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.

High fashion Invader zim by Deserted In Urban

Here's what I don't understand about Gamer Bro mentality.

So they're transphobic, right? And they're misogynistic, right? So Ghost of Yotei comes out and they're already having a fit about it because it's about a woman this time even though the first game is a male protagonist.

Then Erika Ishii is announced to be the voice actor for the female protagonist. And then they have a tantrum because Ishii is nonbinary and uses all pronouns. And they claim it's too woke.

Ok. But. According to their own logic, Ishii is a woman. And she's playing a woman. Who- presumably- is cis, but I haven't played the game yet to actually verify that. So. Why are they having a fit? By their own logic this is a woman playing a woman. What exactly is too woke about that?

Is it just the fact that the studio hired a nonbinary person *at all*?

Is it the fact that they chose to focus on a woman's perspective this time?

Like she just looks like a Japanese woman to me. Is she not fuckable enough to them? We got plenty of scenes of Jin's naked backside during hot spring side quests, and one of the things these guys would mention is that it's only fair to get a shot of Atsu's as well... and apparently the game followed through and she sure does show back and crack when stepping into the water just like Jin.

It's just strange to me. Like. Why are you mad that the person you're calling a woman is playing a woman. Shouldn't you be happy about that since you refuse to acknowledge the depth of Ishii's nonbinary and genderqueer experience? You still get your fanservice nudity and it's a new game from a studio that really knocked it out of the park the first time around. What's the problem here?

The problem is that the denial of queer identities is only ever a weapon to hurt queer people, not an actual opinion. If transphobes were truly convinced that queer identities aren't real, they would not make as much of a fuss as they do. In reality there is no clear opinion on the nature of queer identities, other than that queer people are framed as whatever is convenient to hurt them.

Ishii is a woman to them in so far that they consider her a lesser person, a valid target for misogyny, but she is also definitely not a woman to them, if only because she isn't a willing target for misogyny (by openly identifying as genderqueer, but also otherwise). And both of these on their own are enough for these kinds of people to scream themselves into a rage.

Also, a cis women playing a cis women in a video is already too woke for these people. Usually the voice actor discussion doesn't actually happen, because the idea that a cis womam character would be voiced by a cis woman voice actor is presumed to be "the natural state of things". But people are very much already mad about female characters not being "female enough" in other ways (see people freaking out about HZD's Aloy having peach fuzz on her cheeks, or about how the female protagonist for GTA6 doesn't fullfill white, western, cishetero beauty stadards).

Women in most games are only tolerated as perfect sex objects to white, straight cis men specifically. Everything that moves a female character further from that ideal (agency, inner lives, body hair, being part of a racialized minority or anything that detracts from their ability to be sexualized under a cishetero male gaze) makes them unacceptable.

There is no voice actor pick that would have made that character more acceptable, only ones that would have given less or different ammunition to the people determined to hate everything that isn't made specifically for them to consume as a sexual object.

Or aging, as is the case with Ciri from the new Witcher game.

According to these Gamer Bros, this is a mannish, ugly, ancient woman. Because Ciri is no longer 19 like she was in Witcher 3, and is now approximately 30ish.

She just looks like a pretty white woman appximately my age to me. But it's not actually about her looks. It's about moving from centering Geralt, a male character, to centering Ciri, a female character. Which has baffled both the studio and also fans who are not Gamer Bros, as the series has always always ALWAYS been about Ciri and centering Ciri from the time of the books. Ciri is the main character by the end of the novels and Geralt is incredibly secondary to the plot. Honestly she's the main character approximately 3.5 books in, with less and less focus on Geralt as the story goes on, until the last book where he's in maybe 3 chapters.

But the games have been about Geralt! And since the games are about Geralt, the Gamer Bros are infuriated that they do not get their emotionally constipated stoic and badass representation of their Man Pain. Even though book Geralt is also... nothing like games Geralt.

knew from a young age that i was weird and unfixable

Something I love in Sinners is how they play with the idea of ancestors and descendants. There's this impression I got from the Juke scene that the spirits aren't literally related to those they dance and play with. How could they be, when nearly the entire Juke is wiped out come morning?

Instead it suggests that our descendants are not just those related by blood, but also those who we're connected to culturally. Those who share something with us, and perhaps without knowledge of each other, have been impacted by one another. Those we have influenced directly and indirectly.

It's this beautifully expensive idea of family that white supremacy culture isn't fond of recognizing (in fact, it runs counter to the exclusively biological bonds promoted by white supremacy culture) but it is so valuable and healing. It contributes to a perspective of interconnectedness, and communal responsibility.

This requires us to ask: Who is a part of our circle? Who do we consider to be our family, our relatives, our community? How do we contribute to them, and how did the people before us do that for us? It creates a greater appreciation for what it took to bring us to where we are, and instills us with the desire, the duty, to make things better for those who come after.

I hope this is true.

Last night was a tubi original

imagine looking at my blog to try to find more out about me as a person and all you see is some bullshitttttt

WHAT IS THE CHARGE? EATING A PENGUIN? A SUCCULENT ADÉLIE PENGUIN?

my corner store guy is a 50 year old man who's my best friend in the world and recently he was like "you're too pretty to be single I have some nephews you should meet. very handsome!" and I was like "a niece might be more up my alley" and he just got more excited and said "ah even better! I was overselling my nephews but my nieces are very beautiful"

OP the tags!!

ICE agents just choked a woman and stuck their thumbs in her eyes

they have been beating and tear gassing african immigrants for the crime of being black for the past several days. Emmanuel Sackie is a naturalized citizen from Liberia and they put him in the hospital:

i got a 100% on this bostonian-to-english quiz but i grew up near boston..... i'm curious what you guys get. there's a couple things in here i didn't even know are regionalisms + a couple things i hadn't heard before but could parse pretty easily from context. tag/reply with what you got and if you're familiar with the area or not!

if you concentrate really hard you can exude all of your microplastics into a thin waxy layer, not unlike that of a babybel cheese

proposing what I'm going to call Gaylor's Razor, which is: never explain normal shit as being part of a secret message that can only be decoded by over-analysis.

"These Taylor Swift lyrics are actually coded messages saying that she's a lesbian and is forced to stay in the closet! Any lyrics that are clearly about being attracted to a man are just to throw us off the scent!" Sometimes people, like Taylor Swift, are straight and write about being straight, because they are straight.

"The fourth series of Sherlock was deliberately bad because it was actually a coded message to us fans that there is a secret fourth episode that will make Johnlock canon and will actually be good!" Sometimes writers (even experienced writers who are normally good at their jobs) will write something that's not good, because no one is perfect. They're not going to waste everyone's time and money and energy creating something terrible on purpose as part of a grand master plan.

"Tessa Virtue and Scott Moir, the Canadian Olympic ice dancers, are secretly married (with kids)! Their public relationships with people who are not each other and them repeatedly saying 'we dated as kids and now we're just friends' are just to hide the truth! Which they need to hide for some reason! Their relationship is obvious just from their physical chemistry when competing! JUST LOOK AT THIS TWO SECOND CLIP OF HIM BLINKING AT HER!" It seems counterproductive to put all that thought into hiding a relationship that doesn't need to be hidden but then also telegraph that same relationship in front of millions of people through planned choreography.

"But BB, what about times that people really are speaking in code or hiding something due to outside influences?"

Trying to apply fandom meta analysis techniques to real life is a really good way of fall into conspiratorial thinking that can be easily exploited. You can totally try to predict what's going to happen in a story or choose to interpret a scene in a specific way; you can't do that in real life with real people. That way lies the kind of nonsense that leads to shit like "this image of pizza on a children's toy is actually subliminal messaging by The Cabal™ that proves that Pizzagate is real."

opposing space

i like to entertain myself by thinking about Bad Succession -> (alternate reality succession where it sucks). constant sepia-tinted flashbacks to traumatic childhood memories, with echoey abusive dad dialogue. post-car accident kendall is haunted by a hallucination of the waiter everywhere he goes. shiv has girlboss moments where she triumphs against misogynistic men and they learn not to underestimate women. once you get started you can’t stop.. the ideas are endless. they would try to make kendall into a rebellious bad boy type with personal demons. he would have a scene where he stares into a cracked mirror to represent his fractured psyche

tom and greg are still the same tho