I was told to post this out of context. So I am.
This. This is my legacy.
(Credit also to @maxwellelvis and @alephnull47, and @wackd for creating the chat and @zarekthelordofthefries for posting the link to the video that somehow accidentally started the tangent that made this the funniest fucking thing ever.)
(Also thanks so much @umbramatic for knowing how to screenshot and crop and upload things that I don’t.)
i hope they never stop using floppy disk icons to indicate saving your file. doesn't matter how obsolete they are it's like honouring someone with a portrait on your currency
“Most living entities and systems on this planet obviously do not live by the Western human clock (though some, like the crows who memorize a city's daily garbage truck route, do of course adapt to the timing of human activities). To watch a brown creeper as it inches up and down, peering into crevices and extracting bugs with its little dentist beak, is thus a way of catching a ride out of the grid and toward a time sense so different that it is barely imaginable to us. In Jennifer Ackerman's book The Bird Way, I learned that the male black manakin, a South American songbird, can do somersaults so fast that a human can see them only in slowed-down video. Some birdsong contains notes that are sung too quickly or are too high-pitched for us to hear. Veeries, a species related to the American robin, can predict hurricanes months in advance and adjust their migration route accordingly, and no one currently knows how. Birds own bodies and their movements are an entanglement of time and space: If a loon is in the higher latitudes, it's summer, and the bird is mostly black with a striking pattern of white stripes. If the same loon is near my studio in Oakland, it's winter, and the bird is almost unrecognizably different, a dull grayish brown.”
Jenny Odell, Saving Time: Discovering a Life Beyond the Clock (emphasis mine)
My memory of The Birdcage (1996) is always that it's more dated and more difficult to watch than it actually is. You hear "drag-themed comedy from the 90s based on a musical from the 80s based on a play from the 70s" and you brace yourself just a little, right? But the film has a strong gay perspective, so the fruity fag jokes mostly come off as warmly affectionate. There is a surprising amount of poignancy in Robin Williams' portrayal of Armand, grudgingly agreeing to his beloved son's request that he go back into the closet for an evening ("do me a favor and don't talk to me for a while"). The drag club's staff attempting to redecorate the apartment with stuff straight people might like (a taxidermy moose head, an enormous crucifix, and Playboy magazine) is extremely funny. Albert's histrionics are a point of tension because he does often come off as a stereotypically pathetic/comic figure, but towards the end of the movie he makes it very clear that he's aware of how people see him, and asserts that trying to copy a stoic masculinity he doesn't possess for the sake of social approval would be more pathetic. In the 1983 musical adaptation, they give "Albert" (Albin) the only good song in the whole show, "I Am What I Am", which Gloria Gaynor covered to the delight of gays everywhere. Apparently Nathan Lane wasn't (publicly) out yet in 1996, which is amazing because it means that at one point in this movie you're watching a gay man playing a straight man playing a gay man playing a straight man, in a movie about how it's important to be yourself, an absurdity that does seem to encapsulate the state of gay America in the 90s.
I'm seeing a couple of posts circulating about the gay 90s and this movie. The above is a very good summary, and I think it's worth adding a few other points.
I don't want to imply that this was a Sorkinized moment where everything changed because of one thing, but this was a very important movie that caused real movement in the needle on queer acceptance.
It also proved that there was a market for films with gay characters, which had the knock-on effect of gay filmmakers being able to find distributors of their gay-themed films. Which meant that more people than ever (queer and non-queer) got to see representation on-screen.
[Art of a Black knight, shown in profile from the knees up. He is wearing full armor with his shield and helmet strapped to his back. His hair is close-cropped. He’s standing next to a white horse who has their head lowered. The knight looks serious and determined. ]
SHOUT OUT TO WOMEN!!!!
"She wasn't the best mom" " she was a bad girlfriend" BOOOOOO!!! BOOOO!!! GIVE ME A FEMALE CHARACTER THAT DOESN'T HAVE TO DEPEND ON OTHER CHARACTERS TO BE A BAD PERSON
MAKE HER A LIAR
MAKE HER A TRAITOR
MAKE HER A COWARD
MAKE HER AN ALCOHOLIC
MAKE HER DISTRUCTIVE
MAKE HER EGOTISTICAL
MAKE HER A MANIPULATOR
MAKE HER SELF-VICTIMIZING
MAKE HER ANNOYING
MAKE HER A BAD RULER
i don't want " bad mom" or " bitch" THESE ARE FEMALE STEREOTYPES, MAKE HER A P E R S O N
““When I was about 20 years old, I met an old pastor’s wife who told me that when she was young and had her first child, she didn’t believe in striking children, although spanking kids with a switch pulled from a tree was standard punishment at the time. But one day, when her son was four or five, he did something that she felt warranted a spanking–the first in his life. She told him that he would have to go outside himself and find a switch for her to hit him with. The boy was gone a long time. And when he came back in, he was crying. He said to her, “Mama, I couldn’t find a switch, but here’s a rock that you can throw at me.” All of a sudden the mother understood how the situation felt from the child’s point of view: that if my mother wants to hurt me, then it makes no difference what she does it with; she might as well do it with a stone. And the mother took the boy into her lap and they both cried. Then she laid the rock on a shelf in the kitchen to remind herself forever: never violence. And that is something I think everyone should keep in mind. Because if violence begins in the nursery one can raise children into violence.””
— Astrid Lindgren, author of Pippi Longstocking, 1978 Peace Prize Acceptance Speech (via jillymomcraftypants)
In 1978, when she received the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade, Lindgren spoke against corporal punishment of children in a speech entitled Never Violence! After that, she teamed up with scientists, journalists and politicians to promote non-violent upbringing. In 1979, a law was introduced in Sweden prohibiting violence against children in response to her demands. Until then there was no such law anywhere in the world.
What a legacy. We’re so lucky to have had her.
“1978 seems late, I wonder when that law was introduced in my country”
[2007, the Netherlands]
Jesus fucking christ.
And of fucking course it’s legal in Belgium, the UK and the US. Could have guessed.
I love lady knights so much but I feel like there's a very underutilized variation of knight archetype that I never see lady knights of and it's a fucking travesty but I can't even like. Properly describe the vibe I'm thinking of I'll have to draw it but god knows when or even if I'll finish it lol
Set to drawing trying my best to to explain what I'm trying to articulate in the classic thousand words format but my computer's just full-ass frozen on me, its not doing anything
