Therapist: “You tried saying no?”

Me: “Yes but it doesn’t work like that, so, it didn’t help.”

Her: “Can you ask for more?”

Me: “Yes but it doesn’t work like that, so, it didn’t help.”

Her: “You tried xyz?”

Me: “Yes. It didn’t help.”

Her: “…..”

Me: “..…”

Her: “I’m actually angry FOR you.”

Me:

There is so much to unpack in Joni's post. First of all I don't think he is solely speaking about Louis, but in general of all the things he has seen, witnessed and probably forcedly partecipated to in some measure in all these years of working.

This being said, let's talk about just his experience working with Louis. How many times he must have seen Louis pretending and faking a romance while he knew Harry was waiting in the hotel, or on the yatch, or wherever. How many times he has accompanied Louis at work: stunt paps, Louis clubbing - and clubbing in a certain way - in order to play his public persona. How many behind the scenes discourses he must have heard, how many times he himself had to lie and pretend (to fans, to friends, maybe even with his family and loved ones) because he was and still is under NDAs.

Anyone who works steadily for an artist of that caliber - especially in those circumstances in which Louis is - is not immune to the dynamics behind it and has to play a specific character every single time they are publicly seen with that artist. We have to understand that every single time we see Louis (my whole speech values for Harry too) is work, because of the circunstances he lives in since he was just eighteen. And this must be eveeything but easy for Joni, as for all of them, especially on the long run. Especially if they do not have something that really makes it worthy.

Louis can play this game because the prize is love. He does it Harry, for their love story (as much as Harry does). But Joni? For Joni is just work, for as much he can like and care about the artist he is working for. And there is no job committment that is worth all the shit the industry puts you into.

wow i love twitter sm.

on a serious note - i think it's funny to portray women not wearing make-up as silly and childish when you're the one apparently caring so much about what other people are doing to their faces.

ask yourself: why do you find bare faces not appropriate for formal events? why does it bother you to see a woman without makeup? how does it effect you? why do you think it effects you?

you're so insistent that there are no societal pressures at play, that women are doing this exclusively for themselves and for the joy of it - then where does this urge to force it on women who don't find joy in it come from? why does it annoy you to see women in their natural way of being? it's a choice, but also there's a right choice, apparently, and anyone stepping out of line shoud be promptly shamed into submission. right?

"a little (whatever) never hurt anybody" okay and neither does a bare face. grow up.

you have to go to work so you can pay for your doctor, who is not taking your insurance right now, and if you say i can't afford the doctor's you are told - get a better job. it is very sad that you are unwell, yes, but maybe you should have thought about that before not having a better job.

(where is the better job? who is giving out these better jobs? you are sick, you are hurting - how the hell are you supposed to be well enough for this better job?)

but you go to the doctor because you had the nerve to be hurt or sick or whatever else. and they tell you that it is because you have anxiety. you try your best. you are a self-advocate. you've done the reading (which sometimes pisses them off worse, honestly). you say it is actually adding to my anxiety, it is effecting my quality of life. so they say that you are fat. they say that all young people have this happen to them, isn't it a medical marvel! they say that you should eat more vegetables. they say that you probably just need to lose a little more weight, and that you are faking it for attention.

(what attention could this doctor possibly give? what validation? that's their fucking job, isn't it?)

there is always a hypochondriac, right. someone always tells you about a hypochondriac. or someone who is unnecessarily aggressive during the worst days of their life. or someone looking "for a quick fix". or some idiot who wasn't educated about how to properly care for themselves who just abandons their treatment. and again, the hypochondriac, the overly-cautious hysteric. these people don't deserve to be treated like humans (right), and since you might be one of these people, you also don't get treated like a human. because those people can really fuck with the system, you now have to pay for it. and besides. you're actually probably faking it.

(more often than not, you find a 2:1 ratio of these stories. for every "hypochondriac", there are 2 people who knew something was wrong, and yet nobody could fucking find it. the story often ends with pointless suffering. the story often ends with and now it's too late, and it's going to kill me.)

you are actually just making excuses. someone else got that procedure or that diagnosis and he's fine, you should be fine too. someone else said they watched a documentary about other inspirational people with your exact same condition, maybe you should be inspirational, too. you're just too morbid. your pain and your experience is probably just not statistically concerning. it is all self-reported anyway, and you're just being a baby.

(once, while sitting down in the middle of making coffee, you had the sudden, horrible thought - i could kill myself to make the pain stop. you had to call your best friend after that. had to pet your dog. had to cry about it in the shower. you won't, but that moment - god, fuck. the pain just goes on and on.)

you know someone who went in for routine surgery and said i still feel everything. they told her to just relax. it took her kicking and screaming before they figured out she wasn't lying - the anesthetic drip hadn't been working. you know someone who went in for severe migraines who was told drink water and lose weight. you know someone who was actively bleeding out and throwing up in the ER and was told you're just having a bad period.

in the ER there are always these little posters saying things like "don't wait! get checked today!" and you think about how often you do wait. how often the days spool out. you once waited a full week before seeing the doctor for what you thought was a sprained wrist. it had actually been broken - they had to rebreak it to set it.

but you go into the doctor. the problem you're having is immediate. the person behind the counter frowns and says we're not taking your insurance. you will be paying for this out-of-pocket.

they send you home with tylenol and a little health packet about weight loss or anxiety or attention deficit. on the front it has your birthday and diagnosis. you think about crying, and the words swim. it might as well say go fuck yourself. it might as well say you're a fucking idiot. it might as well say light your money on fire and lie down in it. and the entire fucking time - the problem persists.

it's okay. it's okay, it's just another thing, you think. it's just another thing i have to learn to live with.

you know who lost succession? jeremy strong. man gave his soul for kendall roy and gave it so beautifully and now he has to take his "i believe in making work where the sense of self and the character is amorphous" ass and go job hunting in a media landscape where the options are MCU hero#154 or olaf from live action frozen.

I’m not a fanfiction rights warrior or anything but the discourse about how it’s actively making published literature worse is so stupid. if fanfiction is having a negative effect on the quality of published fiction, that impact is vastly outpaced by the economic reasons for why mass amounts of low quality garbage is being pumped into the fiction market. certain conventions of fanfiction (namely the use of trope and character tags) are being adopted by the industry not because fanfiction has some hegemonic influence on said industry but because those things are easily adaptable for search engine optimisation and marketing purposes. like what explanation sounds more plausible: fiction is being increasingly tailored to fit into various narrow category tags (“gay enemies to lovers slowburn coffee shop romance,” etc) because the consumer market has seen a rapid sea change in the past 5-10 years and now audiences all want to read what is essentially OC fanfiction that they also pay for, or because formulating books in that way makes keyword search optimisation on google and amazon way easier to market low-effort schlock to people? this is not a new phenomenon and blaming end-users for the state of the industry is basic cart-before-horse reasoning. you can dislike fanfiction and find the people obsessed with it annoying, but the relatively niche space those people occupy online is not structurally responsible for books being more shitty than usual lately

tfw you fix a weird engineering bug

The thing people need to get is that it's about more than a queer pirate show.

Art forms are being strangled because of how corporations are allowed to be run. Because the people in positions of power don't give a fuck about creativity, storytelling, or the impact of media on people. It doesn't matter to people like David Zaslav what the companies they're running deal in. They're in it to squeeze out all the money they can and they don't give a shit what gets thrown away in the process. There is no appreciation or respect for what their companies are supposed to be focused on.

Capitalism kills art and it needs to be put on a leash, and these streaming services need a slap in the face. For fuck's sake, there was just a strike over this. The writers weren't going to take the greedy bullshit these companies were serving them, and audiences shouldn't either.

Boeing didn't kill a guy!

THEY KILLED 346 GUYS AND THEN KILLED ANOTHER GUY FOR BEING A WHISTLEBLOWER ABOUT WHAT LED TO THE FIRST 346 KILLINGS

-

Never actually paid attention to the Steam awards this year until the results were out, and holy shit this year was beyond an absolute joke.

I mean look at this one screenshot.

You wanna tell me a literal ten year old game with a practically non-existent Hollywood scoring slop OST has better music than a literal rhythm game???

"My Prof told me I have to use adobe!"

Most of you don't even show up to 8 am class or do the mandatory reading, but this is where you decide to be obedient?

Okay but watcher originally wasn’t going to leave the old videos up. Like that is something that they backtracked on and are trying to gaslight people about. They did an interview with Variety where they told them that they were going to slowly remove their content from YouTube.

I’m trying to figure out if you’re footstamping at me or what, but babe it’s not worth it.

they’re going to do with their videos what they deem they need to bc they’re not actually our weird friends and we don’t know them like that, they’re guys who make video series who are trying to figure out how to keep a studio afloat in a landscape currently dominated by media conglomerates owned by people like jeff bezos. that is the cut and dry of it. yeah, they probably changed their minds and reversed their earlier decision, but if anything the way people are frothing at the mouth about losing their ~comfort content~ (which. yikes don’t get me started), one would think that would be a relief.

look, I had a whole essay here but I have shit to do so, short version: watcher could have strategized and rolled this whole thing out differently, and who knows, maybe more things will change. maybe they’ll change their content output schedule for their own channel. maybe they’ll add shows or cut , or re-scale for international viewer accommodation. I’d hate to be their PR person right now. but it is what it is. if you can’t pay them, don’t. do not subscribe. literally no one is forcing you. if you wanna see their stuff that badly, find someone who can and password share. they literally said it was fine.

cards on the table, I don’t even know if I’ll be getting a sub until October, or at all, bc I’m a grad student and I have bills. but I’m not about to sit here and act betrayed and hope they fail a. because I’m an adult who understands that no matter the size of the staff, providing employee benefits and insurance costs money, as does making any kind of for-fun content in our current hellscape, and b. it’s kind of shitty to watch people turn around and act like a media company is their friends personally stabbing them in the back and betraying some grand marxist ethos when it’s literally just people who don’t have things like mousecorp and netflix behind them trying to make their shit on their own terms. I’m not going to sit here and pretend they’re some rich greedy corpos trying to wring money out of us poor broke smol beans out of malice when they’re not even in the same ballpark. they’re allowed to ask to be paid for their time and their labor. if people can’t pay them, then they can’t pay them, end of. some things we just have to go without and that’s just how it shakes out; there are worse and more critical things I could be missing out on that I will be paying that money for instead.

but I’m not about to insist their stuff be free forever because ~I want it~. because that’s not what it comes down to, in the system that we currently operate and exist under. I’m not entitled to their shit like that and frankly no one is.

watching people openly hope they crash and burn bc it won’t be free anymore just makes me chalk it up to one more shitty example of how consumer culture has just made people not think about how stuff is made as long as they can get that instant gratification, but like. water is wet, news at 11.

i’ve seen conflicting opinions on whether eddie would listen to springsteen, but i feel like the answer should be obvious. i mean, the guy painted a woody guthrie reference onto his first guitar, you can’t tell me he doesn’t have a soft spot for the johnny cashes and the willie nelsons and yes, the bruce springsteens of the world. guys with gravelly voices who sing about loss and disillusionment and being left behind, by life or the government or the girl they love. add in that springsteen openly made out with another man on stage (a black man no less) and you can’t tell me eddie wouldn’t be hooked. queer guy sings about being stuck in a small town and doomed love and hating the man? that’s his fucking shit right there. maybe he wouldn’t admit to liking him in public to protect his metalhead cred, but eddie values music, he values sincerity, he values bravery.

anyway my point is that in the 90s/00s eddie is absolutely a closet dixie chicks fan and i will die on this hill

Not 20 minutes into ep 1 of The Sign and god has already granted me this buxomous green flag 🙏