GEORGE ORWALL FAN?!? 1984 IS MY FAVORITE BOOK!!!!

AHHHH YES I LOVE 1984 UGH

it’s actually a funny story on how I first read it, my brother was taking me shopping for my maybe 13th birthday, and he was like “I’ll buy you whatever you want from the bookstore but ONLY if you also get 1984 by Orwell.” And I agreed bc I also wanted to get The Picture of Dorian Gray and some others and I never really planned on reading it but then I did and IT WAS SO GOOD UGH I LOVED IT, I’ve read it like 8 times it’s great. It’s definitely a book that I love but it’s also definitely not in my top three. Top five though maybe

I started up Stardew Valley again and got the distinct feeling that I wouldn't get out of it without making fanart this time.

btw if ur wondering yes my adhd ass v much resents him even entertaining the concept of the memory issues that come w adhd being a reason he plagarized. idfc if he was quoting his therapist. he already has MOUNTAINS of harm towards minority communities under his belt. it takes some NERVE to add yet another already stigmatized by the spread of misinfo group to that pile. eat my adhd shit, asshole.

nvm this is still on my brain. kim does not like to watch harry suffer… to say that kim takes satisfaction in harry’s pain is a huge misconstruing of his character.

the “getting thrashed like a schoolboy” line comes from a board game, lol. it’s a tease, not a cruelty. there’s never any line that implies that Kim enjoys seeing Harry taking actual morale damage.

he can be amused if you fail a check, but the check is always relatively inconsequential, and again, Harry isn’t taking damage in these.

Failing to pry the trash bin open:

Failing to shatter Ruby’s lorry window:

(also in both of these examples he only responds smugly if you choose for Harry to stubbornly dig in his heels. if Harry gets huffy, Kim teases. If Harry backs down right away Kim won’t rub it in, which feels significant to me! it reminds me of that recent post goin around about Kim meeting your energy!)

and here’s some reactions to failed checks where he does take damage.

Failing the jump to get your cloak:

Failing to break down Plaisance’s door:

he’s not laughing if Harry’s taking damage because he’s not a dick lol.

aaaaand here’s some other instances of morale/health damage and kim’s reactions.

alternate dialogue for failing the harbor jump:

after the call with precinct 41:

seeing bullet holes in the wall:

most significant examples to argue this point for me come when harry has done something to jeopardize the RCM’s image. which kim goes on and on about the importance of maintaining— and yet even here, he still extends worry and assurance.

telling Billie about her husband and handling it badly:

hardie authority check failure cock carousel:

aaaaand the car. this line is one of the most mask-off kim moments we get in the game in my opinion, honestly.

tying this back to the schoolboy line— that line doesn’t show up if you have a negative reputation with Kim. if you have <1 rep, it gets replaced with him calling it “about four hours of our lives that we'll never get back,” lol.

it’s affectionate ribbing!! twisting it into anything else is bizarre 2 me lmao!

anyways. kim is a foil to every other cop we meet in the game specifically because he doesn’t view harry as a punching bag or a lost cause. gottlieb does nothing but sling jabs and glib jokes about harry’s health. torson+mclaine and the others laugh at harry’s panic attack over the radio. in response to harry’s suicide-by-car attempt(!!!!) jean yells about RCM budget. all kim’s lines in response to harry’s check failures and health-damage are consistent, explicit textual contrast against the callousness of the rest of the RCM. twisting kim’s character here requires a bad faith interpretation of the whole game.

there’s this secret silly problem that you run into when a piece of media you love so so much gets a film adaptation, which is when everyone you know starts telling you about how good the movie is and how much you’d like it and you have to be nice and say “yeah I bet :)” all the while knowing that if you watch even the first three minutes of the film you will be such an insufferable cunt about it that everyone on every social media you own will immediately unfriend you

[shaking like a chihuahua] everyone in disco elysium sucks so bad nearly everyone is a genuinely terrible person. Including the player character. But they are all so human that you love the majority of them in spite of it all. In fact you love them more for the genuine knowing of them and their thoughts and fears and hopes and how hard they are trying to survive a world that wants to not only kill them but let them be swallowed up and erased by collective human apathy.

True love is possible only in the next world— for new people. It is too late for us. We will never undo all of the ways in which the old world we were born into warps how we interact with each other and even ourselves. We can pave the way for a new world, but we will never be the new people living in it. We cannot love and know each other in the true way we long to. But we love each other anyway. In our warped and terrible ways. We try our hardest to be the best we can be even if our best feels sad and small and like it will never be good enough to make any real difference. Maybe it won’t. Maybe we can’t stop the pale, or the limbed and headed machine of pain and undignified suffering. But we can still give each other what little dignity and relief is within our power. We can love each other in a way that is even more meaningful for its relentlessness.

tbh its not entirely fair to paint all blatant rep as poor in comparison to queercoding (altho i do love some good queercoding). i think the reason so much blatant rep is Like That, while queercoded stuff feels so much more meaningful and real, is because the blatant rep we often experience is made to Market To The Queers. while it may have queer creatives working on it, the reason its created is to make money off of queers. its trendy. so just write a fairly surface level fluffy movie about white queer teens and get some cash! its blatant, which means it will be treated as a groundbreaking queer media especially by liberals.

while queercoded media on the other hand (intentional or not) cant or wont just slap two conventionally attractive teens on screen and make them kiss and get those rainbow dollars. its an expression of queer silencing, the quiet thats left when you arent allowed to say what you desperately want to. when you cant spoon-feed your audience queerness you have to. yknow. actually think about what it means and how to express that artistically. you have to show and not tell.

thats all to say, there is blatant queer rep that is good. but you probably aren't gonna find it on amazon prime. that kind of rep is being made by queer artists making indie films. i promise you its not either "blatant queerness that feels shallow" or "deep queerness thats not allowed to be blatant". theres a secret third option and its "capitalism will never liberate you and you need to actually support indie queer artists and actively reject queer capitalism to experience the breadth and width of what queer art is capable of being and doing."

I wanna date an old as shit vampire (like 1000+ years old) because I’m pretentious and I want them to teach me everything they know about history and philosophy as a form of foreplay.

pretentious isn't even an insult to me anymore at this point it's a badge of honor

I don’t usually make posts like this, but I’ve been seeing a lot of anti-intellectual junk lately, and I really think we need to put the word “pretentious” up on a shelf until people learn what it actually means.

It doesn’t describe someone who likes artsy-fartsy deep meaning media. People who are pretentious are fake. They’re posers trying to be sophisticated and unique, not like other girls. They pretend to only like stuff they think will make them sound cool when they talk about it. They want to act like they know something you don’t, and they want attention for it.

By definition, if you genuinely enjoy something, you can’t be pretentious. If it resonates with you, and you analyze it, and you don’t care what people think, that’s the polar opposite, actually. If you love obscure experimental prog music, if you watch underground high concept indie films through English teacher eyes, if you spend hours in a modern art museum reading each piece as a vessel for storytelling, if your backpack’s full of poetry books that inspire you, if you play underrated games that were someone’s passion project, if you have an interest in studying the classics or the masters, you are not pretentious.

Of course, some people just don’t like some stuff, and that’s fine, but that’s not what this is about. Don’t let anti-intellectuals shame you for enjoying things just because your interests are inaccessible to them, because they refuse to be brave and put effort into critical thinking. You’re not stuck up for refusing to overlook the craft of artists.

Ok, so I've been watching Beavis and Butt-Head lately (I was born in 2001 with a mom who hated it. Give me a break), and while watching it with friends last night there was a part that I can't stop thinking about.

Basically, while watching a music video, Butt-Head exclaims something like: "I wish I could watch this over and over and over again." My gut reaction was "don't they have a VCR?" but then it dawned on me: "No! Of course they wouldn't have a VCR. What am I thinking!" For context, when I was growing up in the early 2000's, one of the cheapest and most cost effective ways of owning video content was by buying VHS' second-hand. I had a huge collection of movies growing up which my parents bought through a local re-seller. Others I would borrow from the library. A majority of homes had them as a part of their setup, often in tandem with a DVD player. This was the default I was familiar with for years before VHS fell completely from relevance. Meanwhile, this show came out in the early 90s and centers on what are clearly two low-income boys. Of course a VCR wouldn't be something just naturally available. You had to just hope something good would pop up on TV or in a movie theatre. If you're lucky you'll catch something you like getting replayed. I find this "dated" little throwaway dialogue so interesting because of the specific image it paints of the decade it came out. The limited accessibility of information and media, and how a large portion of it centered around the home television set. How exciting and invigorating it was seeing anything playing on there, because there was no telling when you will get an opportunity to see it again. I don't know. Maybe that is a little dramatic (especially for any one reading this who actually lived through the 90s), but it resonated with me a bit. It got me thinking about not only how much has changed in media-consumption, but how expansive and fast accessibility is now. How the television has diminished in relevance as a medium, and how little people seem to care about what they are watching.

A while back I had to create a few thumbnail sketches referencing shots from different movies/TV shows that showed various compositional techniques for school, here are some of my faves.

One of the most baffling and concerning recent online trends has gotta be people that are like… proud of their media illiteracy. People who make posts like “I’m not one of those pretentious film bros who insist on seeing meaning and symbolism in everything! I take my media at face value and only like things that are straightforward and simple enough to activate my Childhood Nostalgia! Sometimes the curtains are just blue LOL!” Like that’s not a good thing. You shouldn’t be bragging about that.

my curse in life is that I fucking LOVE video essays. I watch a movie or show or read a book & I just want to watch someone go insane about it in video essay format but I fucking HATE “ending explained” “all the Easter eggs you missed!” “plot summary” “what this movie is REALLY about” type videos. like. hATE them with a firy passion they annoy me so much because it’s like - ANYONE can make an essay like that if you just watch the thing 🤦🏻‍♀️ they treat their audience like idiots. there is a difference between those videos & video essays ok. Im gonna be pretentious for a second & say that ok? I understand how to enjoy a story & pick up on obvious themes & plot elements. I want to feel like a high schooler in English class discussing themes & subtext in detail again & a good video essayist can bring back that feeling while a bad video essayist can summon in me the urge to kill do u get it do u understand me

Hey. Hey. Somerton is on Tumblr. (: