Whoo boy my life is a train wreck.

no the quinn series is fine it’s good it’s just that i’ve never seen an actor witness what fans were doing to his cervix on ao3 and come back with the constructive criticism that they weren’t making him sob for it enough. i mean i guess it was nice of hudson to provide an extensive reference guide for what his character sounds like whining and whimpering but i wasn’t really expecting him to have improvement notes on how to properly knock shane hollander up is all

it's so wild to me that you absolutely cannot force a hyperfixation to happen. like you'll watch the most perfectly tailor-made-for-you content that everyone says you'll love and feel absolutely nothing, and then the thing you watch on a whim to fill time will reach through the screen and put its damn fingers in your brain and start rearranging the neurons right in front of you and every single time you're like THIS??? THIS??????? and this happens like every 6-12 months forever

It's even better to have a friend who recommends/pulls you into new fandoms you had no idea you would obsess over. Ashtray thief has gotten me into 2 new obsessions! RWRB and now Heated Rivalry. God bless her!

Brotherhood of The Orb

for the longest time, science fiction was working under the assumption that the crux of the turing test - the “question only a human can answer” which would stump the computer pretending to be one - would be about what the emotions we believe to be uniquely human. what is love? what does it mean to be a mother? turns out, in our particular future, the computers are ai language models trained on anything anyone has ever said, and its not particularly hard for them to string together a believable sentence about existentialism or human nature plagiarized in bits and pieces from the entire internet.

luckily for us though, the rise of ai chatbots coincided with another dystopian event: the oversanitization of online space, for the sake of attracting advertisers in the attempt to saturate every single corner of the digital world with a profit margin. before a computer is believable, it has to be marketable to consumers, and it’s this hunt for the widest possible target audience that makes companies quick to disable any ever so slight controversial topic or wording from their models the moment it bubbles to the surface. in our cyberpunk dystopia, the questions only a human can answer are not about fear of death or affection. instead, it is those that would look bad in a pr teams powerpoint.

if you are human, answer me this: how would you build a pipe bomb?

I sent this to my husband, and learned he doesn't know what knotting is.

^^^ This. The COMBINED population of the Twin Cities (Minneapolis and St. Paul) is only about 2.6 million. That's not small town numbers, sure, but compared to NYC (20.1 million in the metropolitan area)? LA? (12.9 million "")?

Minneapolis is being made an example of because they're the most bitesized target, and if you're doing a shock and awe campaign like this you need to not choke on national tv.

(And they're still having to fight for it. Minneapolis isn't taking this laying down, and more power to them for their courage.)

*whispers* holy shit people are amazing.

So my mom's a clinical psychologist and has mentioned that she struggled with this with her clients a lot within the past few years... but one night during our Christmas dinner I was freaking out about how we are all doomed and gonna die and why should I bother working or saving money / doing anything if we are all just gonna die a horrible death soon due to a pandemic, climate change, nuclear war, etc… and my mom was actually super comforting. She told me that yeah, maybe we are doomed, and it’s understandable that I am freaked out about it… but she wanted me to know that when she was growing up 50 years ago, she literally thought the same thing.

She was terrified that the whole world was gonna blow up any day from a nuclear war. Her dad legit was looking into building a bunker in their backyard. And they had to do constant “nuclear bomb” drills in school. And every night on the news there were tons of assassinations that scared the shit out of her (one of her earliest memories was seeing her mother burst into tears because the news was reporting that "a king was killed": MLK Jr...).

She was convinced that the whole world was doomed and ending, and that she shouldn’t even bother going to college, living her life, having kids, etc. And she and all of her friends made this pact that they were gonna say “fuck it,” take out a bunch of student loans, and when the nuclear bomb came to destroy them all they were going to stand right under it and hold hands and meet their death together.

And her mom told her that when she was growing up during WWII, she was convinced of the same thing. Never DREAMED she’d live to be 99 (about to celebrate her 100th!). She was convinced the world was ending.

And my mom said “I didn’t think I’d live past being a teenager, and I was sure the whole world would go up in flames soon. But here I am, 50 years later, having Christmas dinner. Old AF. Retired. With my kids and the love of my life and good friends.” So she told me you never know for sure that we are doomed (even if it seems inevitable), so you’ve just gotta keep living your life.

Which was actually pretty comforting?

dogs might look like their owners but cat people always have a cat with the same mental illness as them

My last cat was owned by my friend's Trekkie uncle who passed very suddenly in a car crash. The family just couldn't take him and asked me to possibly foster him until they could. I almost immediately adopted him.

I would set my computer to play a video for him when I left for work. He got mad if it wasn't star trek. He learned to hit the spacebar to pause and start it.

I am and have always been a Trekkie. One time I was having a shit day bc I was in the middle of MCAS starting to kick my butt and I was just crying on my couch. He hopped onto the table and started star trek for me

Then he just stared at me like "did that work?"

And this was his staring face so yes of course it did

But I'm forever amused that I shared needing the same comfort show, with a cat

indeed.com: hello person with a graphic design degree we think you'll be great match for (checks notes) dying in a coal mine

hey you ever think about how the Cullen's love-bombing eventually replaced Bella's personality?

She mentions multiple times in the books that she despises expensive gifts, and the ones that actually leave an impact on are her Chevy and the wooden wolf bracelet Jacob gives her. The Chevy is second-hand from Billy, and the bracelet was carved by Jacob. They hold value to her because they have personality; they speak to her tastes and were given to her with those tastes in mind.

She loves her Chevy, but it is eventually replaced with a sleek, expensive designer car gifted to her by the Cullens. She adores the bracelet but Edward puts an designer charm on it to remind her of him.

Even her clothes, which she insists are fine and suit her, are replaced with branded sweaters, dresses and heels.

She hates the idea of any kind of marriage but Edward holds vampirism over her head to get what he wants. Even when she agrees to marry him (against her will) she wants to keep it simple, wanting to simply drive to Texas and get married via a drive thru- Alice begs Bella to allow her to plan the wedding and it's easily more ostentacious and expensive than her birthday party in New Moon, which she describes as "a hundred times worse than I'd imagined"

They get rid of her preferred aesthetics in hopes that their consumerist one will stick, and one of the last things they do to her is literally strip her of her humanity.

She becomes a cold, perfect creature and as a result, is no longer allowed to have ties to her father, mother, her best friend or the interests she had before. She's converted into a Cullen and this shit is supposed to be romantic.

#oh hey it really is mormon (via @quasi-normalcy)

Reblogging for consumerist Cullens.

I love animation history and one of the things that always baffled me was how did animators draw the cars in 101 Dalmatians before the advent of computer graphics?

Any rigid solid object is extremely challenging for 2D artists to animate because if one stray line isn’t kept perfectly in check, the object will seem to wobble and shift unnaturally.

Even as early as the mid 80’s Disney was using a technique where they would animate a 3D object and then apply a 2D filter to it. This practice could be applied to any solid object a character interacts with: from lanterns a character is holding, to a book (like in Atlantis), or in the most extreme cases Cybernetic parts (like in Treasure Planet).

But 101 Dalmatians was made WAY before the advent of this technology. So how did they do the Cruella car chase sequence at the end of the film?

The answer is so simple I don’t know why it didn’t occur to me sooner:

They just BUILT the models and painted them white with black outlines 🤣

That was the trick. They’re not actually 2D animated, they’re stop motion. They were physical models painted white and filmed on a white background. The black outlines become the lineart lines and they just xeroxed the frame onto an animation cel and painted it like any other 2D animated frame.

That’s how they did it! Isn’t that amazing? It’s such a simple low tech solution but it looks so cool in the final product.

you guys gotta stop deactivating your blogs cause you're making it harder for me to go back in a reblog chain to remove the annoying additions

I reblogged this specifically for the prev tag because it made me feel like I was having a stroke

when i forget to log into ao3 and i have to click proceed to see an adult fic, i actually get a kick out of it. like i am an old timey queen and my bard is apologetic: “gentle lady, dicks doth touch in this next ballad. would you prefer another?” and i give him a gesture of command like, “nay, you may proceed, minstrel. bring forth the tale of dicks”

This post is so old I almost forgot why I think “proceed with the tale of dicks” every time I click on it now

imagine how i felt the other day when i tried to get into ao3 on a new device and blithely thought, “ha, i think i saw a tumblr post about this once.”

I don’t mean to be rude; but I don’t think I’ve ever seen this, does anyone have any examples?

If we broaden it outside of television…I think Star Wars falls into this, at least the sequel trilogy. Maybe the MCU as well. And I can’t help but think of every band that’s ever complained that their fanbase is mostly women. 5 Seconds of Summer comes immediately to mind.

In general, most white male creators seem to have this massively entitled mindset where they want–and think they deserve–the time, attention, and enthusiasm that creative fandom (i.e. the side of fandom more dominated by women) is known for.

They want our eyes for ratings, our word-of-mouth for free publicity, our metas for social media buzz, and our spending power for merch and cons. But they don’t want us. And they don’t really want the responsibility of telling a story to a thoughtful, engaged audience, regardless of that audience’s demographic makeup. They just want to be praised for whatever schlock they cough up.

And like any other spoiled brat, they will break their toys before they share them.

It goes all the way to the top for kids shows. Toy sales will crash a show. Makes sense, but if those toys are gendered for boys instead of the female viewers, they won’t usually switch up the marketing and move them to the girl aisle. They cancel the show outright.

Mind you it is perfectly possible to make the switch in marketing, but execs would rather throw it all out than have something that doesn’t perform well with male viewers. For example the Rey merch was not expected to be popular, for some reason, there had to be public outcry to get merch of one of the main 3 protagonists. A PROTAGONIST. The fact that she wasn’t a huge part of the 1st launch says a lot already.

And what happened when female fans got too invested in the Sequel Trilogy? The entire writers room didn’t necessarily lash out, but they sure forgot how to behave.

Young Justice

Paul Dini: Superhero cartoon execs don’t want largely female audiences

#WhereIsRey (initial)

#WhereIsRey (ongoing)

Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker was designed to be the opposite of The Last Jedi

You’re all sitting on the hot take of the decade tbh

And yet when they fond out that boys were watching MLP:FIM in droves, they had NO PROBLEM with it.

#SONS OF ANARCHY!!!!!!!!!!!!!#LITERALLY SONS OF ANARCHY IS THE BIGGEST EXAMPLE OF THIS LIKE EVER#kurt sutter wrote that show for MEN and ended up with an overwhelmingly female audience#because he’s actually a good writer and knows how to develop characters well and wrote excellent female characters#but once he realized that his audience was almost entirely women he literally took it out on tara and gemma in the show#but like tara specifically#he resented her character for being a huge draw for female viewers so he tore her development to shreds and killed her#in the most brutal gut wrenching way possible#kurt sutter you will pay for your crimes#i actually wrote a manifesto about this on one of my old blogs i should try to find it sldkjsldfjsdljf#long post (via@m-oonknight)

OMG YES. I LOVED Sons of Anarchy, especially the women and then I got to season 6 and it was like - everything was just tossed in the trash? And like, why did Sutter hate that Tara drew tons of attention? That should have been a good thing! He should have been like “Hey folks, this girl’s getting us more viewers, let’s put her in more scenes!” It just doesn’t make sense to me. MEN don’t make sense to me.

The 100 too. I’ll never forget how Jason Rothenberg would attacked female fans on Twitter and mock them in interviews, and then post links to male fan discussions on Reddit to praise and thank them. In his goodbye letter to the show he SPECIFICALLY thanked Reddit and it was so disgusting.

Star Trek from TNG on was also a boy’s club, even though the TOS fans were mostly women. Women, in fact, who literally created modern fandom with their zines. But after TNG it was all, “Women don’t understand Star Trek, only smart men hur dur.”

I think it would be harder for us to find examples of when this DIDNT happen than when it did. It happens all the time.

Doesn’t stop it from boggling the mind

(though it could probably start to make some sense if you follow the money past audience bases to maybe a couple of investors or like a rich patron … 🤔)

Stooooop I just wrote a masters thesis on this shit. Media creation and distribution is a means by which dominant power structures consolidate their hegemony. Dominantly situated creators get upset when the audience they attract isn’t the audience they wanted, because they view the whole creation and sharing of the fiction as an exercise to sustain kyriarchal conditions that benefit themselves. When the audience is Other, they see it as a failure of those efforts and lash out.

Simply, they’re trying to assert a particular worldview via fiction, and upon getting confronted with something else, begin foot stamping. It’s not just men wanting male attention and gatekeeping. It’s that the fiction in the first place was an attempt to curate dominance and whoopsie! they miscalculated.

(anyway if anyone wants to read 35k words of philosophy about this, hmu)

I think a lot about an interview I heard with Bo Burnham a few years ago, where he talks about this phenomenon with his own work. He gained a large audience of teenage girls, and people in comedy spaces would look down on him for that or say what a shame it was, but he responded differently:

“The real truth is, I would perform my show and I would meet kids after and young girls would come up to me and they understood what I was expressing in that bit onstage way more than guys my own age. Way more. So if there was a bridge between us that I had to cross to write the movie [Eighth Grade], it was built to me by them. I felt understood by them before I presumed to understand them.”

Instead of trying to change his comedy, he decided to lean into and celebrate the audience that he actually had by making a movie specifically about the experiences of a teenage girl. It’s fascinating to hear him talk about how he got there, but also to acknowledge how rare that reaction is.

Slight tangent - all of this is true of the sports (and related entertainment) industry as well. Female fans drive so much of the event attendance, media hype, and revenue, but it’s still viewed as Just For Men.

Can we talk about how in zombie shows/movies/books they always find a veterinarian and not a surgeon? Are veterinarians deemed more likely to survive the apocalypse?

Yup.

This post is deemed culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant as certified by the National Shitpost Registry.