Hey there. Glad you stopped by. This is a spot for my thoughts, art, and things I enjoy. Hope you enjoy your stay. Also, DFTBA.
"Play, as we see it, is any activity which takes place entirely for its own sake." ~Moritz Schlick
friendly reminder that characters don’t need to be saints to be entertaining. and telling a story does not mean endorsement. art does not need to be all about morally good people.
IDK if this was meant as hyperbole but it’s literally true:
We are genuinely in a crisis of media literacy, with ever fewer genuinely factual resources available in the style and language used by contemporary audiences.
It may sound condescending, but we genuinely need to remind people, or worse, explain to them for the first time that art is not evidence of real world behaviour.
So, thank you, for this reminder. Genuinely.
You’re correct:
Art does not need to feature exclusively morally pure characters. Art is not proof of the creator’s secret, violent desires.
ETA; Yes, the links are US American; no your country is not immune to propaganda. Be POLITE in asking, and I will help you find the data for your own country as well.
Also please, please, please, for the love of all that is ship worthy: find a way to read as an adult.
Like muscles, reading skills can atrophy! If you don’t practice, at least a little, your reading levels will go down.
Also, for everyone who has ever said: ‘This could have been an email.’ THIS IS WHY IT WASN’T. Your meeting where your boss/co-worker/work bestie Read An Email Out Loud is because so, so many adults are deficient in reading comprehension and literacy.
right now it’s almost halfway through 2023, and 2024 is an election year in the US. I have started to see a growing proliferation of posts suggesting that there is no difference between the republican and democratic parties–the exact same kind of posts I saw an awful lot of before the last major election here. I am unfollowing folks who post or reblog these sort of posts, as I consider these posts to be fascist propaganda framed as leftist discourse, designed to suppress anti-fascist votes and voters.
Prepare yourself to vote for Biden now, because the only other option is someone who will make 2016-2020 look like a picnic.
You work with what you’ve got, not what you wish you had.
I detest Biden more with every passing day (and he was not in my top 10 candidates in 2020). 2024 will be an election between:
Biden/The Former Guy
Biden/DeSantis
Biden/Republican Fascist to be Named Later
No Labels is an op. It’s being funded by unknown parties to defeat Biden and the Democrats. Their election scenarios are fantasy football for political junkies.
No Third Party has a road anywhere outside statewide offices (Bernie is the exception that proves the rule, and he’s a Democrat for all intents and purposes).
Arguably the rosiest scenario is that TFG breaks with the Republicans to form his own party and tanks any chance the Republicans have, but that’s not looking as likely as it did two years ago.
If you’re pissed, get involved in your local elections. Ensure that no position is running unopposed (and that includes if you’ve got a conserva-Dem somewhere now–primary them).
Get the House back in the Democratic hands (unless you’re up for two more years of this only with MTG as Speaker this time). Increase the margin in the Senate (and send Selema to her post-senate career). Make sure your school board isn’t full of flat-earthers. Wake sure your county counsel isn’t going to shut down your libraries if they have a book someone doesn’t like.
As Stonekettle says, if you want a better country, but a better citizen.
There’s a reason we call it a civic DUTY, not a civic privilege.
Starting mid-April I’ll be posting to-do lists and action items for people who’ve never gotten involved before. One party wants you dead. FIGHT.
Speaking as a Michigan resident: Look at the laws being passed in Michigan. Now look at the laws being passed in Florida. Spot the difference? That’s because Michigan is being governed by the Democratic Party, and Florida is being governed by the Republican Party. That’s the difference. They’re different parties. It is not the same.
You want what we’ve got? Vote for it.
(And you want Michigan to stay the way it is and not slide backwards into the shit we had to deal with with Rick Snyder, or even just the way it was when the House and Senate were Republican-controlled? Keep fucking voting.)
D are not our friends or even allies but R is a staunch enemy
look the main thing is that our first-past-the-poll voting style automatically and always devolves into a two party system where the majority of people dislike both parties. This is now a known phenomenon, a feature of our voting method as inevitable as water running downhill.
But that isn’t going to change until we get some sweeping voting reform that revises our voting system into some kind of ranked or run-off voting
Meanwhile one of our destined-to-be-disliked parties is actually trying to do things we want (health care, living wages, social services, public transportation, civil rights, education, support for gay and trans people, religious tolerance, etc) and one of our parties is banning books and undoing women’s rights and supporting corrupt racist police and endangering gay and trans lives while paying people to make posts about how both parties are equally bad so that people don’t vote democrat.
Like, we are going to not like a lot of how the Democrats operate, that is a feature of the current design, but they are trying to protect women’s rights, they are trying to help the homeless, they are trying to raise minimum wage they have agendas that include important things. And republicans? are at this point a literal cult that want to create a religious fascist state.
Even my father, now 80 years old, a man whose politics i have often despised, a man who voted for Reagan for fucks sake! even he (unhappily) votes Democrat now, because he’s not an insane person, and the republican party has become SO BLATANTLY EVIL AND STUPID that he can’t ignore it.
Democrats pass legislation we want that republicans then find ways to block. Democrats have passed bills that:
close gender pay gaps raise federal minimum wage make becoming a US citizen easier for immigrants protect civil/public water sources from pollution cut greenhouse gas emissions to fight climate change increase gun regulation lower and control prescription drug prices improve healthcare access for those with pre-existing conditions protect net neutrality protect gay marriage rights
these are all the subjects of specific real bills that democrats have either passed into law or tried hard to pass in the last few years.
Meanwhile republicans act to block these bills while championing book bans and attacking trans folk and giving more power to corporations to ruin our planet and taking away women’s rights.
when you see posts attacking Democrats from the left or whatever, the talking points and quotes can often be traced back to right wing sources
So all posts trying to keep non-republicans arguing amongst ourselves and calling for us to not vote democrat (or not vote at all) ? I will be assuming they are bad-faith posts and i won’t be spreading them or engaging with them or anything.
Honest critique of the party is necessary, but like it or not our system currently is a two party system, and i’ll be voting for the better of the two until we can change our voting style to make additional political parties viable.
I live in Pennsylvania.
Neither of my children is cisgender.
The last gubernatorial election was, literally, do we elect this guy who is overly fond of cops but is generally a normal human being, or do we elect this other guy who believes frightening conspiracy theories and wants my children removed from my care and forcibly detransitioned and honestly would prefer them to be dead?
That’s it. That’s the kind of choice we get in first-past-the-post voting. If that second guy won, we needed to move. There was no safe way to stay here. The votes of my fellow citizens were all that was standing between my kids and serious fucking danger.
And my fellow citizens DID turn out. Lots of them came out and voted to reject the scary death cultist. I am grateful to all those who went, ugh, I don’t really like this guy, but the other guy is worse, and hauled themselves down to the polling place to get it done.
You, too, can vote to reject scary death cultists, in your hometown and your home state and in the country as a whole.
Getting rid of the scary death cultists is a prequisite for getting political representation you actually want.
i know people make these kinds of posts with fictional characters a lot but like. hank green truly is one of The Most Guys Ever. like. he’s one of the earliest youtubers who is still on there. he’s a 43-year-old tiktok star. he’s a science educator. he got cancer and his response was to make a tier list of the press’s coverage of his cancer announcement. the president of the united states sent him a message of support and he told the president that he was pissing out the cancer. years earlier he was diagnosed with ulcerative colitis and his response was to write a polka song about it. he created vidcon. he’s the ceo of a company that produces a shitton of educational series (well, not acting ceo at the moment due to the aforementioned cancer). his guitar says “this machine pwns n00bs” on it. he invented 2D glasses. one of his earliest videos to get popular was about animal sex. between him and his brother, he was known as “the science one” (or “the music one”) while his brother was “the writer one,” and then he wrote two new york times bestselling novels. his most controversial opinion is that butt is legs. he’s done so many things that there is a website dedicated to counting the number of days since he started a new thing. he and his brother use their internet following to (among other things) fight maternal/infant mortality in sierra leone. he has a baked bean furby. hes even bisexual
In 1998. his Winter Park High School classmates named him “Best Dancer.” He’s had an album on the Billboard Charts, and he won an Emmy for a web-based adaptation of Pride & Prejudice. He co-founded DFTBA.com, the Awesome Coffee Club, the Awesome Sock Club, and Sun Basin Soap–but doesn’t make money from any of them. Instead he’s led these brands to donate over $5,000,000 to a hospital in Sierra Leone. His companies, when he stepped down as CEO due to the cancer, had over 115 full-time employees, all of whom receive a living wage and good benefits. His production company, Complexly, has made educational videos with 5 billion total views, and helped hundreds of millions learn through SciShow and Crash Course. He is the sweetest dad to the world’s most amazing six-year-old, and the spouse of one of the funniest people you’ll ever meet, and he is loved–ferociously–by his brother. He truly is among the Most Guys Ever.
And this is why I play Right Answers Only “who the eff is Hank?” during P4A.
Their flagship store and New York has unionized along with 3-4 other stores! This is happening! People are tired of being seen as dollar signs and being made to work just to get to work more, to survive instead of thrive. Keep it UP.
I want to make so many dad jokes right now, you have no idea.
But, yes, I am a member of SAG-AFTRA since 1980, and I am on strike with my union, which has been in solidarity with the WGA since May.
I hope we can get back to bargaining, and I hope that the AMPTP will move off its stated position of letting us all go broke and homeless while their billionaire owners add decks to their yachts, so we give up and our unions are destroyed.
I hope that some sane people will sit down and negotiate with us, because so far all we are getting is outright rejections of our proposals, a refusal to counter, and the insulting fiction that paying a background actor 200 dollars one time to use their image and labor in perpetuity (thus eventually removing background actors from production, entirely) was some kind of groundbreaking offer to address the serious issues we all have with AI.
So unless and until the other side negotiates in good faith, I’m proudly on strike.
Along with stepping away from all film and television productions worldwide, actors will not be permitted to take part in promotional work of any kind, including press junkets, film premieres, and fan events like San Diego Comic-Con.
Sources also say that SAG-AFTRA has informed publicists that any scheduled press or acting work after a strike is ordered must be cancelled. SAG-AFTRA members are also not permitted to promote any work on social media, as that is considered publicity.
Actors are permitted to attend the pop culture convention as long as they don’t take part in any panels that promote a specific film or television show or discuss any current or future work. While attendance is allowed, individuals with knowledge of the publicist meeting tell TheWrap that SAG-AFTRA would prefer that its members completely skip the event [SDCC] later this month.
