The people against bows becoming a trendy fashion accessory has annoyed me sooo much lately. Saw a tiktok that was like “if you get uncomfortable with us saying wearing bows infantilizes women and supports the patriarchy, it just means you’re uncomfortable with us pointing out you’ve been engaging in a harmful trend/behavior 😌” aaaaaAAAAAAH people online are allergic to nuance

I wish we had more female characters like Eleanor Shellstrop. One of the most unlikable people you've ever met. Read a Buzzfeed article on most rude things you can do on a daily basis and decided to use that as a list of goals. Makes everyone's day worse just by being there. Dropped a margarita mix on the ground and tried to pick it up, only to get hit by a row of shopping carts which pushed her into the road where she was hit by a boner pill delivery truck, killing her instantly. Cannot keep a romantic partner despite being bisexual. Had a terrible childhood but will die before she gets therapy. Best employee at a scam company. Just the worst but also can't help but root for her to improve.

Absolute loser. Girl-failure. Bad at almost everything. Literally perfect female character.

I'm getting so sick of major female characters in historical media being incredibly feisty, outspoken and public defenders of women's rights with little to no realistic repercussions. Yes it feels like pandering, yes it's unrealistic and takes me out of the story, yes the dialogue almost always rings false - but beyond all that I think it does such a disservice to the women who lived during those periods. I'm not embarrassed of the women in history who didn't use every chance they had to Stick It To The Man. I'm not ashamed of women who were resigned to or enjoyed their lot in life. They weren't letting the side down by not having and representing modern gender ideals. It says a lot about how you view average ordinary women if the idea of one of your main characters behaving like one makes them seem lame and uninteresting to you.

calling my lover "mine" but not in the way that my toothbrush or notebook are mine, mine in the way my neighborhood is mine, and also everybody else's, "mine" like mine to tend to, mine to care for, mine to love. "mine" not like possession but devotion.

something so fucked up about Chat Noir’s whole deal is that he is in a lot of ways Adrien playing a character. Like Adrien picked up his miraculous and was told he’d be a superhero so he was like “ok, time to act like a superhero!” and he lets himself have fun w it and play up the role and let loose and kind of just allow himself to be silly and goofy and have fun and for once in his life not care about performing Perfection™.

But. But none of the other characters KNOW THAT. So everyone just sees Chat Noir and is like “look at this guy’s ego. He’s so full of himself. Surely it’d be fair to knock him down a few pegs” without being aware of how few pegs he actually HAS. He’s like the “insecure character who overcompensates in ego” trope except he’s really not doing it unironically, he’s just having a fun LARP pretending to have self worth in his off-hours but nobody else is on the same page about it being a game and he refuses to tell them. He just dramatically pouts about it and lets them laugh and pretends like he’s not internalizing it and it is almost 3 am and my brain forced me to write this instead of sleeping I’m gonna take a melatonin

I think I can trace my intense hatred for the whole "regulations are just corporate bullshit, building codes are just The Man's way of keeping you down, we should return to pre-industrial barter and trade systems" nonsense back to when I first started doing electrical work at one of the largest hospitals in the country.

I have had to learn so much about all the special conditions in the National Electric Code for healthcare systems. All the systems that keep hospitals running, all the redundancies and backups that make sure one disaster or outage won't take out the hospital's life support, all the rules about different spaces within the hospital and the different standards that apply to each of them. And a lot of it is ridiculously over-engineered and overly redundant, but all of it is in the service of saving even one life from being lost to some wacky series of coincidences that could have been prevented with that redundancy.

I've done significantly less work in food production plants and the like, but I know they have similar standards to make sure the plants aren't going to explode or to make sure a careless maintenance tech isn't accidentally dropping screws into jars of baby food or whatever. And research labs have them to make sure some idiot doesn't leave a wrench inside a transformer and wreck a multi-million dollar machine when they try to switch it on.

Living in the self-sufficient commune is all fun and games until someone needs a kidney transplant and suddenly wants a clean, reliable hospital with doctors that are subject to some kind of overseeing body, is my point.

What About The Kens?

I'm already seeing guys complain about the Barbie movie end, how they wanted Kens to be equal in Barbieland but were only given a small part on the Cabinet.

That's the point.

You're meant to feel bad for the Kens. Believe me, women aren't partying over the 'Returns to Matriarch' ending. Some will be, but the ones who also clocked the meaning behind it won't. Most women will also feel bad for Kens. Because it's an exact parallel to how women are treated in reality.

Men, you're meant to be upset. You're meant to question it. Because you're meant to feel it, and feel what that is like, so you can finally understand women. You're upset at seeing it in a movie, now imagine living it in reality. That's being a woman.

Kens were shit on so you could feel what it was like for women this entire time. Kens were being used as a placement so you could see yourself in a woman's shoes. A world dominated by the opposite sex. When Ken leaves, and sees male presidents (All men) for the first time, men being doctors and lawyers, etc, realising he is more than just a prop for Barbie, that was on purpose. Because that is the feeling that Barbie gave to women. It's why you cheer for him at first before he goes a little overboard.

It's exactly why the real world was an exaggerated Partriarchy and Barbieland an exaggerated Matriarchy. Neither wins. Neither is equal. None of them change for the better. It's why you should want women in the real world to be respected, and Kens in Barbieland to be respected.

The thing is, women also didn't win. Not in the real world. In Barbieland, yes, but not anywhere else. The real world didn't change. But you didn't notice, did you? That Gloria (The mother that helped Barbie) also didn't get a position on the Mattel board? It was still all men? Her idea was ignored until it made a profit, and the men will likely get the credit? She'll still just be the receptionist? The women representing the real world didn't get anymore opportunities, neither did the men in Barbieland.

I was hoping that Gloria would be offered a position on the board, and that the Barbie Cabinet would introduce another entire Cabinet to represent the Kens, but neither happened. They're complete mirrors.

But which one did you actually notice? Which did you actually care about? Now tell me again the ending was unfair. Because it was. For both parties. That's the point.

The difference is, Barbieland is fictional. You will walk out of the theatre with the reassurance that at least it's not real. Women won't. Women can't. Companies not giving women equal opportunities or voices isn't fictional, and that was just one example. There are no women presidents (USA at least) for us to go look at in the real world. We don't have somewhere to go to realise it could be different for us like Ken did. Barbie and make believe is all we had when we were kids, or even now.

You're supposed to be mad, just not at the movie.

(I point. Gently, in the voice of somebody who’s mind touched by the outer gods, i whisper truth in your ears:

Your honor the horses are now lesbians

(Anyways here’s the designs)

This might seem like an "old man yells at cloud" situation, but it's just wild growing up and being told how dangerous distracted driving is - how, at highway speeds, you can traverse the length of a football field (100 yards, 91 meters) in a matter of seconds - how one split second sending a text while driving could result in a potential fatal crash, and then getting on the road as a driver and being surrounded by billboards. Their entire purpose is to catch one's attention, so they're lining major roads, which tend to be highways. How is it that you're told how important it is to never be distracted while driving, but still being advertised to?

At best, this type of advertising is an eyesore to pedestrians and motorists and a general waste of electricity to light it, and at worst, it is an active danger considering they are there to advertise and therefore, must catch people's attention.

I'm not even against advertising in theory, but this particular mode bothers me so much and I hate how pervasive it is - especially in large cities or highways.

gooooooooorls

Breathing is something you don’t think about until you can’t do it anymore.💀

Story of Frill being brought back is something that has been hiding in my folders for several years unfinished. I’m still not quite happy with it, but I guess it’s time to accept it and move on to something else. 

Frill is my DnD character. A skeleton bard with a lot of package to carry on his bony shoulders. 

still thinking about the imagery of the changebringer coin embedded in the wall after the blast, pointing bells hells toward the exit. the final piece of divine guidance from their cleric, who just saved all their lives, pointing them on a path up toward hope

keyleth wearing a hat that says “ravens want me goldfish fear me”

You know, it's rather interesting to me that Taylor Swift's parasocial relationship with her fans is honestly more akin to a YouTuber than a writer's. When I scroll through her tag on tumblr/Twitter, it's far more regarding the connection to her personal life/relationship developments than the actual metaphors/fictional story she might be telling. Everything comes back to how her songs reflect back on her relationships with Joe/Matty/Travis/Jake/insert ex-boyfriend here. And what fascinates me about it is that even though she complains about it, she leans into that very perception because it strengthens the parasocial bond.

The marketing for TTPD so clearly being about Joe Alwyn and the songs to Matty Healy. The marketing/video for Red TV so CLEARLY being about Jake Gyllenhaal, with so many of the new lines in All Too Well specifically being digs at him (I'll get older but your lovers stay my age, casting an actor that looks like him for the video, specific lines in I Bet You Think About Me). The fact that songs like Getaway Car and Bejeweled and Gorgeous and London Boy and Lavender Haze being picked apart at time of release and long after for signs of relationships crumbling. The way she uses surprise songs in relation to her relationship development with Joe/Matty/Travis. The damn TTPD "stages of grief" playlists where she deliberately undid/changed the meanings of old songs just to keep her audience speculating on her love life.

It's not sexist to point out that her wielding her love life is a marketing tool and that the strongest connection to her audience isn't the strength of her writing/the composition of her music- it's her deliberate crafting of a connection between her music and her personal life, leaving the audience invested in her music as an extension of Taylor the Person/Girlfriend rather than Taylor the Artist.

Quiet Zemnian mornings ✨️🌄

It’s about this time, another voice pushes into your head, like a bat out of hell.