The idea of “but everyone knows that” needs to stop.
I saw a post about someone chiding Millennials for not knowing about JKRowlings transphobia, and asking how it is at all possible that people can exist in the world and the internet and, you know, not know.
Which I mean, I get. It is so present in so many of my online spaces that it seems astounding that someone could simply be ignorant! It feels impossible!
But let me tell you a story:
I went on a girls trip with a bunch of friends. All of us are rather incredibly liberal and all of us are incredibly online.
One girl would not stop talking about Harry Potter.
At one point, another girl asked her why she was ok with supporting it, and she had no real clue that JK Rowling was at all transphobic. She had heard that she likes to support Lesbian causes and thought “oh ok cool!” And that was it. She was AGOG with the news and rather horrified.
I must once again emphasize that she was an incredibly online person. She’s a foodie and a restaurant blogger.
Later in the trip we were picking restaurants and I suggested one I found on Google, and she gasped at me. Actually gasped, asking how I could ever be okay picking that one.
The shock must’ve been on my face, because she then told me all of the shitty things that restaurateur does. He abuses staff. Underpays them. Fires them on a whim. Is known for being one of the worst people to his employees in the entire restaurant business on this coast.
And she was so shocked I had never heard of this. Because in her mind, I was just as online as her. And in her online world, EVERYONE knew about this guy.
So I think the moral of this story is: always approach the other person with some empathy. Even online people, even people you think MUST know about how bad people are, may not have heard. It may truly be just them being on a different sphere of the internet than you.
So be gentle, be kind when letting people know they might not have heard about the cancellation of XYZ person. Don’t assume that everyone knows all the same info as you.
By all means, let them know so they can make informed decisions, but being kind will go a lot further than attacking them for some info they might not know yet.
The last time I played Puck, the director was a huge freak about not letting us wear shoes on stage because it would “ruin the look”, but we all kept eating shit, and instead of just letting us wear skintone dance shoes or something with grip, motherfucker poured Pepsi on the floor so it’d be sticky and we had to schlorp around. I fucking hate you, David.
Why couldn’t this have been a one time I dreamt
Coking the stage (mopping it with diluted soda so it’s a little sticky) is a legitimate low-budget tactic for slick floors, but he just poured so much Pepsi on the floors that for about a whole week, it was audible.
Maybe the course of true love would run a little fucking smoother if we didn’t have to ford your Pepsi river, DAVID.
I would just quit. Fuck people like that. It’s easy to walk away
No it’s not. Didn’t you read the post? There was dried Pepsi everywhere.
Hate it when TikTok farm cosplayers and cottagecore types say stuff like “I’m not going to use modern equipment because my grandmothers could make do without it.” Ma'am, your great grandma had eleven children. She would have killed for a slow cooker and a stick blender.
I’ve noticed a sort of implicit belief that people used to do things the hard way in the past because they were tougher or something. In reality, labor-saving devices have historically been adopted by the populace as soon as they were economically feasible. No one stood in front of a smoky fire or a boiling pot of lye soap for hours because they were virtuous, they did it because it was the only way to survive.
Taking these screenshots from Facebook because they make you log in and won’t let you copy and paste:
i agree with everything this post is saying and think it is and think it’s important to understand the relationship between the automation of domestic labor and increased quality of life for women, but this facebook story appears to be completely fake and I don’t think it’s helpful for an otherwise solid post to be going around with a big chunk of mush tacked on to the end. If anyone can some citation for this story outside of facebook reposts I’d love to hear it.
searching for the original post on facebook found me a version of it with citations included
ALT
i went ahead and looked for all of these supposed references individually, and none of them exist at all. the closest one of these comes to existing seems to be a library of congress page called rural life in the late 19th century which is of course completely unrelated. if you search specifically for any of the exact string of words here it just brings you back to endless different facebook reposts of the exact same story.
I did a really brief google search to see if I could find similar information from more credible sources without the fictionalized biographical elements. Here’s an article from history.com about the new deal era electrification of rural american homes.
For rural people who didn’t have electricity in their homes, electrification wasn’t just power lines or outlets. It meant the strange, often jaw-dropping experience of going from a home with outdated, hand-powered technology to one that seemed to do its own chores, light its own rooms, and allow for modern miracles like washing machines and radios.
Here’s an excerpt from the book evolving households: the imprint of technology on life that takes an economic-focused look at the effect of household appliances on womens’ labor. here’s an impressive number:
In 1900, the average household spent 58 hours a week on housework, including meal preparation, laundry, and cleaning—a figure that dropped to 18 hours in 1975.
58 hours to 18. In the span of a single lifetime, a household shaved an entire full time job’s worth of hours off of their domestic work! On the subject of laundry specifically, here’s an actual account of one woman’s transition from an analog laundry setup to an electric one, and the time and effort it saved her.
The researchers reported on one subject, Mrs. Verett, in detail. Without electricity, she did her laundry in the manner described above, though using a gas-powered washing machine instead of a scrub board. A 38-pound load of laundry took her about four hours to wash and another 4.5 to iron. After electrification, Mrs. Verett had an electric washer, dryer, and iron, as well as a water system with a heater; it took 41 minutes to do a similar load and 1.75 hours to iron it. The woman walked 3,181 feet to do the laundry by hand, and only 332 feet with electrical equipment. She walked 3,122 feet when ironing the old way, and 333 the new way.
so moral of the post is automation of domestic labor is good and please do not trust the validity of unsourced blocks of text. and especially do not trust the validity of what is pretty transparently facebook tearjerker virality bait content, most likely ai generated based on how well it scans (not that screenshots of facebook clickbait were more likely to be reliable before AI or anything!)
One of the videos shared by conservative news outlets of the Renee Good shooting is heavily edited. The one where Ross is holding the camera- it includes the part where her wife was heckling him (not a crime) follows him walking to the front of the car. Shows her wheels turning as she’s talking to another ice officer and begins to drive forward*. Then, he drops his phone and it shows them speeding away.
*In the full video, Ross walks around to the driver side and holds a conversation with her. Good appears to see him in front of her and stops. He tells her to get out of the car. She says ‘im not mad at you.’ Turns her wheels away from Ross. Then he drops his phone, car speeds away.
There is no indication that this version of the video is edited. There is no 'cut to.’ No note about the cut. Responsible journalism typically indicates a cut.
Obviously, there are people who look at the full video and make a decision regardless, but this took it an extra step further by removing the part where body language, wheel direction, and slow speed showed little (or no) intention to harm.
But no wonder people are coming to very different conclusions, if this is how they get their news. That, and all the bot farms.
I have to remind myself that im not a reporter or a detective: its not my job to correct people or tell them about journalistic ethics.
But holy shit. Between this and the 'legal document’ claiming she was a child abuser (and also that she was born in 1980, which is false) no wonder people are confused.
(Im also very fascinated by this because an eerily similar thing happened here a couple years ago, but with a cop. So im drawing a lot of parallels to that, knowing that the cop walked.)
We lost power today due to wind storms and every time the wind would gust, this is the look I would get from Bug. A very much “are you hearing this shit” face.
It’s interesting, because peafowl do a bit of group think when it comes to reacting to new or surprise things. Big bird flies by overhead? 4 out of 5 birds aren’t sure if they should be concerned. If the 5th bird honks, everyone runs for cover. If the 5th bird looks and doesn’t react, the other 4 ignore it. New treat? 4 out of 5 birds wait for bird #5 to taste it and show approval or disapproval before they’ll try it.
Bug was nervous about the wind, and was on edge about it, but every time she looked to me to see how to react, I just closed my eyes and showed indifference, and she would settle down. Mantis was keeping an eye on Bug, but since Bug was just apparently chilling on my legs, she was not concerned about the wind almost at all, either. Eternal sunshine of the mind, that one.
I miss hanging out with them!! I can’t wait for the weather to warm up enough. To be outside more or bring them in more.
Is it always the same #5 bird they look for? And is it different, if it’s for treats or threats or something else? Or this is more hierarchy/seniority based?
It’s not always the same! The babies will look to older birds (in this case bug looking to me, Mantis looking to her mom) and the older birds won’t necessarily pay attention to a baby (and in this case, “baby” is anyone younger than bedding age, aka around 3 years old) but in the adults it’s random. Anyone might call a threat or dismiss a treat. Well, almost anyone. Some birds get a reputation for being scaredy cats or picky eaters, and some of the birds will learn to ignore that bird and look for themselves.
Wendy, for example, does not trust Heather’s opinion on treats. Earl took a cue from Bug early on about how tasty baby mice are, and now doesn’t care about anyone’s opinion of them, he is into it. Often even if birds like a treat, if someone else says it’s yucky THIS time, the rest of the birds will ignore it, so it’s odd to see him grab them even after someone else has shook their head no.
This is part of why it’s nice to have a bird or two (hens, not males) that really trust you. Bug will try stuff other birds won’t touch, because she usually trusts me when I tell her a treat is yummy. If I tell Bug something like a big dog on the end of a leash on the other side of the fence isn’t a threat, she’ll believe me. And when the other birds see her being chill, even though most of them don’t really like her, they still often take cues from her, and this keeps the entire flock calmer.
Of course it works the opposite way too. Polaris was beautiful but his personality was kind of dogshit (fearful and kind of a jerk) and he actively made his pen worse. Since he’s been gone, the rest of the birds are taking cues from the remaining adults (Aris and Corona) because they’re all babies still, and this means they’ll all come over and I’m tripping on them trying to do chores when before I could barely get them to come within 10 feet of me because they were often taking cues from Polaris (not always but often enough to be annoying). So, as much as I hated to do it, selling him was a solid choice for flock dynamics. It’s the same reason I sold onyx a while back. She would freak out EVERY time she went outside, she was terrified of any bird flying overhead, and it was freaking everyone else out to the point they didn’t want to be outside.
It’s something I don’t think many, if any, breeders actually think about when breeding. Maybe they don’t notice. I can’t imagine ignoring it though.
Rewatching Treasure Planet (great movie, watch it) made realize something about the way that stories convey information to their audiences. There’s been a lot of discussion on the overuse of plot twists and how many stories prioritise surprising their audience over telling decent stories. However, if you instead reveal the “twist” to the audience before it becomes known to the characters, you can build tension and stakes.
Treasure Planet comes right out and tells you that Long John Silver is the main villain almost immediately after his introduction (And even before he’s introduced we’re warned about a cyborg, so you’d have to be pretty dense to not put 2 and 2 together and realize he’s a bad guy). So when the audience watches him and Jim bond and grow closer, it builds tension for when Jim finds out and it highlights the tragedy of their friendship, because we all know it’s not going to end well. Then, after the truth is revealed, stakes are created because we want the friendship between Jim and Silver to be repaired, because we know it was real, but we don’t know if can be after what Silver’s done. And all of this would have been lost if Silver’s true nature had been a cheap plot twist. The tragedy would be completely overshadowed by the surprise and betrayal, and any investment in their relationship would have been built on the false impression that Silver was a good guy.
Another good example of this is Titanic. Even if you were somehow ignorant of the ship’s sinking, the film makes sure you know that it sank with its framing device of Old Rose telling her story to people salvaging the Titanic’s wreak. And Titanic’s plot structure could only possibly work if you know the ship is going to sink. I’m not just talking about building tension, tragedy, and stakes for the characters like with the above example, I mean that if you didn’t know that the Titanic was going down walking into the film, the abrupt shift from romance to suspense-disaster would be an increadibly tough pill to swallow. But it works because we expect it. You don’t walk into a film called Titanic without expecting the damn boat to sink.
However, the sad thing about both of these examples, is that despite all the benefits that came from telling the audience these things ahead of time, I think the main reason the creators didn’t make them plot twists was because they couldn’t have. Treasure Island is the single most influential piece of pirate media out there, and you’d have to have been living under a rock for over a century to not know the Titanic sank. So, the writers had to work around the fact that these important turning points in the narratives were common knowledge, and they wound creating incredible stories as a consequence.
I want to see more of this style of writing in stories where the writers aren’t forced to do it. We’ve clearly seen that you can tell some really damn good stories by giving information to the audience before the characters learn it, and I just wish more works would do that instead of trying to surprise people with shocking twists.
This is also why most adaptations of The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde don’t follow the mystery plot structure of the original book, since everyone already knows they’re the same person, no one will be surprised by that twist nowadays.
As a consequence, most adaptations of the story are told mainly from Jekyll’s point of view, and the conflict between Jekyll and Hyde becomes the main story, which makes for really compelling drama!
We are now having a very innocent little chat. Let’s suppose that there is a bomb underneath this table between us. Nothing happens, and then all of a sudden, “Boom!” There is an explosion. The public is surprised, but prior to this surprise, it has seen an absolutely ordinary scene, of no special consequence. Now, let us take a suspense situation.
The bomb is underneath the table and the public knows it, probably because they have seen the anarchist place it there. The public is aware the bomb is going to explode at one o’clock and there is a clock in the decor. The public can see that it is a quarter to one.
In these conditions, the same innocuous conversation becomes fascinating because the public is participating in the scene. The audience is longing to warn the characters on the screen: “You shouldn’t be talking about such trivial matters. There is a bomb beneath you and it is about to explode!”
In the first case we have given the public fifteen seconds of surprise at the moment of the explosion. In the second we have provided them with fifteen minutes of suspense. The conclusion is that whenever possible the public must be informed. Except when the surprise is a twist, that is, when the unexpected ending is, in itself, the highlight of the story.
–Alfred Hitchcock, on the difference between surprise and suspense.
This device is called dramatic irony and it’s very fun.
recently my friend’s comics professor told her that it’s acceptable to use gen AI for script-writing but not for art, since a machine can’t generate meaningful artistic work. meanwhile, my sister’s screenwriting professor said that they can use gen AI for concept art and visualization, but that it won’t be able to generate a script that’s any good. and at my job, it seems like each department says that AI can be useful in every field except the one that they know best.
It’s only ever the jobs we’re unfamiliar with that we assume can be replaced with automation. The more attuned we are with certain processes, crafts, and occupations, the more we realize that gen AI will never be able to provide a suitable replacement. The case for its existence relies on our ignorance of the work and skill required to do everything we don’t.
Sometimes you will be a lesbian to your parents and a straight man to your partners parents and a gay man to your partner and a woman to your grandparents and out to your friends and stealth to your classmates and a nice young lady to the cashier at the coffee shop and then people on your computer will ask you to choose which of these identities you ACTUALLY are and which you are Appropriating The Oppression Of because don’t you know they contract each other. You can only be one thing solidly forever
ALT
