I’m increasingly convinced that practically everyone who smugly dismisses optimistic media as a childish indulgence has literally never experienced anything worse than moderate inconvenience in their entire lives.
Tag: exactly
‘Vote shaming’ Trump supporters is fair. What they have done is shameful
Trump voters sure are sensitive lately. They’re upset that the cast of the hit play Hamilton made a statement to Vice-President-elect Mike Pence, and that the audience booed him. They’re displeased that their vote is costing them relationships with family and friends. And for some reason not entirely clear to me, they’re unhappy with Starbucks and decided to demonstrate as much by … buying lots of coffee at Starbucks.
The same people who wear shirts that read “fuck your feelings” and rail against “political correctness” seem to believe that there should be no social consequences for their vote. I keep hearing calls for empathy and healing, civility and polite discourse. As if supporting a man who would fill his administration with white nationalists and misogynists is something to simply agree to disagree on.
Absolutely not. You don’t get to vote for a person who brags about sexual assault and expect that the women in your life will just shrug their shoulders. You don’t get to play the victim when people unfriend you on Facebook, as if being disliked for supporting a bigot is somehow worse than the suffering that marginalized people will endure under Trump. And you certainly do not get to enjoy a performance by people of color and those in the LGBT community without remark or protest when you enact policies and stoke hatred that put those very people’s lives in danger.
Being socially ostracized for supporting Trump is not an infringement of your rights, it’s a reasonable response by those of us who are disgusted, anxious, and afraid. I was recently accused by a writer of “vote shaming” – but there’s nothing wrong with being made to feel ashamed for doing something shameful.
‘Vote shaming’ Trump supporters is fair. What they have done is shameful
Actually friendly reminder to comment on that fic.
Leave one word “subscribed” comments
Tell them “consider this extra kudos <3″
Leave that essay on that old fic
Tell them if you’ve reread it once. Tell them if you’ve reread it 100 times
Tell them how much you’ve seen their writing grow
Tell them when you rec their fic
Tell them how much you can see their passion
Tell them when the fic made you grin when it made you cry when it made you FEEL
leave that comment. You’ve got nothing to lose but .02 seconds of your time and everything to gain by making an authors day.
Reblogging just to say THANK YOU to the people who do leave “extra kudos!” comments and the like on old fic. It’s not something that gets mentioned a lot but I do love hearing from rereaders just as much as new readers. (Also I should remember to do this myself more often.)
Writing “this is the fourth time I’ve read this” could be the difference between that writer coming back to that ship or not.
If the only feedback I get is 500 hits and ten kudos that tells me that 490 people didn’t think it was worth a single, free, easy internet point. I wasted their time. They noped out. That feeling sucks. I won’t do that again.
If I see the same stats but a note about rereading then I know I’ve connected with at least one person, possibly more. I love that. I want to do more of that.
#( I made this awhile ago and forgot to post it )#( there is no denying that flint is a mess )#( but it bothers me when people say he is soulless and heartless )#( he’s literally lost everything )#( he’s in so much pain he doesn’t know what to do with it all )#( yeah he’s angry and destructive and violent )#( but some never stop to consider why )#( he lost the man he loved in one of the most horrific ways possible )#( a man whom was trying to save them all from dying )#( he lost a best friend and the last person he loved and who loves him )#( again in pursuit of a non-violent end )#( he lost a career he built against all odds; a career that usually goes to the upper classes and those with money or titles and status )#( when he says he’s sacrificed a hell of a lot; he means it. it’s not some manipulation; it’s the truth )#( you don’t have to like him )#( he’s very much a ‘road to hell is paved with good intent’ type character )#( but please stop undermining him as some one dimensional jerk with no feelings ) [x]
I wouldn’t reblog this with those tags if they weren’t the most spot-on summary of Flint and the core conflict of his character that I’ve seen so far
Companies like Google and Facebook have 67 days to minimize their data collection and retention before Trump is sworn in. That’s 67 days during which they can take a hard, close look at how much of their data they actually need to do their jobs, and how much they’re storing because hard drives are cheap and someone might have a cool idea down the line somewhere.
Dutch governments used their registers to record the homes of ethnic minorities in its border; these files could have been used by the Nazis to figure out which doors to break down. That’s why, on 27 March 1943, the Dutch resistance set fire to the municipal records hall, why the firefighters who responded made sure that they kept watering the building long after the fire was out, destroying any records that survived.
How fascism accumulates power by testing people (with image, tweets) · miniver
REQUIRED READING.
This is terrifying and I need everyone to read it.
How fascism accumulates power by testing people (with image, tweets) · miniver
vox:
One tweetstorm that perfectly captures the problem of being walled off to other communities
“Coastal elites” are in a bubble. So are white working-class Americans. See the full story (and the rest of Patrick’s tweets) here.
Actually, I would like to say – since I am also in the rural Red Zone – that while he’s right about this part of the country being like 99 percent white with a power structure heavily slanted toward ‘dude’, the answer isn’t going to be “they need to get out more” because, frankly, they can’t.
Lemme put it to you like this: I’m in a Town. If you’re on the coast, you’d consider my Town to be a badly dislocated suburb. One. Suburb. It has one starbucks. One mcdonalds. One (small) strip mall. I’d have to travel 30 miles to get a full service FedEx place or bookstore. I’d have to drive a hundred miles to get to a City, and quite a bit more than that to reach a Major City. “get out more”, for what you want, would involve basically taking a vacation because it’d be at least 12 hours of driving. And on minimum wage (which is nearly all the jobs out here) vacations are few and far between.
And therefore my response to you is this: REPRESENTATION MATTERS. You know what people around here use to see the rest of the world? TV. That’s what. And if all your villains are foreigners, or non white, and all your good guys are straight white dudes, there is nothing in the world hereabouts to contradict that. That’s what we see because there sure aren’t a lot of non-white, non-straight, non-christian types here. What people here know of all that diversity they get from hollywood.
You want to teach the locals that black people aren’t all thugs? Cast more black heros and romantic leads. You want to teach them that muslims aren’t all terrorists? Start making a point of representing them more positively in oh, I don’t know, everything?
I admit I’m not fully sober right now, but listen up:
I just looked over at my cat and realized that she doesn’t give a shit about who’s president. And why doesn’t she give a shit? Because I take care of her.
So here’s what we’re gonna do, we’re all gonna take care of each other. Watch each other’s back, let each other vent, support your friends who are lgbt, black, disabled, muslim, or any of the things that a Trump presidency is hateful towards.
Go fucking vote in 2018, every single House seat is contested in the mid-term. But until then, UNITE, ok? Enough of this clique shit, we’re all fighting the same battle.
We’re gonna take care of each other. We’re gonna make it. And we’re gonna kick ass in the long run.
i have NEVER understood the whole, “oh it’s an old person, just grin and bear it”, like, what does their age have to do with getting away with rudeness?? like i’m not sorry gertrude but you’re literally insulting me, back yer ass up.
age is not an excuse to be an asshole.
Seriously though, what makes Sauron so terrifying in the books is that we (the readers) never actually see him, or even hear him. Ever. Pippin is the only main character to really ‘meet’ Sauron face-to-face and speak with him, and it leads to Pippin being briefly possessed and leaves him severely traumatized. Even then, the readers don’t actually see or hear Sauron, they just see what happens when someone DOES actually see or hear him. The chapter when Pippin ‘meets’ Sauron is one of the most terrifying moments in all three books, and mainly because the reader sees what it does to the poor kid.
Unfortunately, because of the way Sauron is so literally depicted in the films, we have a rather benign idea of him. He’s kinda creepy looking, but at the same time also kinda cool looking and simultaneously kinda silly looking. Basically he looks like a death metal album cover.
Tolkien knew the basic principle of Horror Writing 101: don’t show the monster, and if you do, only show it once or twice at very crucial moments. The scene in the movies where Pippin gazes through the Palantir to see Sauron is thus kind of anti-climactic – we just see more flashes of the eyeball and ~spooky voice~ ….which has happened a dozen times already.
Meg's Mumbles 