds me of it: it is called low-caliber rounds. What a thing to limit oneself to against your greatest enemy, the Covenant.

Also, there was a Mythbusters special where someone militarily-involved actually demonstrated that the concept of running at the same speed with like eight different weapons as in Doom 3 was actually realistic. Then what is Halo doing - you get two weapons. Right, and not only that, this is according to someone who already has to wear unrealistically-heavy power armor everywhere he goes, Master Chief. So you saying there's no weight to spare -

Update (Paraphrasing out my ass) "You know how much this gear costs, son?" "Tell that to the Covenant" Yeah

Update And, just making some attempt to mediate with that argument before the one about Doom and Halo - first of all, if it takes that long to figure out what wavelength you're on, figuratively speaking, to even know what you're trying to say, that inherently means it's not self-evident. So then on the other hand, I might not have the best valuation of the lowest common denominator in mind regardless, having my own idealism in mind with my endeavors.

So then after that comes the crux of it from their side: the lowest common denominator are (obviously) the more common! So am I obligated to be directed toward that?

Update So because of that split between focus on idealism and the lowest common denominator among the right-wing, I may react to you thinking your gay point is self-evident with a cutoff of "no"

Update Doom ammo v. Halo ammo: Literally self-cameo of the director of Pulp Fiction: "Bonnie goes out shopping, she buys *shit*"

I'm considering whether to keep that. It's stinky.

Update First and foremost, I'm going to have to atone for my sins orated against boomers The people who systemically said, I'm enjoying my wine and dinner; I don't care what happens to the untold generations after I'm dead

Realistically, a boomer forms a hot take: I'm bracing for impact. Compromise isn't about to happen there. They are ignorant. They are ignorant.

Update In grade school, we literally had a story - I don't think the racial element was intended to be a consciously-acknowledged part of the storytelling - but the narrative was about a black family in bad conditions where the man of the house thought they would start a small organization with other individuals and improve the quality of life in some way, and the ending consists of the others up and running off with the money. You expect us to be like early Christians with black people? Especially if they're inner-city blacks, just don't trust them.

Update So if it was deracialized, what does it mean? It would be that message even in rap, "trust no one", intended even for all white people. In this environment? I can't say otherwise.

Update If I catch sight of my youthful ambition again while drunk, in that moment, it's like nothing wouldn't be worth grasping it again, even in a dark sense - and that is despite the fact that most people wouldn't have taken it for what it is seriously in the first place, the same from then until now - a question of if it's the right day and age for it or not?

In a sense, frankly, I hate the artistic direction itself of "minimalism", but I had a lot of the inspiration of "cubism" as a basic structuring. Cubism even in a simple game engine could still include the rugged texture, provided the modern day's upscaling, of Doom's marble surfaces.

"God forever geometrizes" - does minimalism appeal to that or not?

I'm positive there's a realistic middle ground workable between the perspective of, we should have room to be more pretentious, and the - frankly overstated, you're "fucking up the game game game"

Because at core, I *know* there's an inspiration in my ambition where it has hit me like a ton of bricks undeniably in the past

Consider the episode of some cartoon which became a meme where a woman is saying, paraphrasing, "edgy" is where a set of corporate executives make calculated moves to appeal to their set audience - if you're "minimalistic" in the most commonly-recognized use of the phrase, it's probably more like that than what would be in taste.

My boomer dad - my boomer dad plays (all the damned time) Watch Dogs 2 on PS4, which starts with a mission with that very style of music, and, thinking about it, what does that amount to My dad still spends a lot of his time re-exploring that game to the exact same effect, just taking pictures of semi-realistic monuments

Update Okay, okay - it feels like breaking the fourth wall, but, in the time Denzel Curry made "The Game", I also made the quip that I have one job in that instance: don't come off as a narcissist. So is that distinct from screaming "that you game game game" or not?

For quick-reference, *definitely* don't want to be a narcissist. There's no value in that.

Like, I would love to be regarded as a pioneer when it comes to ideas - there's that

I referenced Death Grips - Niggas on the Moon, and there's probably justification behind the fact that Death Grips hasn't released anything in the past few years. Hey

Update I've heard recently that the age when individual men would have duels to sort out conflicts was a more unsure age, because of the lethality of the things. Honestly - if duels were non-lethal

There are things that I would love disputing that I would *never* lie my life down on the line for - at best, today's conflicts would be considered "proxy battles" - and guess why that is? Because people generally are ignorant - no getting around that

Update Drunken rants for those which I deem to be so stupid I consider us on a level playing field regardless of the fact: Halo's energy weapons: I wish your shooting devices wouldn't give out after every four seconds of initially using them, as would think anyone in their remotest right mind. "Halo: MyFirst FPS": Encyclopedia Dramatica

Update Nietzschean philosophy: boy, I wish globohomo jews would direct their will toward themselves, as opposed to through and superceding the will of the lesser-willed Gentiles against themselves Realiity: "No good" *timeline severed*

Update Fighting these "Hunters" in Halo on PC is ridiculously easier than on console

Let me tell you how much I love bureaucrats, and those supportive of that mindset, as of 2023

"niggers"

Update for sure Halo, with its bureaucratically-delegated rations of low-capacity ammo, so that artificial difficulty would rule the day on its respective platform for who knows what reason ever - you could say, how does that then compete with Siren? Well...I guess no one ever went there.

Update So then, dare I ask, what is "charm" as we call it held between Siren the series even outside of American release and Halo as an American "you can Ghillie-Suit your way through anything you want if you ambition hard enough" type of mentality?

Update If it's all forfeit for what it was anyway, /pol/ is replaced with whatever races - who knows why - where the rest went off to Telegram or wherever else, despite none of those sites constituting remotely the social media web site that the original board was. I guess I commonly represent Encyclopedia Dramatica's vision - so if I add my own narrative - to make up for every pre-prejudice of society even in spite of social justice, since, in the first place, social justice is just yet another product of what has been coined as Nietzsche's ascetic idealism.

Update So as for those medical pamphlets that were documented online, saying that, our - I even forgot the word - - see, I can't even remember the word! Meritocracy. Those pamphlets were claiming that that word being used as an appeal was some kind of last stand of white identity, or something along those racist lines - but, at the same time, before I ever heard of that, I always considered that that would always serve as a last potential middle ground between these issues. Since nobody will listen to anything else. So then I guess if that's really past, although it may have just been forced, what would be grounds beyond that? I don't think anything else would constitute a fair contest. (Of course that just highlights the inherent lack of legitimate comparison in our Western cultural divide)

I wish I could ever enter "Zen state" as it's been applied to people playing video games seriously sometimes, mainly back when they were talking about arcade games, which were much harder

Update Because there is enough rallying toward the idea of feeding the entire world and ending world hunger, wasn't there already the debacle of Bill Gates testing his own system for Africa to turn even faeces into drinkable healthy water? Why hasn't everything been solved even remotely? Why couldn't that excess money to Ukraine etc. have been donated to Africa, especially for one-time investments such as these to make the effect permanent? I don't know, and neither do - *how* close to 100% of the government's lackeys?

And in times when Common Filth re-quotes things like Shakespeare's "all the world's a stage", I wish he could manage to speak with a bit more authority. That's no insult. But there are people acting like I need to take my meds even though I already explained it was primarily just for anxiety and literally nothing else.

We don't have a good system.

Update So, to be very open about these things, they're coming out with such things as the rejection of meritocracy not very openly, but with their feelers, per se, to see if it's okay or not so that they can get away with it.

Update "A Revaluation of the Adage "Nigga" - by Friedrich Nietzsche"

I don't think he would have ever addressed black people in depth, because he was already spending his time critiquing everything wrong with European people, holding from the standpoint of all their highest philosophers and artists. Truly Hitler's philosopher.

Update If I could ramble without it getting on most people's nerves - that would be convenient for me In Five Nights at Fuckboy's, there's a line if you view a bottle of some kind of booze on the floor in the main lobby by Freddy Fazbear - "get crunk" - but actually thinking of that as the lore for Chuck E' Cheese's animatronic mascots

(and other such one-liners)

Update Rappers Nietzsche, since I read as close to his core philosophy as I could manage just recently, said personally he wishes still to see the positive aspects of the English philosophers of his time, even despite knowing in advance they all gravitate unnaturally toward the same exact ideas unoriginally. So with rappers, in a sense you already know what they mean in the "cultural sense" is that basest thing from the back of your unconscious about the thing. We (clearly) don't live in a perfect world.

What is ontology? Obviously we don't know minorities in the same sense as deep=state jews

And no one is tested in real life in any way like we've come to know, over this generation, the nature of tests of skill implicitly given in videogames

I might still have to agree with the now-non-active meme, "extra mild [sauce] for white people"

Update If I'm going to be "pretentious", I'm going to make a bigger playlist than I did on imgur

I download these on ytmp3hub.com now to get them at whatever compressed quality you can get at its highest proclaimed quality of 320kbps

4.Warbled (Level - Slipgate Complex) - YouTube

Update Select from Yuque's OST - underrated *Many* such cases

Update To preserve the ambience, we'll wait a little longer before posting for such a playlist

Update "Pretentiousness" honestly I don't even think would describe how I value my own youthful ambition - and what, I'm going to expect people to see me as not a narcissist despite that? Always a contradiction. Why I don't be productive - I'm too self-conscious.

As in, "causes my jaws to *call*: "yuh" Y'all niggas ain't doin' shit

Update There's a contradiction - even in saying, what would Nietzsche himself have had as an impression - if I'm too drunk, just plainly, on principle, I shouldn't post it because it's risky

Take it as you will, the minute thing isn't so important - Yume 2kki, back in 2014 when the (secret) Library with the musical segment (taken from Ib) was still fresh and new for what it was in the context of its present era - that was obviously more than the minute interpretation one would have like right now, long after that era - I saw it when I was first alone in college with a roommate even at the time I tried my best not to remember in the first place

Update Thinking "correct"ly, you can't hurt the corporate algorithmic oligarchs enough, even physically by your human means

They hold more power, beyond all justifiable reason, than you know

What was a lifetime? What was a lifetime? What is the total profit? Compare that to the corporate oligarchs.

A million years - guess what? - their rates are in the first place far faster - do you expect to win by a war of attrition? They win presently, by doing nothing.

I want to invent a word harsher than the n-word, because certain of these shills are so horrible. They definitely deserve it. There's no doubt about that much

And these are the run-of-the-mill, where I have to witness it online

I feel like, in a sense, I'm actually *obligated* to espouse kino

Just because of this position, and scenario

But then call to mind, boomers were legally allowed ecstacy, the drug, and felt that induced sense of unity, and went on to think that the rest of us descendants can all die for all they care - so what is that in itself

Between the prospect of being drunk at all or not - not being drunk at all has life feeling too long altogether - being drunk makes time fly by, to an extent it feels unnatural What am I trying to say? History is too slow - - [redacted]

Update Nietzsche's coining of the "spirit of gravity" - how is that related to my own sense of history (or rather the "end of history" as we're taught (*that it is*) in the modern day) and the inherent boredom that comes with it?

And I assure you - no matter how much shills will reinforce to you that you not doing anything violent against jews specifically at the present moment in and of itself means you have no capacity in you to do anything ever at any point in time - I do not apreciate jews or their ascetic priesthood, or the ascetic idealism of the - boomer, or any of such adherents, or any such people

Update Honestly, the space - not even necessarily in the sense of the word the "right", but literally just the "space" to be "pretentious"

Time takes too many days, with no responses, at least from males - in fact I get more responses from females online than males

Tired of the autism diagnosis, which people give for lack of a better understanding frankly

I don't really have a better term than Rick and Morty's "true level" for the basic concept of what I would want over the day-to-day (I never saw that segment - I just heard about)

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thejacksmit · 1 year ago

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First Take: Mission Impossible: Dead Reckoning Part 1 - there’s another maverick-like success coming

SYNOPSIS: Ethan Hunt and his IMF team must track down a dangerous weapon before it falls into the wrong hands.

Spoiler free as usual. This message will self destruct in 5…

His mission, should he choose to accept it, is to promote the big screen experience. Tom Cruise has done so much for the industry these last 12 months, firstly with Top Gun Maverick, and now, after 5 years in the works and an intercontinental shoot which started in the midst of Italy’s toughest Covid restrictions, Mission is back. And we’re in the Endgame - the first of a two part finale to the series (or so we’re being lead to believe), this is the biggest and arguably most impossible one they can do. To that we say this: damn, this is a true big screen movie.

youtube

At the helm, as you would expect if you’ve seen the last 2 missions, is a man who has earned the shortened name McQ. Yes, Christopher McQuarrie is back directing (and co-writing with Band of Brothers exec producer Erik Jendresen) this two parter, and he is the ideal choice, having worked with Cruise for a long time now. This is by no means a short film, coming in at 2 hours 43 minutes, and a lot of audiences have struggled with this - but there is so much plot to explore in this runtime that it does feel justified, if a smidge excessive (only by 5-10 minutes though). It is shot brilliantly, although digitally (a departure from tradition) by Fraser Taggart, with every action setpiece looking right at home on screen 3, or even an IMAX screen, plus I also have to single out Lorne Balfe - returning to soundtrack another Mission after his iconic bongo-heavy score for Fallout - who takes things even crazier by getting 555 musicians (including orchestras in London, Rome, Budapest & Vienna; the Top Secret Drum Corps in Switzerland; 20 bongo players and a choir in Venice) playing on this score. Zimmer’s prodigy, my backside - he’s the real deal now.

On to the cast, and before we tackle Tom Cruise, we have to mention Simon Pegg, Ving Rhames, and Rebecca Ferguson - we’ve seen them develop Benji, Luther and Ilsa respectively over the last few films, and knowing how Part 1 ends, a lot of narratives for them are being tied up from their respective introductions up to now. Joining the ride is Hayley Atwell, who is an inspired addition to a strong cast, Pom Klementieff, Esai Morales as villain Gabriel, the return of Henry Czerny as his character from MI1, and we also have Vanessa Kirby back as the White Widow too, someone we still don’t know too much about after her role in Fallout. And then we have the modern day miracle of science himself. 60 years old. And pulling off stunts like he is, without a double, without any injuries (this time) is still a sight to behold - say what you want about him, but when it comes to Hollywood’s time honoured traditions of showmanship, Tom Cruise is one of a rare breed of showing exactly where that $300million budget has gone: on screen, with REAL effects.

THE VERDICT

He’s done it again. He’s only gone and done it again. One year after giving cinema its first billion dollar movie since Covid, Mr Cruise and his team have casually gone and delivered another guaranteed box office success. Action turned up to 11, a well thought out plot, and everything you expect from a Mission Impossible movie is all present and correct - all it needs is the screens to be filled during a busy week of competition with ‘Barbenheimer’ as the kids are calling it.

RATING: 5/5

#first takes

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stackthedeck · 2 years ago

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Hi hello! I’ve been thinking instead of writing an essay but, do you personally think the way Kate Bishop is treated is similar to Peter? In the sense that the writers will always have their jokes being “haha I’m not gay though”. Like I read all these comic panels and at this point I’m thinking “just make her bisexual cowards”

Anon please do write that essay and send it to me or tag me in it because I would love to read it!

I think both Kate and Peter are both extremely bi-coded and there's plenty of sub-text to make a convincing argument that either of them is queer. The jokes but also the canon queer character that they're often hanging out with and flirting with. Like Kate/America is one of the biggest femslash ships in marvel and Spideypool is one of the biggest dudeslash ships. Like everyone can see it!

I think the biggest difference between the two of them is that Kate is a legacy character and Peter is their best-selling character and one of their oldest. Kate Bishop was created by Allan Heinberg and Jim Cheung, but Peter Parker was created by Stan Lee. Heinberg and Cheung both have tons of queer characters that are credited to them. Do you know how many queer characters Lee has credited to him? One (it's Bobby Drake btw). That's not to dunk on Lee, may his memory be a blessing, but Marvel has enshrined him as the ideal of their company and he had a dismissive attitude towards queer characters because he was an old man that knew when to take the right risks. But his characters can't stray too far from his vision because he has taken on this mythic status at the company, despite the fact that Lee really believed in the power of collaborative storytelling. Spider-Man is the best-selling character Marvel has ever created, he is the figurehead of the company. There is a reason that the black Spider-Man is not Peter, but Miles. (different company but same mentality) There's a reason Jon Kent is bi and not Clark Kent, Tim Drake is bi and not Bruce Wayne. Marvel still thinks its prime audience is cis straight white dudes and they don't want to lose readership by changing old characters, but they'll happily queerbait the old characters and confirm new ones with far less page time.

Kitty Pryde has recently been confirmed bi and I think Kate Bishop has a chance of also being confirmed bi soon. They're both young women that are popular but not iconically so and they're not Lee or Kirby characters. If you look at the trend of what characters are queer in comics, it tends to skew towards women because the target audience of comics finds wlw relationships hot and mlm relationships gross. Like I love that I have sapphic characters in comics, but it's not lost on me that they don't get to have weddings and their physical intimacy is far more sensual. The only character that I feel is anywhere close to my experience of queerness is America Chavez. And this sucks for all queer readers. Gay dudes deserve more physically intimate relationships that don't end in a perfect marriage. Gay women deserve to feel like they're not being sexualized and to see that perfect marriage.

so yeah, basically, you're super right anon to see the similarities between Kate and Peter, but I can't help but be pessimistic about Peter and cautiously optimistic about Kate.

#asks

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selkiesbittybonanza · 4 years ago

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500 Followers Appreciation Bitty Profiles! (+ Bonus bitty!) (ALL FREE TO ADOPT)

Fellswap Gold Lamia Bittys

Merlot

Snake: Taipan

Venomous?: Yes

Size (Bitty): Length - 0.5-1m (1.6-3.3 ft.), Standing - 0.25-0.5m (0.8-1.6 ft)

Size (Full Sized): Length - 1.5-2m (5-6 ft), Standing 1-1.25m (3-5 ft)

Merlots are very calm and soothing bittys, they always seem to have it together. It can be easy to let them take control of things – you always feel like they have your best interests at heart. Merlots are very distinguished, they don’t appreciate looking disheveled, it gives them an almost “old man” quality. A Merlot’s nest is impeccably clean – you may even find a doily or two! And they somehow have a bowl of no-name candy to offer guests like a strange satire on how seniors live everywhere. However he had an eye for quality and doesn’t accept poor quality furnishings. While a Merlot doesn’t mind taking charge, he appreciates an adopter who takes initiative. A Merlot isn’t above using intimidation to get his way, but he’s so smooth about it you have a hard time noticing! He prides himself in being unflappable, to demand respect without screaming for it. He certainly has a devious side – he didn’t get this far without knowing how to “play the game” and isn’t above a few white lies for the sake of it. He can be quite paternal as well, he enjoys taking younger bittys under his “wing” and helping raising them. While he can seem rather stiff he’s actually a warm-hearted bitty who enjoys cuddles and being needed.

Espresso

Snake: Black-tailed Criibo

Venomous?: No

Size (Bitty): Length - 0.75-1m (2.4-3.3 ft), Standing - 0.25-0.5m (0.8-1.6 ft)

Size (Full Sized): Length - 2-2.5m (7-8.5 ft), Standing - 1-1.5m (3-5 ft)

Despite the name: Espressos aren’t very active bittys. They mostly prefer the quiet – gaming and drawing are their favourite hobbies. They tend to be shy and soft spoken – loud people can startle them into muteness and a lot of the time they prefer to communicate in non-verbal ways. If you want a gaming companion an Espresso is your perfect bitty match: but be warned – gaming is a fixation for them. If you ask them to not continue a game until you can play it together later it’s almost unfair to them, they’ll become obsessed with what’s next. Games with both single player and co-op content is more ideal – he can work on the single player campaign while he waits for you to come back to the co-op campaign. His shyness makes multi-player gaming a bit hit or miss – he doesn’t like gaming where a lot of communication and strategy is necessary – he prefers staying quiet and working towards objective without any instruction given or taken. His exception is co-op, he loves playing games together with you and feels his most accomplished when you both complete a challenging level together. He isn’t super competitive but takes pride in his skills so be careful setting up play-dates with bittys that may not appreciate losing to a quiet, seemingly submissive bitty. Despite his quiet and gentle nature he isn’t one to allow people to take advantage of him or disrespect him – he will stand up for himself, usually by exiting the situation instead of getting into an argument, and when pushed, he WILL fight back. He is surprisingly skilled and controls his magic well.

G!Siblings Ampitheres

So I decided to give my ampitheres the same human-like intelligence of all my other lamia bittys, but restrict them to a one-size bitty like my Harpys. Honestly a full size ampithere’s wingspan would make them pretty tough to house indoors…

Suave

Snake: Bolen’s Python

Venomous?: No

Size: 1-1.5m long (3-5ft), 0.5m (2ft) standing

Suaves pride themselves on being, well, suave and flirtatious – it helps them stay in control of the conversation and relationship so you don’t discover how much of a dork they really are. Suaves inherited Gaster’s love or building important monuments – like the Core. He’s interested in work that will stand the test of time, with the added benefit of being practical. He’s not interested in building, say: the Pyramids for vainglory. But, if that Pyramid was covered in solar panels that provided electricity for the nearby citizens – that’s up his alley. He also has an interest in motorized vehicles like cars, trucks and motorcycles – but he admits he’d have a difficult time using one without a lot of modifications. Which could be fun. Suaves love flashy experiments and inventions that leave an impact on his audience: however, when he’s working on his next big thing he ends up working at all hours of the night in his pajamas. His inspirations are flashes of brilliance and a flurry of work, after which, he collapses into a deep sleep for up to 36 hours. Despite appearances Suaves are huge nerds who love to share their work with interested listeners and isn’t above goofy shenanigans. They share a Sans’ sense of humour and laid back attitude – but it’s a mask to cover the whirling chaos of the mind within. Suaves can be surprisingly immature and will get a kick out of pranks and childish humour. A Suave can summon up to four disembodied “hands” to help him work on projects that require dexterity but doesn’t often use constructs in offensive magic. He’s more of a behind-the-scenes guy – but he can certainly manage bone attacks.

Savvy

Snake: Amazon Tree Boa

Venomous?: No

Size: 1.25-1.75m long (4-6ft), 0.75m (2.5ft) standing

While Suaves are the rock star scientists, the Savvys end up being in the babysitter role more times than they’d like. Savvys inherited Gaster’s interest in the soul and physical health of monsters and humans; since Savvys are on the autistic spectrum it helps them understand others better because, although they have trouble empathizing with others, it does not mean they don’t CARE. I head-cannon that smoking is a Gaster-trait and a Savvy’s Papyrus half REFUSES to participate in such a disgusting habit! Therefore Savvy’s tend to have an oral fixation to make up for the lack of smoking: chewing on the end of pencils, pens, their own tails… and rely far too much on caffeine. A Savvy works hard, but on a schedule and his experiments are always tightly controlled as opposed to a Suave’s scientific method. Savvys are polite, distinguished and a bit absent minded when it comes to personal relationships. If you’re looking for a bitty that will faun over you – look elsewhere. While Savvy’s certainly care about their adopters and family they are independent and self sufficient. They can seem humourless but the right touch can send them into giggles, they are very passionate about their interests and appreciate an interested audience (or at least captive). Savvys enjoy being needed and do well in situations where they can work as doctor’s, biologists or psychologists. They’re not judgmental and they like to look at the world with endless curiosity and enthusiasm! Savvys can summon up to four disembodied “hands” to help him work on projects that require dexterity but prefers to use his magical energies in his studies and use of healing magic. His offensive magic abilities are rather stunted because of this.

Bonus Lamia Bitty - Blueberror

Blue Ribbon

Snake: Blue striped Ribbon Snake

Venomous?: No

Size (Bitty): 0.5-1m (1.6-3ft), 0.3m standing

Size (Full Sized):1-1.5m (3-5ft) 0.5m standing

Ribbons are afraid of being alone (autophobic), they know that being alone in the anti-void is what caused their transformations from Blueberries to Blueberrors. They thrive in large families and want to be seen as a friend and protector by the group. Do not adopt one of these guys if you spend a lot of time out of the home and can’t provide them attention. A bitty family is a good stop-gap but they really need validation and one-on-one time with their adopters. Ribbons retain most of their personality traits from their Blueberry days but they’re a little… off. A little, too intense. Ribbons can get caught up in an emotion or situation and can spiral out of control whether the emotion is: joy, anger, frustration, or fear. They need a patient friend who can help them “reset” their emotional clock. Of course, being an Error, it sometimes causes a hard crash that they need to restart from. Depending on the situation they can forget completely what had set them off and will continue along like nothing happened. Other times, they remember what happened but the restart gave them enough time to reprocess so they can move on and get past what set them off. They can get depressed easily especially is someone is afraid or intimidated by him – he knows he’s different now, but he’s still a good guy at heart! A Ribbons magic is star-based – they create star-shaped attacks and can even summon a star to ride around on like Kirby.

Creators

Blueberror created by @loverofpiggies

Fellswap Gold AU created by @blackggggum

G!Sans created by @bouru

Art

Fellswap Gold Sans & Papyrus + Blueberror Lamias commissioned from @calmchapsart

G!Siblings Ampitheres commissioned from @me-and-my-gaster

all art commissioned by me: @sealpointselkie / @selkiesbittybonanza

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beardycarrot · 5 years ago

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Axolotl update: one week in!

When I first got it, my baby axolotl was pretty dang pale. I didn’t realize at the time since I had no basis for comparison, but it seems being cooped up in a little deli container in a pet shop was pretty stressful. I feel bad for bettas whose owners take them home and put them in vases not much bigger than this.

It did start to recover once it was in a proper tank, with space to move around and cool, filtered water... but since I hadn’t known for sure whether I would actually be getting an axolotl that day, I hadn’t bought a hide or anything.

Temporary measures are better than nothing, right? As for food, given how absolutely tiny this axolotl (axolitl?) is, big home-grown nightcrawlers are out of the question. Even cutting a bit off of one, it would be like taking a six-foot party sub, cleaving off a few inches, and asking someone to swallow it whole. I was going to need to find some smaller worms.

...I mean, if it were me, I know what kind I would want. Garlic earthworms? Since when do fish have it so good? I ultimately ended up buying a tub of baby nightcrawlers (which were still about half the length of the axolotl’s body) and some tiny bloodworms frozen into little cubes.

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After a few days, I’d obtained a proper hide (using a rotary tool to grind away a few sharp unfinished edges on the inside), and the axolotl’s color was a lot better. You’re able to see its digestive tract because of how small and light-colored it is, and bloodworms apparently just... look like that, inside of axolotls.

At this point I hadn’t yet tried feeding it a piece of earthworm, since it wasn’t eating much at first, and I wanted to get through the entire cube of bloodworms I’d thawed. I was worried about it hurting its face on the tweezers I was using, since the bloodworms are so small, so instead of feeding it directly I just dropped some bloodworms near the axolotl and let it sniff them out. As you can see, some drifted behind the hide, and I was forced to pull it away from the walls. Note to self: get a reptile dish to put the bloodworms in.

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Even a tiny segment of a tiny earthworm is a bit much for this tiny axolotl. Well, at least I know I can feed it these without worrying about a mess. My next concern was putting some kind of substrate on the bottom of the tank. This is apparently a tricky issue for a lot of axolotl owners; gravel is no good because the way axolotls suck up food can lead to them ingesting it, and while the same is true of sand, they can at least safely pass it most of the time.

Neither is ideal, however, as the amount of waste axolotls produce can make cleaning gravel or sand difficult. Most people who choose a substrate go with sand, but that’s not currently an option for me, as my ‘lotl is so small that swallowing even sand could be an issue. The alternative is leaving the bottom of the tank bare, but the smooth glass prevents the axolotl from gaining purchase, which can stress them out.

I’ve yet to see anyone suggest this while researching the subject, but in my mind the ideal substrate for an axolotl would be something with a rough enough texture that they can crawl along it, but is impermeable enough that nasty stuff won’t build up inside. Something in one solid piece so that the axolotl won’t ingest it, while looking like a natural bottom for a watery environment. Something... that is a single piece of natural slate exactly the size of the bottom of my aquarium. Too bad that’s not a thing you can just buy, eh?

OH WAIT YES IT IS BECAUSE I DID JUST THAT.

After spending ages browsing Amazon and home improvement stores for slate tiles that would fit my needs, I eventually found BlankSlateCrafts on Etsy, who sells home goods made of slate... as well as big pieces of unfinished natural slate, which just so happen to be 10″x20″, the same size as your standard ten gallon aquarium! It needed to be trimmed a bit, since the interior dimensions of the tank are a bit smaller, but this was an incredibly lucky find. Since I’d told him that I would be experimenting with cutting the slate, and that he could just send me a discolored piece if he had any (hey, discoloration is natural, I’m not a suburban mom making it into a fancy cheese board), he decided to send me two slates for the price of one! Sweet guy.

Finally, I decided to pick up a few aquatic plants. Some people don’t bother with plants, but they can really help to reduce the nitrates (converted from the nitrites (converted from the ammonia (converted from the axolotl poop))) in the water. Since axolotls don’t like a lot of light, I went with plants that also thrive in low light: java fern, hornwort, and a marimo. The hornwort is mostly there to sit at the output of the filter and reduce the amount it disturbs the water, but it should also help to keep the water clean.

So, all together, what does the tank look like now?

Bam! Seeing the wall and power cords through the back kinda makes me want to get one of those scenery backings for the tank, but other than that, I’m really happy with how it all came together! I guess we’ll see how it works out on a practical level, but the slate at the very least LOOKS great, and my little axolotl seems to be exploring a lot more than before. Whether it’s due to being able to walk instead of swimming everywhere or because there are actually points of interest in the tank now is unknown, but...

Well, what do you think, Kirby?

...Okay, I’m not 100% sold on the name Kirby yet, but it’s growing on me. Tiny, pink, consumes everything like a vacuum? I’m also considering Woobeewoo, Crona, Quality Woop, and a few other things... so the Untitled Axolotl Project remains, for the time being, a work in progress.

“The Creation of A Lotl” - The Artsy Axolotl, March 2020

#axolotl

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vanessakirbyfans · 4 years ago

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Vanessa Kirby has never given birth, but after shooting her first lead movie role in “Pieces of a Woman,” she kind of feels like she has.

“Whenever I see a pregnant woman now, or someone’s telling me that they’ve just given birth, I smile,” she said in a recent video chat. “I feel with them.”

The two full days she spent shooting a searing scene for the film could explain this psychic confusion, as could the thorough way Kirby, 32, immersed herself in the role.

In “Pieces of a Woman,” which debuts Jan. 7 on Netflix after a limited theatrical release in December, Kirby plays Martha, a pregnant woman whose home birth goes horribly wrong.

This pivotal event at the beginning of the film plays out in a 24-minute, single-take scene that starts with Martha’s first contractions and ends in tragedy. The camera follows Martha, her partner Sean (Shia LaBeouf) and a midwife, Eva (Molly Parker), around the couple’s apartment, condensing the agonies of labor into under half an hour.

In September, the film premiered at the Venice Film Festival, where Kirby won the best actress award, and began to be talked about as an Oscar contender.

Kirby said she wanted to portray Martha’s labor as authentically as possible. “That was terrifying, because I didn’t want to let women down,” she added.

So she got down to research. Watching many onscreen depictions of birth left Kirby no closer to understanding the experience, she said, since they were so censored and sanitized.

“Then I was even more scared, because I realized that I had a responsibility to show birth as it is, not as it’s even edited in documentaries,” Kirby said.

She talked to women who had given birth and women who’d had miscarriages, as well as midwives and obstetrician-gynecologists at a London hospital. While she was there, a woman arrived having contractions, and agreed to let Kirby observe the birth.

The experience of watching that six-hour labor “changed me so profoundly,” Kirby said. “Every second of what was happening to her, I just absorbed.”

And she began to understand how to play Martha. The woman in the hospital went into a primal, animal-like state, Kirby said. “Her body was taking over and doing it, so that helped me so much for the scene,” she added.

Over two days, that long take was shot six times. In a phone interview, the director, Kornel Mundruczo, who also works in theater and opera, said that preparing it was like getting a stunt scene ready: “Lots of planning, but you don’t know what’s actually going to happen.”

In the end, each take was different, Kirby said: Martha and Sean’s conversations shifted, the way Martha’s body reacted to the contractions was distinctive each time.

“It was, I think, probably the best career experience I’ve ever had,” Kirby said of those two days of shooting. Inspired by the labor she’d observed, she tried to think as little as possible, she said, and not judge what her body was doing in the scene.

After a decade of work, “Pieces of a Woman” is Kirby’s first time leading a feature film, and it is a bold and memorable role that shows her flexing her acting muscles. Mundruczo said he needed an actor at Kirby’s exact career point: “Where all of the skills are already there, but the fear is not,” he said. “When you are very established, you are more and more careful.”

Kirby has been honing those skills since she was a teenager. She grew up in a wealthy, West London suburb, where she attended a private, all-girls’ school and escaped the social pressures of teenage life onstage, in plays and youth drama clubs.

“Every time I walked into that space, I suddenly felt not judged at all, I just felt accepted,” Kirby said. “You didn’t have to be anything, or do anything right.”

After graduating from college, where she studied English literature, Kirby was accepted to the prestigious London Academy of Music & Dramatic Art in 2009. A few months before term began, though, she was offered three stage roles by David Thacker, a former director-in-residence at the Royal Shakespeare Company, who was then the artistic director of the Octagon Theater in Bolton, a town in northern England.

Come to Bolton, he told her, and you will learn more from these roles — which included Helena in “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” and Ann Deever in “All My Sons” — than you will in three years of drama school. Kirby agreed, and now describes that season as her training.

“I learned everything there,” she said. Working with Thacker taught her to trust herself, to find her own way as an actor, rather than waiting for other people to tell her what to do, she said.

Kirby has been working steadily ever since, with lead roles in the West End, as well as high profile supporting roles in films and British TV costume dramas. She starred as Princess Margaret in the first two seasons of “The Crown,” a performance that earned her a BAFTA award. Her Margaret fizzes with restless energy, an ideal foil for Claire Foy’s restrained Queen Elizabeth.

In 2018’s “Mission Impossible — Fallout,” she played the White Widow, a glamorous black-market broker who carries a knife in her garter, and knows how to use it. She is slated to appear in two further “Mission Impossible” sequels.

Even as these supporting roles brought her critical praise and awards, Kirby wasn’t in a hurry to find her first onscreen lead role, she said. She’s played many complex characters onstage: women like Rosalind, the fiercely intelligent heroine of Shakespeare’s “As You Like It.” She was holding out for an onscreen lead in whom she could feel some of Rosalind’s “magic,” she said, which made performing “like flying when you step onstage.”

“I could never find those roles at all onscreen,” she said. So she waited, using her smaller parts as opportunities to observe and learn, asking Anthony Hopkins about his craft when they worked together on the British TV drama “The Dresser,” and watching how generous Rachel McAdams was onset for the film “About Time,” she said.

It’s fitting, given Kirby’s theatrical background, that “Pieces of a Woman” started life as a play, written by Kata Weber, Mundruczo’s partner, who drew on the couple’s own experience of losing a child. The play “Pieces of a Woman,” which is set in Poland, consists of only two scenes: the birth, and an explosive dinner with Martha’s family that occurs about halfway through the film adaptation. Its 2018 premiere, directed by Mundruczo at the TR Warszawa theater in Warsaw, was a hit, and the production is still in the company’s repertoire.

Around the time Mundruczo turned 40, five years ago, he started wanting a bigger audience for his work, he said, so he switched from working in German, Hungarian and Polish; “Pieces of a Woman” is his first English-language film. In adapting the play for the big screen, Mundruczo set it in Boston, he said, because he felt the city’s Irish Catholic culture mirrored Poland’s conservative social landscape.

The loss of a pregnancy is rarely featured in onscreen entertainment. Mundruczo said he hopes watching Martha’s experiences will encourage “people to be brave enough to have their own answer for any loss,” he said.

In recent months, the model Chrissy Teigen and Meghan, Duchess of Sussex (writing in The New York Times), have shared stories of their experiences with pregnancy loss. Kirby said that, while researching for the role before filming, she found that women who had experienced one were “actually really relieved to talk about it,” and appreciated that someone wanted to understand.

“Pieces of a Woman” was shot over just 29 days last winter, but Kirby said it took months for her to shake off the experience of playing Martha. “I knew my job was to feel it, to feel what she felt,” she said. Carrying that degree of empathy was “really difficult and disturbing,” she said, but added that the privilege of spending time inside another’s experience is what she loves about her work.

Kirby’s next project will see her co-starring as Tallie, one of two farmers’ wives who fall in love in the United States in the 19th-century in “The World to Come,” a meditative drama from the Norwegian filmmaker Mona Fastvold slated for theatrical release next month.

And after that? Kirby said she was reading scripts, on the hunt for the next role that will scare her. She’s looking for an “untold story about women,” she said, that will feel as urgent to tell as Martha and Tallie’s did.

“What’s that expression?” she said. “Feel the fear, and do it anyway.”

#Vanessa Kirby #Pieces of a Woman #Interview #Articles

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cha-d · 5 years ago

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Early in the formidable new essay collection “Minor Feelings: An Asian American Reckoning,” the poet Cathy Park Hong delivers a fatalistic state-of-the-race survey. “In the popular imagination,” she writes, “Asian Americans inhabit a vague purgatorial status . . . distrusted by African Americans, ignored by whites, unless we’re being used by whites to keep the black man down.” Asians, she observes, are perceived to be emotionless functionaries, and yet she is always “frantically paddling my feet underwater, always overcompensating to hide my devouring feelings of inadequacy.” Not enough has been said, Hong thinks, about the self-hatred that Asian-Americans experience. It becomes “a comfort,” she writes, “to peck yourself to death. You don’t like how you look, how you sound. You think your Asian features are undefined, like God started pinching out your features and then abandoned you. You hate that there are so many Asians in the room. Who let in all the Asians? you rant in your head.”

Hong, who teaches at Rutgers, is the author of three poetry collections, including “Dance Dance Revolution,” which was published in 2007, and is set in a surreal fictional waystation called the Desert, where the inhabitants speak a constantly evolving creole. (“Me fadder sees dis y decide to learn Engrish righteo dere,” the narrator says.) “Minor Feelings” consists of seven essays; Hong explains the book’s title in an essay called “Stand Up” that centers on Richard Pryor’s “Live in Concert.” Minor feelings are “the racialized range of emotions that are negative, dysphoric, and therefore untelegenic.” One such minor feeling: the deadening sensation of seeing an Asian face on a movie screen and bracing for the ching-chong joke. Another: eating lunch with white schoolmates and perceiving the social tableaux as a frieze in which “everyone else was a relief, while I felt recessed, the declivity that gave everyone else shape.” Minor feelings involve a sense of lack, the knowledge that this lack is a social construction, and resentment of those who constructed it.

In “The End of White Innocence,” Hong describes her childhood home as “tense and petless, with sharp witchy stenches.” Her father drank; her mother, she writes, “beat my sister and me with a fury intended for my father.” Her parents grew up in postwar poverty in Korea—as a child, her father caught sparrows to eat. In order to get a visa to immigrate to the United States, he pretended to be a mechanic, and ended up working for Ryder trucks in Pennsylvania, where he was injured, and fired. He moved to Los Angeles and found a job selling life insurance in Koreatown, then bought a dry-cleaning supply warehouse, and became successful enough to send Hong to private high school and college. He recognized that Americans valued emotional forthrightness in business and developed a particular way of speaking at work. “Thanks for getting those orders in,” Hong remembers him saying on the phone. “Oh, and Kirby, I love you.”

Hong feels ashamed, but not of her proximity to awkward English, or her features, or witchy domestic stenches. “My shame is not cultural but political,” she writes. She is ashamed of the conflicted position of Asian-Americans in the racial and capital hierarchy—the way that subjugation mingles with promise. “If the indebted Asian immigrant thinks they owe their life to America, the child thinks they owe their livelihood to their parents for their suffering,” Hong writes. “The indebted Asian American is therefore the ideal neoliberal subject.” She becomes a “dog cone of shame,” a “urinal cake of shame.” Hong’s metaphors are crafted with stinging care. To be Asian-American, she suggests, is to be tasked with making an injury inaccessible to the body that has been injured. It is to be pissed on at regular intervals while dutifully minimizing the odor of piss.

For a long time, Hong recounts in the book’s first essay, she did not want to write about her Asian identity. By the time she began studying for her M.F.A., at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, she had concluded that doing so was “juvenile”—and she couldn’t find the right form, anyway. The confessional lyric felt too operatic, and realist fiction wasn’t right, either: “I didn’t care to injection-mold my thoughts into an anthropological experience where the reader, after reading my novel, would think, The life of Koreans is so heartbreaking!” In “Stand Up,” she asks, “Will there be a future where I, on the page, am simply I, on the page, and not I, proxy for a whole ethnicity, imploring you to believe we are human beings who feel pain?” The predicament of the Asian-American writer, as Hong articulates it, is to fear that both your existence and your interpretation of that existence will always be read the wrong way. At Iowa, Hong noticed other writers of color stripping out markers of race from their poems and stories to avoid being “branded as identitarians.” It was only later that Hong realized that all of the writers she had noticed doing this were Asian-American.

I read “Minor Feelings” in a fugue of enveloping recognition and distancing flinch. I have tended to interpret my own acquiescence to and resentment of capitalism in generational terms rather than racial ones; many people my age seem to accept economic structures that we find humiliating because we reached adulthood when the margins of resistance appeared to be shrinking. I know, too, that my desire to attain financial stability is connected with a hope, bordering on practical obligation, to protect my parents, as they grow older, from the worst of the country that they immigrated to for my benefit. But, for some reason, I haven’t written very much about that. Was I, like Hong’s grad-school classmates, afraid of being branded as an identitarian? Had I considered the possibility of being positioned as a proxy for an entire ethnic group, and, unlike Hong, turned away?The term “Asian-American” was invented by student activists in California, in the late sixties, who were inspired by the civil-rights movement and dreamed of activating a coalition of people from immigrant backgrounds who might organize against structural inequality. This is not what happened; for years, Asian-Americans were predominantly conservative, though that began changing, gradually, during the Obama years, then sharply under Trump. Today, “Asian-American” mainly signifies people with East Asian ancestry: most Americans, Hong writes, think “Chinese is synecdoche for Asians the way Kleenex is for tissues.” The term, for many people—and for Hollywood—seems to conjure upper-middle-class images: doctors, bankers. (We are imagined as the human equivalent of stainless-steel countertops: serviceable and interchangeable and blandly high-end.) But, although rich Asians earn more money than any other group of people in America, income inequality is also more extreme among Asians than it is within any other racial category. In New York, Asians are the poorest immigrant group.Hong describes a visit to a nail salon, where a surly Vietnamese teen-age boy gives her a painful pedicure. She imagines him and herself as “two negative ions repelling each other,” united and then divided by their discomfort in their own particular Asian positions. Then she pauses. “What evidence do I have that he hated himself?” she wonders. “I wished I had the confidence to bludgeon the public with we like a thousand trumpets against them,” she writes elsewhere. “But I feared the weight of my experiences—as East Asian, professional class, cis female, atheist, contrarian—tipped the scales of a racial group that remains so nonspecific that I wondered if there was any shared language between us. And so, like a snail’s antenna that’s been touched, I retracted the first person plural.” Hong doesn’t fully retract it—“we” appears fairly often in the book—but she favors the second person, deploying a “you” that really means “I,” in the hope that her experience might carry shards of the Asian-American universal.

Throughout the book, Hong at once presumes and doesn’t presume to speak for people whose families come from India, say, or Sri Lanka, or Thailand, or Laos—or the Philippines, where my parents were born. The Philippines were under Spanish control from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century, and under American control until the middle of the twentieth. Many Filipinos have Spanish last names and come to the States speaking English; many have dark skin. In his book “The Latinos of Asia,” the sociologist Anthony Christian Ocampo argues that Filipinos tend to manifest a sort of ethnic flexibility, feeling more at home, compared with members of other Asian ethnic groups, with whites, African-Americans, Latinos, and other Asians. The experience of translating for one’s parents is often framed as definitive for Asian-Americans, but it’s not one that many Filipinos of my generation share; my parents came to North America listening to James Taylor and the Allman Brothers, speaking Tagalog only when they didn’t want their kids to listen. I grew up in a mixed extended family, with uncles who are black and Mexican and Chinese and white. Ocampo cites a study which found that less than half of Filipino-Americans checked “Asian” on forms that asked for racial background—a significant portion of them checked “Pacific Islander,” for no real reason. It denoted proximity to Asian-Americanness, perhaps, without indicating a direct claim to it. (About a month ago, at a doctor’s appointment, an East Asian nurse checked “Pacific Islander” when filling out a form for me.)

“Koreans are self-hating,” one of Hong’s Filipino friends tell her. “Filipinos, not so much.” My experience of racism has been different than Hong’s, as has my response to it. Much of the discourse around Asian-American identity centers on racist images associated with the stereotypical East Asian face: single-lidded eyes, yellow-toned skin, a supposed air of placid impassivity. I don’t have that face, exactly, and I’m not sure that I’ve confronted quite the same assumptions; when I hear people perform gross imitations of “Chinese” accents, I don’t know if it hurts the way it does because I’m an Asian person or because I come from a family of immigrants or simply because racism is embarrassing and foul.

If you escape the dominant experience of Asian-American marginalization, have you necessarily done so by way of avoidance, or denial, or conformity? What can you do when colonization is embedded in your family’s history, in your genetic background, in your very face? If I feel comforted in a room full of Asian people rather than alarmed at the possibility that my inner racial anxieties have been cloned all around me, is this another effect of the psychic freedom I’ve been granted with double eyelids and an ambiguously Western last name, or does it mark progress in the form of a meaningful generational shift? In the decade that separates me from Hong, the currency of whiteness has lost some of its inflated cultural value; one now sees Asian artists and chefs and skateboarders and dirtbags and novelists on the Internet, in the newspaper, and on TV. Is this freedom, or is it the latest form of assimilation? For Asian-Americans, can the two ever be fully distinct?

“Minor Feelings” bled a dormant discomfort out of me with surgical precision. Hong is deeply wary of living and writing to earn the favor of white institutions; like many of us, she has been raised and educated to earn white approval, and the book is an attempt to both acknowledge and excise such tendencies in real time. “Even to declare that I’m writing for myself would still mean I’m writing to a part of me that wants to please white people,” she explains. She’s circling the edges of a trap that often appears in Asian-American consciousness, in which love is suspicious and being unloved is even worse. The editors of “Aiiieeeee!,” one of the first anthologies of Asian-American literature—it was published in 1974—argued that “euphemized white racist love” had combined with legislative racism to mire the Asian-American psyche in a swamp of “self-contempt, self-rejection, and disintegration.” A quarter century later, in her book “The Melancholy of Race,” the literary theorist Anne Anlin Cheng described “the double bind that fetters the racially and ethnically denigrated subject: How is one to love oneself and the other when the very movement toward love is conditioned by the anticipation of denial and failure?” In the introduction to his essay collection “The Souls of Yellow Folk,” published in 2018, Wesley Yang writes about a realization that he regards as “unspeakable precisely because it need never be spoken: that as the bearer of an Asian face in America, you paid some incremental penalty, never absolute, but always omnipresent, that meant that you were default unlovable and unloved.”

The question of lovability, and desirability, is freighted for Asian men and Asian women in very different ways—and “Minor Feelings” serves as a case study in how a feminist point of view can both deepen an inquiry and widen its resonances to something like universality. Essays and articles about Asian-American consciousness often invoke issues of dominance and submission, and they often frame these issues according to the experiences of disenfranchised men. The editors of “Aiiieeeee!” call the stereotypical Asian-American “contemptible because he is womanly”; Yang often identifies the Asian-American condition with male rejection and disaffection. Hong reframes the quandary of negotiating dominance and submission—of desiring dominance, of hating the terms of that dominance, of submitting in the hopes of achieving some facsimile of dominance anyway—as a capitalist dilemma. I found myself thinking about how the interest and favor of white people, white men in particular, both professionally and personally, have insulated me from the feeling of being sidelined by America while compromising my instincts at a level I can barely access. Hong writes, “My ego is in free fall while my superego is boundless, railing that my existence is not enough, never enough, so I become compulsive in my efforts to do better, be better, blindly following this country’s gospel of self-interest, proving my individual worth by expanding my net worth, until I vanish.”

I hate my Asian self the way I worry about being written off as a woman writer—which is to say, not at all. Hong concedes that the self-hating Asian may be “on its way out” with her generation: for me, the formulation still has weight, but does not capture the efflorescence of the present. The question, then, is whether the movement toward love, as Anne Anlin Cheng put it, can be made outside the grasp of coercion. Is there a future of Asian-American identity that’s fundamentally expansive—that can encompass the divergent economic and cultural experiences of Asians in the United States, and form a bridge to the experiences of other marginalized groups?The answer depends on whom Asian-Americans choose to feel affinity and loyalty toward—whether we direct our sympathies to those with more power than us or less, not just outside our jerry-rigged ethnic coalition but within it. The history of Asian-Americans has involved repression and assimilation; it has also, to a degree that is often forgotten, involved radicalism and invention. “Aiiieeeee!” was published by Howard University Press, partly as a result of the friendship that one of its editors, Frank Chin, formed with the radical black writer Ishmael Reed. Gidra, an Asian-American zine that was published in Los Angeles in the nineteen-sixties and seventies, called for the “birth of a new Asian—one who will recognize and deal with injustices.” (Gidra reported on cases of local discrimination and profiled activists such as Yuri Kochiyama; it’s now back in print.) To occupy a conflicted position is also to inhabit a continual opportunity—the chance, to borrow Hong’s words, to “do better, be better,” but in moral and political rather than economic terms.In one of the essays in “Minor Feelings,” called “An Education,” Hong looks back on her friendships in college with two other Asian-American girls—brash, unstable hellions named Erin and Helen. They made art together, they traded poetry, they got drunk and fought and made up. “We had the confidence of white men,” Hong recalls, “which was swiftly cut down after graduation, upon our separation, when each of us had to prove ourselves again and again, because we were, at every stage of our career, underestimated.” The story of their friendship is a story about the way that loving others is often a less complex and more worthy act than loving ourselves—and the way that love can blunt the psychological force of marginalization. If structural oppression is the denial of justice, and if justice is what love looks like in public, then love demonstrated in private sometimes provides what the world doesn’t. Hong is writing in agonized pursuit of a liberation that doesn’t look white—a new sound, a new affect, a new consciousness—and the result feels like what she was waiting for. Her book is a reminder that we can be, and maybe have to be, what others are waiting for, too.

#long reads

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the-necessary-unnecessary · 5 years ago

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hi again 😂😂 i keep send you asked so i hope it's o.k. hard question: surely we need another CF so we can rest viv, if you could pick someone, who would it be?, you need to be realistic cuz as we know viv will play the most minutes.

definitely okay to send me asks, you have interesting insight! Okay so I’ve mulled this one over for a while because its a hard one to get right and joe really has his work cut out here. He might keep insisting that we don’t need another cf as there are players to cover viv and other lineups that would work whilst resting her. I’d honestly like to see Jill play in that position too since she used to be a CF anyways so I’d like to see how she does more in that position. I also wouldn’t totally disregard the academy players Ruby Grant and Melissa Filis from being experimented in a cf position as they’re very attacking midfielders from what it seems.

But if we are to sign another cf basically we need someone who is on the rise and will take the opportunity to play at Arsenal even if she’s not going to get much playing time, someone who isn’t being played much already/ believes they’re going to be played even less because of other signings or someone who is versatile and can also by played as a winger or CAM if necessary. I’m also going to keep it to players who are already in the wsl, my brain can’t think on a global level at the point and honestly if they’re not going to get that many minutes anyway its less likely someone will come from abroad

This is a mix of ideally and realistically. Ebony Salmon, who plays for Bristol City and the england u-19 nt, could be a good option. Yes she just transferred to bristol over the summer so she might not be just ready to leave, but honestly bristol just haven’t been getting the results whilst she’s playing pretty well so might consider her options elsewhere. She is definitely a quality player, scoring 3 out of 6 of Bristol’s goals this season and performing well in the u-19 team. She is young and clearly has a future ahead of her so I’d like to see her in the arsenal squad shadowing viv a bit to begin with whilst simultaneously developing her own skills and play.

A more high profile player who they could sign is Chelsea and England’s Fran Kirby. Still a London team so wouldn’t have to move far/be far from Maren, but may ensure her fractionally more playing time what with Beth England already taking that starting spot and Sam Kerr’s transfer too. She’s well-weathered, she’s smart on the ball, she’s world-renown but doesn’t have too many playing expectations at the moment so would be relatively likely to take on that role at arsenal.

#wow that took a while #there's more options i'd consider but i'm too tired for this rn sorry #the asks #arsenal wfc #fran kirby #ebony salmon #og

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racefortheironthrone · 5 years ago

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Thoughts on House of X#2

I fell way behind on writing these even as I devoured each issue, so I thought I might as well knock these off as the HoX/PoX miniseries come to an end and the “Dawn of X” looms over the horizon. (Also I did a re-read recently and it got my mind buzzing.)

So let’s get into it!

Moira’s Ten Lives:

It turns out that, like everyone else, I was sort of right/wrong about time travel shenanigans. It’s technically a semi-stable time loop, but I’m not about to quibble. (Incidentally, on a re-read one of the things that’s been really impressive to see with the benefit of hindsight is the way in which Hickman et al. top each issue with the newest high concept or reveal, like some mad plate-spinning act.)

Here’s how the individual lives break down:

Life 1:

Because everything in this life takes place prior to the activation of her mutant gene (which, talk about a hell of an additive retcon), Moira’s first life is a romanticized, bucolic portrait of innocence not corrupted by worldly knowledge. The emphasis is strongly on family and nature (note the tree motif, which isn’t as prominent as the tower motif but still) as opposed to scientific pursuits.

On the other hand, you definitely get the sense that the perfect nature of this life is a distortion caused by nostalgia, as we’ll see in the next life.

Life 2:

Moira reincarnates for the first time with full knowledge of her previous life, which for all that HoX/PoX has been analyzed through the lens of both Christian and Jewish theology, can’t help but draw from Hindu and Buddhist thought.

One key aspect of her power is that Moira is given an enormous developmental leg up, being born with all of the skills of a grown adult. Suprisingly, we don’t actually get to see Moira make much use of some of the broader implications of her mutant power.

As a good scientist, Moira uses observation and experimentation to prove to herself that her memories are real and that she can change the future through her actions, two critical pieces of information.

Speaking of Buddhism, Moira’s “curse” concept is tied to the Second Noble Truth, that suffering comes from attachment. In this case, Moira’s problem is an attachment to her memories of her idealized first life: when she meets Kenneth Cowan for the second time, the emotional connection isn’t there because her foreknowledge of her first life changes her perceptions.

At the same time, I wonder how much of her reaction to this upheaval is due to her realizing that her first life wasn’t as perfect as she thought it was (the flaws she focuses on), or that she herself has changed and isn’t content to live and die as a rural schoolteacher.

In this timeline, Charles decides to come out of the closet as a mutant on national television, which is a different tack to how he’s approached pro-mutant activism in the past, although there is a common theme of putting his faith in public debate. Sadly a faith that will be broken.

Despite her misgivings about her own mutant gifts, Moira decides to fly to America to meet Charles...and dies in a plane crash. I wonder how much of her heel turn in life 3 is due to the Kenneth Cowan issue and how much of it comes from her experiencing violent death for the first time?

Life 3:

In Moira’s third life, she turns sharply away from Charles (nicely symbolized by her turning away on a pub stool) to try to cure the mutant gene, which brings her face-to-mask with Destiny, who is the closest thing that this issue has to an antagonist (at least in the sense an outside force acting on Moira and changing her behavior).

The conversation between them is split in two: in the first, Destiny does a good job of laying out why narrative of individual choice/consumerism don’t really work with regard to mutant cures, because of pre-existing structures of power and inequality that will turn an option into a mandate. Something that Whedon’s “Gifted” arc and X3 should have maybe mentioned.

(Incidentally, even before we got the later infographic from Powers of X #4 about mutant genocides, I thought this didn’t bode well for Wanda Maximoff.)

After setting up a Prisoner’s Dilemma situation - if you don’t change your behavior, this scenario will keep recurring - Destiny then gives us the next big reveal of the issue. Moira’s powers of resurrection only give her ten or eleven lives, that there is a way out of the cycle of endless rebirth if she makes the “right choice.” (Word is still out on the other aspects of the Eightfold Path.) I don’t know what the eleventh signifies - after House of X #5, I saw a lot of people suggesting pod-rebirth as her eleventh life, but I dunno.

However, I did spot something this time: Destiny “see[s] ten lives...eleven if you make the right choice at the end.” This may be me reaching, but it suggests that Destiny knows already that Moira isn’t going to get it right in lives four through nine, but isn’t telling her. Which, given the immense potential involved in combining their powers, suggests that it’s not just about Rube Goldberging her way to the Good Ending but rather that Moira has to experience her defeats personally in order to grow into the person who would make the right choice.

Life 4:

Having received a fiery “swift spiritual kick to the head,” Moira makes two changes in her life. First, she begins to approach the question of mutancy from a systems perspective - although I have some significant issues with Hickman’s evolutionary biology. Second, she looks deeper past Charles Xavier’s “confidence...arrogance,” to see the real Charles beneath, and the two fall in love (which makes the second time in her lives).

The result seems to be the 616, breaking down into the Gifted Years (the Kirby/Lee years), the Time of Hate and Fear (the All-New X-Men given to us by Claremont et al.), and “the lost decade,” which given the associated panel is a pretty clear slam on the last ten years of X-Men storytelling, most pointedly Avengers vs. X-Men.

This page (p. 17) has made me somewhat out of step with a lot of folks who’ve been arguing online that Moira’s sixth life must be the 616 - a trend we’re going to see repeating.

Regardless, this timeline is the first to end with Sentinel genocide, resulting in Moira for the first time seeing the dystopian dilemma. Much of what follows is a series of unsuccessful iterative attempts to solve this dilemma.

Life 5:

In her first go, Moira decides to see if accelerating the process will work, showing Charles what happened to his dream in her past lives. Hickman’s use of the term “radicalized” is key here to understanding what’s going on with Krakoa in X^1, because as Moira learns (and Charles will learn), separatism alone will not do the trick. Mutants got an 11-year head start to build up their defenses, and the Sentinels came anyway.

Life 6:

Because this life remains completely redacted, the fandom has gone absolutely nuts in speculation. One common speculation I’ve seen is that the X^3 timeline is Life 6, which I find quite puzzling. The reveal in Powers of X #1 that Cylobel is stuck in Nimrod’s femtofluid database is strongly suggestive that X^3 is Life 9, unless we’re going to say that in alternate timelines in which so many variables change, there’s always going to be a black brain hound mutant who looks identical to Cylobel and who dies in the exact same way. Which strikes me as falling afoul of Occam’s Razor.

Life 7:

Here’s where we really start zeroing in on the dystopic dliemma, as Moira tries to forestall the inevitable by eliminating the Trask bloodline. It doesn’t work because of the whole idea that AI is a discovery not an invention, and as a result Sentinels will always come about and the only thing that can be changed is the name of the person who’ll discover them.

Here is where Hickman’s obsession with mechanical vs. biological transhumanism (and/or singularities) really come into play. If you’ve read his book Transhuman (which I don’t necessarily recommend, as it comes with some rather nasty sophomoric undercurrents that have aged very badly in the last ten years), you’ll know that Hickman considers biological transhumanism to be superior to the alternative. Something to keep in mind when thinking about mutants vs. the man-machine supremacy, mutants vs. the technarchy, etc.

Interestingly, we never learn what happened to Xavier or the X-Men in this life.

Once again, Moira is “radicalized” by the seeming inevitability of robotic genocide, although it’s noticeable that her focus is shifting from humans to their creations.

Life 8:

Her solution is to go to Octopusheim and ally with Magneto, presumably because the Master of Magnetism is her first bet to go up against the mutants.

Magneto reacts to “the good news” with thermonuclear war, and gets curb-stomped by a combination of the Avengers, Fantastic Four, and X-Men.

Important note that by this point, Moira dismisses the idea of any great good beyond that only of mutants, and we go for another round of radicalization.

Life 9:

At this point, Moira decides to ally with Apocalypse out of desperation, presumably because Apocalypse is a revolutionary who can’t be killed as easily as Magneto can.

Although we didn’t know it at the time, this is X^2 (and I think X^3) as well, and while Apocalypse’s power levels allow him to prosecute a war “without end,” it doesn’t solve the strategic stalemate.

Life 10:

I don’t know what the two black panels suggest; it’s quite possible that they’re just pauses for emphasis.

In her tenth life, Moira takes a step back and focuses instead on “all the old ways of thinking.” Here, I think we see a preview of the Krakoan solution: mutant unity will unlock synergies of cooperation that were not possible while working with limited mindsets and only a part of mutankind.

Notably, we don’t know when Moira or anyone else found out about the possibilities of Krakoa and mutant biotechnology - we know some of it existed in Life 9 because we see Krakoan flowers being used, but we don’t know if Moira encountered it earlier or whether the higher order stuff was in use. I somehow doubt the resurrection system was intact, because it would seem to make Mister Sinister’s breeding program largely irrelevant.

Once more, we return to Powers of X #1, as we now know what Xavier learned from Moira’s mind.

Infographics:

The whole circle wrap-around thing is very evocative of other signs we’ve seen (on Cerebro when Xavier uses it for various higher-order stuff, on the Librarian’s face, etc.), but it actively makes the map harder to read, which I think is the point.

(Also, while I’m complaining: Comixology is not well set up for these large-scale infographics, because it keeps crashing on me when I try to zoom in. Very annoying.)

Note: earlier lives are more leisurely, things more spaced out, and then the pace accelerates as things get more intense.

One interesting difference between Life 4 and 616 canon: Moira and Xavier marry when she’s 23 and establish the Xavier School 12 years later.

Life 5 is interesting, because we’re seeing repeated themes of Moira in comas, even when it might not be necessary. For example, what’s the dramatic purpose of having the two Sentinel attacks?

In Life 7, I noticed that Larry Trask isn’t killed with the rest of his family. Is it because he turned out to be a mutant?

Life 8 is the first instance where I think the initial panelling let us down. The original one-two punch heavily implied that Magneto was defeated on his first attack on Washington D.C, but here we learn that he ruled America for eight years before being defeated and killed. (Incidentally, this suggests that the visions he’ll have of his failures don’t include this life).

As other people have noted about Life 9, Xavier and Magneto are killed in Years 19 and 21 respectively, which makes it easy to rule out their appearances as happening in Life 9. Also, it’s significant that the first horsemen aren’t on earth (almost certainly on Arakko/No-Place).

Life 10 including Moira’s marriage to Joseph McTaggert despite presumably knowing from earlier lives that he would be abusive suggests that Moira may well have gone into the marriage because she needed Proteus to form the Five. Not sure how I feel about that. Finally, I’m a bit puzzled about what the schism was and whether it was genuine vs. feigned (after all, Moira is faking her death, so there’s plenty of skullduggery going on).

#xmen #xmen meta #house of x #hoxpox

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buzzdixonwriter · 5 years ago

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Hoo Noo Shmoo?

Never let it be said that this blog is flagging in its enthusiasm for flogging horses so dead they’re found in the glue bin at Office Max.

To whit, the Scorsese vs MCU brouhaha.

Bottom line: Scorsese is right. As well made as MCU movies are, they ain’t cinema, they’re glorified commercials to sell MCU product.

Full disclosure: I should know, since I wrote for G.I. Joe, Transformers, and a host of other toy-based syndicated animation shows. I’m happy with the work I did, I can point proudly to specific episodes I wrote that aspire to be more than mere half-hour commercials…

…but they ain’t art.

They ain’t art, despite our aspirations to do the best job we could, because ultimately we creators were not allowed to create what we felt best for our stories, but what Hasbro deemed vital to their sales.

(The closest we got to art was when Hasbro cancelled The Inhumanoids toy line in mid-production of the TV series, and said we could finish our broadcast commitment however we saw fit so long as it didn’t result in an FCC complaint. As a result, we went nuts.)

My Hasbro / Sunbow experience remains a highpoint of my creative life, so I’m not denigrating the talent, skill, ability, spirit, and enthusiasm of those making MCU movies.

…but they ain’t art.

Now, those who love MCU movies think Scorsese’s comments are a slam against them.

Welllll…no, not directly.

But they do underscore how popularity -- especially of media designed to push product -- is a faulty measuring stick for artistic merit.

Case in point: The Shmoo.

Wuzza shmoo, you ask (and thus proving my point)?

Shmoos were extremely popular in the late 1940s. Part of the wonderfully wacky world cartoonist Al Capp created for his hit Li’l Abner comic strip, shmoos represented a parable on American consumerism, modern day geese laying not mere golden eggs but birthday cakes with candles a’blazin’.

As Capp described them:

They reproduce asexually and are incredibly prolific, multiplying faster than rabbits. They require no sustenance other than air.

Shmoos are delicious to eat, and are eager to be eaten. If a human looks at one hungrily, it will happily immolate itself -- either by jumping into a frying pan, after which they taste like chicken, or into a broiling pan, after which they taste like steak. When roasted they taste like pork, and when baked they taste like catfish. Raw, they taste like oysters on the half-shell.

They also produce eggs (neatly packaged), milk (bottled, grade-A), and butter -- no churning required. Their pelts make perfect boot leather or house timbers, depending on how thick one slices them.

They have no bones, so there's absolutely no waste. Their eyes make the best suspender buttons, and their whiskers make perfect toothpicks. In short, they are simply the perfect ideal of a subsistence agricultural herd animal.

Naturally gentle, they require minimal care and are ideal playmates for young children. The frolicking of shmoos is so entertaining (such as their staged "shmoosical comedies") that people no longer feel the need to watch television or go to the movies.

Some of the more tasty varieties of shmoo are more difficult to catch, however. Usually shmoo hunters, now a sport in some parts of the country, use a paper bag, flashlight, and stick to capture their shmoos. At night the light stuns them, then they may be whacked in the head with the stick and put in the bag for frying up later on.

Of course, in the original strip continuity, the shmoos were quickly eradicated, driven to extinction by food packagers who feared bankruptcy.

It was a sharp, biting message, and one that looked critically at both insatiable consumerism and capitalism’s claims of superiority.

Capp, of course, was too savvy a marketeer himself to eliminate the shmoos entirely, and so he provided for one breeding pair to survive…and for the shmoos to make repeated appearances for the rest of Li’l Abner’s run.

Shmoo mania ran rampant with shmoo dolls, shmoo clocks, shmoo games, shmoo candy, shmoo snacks, and shmoo apparel.

The money truck basically backed up to Capp’s front door and dumped its load on his porch. Shmoos proved insanely popular and it seemed the mania would never end…

…except it did.

To mangle metaphors, you can only take so many trips to the same well before your audience starts asking “What? Beans again?”

And then, in a fickle flash, it’s over.

I’d be hard pressed today to find anyone younger than the boomer cohort who ever heard of Al Capp or Li’l Abner unless their school or community theatre presented the Broadway musical adaptation of the strip (the show remains popular with amateur theatrical troupes such as high schools and colleges because the huge cast of Dogpatch citizens guarantees everybody who tries out for the show will land some part in it).

For all their popularity and merchandise and media impact -- songs on the radio, big spreads in weekly news magazines -- the shmoos left virtually no cultural footprint.

(Full disclosure yet again: I wrote for a Scooby-doo knock-off by Hanna-Barbera called The New Shmoo and it was a piece of crap, abandoning the whole consumerism point of the original shmoos and making them -- or just “it” in our case -- a pseudo-funny dog sidekick for a squad of mystery solving kids. And it wasn’t a piece of crap because we didn’t try our best, it was a piece of crap because the shmoo was treated as ubiquitous “product” under the misconception that of course everybody younger than Joe Barbera would recognize the name and love the character so deeply that they’d simultaneously develop amnesia about what made the original character so appealing.)

Product.

That’s what one of the most brilliant, most poignant, most spot-on commentaries on rampant consumerism and ruthless capitalism ironically reduced down to. Product.

There’s a line in Jurassic Park that resonates here: ”Life will find a way.”

Let’s paraphrase that to “Art will find a way” because like life, art is an expression of the creative urge.

Right now, by and large, it’s trapped in the giant all encompassing condom of corporate consumerism, providing fun and pleasure and excitement, but not really creating anything new, to be wadded up and thrown away when the suits are done screwing us.

But every now and then there’s a tiny pinprick in the sheath, and when that happens there’s the chance of something wonderful, something meaningful, something of lasting value emerging.

It is possible for art to emerge from a corporate context, but only if the corporate intent is to produce a work of art for its own purposes. Michelangelo carved David as a work for hire, the local doge commissioning the sculpture because he wanted to impress peers and peasants by donating the biggest statue ever made by the hottest artist of the era (and even then Michelangelo needed to resort to subterfuge to keep the doge from “improving” on his work with “suggestions” [read “commands”].)

The very first Rocky movie was a work of art because the producers focused on telling a simple, singular story about a loser who could only win by going the distance, not by defeating his opponent but by refusing to be beaten by him.

It’s a great cinematic moment that rings true and it’s going to last forever…unlike sequels Rocky II - V where Rocky fights supervillains like Mr. T and a robot (hey, that was the movie playing in my head when I watched Rocky IV and it was a helluva lot more entertaining than what I actually saw onscreen).

The suits castrated Rocky, reducing him from a unique universal cultural touchstone down to…well…product.

The MCU movies are product; rather, they are two-hour+ commercials to sell product in the form of videogames, action figures, T-shirts, and Underoos.

The real art occurred almost 60 years ago when Jack Kirby and Steve Ditko knocked out page after page as fast as they could, drawing deep from the wellsprings of their own interests, experiences, and passions.

(“What about Stan?” I hear you ask. Look, we all love Stan, but truth be told his great contribution to the MCU came in his service as drum major for the Merry Marvel marching Society. God bless him for firing up the fan base’s enthusiasm for the Marvel bullpen’s work, but compare what his artists did before and after their collaboration with him to what he did before and after his editorial tenure at Marvel and it’s clear upon whose shoulders the muses rested.)

As much fun as MCU movies are (I’ve seen about 1/3 of ‘em and enjoyed most of what I saw), I also recognize in them the harm they do.

They are promoted heavily to sell product to raise the fortunes of one of the biggest corporations on the planet, a corporation that holds control over five of the largest, most popular entertainment brands on the market.

To protect their cash cows, Disney chokes potential rivals in their cribs.

Think there’s going to be another Alien or Predator movie now that Disney owns them and Star Wars? Why create rivals to a mega-successful property you already own? (I will be genuinely surprised if we see another Guardians Of The Galaxy movie in light of the faltering popularity of Star Wars in Disney’s eyes; they’re going to want to shore up their billion dollar investment rather than call it a day and let some upstart -- even an upstart they own 100% -- rob them of revenue.)

Disney’s battle plan to choke out all potential rivals leaves no room in the DEU (Disney Expanded Universe) for independent minded creators.

They want competent hired pens who can churn out the product they desire in order to bolster sales of other products derived from those.

(Even more full disclosure: I wrote for Chip ‘n’ Dale’s Rescue Rangers as well as some Aladdin and Scrooge McDuck comic book stories.)

Disney’s MCU, for all its expertly executed whiz-bang, is a bloated, soulless zombie, a giant gaudy inflated parade balloon blocking the vision of others.

There’s a scene in the movie The Founder -- a genuine cinematic work of art that comments ironically on the selling of a product -- that applies here.

Ray Kroc (Michael Keaton) relentlessly browbeats the McDonald brothers (Nick Offerman and John Carroll Lynch) into letting him replace their real milkshakes with what will come to be known as the McShake, an ersatz product that at best reminds one of what a real milkshake should taste like.

The McDonald Brothers are horrified. Not only does it not taste like a real milkshake, but it goes against the very grain of what they desire as restauranteurs: To provide quality food quickly for their customers, trading value for value.

Kroc will have none of this. To him the customers are simply one more obstacle between him and their money.

He doesn’t see them as the source of his revenue, but as impediments to same.

What benefits them, what nurtures their diets, what gives them pleasure, what trades value for value is completely unimportant to him.

They exist only to make him rich and powerful.

By the end of the film, Kroc has effectively declared war on his own partners, his own employees, his own customers. He recognizes he is not in the business his customers and employees and partners think he’s in (i.e., fast food) but rather in the real estate business, buying land that McDonald’s franchises must lease from him in order to operate.

By the end, he’s not concerned with how well his customers eat, or how well his employees are treated, or how financially secure his franchise managers feel.

By the end, all he wants is the money, and he doesn’t care how his franchises make it so long as they pass it along to him.

As a result, McDonald’s contributes heavily to America’s obesity and diabetes epidemics, advising their employees to take second jobs so they can afford to continue working for them at substandard wages.

Disney’s MCU is a super-sized Happy Meal™ that’s ruining the cultural health of its consumers.

#Marvel #Disn #Jack Kirby #Stan Lee #Steve Ditko #Star Wars #MCU #Rocky #Martin Scorsese #media #movies #superheroes

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whiterosebrian · 6 years ago

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Open Letter to Professor Geek

Professor Geek,

I have seen a large number of your videos on YouTube. You have commented negatively on “social agenda” within movies, TV series, and comics. Very recently I sent a direct message on Instagram inviting you to a private dialogue over representation and social justice. I did not get a response even as I kept in mind what I wanted to ask or say. Why am I making this letter public? I want to help build bridges between people, however difficult that task might be in the polarized cultural climate.

You have associated yourself with “Comicsgate”, a loose grouping of fanboys (and, yes, a handful of fangirls) opposing “Social Justice Warriors” bringing “forced diversity” and “politics” into comics and related media. “Comicsgate” is itself associated with other sects of fandom that similarly militate against “forced diversity” and “politics”. People within this overall grouping assert that they do not oppose diversity among creators and characters and stories per se, but rather diversity handled poorly. I admit that diverse characters and their distinctive stories can be poorly made and feel contrived. They assert that they do not oppose integration of real-world issues per se but rather real-world issues clumsily crammed into fantastical stories. I admit that politics and social issues can be integrated poorly.

I can even accept that, ideally, one group of people should not be pitted against another. I am male, my ethnic heritage is very much northern European, I’m sexually attracted predominantly to women, and I’ve never experienced serious gender dysphoria. I do believe in reconciliation and friendship and collaboration. That basic sentiment, however, quickly bumps into complications.

The reason why so many creators want to introduce diversity revolves around historical contexts of marginalization and erasure. In your videos, you seem to ignore the historical injustices and the current desire to correct them. Is it not true that women and various ethnic or religious groups have been depicted in stereotypical or downright demeaning ways? Is it not true that sexual minorities have been depicted as either freaks or demons? Is it not true that various groups of people have suffered at the hands of ignorant or outright prideful or scornful attitudes? Is it not true that social systems arose that perpetuated injustices, from silencing to controlling to worse?

Twitter talkers and Youtube commenters who link themselves to ComicsGate might claim that their movement is open and accepting. That may be true in some if not many cases. I still ask you to read and listen to what opponents of Comicsgate are actually saying. They bring up evidence of harassment and hate speech that is simply too strong and too voluminous to be entirely dismissed. Do you intend to dismiss or gaslight? I should hope that you do not readily dismiss the many marginalized people who experience harassment and hate speech. As I type this I’m reading of Comicsgate folks abusing Twitter’s reporting system to punish their critics.

I also ask that you take a closer look at those who comment on your videos. Some of them will directly echo extreme-right stereotypes and conspiracy theories. For example, some will repeat the talking point of Cultural Marxists eroding culture and civilization. I invite you to look into critical videos that expose “Cultural Marxism” as a half-truth or outright hoax rooted in antisemitism. Do you stand against such stereotypes and conspiracy theories?

Late last year, after nearly twenty-five years as a convert, I made the very difficult decision to defect from Catholicism (and I am still seeking a new spiritual home). I had many difficult questions about what that religion looks like in the real world. When browsing the Twitter feeds of centrist or left-leaning priests and their fellow-travelers, I would see horribly inflammatory responses that further made me question the fruits of Catholicism. The term “SJW”—which you have used multiple times in your videos—is used within this context as a means of mocking any Catholic who dares to give a thought to social justice and the uplifting of marginalized people. Apparently, “saving souls”—whatever that means in the real world—is the only thing that Catholics may engage in doing. When I hear “SJW” used as pejorative I think of mockeries of anyone who voices any concern for marginalized people and systemic injustices. I’m not entirely ready to think of you using “SJW” in exactly the same way, but I feel that it draws dangerously close.

It may very well be that characters have appeared throughout comics history coming from marginalized groups. Yes, that’s true. That wasn’t not because of conservatism, for lack of a better term. That was in spite of conservatism.

Recall that Black Panther was created in the 1960s. Stan Lee and Jack Kirby may very well have riding the wave of the Civil Rights movement, when black Americans were trying to gain more rights—and, ultimately, fuller humanity—than local and state governments afforded them. Stan Lee would later publicly state that when he created the likes of Black Panther he wanted to show different people as real, human characters. He wanted to influence young readers of the time to respect different people as real, human people. You might also recall that Jack Kirby worked with Joe Simon on Captain America comics during the Second World War. They were American Jews (like Lee) who felt a need to do their part to fight Nazism even before the U.S. government declared war on the Axis Powers. They were even threatened by domestic Nazis for making those comics! I’d also like to note a famous story arc on the Superman radio show where Superman fought against the Ku Klux Klan, with a script influenced by a government agent’s research into the Klan.

Shouldn’t a wide variety of people get to share the spotlight? That’s the fundamental question that I’m discussing. Shouldn’t a wide variety of people get to be seen as full-fledged humans who are welcomed? That is the main implication of the efforts at diversifying characters and allowing diverse creators to create.

In many of your videos you have appealed to mythology and archetypes. You’ve spoken in particular of the “iconic feminine” and “iconic masculine”. Yes, I do see value in ancient mythology and archetypes. I can draw upon them. On a side note, I can even see how the differences of male and female brains (which you’ve mentioned), plus the research into those brains and apparent mismatches with the rest of the body, have led to more understanding and acceptance of trans people.

Surely I can also draw upon modern insights and the voices of historically marginalized people who are now speaking. Surely I should be able to write complex and nuanced stories that go beyond tired formulas. Would you accept that archetypes can be degraded to hollow stereotypes? Would you accept that characters should have a chance to shine outside rigid molds? Would you accept that stories should be relevant to people’s real lives and not simply be hollow escapism or antiquated abstraction?

Among the people associated with Comicsgate and other anti-SJW fan sects, I believe that you are far from the most virulent or radical. You also seem to be a sincere seeker of truth and beauty. That is why I invited you to a dialogue then later decided to compose and post an open letter. If you ever do see this, I ask you to look carefully at all my words and trust that I mean well. You are welcome to publicly respond as long as you make an honest effort to respond to the points and concerns that I raised. I ask you to consider where you go from here as a pundit and as a member of the human family.

Blessed be,

Brian Solomon Whiterose

#comicgate #open letter #comics #representation #social justice

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scribemallow · 6 years ago

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kirburbia ch. 28 - save as draft

you’ve gotta get your feelings out somehow.

support me here, and read in full on ao3 or below!

Meta Knight tries his best to think. Tries to think about where he’ll go now, what he’ll do with the time he’s been afforded. Lets the car engine thrum underneath his fingers and attempts the best he can to focus his mind- concentrate and know.

Is there anything out there for me?

Then it comes to him. The one place that Dedede forbade him from going- at least as a formality. Or some kind of joke. To Meta Knight, in the moment, it doesn’t matter.

The Outback Steakhouse. Whatever Dedede’s problem with that place is, it’ll piss him off real good if I show up there.

The car kicks into gear again as Meta Knight puts his hands on the equipment, adjusting it as necessary and taking off from the parking lot and onto the road. Before long, he’s driving alongside hundreds of anonymous faces, unknown people, going wherever whenever regardless of Meta Knight’s actions. And it soothes him, at least a little, to know that he’s not alone in the world, but it can’t stop the craving he has for the world to start turning again. For him to see Dedede and Kirby, making up and going back to the way things were before.

----------------

so. long post below.

i fucked up real bad. the situation is a little hard to explain, and though it may be hard to understand it please give me the benefit of the doubt here. i’m a guy, a bachelor, mid-30s and i live alone. i’ve dated briefly in the past, but there aren’t many important people in my life. amongst the people i’m close with is a male friend of mine. we’ve had a long and complicated past together, but too much crazy shit happens to us together for us to not come out of it with our friendship intact. mid-30s, probably even more of a loner than i am. doesn’t associate with his family often, like me.

my normal home is on a sizeable family estate outside of the us, but amongst my personal property is a very generic suburban home in the midwest. i stay there sometimes when i need to clear my head. recently, due to events including a natural disaster, aforementioned male friend is staying with me in this home. he has his nephew with him. again, complicated story, but it’s basically a parental relationship. he’s not surface-level parental, so he doesn’t get called dad or anything, but all i can say is thank fuck he’s a competent adult in the situation. sweet kid, but he gets into trouble a lot, meanwhile i feel like i’m barely out of my 20s. i don’t like to admit it, but my current job is a managerial position and basically the result of nepotism incarnate. his thing is complicated, but he’s self employed, and i’ve always admired that he runs his own shit.

so this weird inter-family vacation starts with us on fairly rough terms. life has been busy as all hell and things happen so fast, whatever. but we warm up to eachother a lot quicker than i expected. like, way quicker. i was more expecting hanging out with a kid and the guy i know who doesn’t say shit to be something i’d tolerate, not enjoy. we go to the park, teach the kid a new words, hang out and grill in my backyard etc. basically just two bros chilling. this stretches out over a bunch of lazy summer weeks where we really aren’t doing anything much other than hanging out with the kid. once we’re able to take him to daycare, we spend a couple days together instead of just the nights. and i don’t think anything in this post would be so much of a problem if i didn’t enjoy his company as much as i do. i stated previously that i’m not close to many people. my career mostly involves telling other people to do things and mandated showboating, so no colleagues i can relate to, and i don’t get out much. you are entirely right to think this is a bit sad. this is a dude i’m really interacting with for the first time in a while, and it feels great.

so where’s the fuckup, you might ask? well, it happened yesterday. we go to a café after finding a lost cat (mostly irrelevant to this) and, well, he “comes out” to me. we talked about a joke and i said it was weird for two men to date. understandably, this did not fly with him. i promise i’m not close-minded, okay? or at least i’m trying not to be. my parents spend a lot of time trying to hook me up with girls they know, so i never thought of it like that is all. he gets mad, i gets mad, frostiest drive home you’ll ever experience. no telling the kid, who gets his favourite cartoons all night to distract him. we avoid each other until the morning.

in the morning, my car is gone, as is my friend. the easiest conclusion here is the correct one. he drove off with it, taking the keys and everything. which absolutely sucks, by the way, but we’ve survived way worse. i call him and we kind of start our regular joking banter routine before i just, really want my car back, ideally with him in it. then we disagree, it goes on and the call disconnects. i forget who turned it off. then i go to sulk and mope and make this post on reddit so you guys can goof on my failure. all after taking a nap and dreaming.

i don’t hate him. and i don’t really understand that dream exactly, but i know he was there, and we were both crying. after a while we were kissing each other. like, on the lips and shit. it finished before it could get any more interesting, but now i know that i’m not just an idiot, i’m a hypocrite. guy who internalizes years of pressure from his family to marry a woman for business purposes represses exclusive attraction to men.

what a shocker, huh.

#metadede #meta knight #king dedede #kirby #kirburbia

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