I remember being curious what the original Japanese was for the Danganronpa 2 scene where Ibuki says “Good Nom-nom-noming!” and I looked it up and it was “Ohayo Gozainomnom!” and my jaw hit the floor

imagine how many samurai death poems just fucking sucked

The two most culturally important things from the past few years are Friday by Rebecca Black because we learned we like hating things more than we like liking them and Cookie Clicker cause we figured out the only reason people play video games is to watch the numbers go up and since then we’ve just been applying those lessons to new and better incarnations of those two things.

I’ve thought about this post every few weeks for the better part of a decade. continues to have aged terrifyingly well

YES!

After watching Koyaanisqatsi - with ads - Youtube autoplayed to When Harry Met Sally, a fitting sequel and a movie I had never seen before so sure, why not. Great film! Very funny, and very mercurial - Billy Crystal really brings this chaos gremlin energy to his character in the first ~1/3rd; gives him this understated personal arc that sets up the relationship arc, a nice touch of depth honestly.

Lots of 80's Gender Stuff, obviously - it sits in those middle-child years of feminism, where the goals of careerism, independence, Life And Sex In The City, etc, are presumed as givens, but are never actively pursued or generate competing visions for what one wants. Girls really just want to get married in the end, and the desire for independence is a phase one processes through; and for the flip side guys just need to "grow up" and settle down. It is both a limitation and strength of the film, because while there are blinders it is also very honest about the "raw" desires of the leads.

The fake orgasm scene - takes place in Katz's Deli, hilarious! - is pretty cute but it definitely doesn't hit the same way today. The premise that Harry is "surprised" to learn that women fake orgasms is dated now; everyone knows women fake orgasms sometimes! And somewhat paradoxically, they also have less need to do so as you can just communicate more honestly about sexual needs on dates, "sex positivity" is in the water now. Though you can probably in a small way credit that scene with starting discourse around that idea and making it mainstream!

I watched an interview with the lead creators, Nora Ephron and Rob Reiner, and apparently a lot of the one-off beats of the film are just pulled from their real lives? The fake orgasm scene was an actual conversation between the two where Reiner was shocked women do that - at which point he pulled all the women in the company writer's room out of their offices so he as their boss could poll them in the middle of the work day on if they had ever faked an orgasm, incredible. The movie has authenticity and you can tell how important such an honest creative process was for achieving that.

The worst part of the film is, of course, the ending. It isn't just that they do in fact get together in the end; that isn't great, but you could make it work. The problem is that it is so hollywood-schmalzy about it; Harry running through the streets of New York to profess his feelings to Sally right in the middle of a New Year's Party in a big speech, blegh. Triggering my pet peeve too - people don't run like this in real life! You will never need to physically run to arrive somewhere quicker to profess your feelings at a crucial moment; this is a lie Big Hollywood told you, running is fake. From the interview I learned the creators agreed with me, and in the original ending they didn't get together. But it was too much of a downer for the audiences, so they changed it to boost approval ratings. Can't blame em, but still sad.

So yeah, very solid 8/10 film. Best scene for me was the time the ladies friend squad are talking about how it is better to commit to someone who is gonna die in six months than not because "at least you can say you were married" after he croaks. So true, get those points on the fucking board.

more evidence of the obvious conspiracy against schmoovement; ¿has running always been a public enemy?

i run all the time (in the getting to places sense, not the ‘jogging’ sense) and ppl look at me like i’m committing a crime for using legs properly. someone who keeps a ferrari in first gear is a bad driver.

one day we’ll finally get real hustle culture; what are you doing wasting your one life bumbling and shuffling along

a friend of mine makes fun of me by saying i move like a video game character mashing sprint everywhere and jumping (usually over benches or up onto the raised part along a curb or path) but if anything the same incentives should apply more irl, how are ppl not bored of the transit cutscenes? there’s a skip button and it came free with your bipedalism.

To be fair this is the skill issue; while you are constantly trying to dash your way through life, the rest of us are just tapping A to roll everywhere even faster and getting some sweet bonus i-frames & clipping shortcuts for our trouble

But I agree that there are plebs out there who don't even optimize their daily walk paths; the world really is diverse!

2001 baby!

"This one event will break us out of our partisan deadlock and decadent ennui and finally solve politics forever" the human temptation to believe in such ridiculous cope is eternal, all of us will be cursed to live in times where otherwise intelligent men put such nonsense to pen.

Alex Kapranos on fan fiction in conversation with Canadian online review magazine Chart Attack in November 2004:

"[Fan fiction] was pointed out to me at one point and I thought it was very humorous," Kapranos says. "The thing I didn’t realize is that there are so many hot blooded girls who are really kind of into this voyeuristic thing about homosexual sex. At first I thought they’d been spying on my private life and then I realized it’s just fantasy."

"I think it’s brilliant. It’s really, really funny. And I like that sort of thing cause it means that there’s people who have imagination who are inspired by your personality and the things that you’ve done, so it’s a good thing," he says.

"There’s absolutely nothing wrong with fictionalizing a genuine character as long as you make it clear that you are fictionalizing, which I think all that slash stuff does."

[...]"It’s what we do in songs as well," he says. "I mean, we take characters who are around us and write stories, write songs about events that have happened in their lives. Of course, when you tell any story, you make it dramatic, you use the tools of drama to make an exciting story. All they’re doing is an extreme example of what we do."

they got the bundys mixed up with Ruby Ridge and the Branch Davidians.

conservatives do this a lot in casual conversation. I have had people "mandela effect" thinking that obama shot up the bundy ranch and the nature preserve occupation, and that Randy Weaver and co were ALL murdered like the entire family was wiped out. these peoples brains are soft.

Yup not only did they survive, they were acquitted. Because our federal government apparently runs a UBI program exclusively for far-right activists that they call an "informant program" and they decided that it wasn't fair to convict them when we also paid so many of their buddies.

There is a really frustrating thing where some kinds of speculative story are hard to write because they will be assumed to be bad (clumsy, harmful, regressive) metaphors for real-world events or people, rather than exploring completely speculative ideas. Like:

"What if a small group of religious extremists, persecuted in their own country, moved to an inhospitable uninhabited island and had to rebuild society there?" - But the Americas and Australia weren't inhospitable and were full of Native nations, why are you perpetuating the idea of Terra Nullius and manifest destiny? - Yes, that's because this isn't a metaphor for the British invading other countries, it's a metaphor for finding out how much of a person's religious practise is rooted in worldly concerns, vs how much they will really stymie themselves for the sake of God.

"What if 1/100 children born was a werewolf?" - But queer people are no danger to straight people, and disabled people don't have predictable patterns to their illnesses, and most people who have uncontrollable rages really CAN control them and are just lying, and no minority group has superpowers... - Yes, but that's all immaterial, because I wanted to talk about a load of other metaphors about the passage of time and responsibility and the relationship between humans and wildlife.

It almost feels like death of the author, like "Death of the most obvious metaphor" - If you couldn't reach for the (tormented) parallel between being an alien species and being stateless, what stories could someone tell? If your changeling-baby was neither disabled nor adopted, what would the story be about? Etc.

I was literally just thinking about this yesterday! It's a trend I've seen a LOT in recent years in lit crit, particularly when discussing fantasy.

I think it particularly comes up the moment an author includes any sort of marginalisation/oppression for their fictional/fantasy world. I've lost count of the times now where I've seen people read a book on, say, the terrible oppression of the Gwyllion, and immediately gone "Oh, so the Gwyllion are a metaphor for the real world X people, either deliberately or accidentally through the author's inherent racism. This is therefore super problematic because the Gwyllion are also described as Y, which means the author is also saying that about X people."

There will always be real world parallels when discussing oppression. Always. But that's because oppression is oppression - precise details may vary, but it follows the same pathways the world over, and that will naturally be copied into fiction as well. This does not mean the author is intentionally telling the exact allegory that you've projected onto it. If that's how you read everything, then yeah, everything becomes super problematic, but also, why are you reading any fiction that isn't solely about real world historical events? It's clearly not for you

And, you know, obviously there are works that are racist/misogynistic/etc, including deliberately so. But I really don't like the way people have started going "I have spotted a PROBLEMATIC ALLEGORY here, I'm ever so smart" and acting like they're the cleverest little critic that ever lived. You have to meet a work on its own terms. Lovecraft was a big ole racist, sure. Someone who has written a book about the oppression of magic users in their fantasy world, however, is rarely writing a story about how queerness lurks in family lines and must be controlled; they are way more commonly writing a story about a world with magic that they then wanted to take seriously, and while there might well be elements of queerness there, those magic users are not a 1:1 replacement.

Sometimes these lines are blurry! But we're going way too far to one end of that spectrum

The post that got me thinking about this yesterday was someone talking about how they'd love to write a vampire story exploring vampirism as a disability (dependence on a substance to manage the condition, blindness/weakness in daytime, can't enter buildings without accommodation, etc). But, they said, they can't, because they don't want to be making the point that disabled people are parasites, and vampires are generally considered parasitic.

And like. What an incredible shame. That we'll lose that, because they're already afraid of the "I have spotted a PROBLEMATIC ALLEGORY" crowd. That would be a great story for exploring disability themes, OR just a great new take on vampires, and either of those things would be so good to read. But there would be so many people who would jump in with "So you think disabled people are draining the life force of the ableds around them?", never stopping to actually think "Vampires are not a 1:1 stand in for real world disability because they are fictional and do not exist."

Anyway sorry I've rambled here, not sure how coherent I'm being. But yes, I was thinking about this just yesterday! Wild.

@apilgrimpassingby

(Those who cannot create will only deconstruct and problematise.)

Responding to your tags: I actually don't think the problem is SJWs or deconstruction. Or, more accurately, those are downstream of a bigger problem, (to quote historian of Christianity Alec Ryrie) "the widespread conviction which has dominated European and European-derived societies at least since the French Revolution, that politics fundamentally matters, the conviction that most human problems are susceptible of political solutions" (emphasis added).

The relevant fruit of this is failing to see universals - if you assume that all of life is about politics (which is by definition particular), how can there be?

One example of this is the argument I've sometimes seen that the portrait of witches in the witch trials of Early Modern Europe and the Satanic Panic of the 1980s Anglosphere was antisemitic, due to the similarities to accusations of Jews kidnapping and cannibalising Christian children. However, the problem is that (basing this on Ronald Hutton's lecture on witch-hunting and the book Speak of the Devil: Tales of Satanic Abuse in Contemporary England by J. S. LaFontaine) these ideas are all part of the shared complex of ideas about "night witches", which are also found in societies which predate blood libel (such as the Roman Empire), lack a history of antisemitism (such as contemporary West Africa) or both (such as pre-Christian Germanic tribes): across time and space, the night witches worship an evil god who gives them black magic to hurt other people, meet secretly at night (and often in the nude) to engage in blasphemy, cannibalism and sexual deviancy, and have friends in high places (to explain why there's no hard evidence of them). This is a universal image because it's a powerful image of, to use a D&D term, Chaotic Evil - a group which inverts all social norms to horrifying results - that only needs minor adjustments to move between cultures. More cynically, they're also an enemy so utterly depraved that any action against them is permissible and any defence of them (such as denying the reality of night witches or asserting the innocence of people accused of being night witches) is unthinkable. So the antisemitism theory has got it backwards; in reality, people who hated and feared Jews accused them of being night witches, because night witches are a near-universal bogeyman.

Or for another example, I've heard accusations of monsters coded as rapists (such as King Kong and the Creature from the Black Lagoon) being black stereotypes. But, again, that's backwards. Rape (or the fear of a loved one being raped) is a universal one, so black people were accused of being rapists because it's an effective way of stirring up fear and hatred and so justifying oppression, while independently monsters were coded as rapists. For example, literal rapist monsters (incubi and succubi) predate American racism by centuries (for example, they appear in St. Augustine's City of God), and the most direct literary descendants of incubi, vampires, are almost always white and are usually upper-class Europeans.

But, if you think that all of the human experience is political (and many of these people will outright say that - "all art is political", which is a statement I have further thoughts on if anyone is interested) and so can't grasp the idea of universal fears and hatreds, you won't get that.

I feel like this kindac relates in some way to the thing where left wingers accuse religious people of using religion to "justify" a pre-religious bigotry which... May be accurate in certain specific cases?

(also: the call of the edgy, which sometimes replicates a "safe edgy" pastiche of night witches.)

Abstract meta level take on the latest scissor statement headline event in Leftpondia: looks like it's God-damned human shield politics again.

Not literal human shields in the legal sense, but this general sort of thing keeps happening, vaguely human-shield-shaped tactics of "Let's send sympathetic unarmed people in harm's way" which civilization seemingly hasn't settled on a good response to yet.

Agitator groups like the misleadingly-named National Lawyers Guild incite sympathetic-looking unarmed people to obstruct law enforcement, resist arrest, commit low-grade assault, and generally Pick Fights with cops (whether ICE, National Guard, or other kind), and then cops face the human-shield-like dilemma of:

In normal circumstances, cops can use a mixed strategy and personal judgment. Sometimes #1 only has to be done once and the person calms down or leaves with a warning. Sometimes #2 resolves the situation nonlethally and nothing further comes of it.

But when organized agitators keep inciting people and repeat the dilemma at scale, escalating on one specific matter so the choice plays out again and again, where mixed strategy looks like inconsistency and the worst of both worlds, the options "evolve" into something worse:

In theory it's simple to say that #2 is the better response, violence against unarmed people is not inherently wrong and in a country of over three hundred million people there will inevitably be some casualties from law enforcement violence, this is statistics not malice, like how someone in America dies from falling out of bed every day (on average).

In practice, good luck explaining that to the people wailing that ICE murdered an unarmed mother of small children.

And calling "better response" still doesn't mean it's good. This is a dilemma, both options are bad!

That isn't what happened.

The woman did not threaten to use force against the officer. The officer deliberately and for no reason put himself in the way of her vehicle instead of not doing that. There was no reason to do that and every reason not to do that. She was trying to drive away from someone who was grabbing her through her window, which is also a thing they should not have done and were not trained for and was no reason to do. It is extremely unlikely she even saw the guy in front of her, since a guy at her window was currently grabbing her.

Obfuscating the objective reality of a uniformed officer as "someone grabbing her through the window" is dishonest. You're just lying about what actually happened. You're lying by trying to paint the situation as self defense on the part of the leftist activist who was just "trying to leave". You're lying about whether she saw him, because in the video taken by the officer who fired the shot she's looking directly at him when she accelerates. And if you're lying about all this, why should anyone trust your input on anything ever?

I didn't say it was self-defense.

I said she was trying to drive away from someone grabbing her through the window. This is what happened. That person grabbing her through the window was a law enforcer! It does not change the fact that "someone is grabbing me through a window, I want to get away" is an ordinary reaction you can expect people to have and that you should be ready for.

Police officers are not supposed to grab people through windows for exactly this reason. They are also not supposed to walk in front of cars that are running.

It doesn't matter if she was committing a crime. She was committing a crime! Committing crimes is not what gets you shot by police. Posing a threat to other people's lives is what gets you shot by police.

The only threat she posed was due to the grotesque incompetence of the ICE officers, putting themselves in more danger at every opportunity. One officer tried to grab her out of her car because he was a dipshit whose only training was watching action movies, and in doing so put both of them in danger. Then the other dipshit walked in front of her car and then shot her because the car was coming right for him because he walked in front of it.

That is not an analogy, That is literally what happened. He moved in front of a potentially dangerous vehicle and then immediately shot the driver because his life was now in danger due to moving in front of the vehicle. This took less than two seconds.

Someone who did not pose a threat to others died because two ICE officers, in their horrible neglect, manufactured a threat to themselves and then panicked. This was over in seconds. How the fuck you expect me to believe she turned her head and then with malice aforethought decided to gun the engine and run the officer down? I could see what happened with my own fucking personal eyeballs! There wasn't enough time for that! He wasn't standing in front of the car for long enough, she didn't have the fucking time to register he was there because she was trying to get away from a dude grabbing her through her window!

Dipshit #1 did something he was not supposed to do that predictably created a large risk of her trying to drive off and Dipshit #2 did something he was not supposed to do that put himself in danger if she tried to drive off, and then instead of reacting like a normal person to that danger ("taking a single step backwards") he shot her. They behaved incredibly unsafely, and then shot a person because they were unsafe. If they did not behave incredibly unsafely, this would not have happened. They would have either arrested her then, or got her plates and arrested her later, or she would have escaped and nobody would have given a shit because she was just blocking the road.

I am with the radicals in that every lib defense of Western elite/state conduct in any matter whatsoever is obscene and filthy hypocrisy, but I am with the libs in that obscene hypocrisy has some sort of place in the international anarchy; the Actually Existing alternative is China's stance of nihilism.

Controversy in the field of competitive penis-measuring

-Steven Landsburg

Eastward? 🤨

Eastward = "in the direction of the East"

Japan is "the East"

QED

Thinking about organizing a 5k footrace for queer people, to celebrate the death of the President whose attitude on AIDS caused so many deaths by shooting cool lasers into the air. Or in other words, arranging a ragin'-at-Reagan ray gun Gay Run.

as someone who remembers the patriot act and all the conversation surrounding it, it's a bit... of an experience being able to remember how many people pointed out that Terrorist was a politically convenient term which could be used to dehumanise and legally strip the rights from someone and that eventually all this would be used internally. and the response was 'nuh uh only browns with funny headgear are terrorists'. and then two decades of 'fighting age males' being blown to pieces at weddings because they might have, maybe, looked at a terrorist once. A week ago a head of state is black bagged in the middle of the night by the US for being a 'narcoterrorist'. And now an unarmed, random woman - white, citizen - is gunned down by jackboot thugs and before her body is cold she is, of course, a domestic terrorist.

If you are reading this, you need to know that the moment the US state needs to kidnap you, the moment a drone pilot decides you're in the wrong place, the moment you are bleeding to death on the sidewalk, you will be a Terrorist. Because anything can be done to a Terrorist.

It is in a sense impressive that it took the American state 250 years to come up with a replacement for 'traitor' after putting in the actual literal Constitution that "the executive is not allowed to go after its enemies just by accusing them of treason, here's the extremely onerous standard of proof for treason going forward". I propose a new amendment: "Terrorism shall consist only in levying war against civilians without a military target, and no person shall be convicted thereof except on the testimony of two witnesses to the same overt act, or on confession in open court".