My boyfriend is trying to explain cricket to me again. “He’s only got two balls to make 48 runs”, he says. The camera focuses on a man. Underneath him it says LEFT ARM FAST MEDIUM. A ball flies into the stands and presumably fractures someone’s skull. “There’s a free six”, my boyfriend says. 348 SIXES says the screen. A child in the audience waves a sign referencing Weet-Bix
The first time he showed me this I assumed he was pranking me
To be or not– but hold that fatal question: I am advis’d by mem'ry’s wisest counsel That jests at dying by oneself do naught, But give a melancholy temp'rament Yet more excess of bile: so speak me thus, I’ll take up arms against a sea of troubles By putting ‘pon the stage the greatest play That Denmark’s royal court has e'er attended
we need more pathetic female characters written by authors who don’t hate women
to be clear since this is making the rounds: she has to be an absolute loser in no way that can be pinned on her gender. no “i’m just a girl tee-hee” stuff. straight up just a loser (nondenominational)
addendum: she must be the most important person in the whole narrative
I decided to sit down and concentrate and properly write the list of rules that qualify a character for this role.
FIRST LAW: This character must be a woman.
SECOND LAW: This character must be a loser, but not in a way that can be pinned on her gender. Misogynistic response from the audience does disqualify the character.
THIRD LAW: If the audience does not enjoy this character, then it becomes impossible to enjoy the show/film/book/game altogether. It is not possible to ignore this character, for better or for worse.
FOURTH LAW: The character must make bad decisions, and not just be a victim of poor circumstances outside of her control. The character can also be a victim of poor circumstances outside of her control, but it has to be primarily her personal choices that deem her a loser.
it is funny when people act as though no transitional program for family abolition exists when cuba’s family code is right there
replacing the concept of parental custody with parental responsibility alone is like. unthinkable in most places on planet earth. it may seem contradictory that steps towards broadening and expanding what a family “is” is a step towards family abolition, but those steps both create division between strict bioessentialist definitions of the family and enshrines the dignity and personhood of (particularly structurally vulnerable) individuals within a family unit, giving children elderly and disabled persons the right to recourse when their rights are infringed upon by family members
Girl, just do it fat. Don’t wait until you’ve lost enough weight. You’re worthy of taking up the space that you fill. Live your life now. Don’t wait for some future version of yourself that you think will be more deserving. You have every right to pursue your passions and dreams just as you are today. Your worth isn’t tied to a number on a scale or the size of your clothes; it is inherent in who you are. You’re allowed to be seen, heard, and celebrated in whatever body you inhabit right now. Don’t let anyone or anything convince you for too long. So go out. Do it fat! Wear the clothes you love, pursue the opportunities that excite you, and live unapologetically. There’s no reason to put off living the life that you want, waiting for a moment that you’re not even sure will come. You deserve to be happy and fulfilled just as you are, and the world needs you exactly as you are today. Everything good that has ever happened to you, happened in this body. Girl, just do it fat.
I think about how they used to do trepanation and bloodletting for medicinal purposes and how foolish it seems in hindsight. Like, obviously you need brains to live and you shouldn’t cut holes in your skull. Obviously you need blood to live and you shouldn’t slice open your flesh. But somehow people still convinced themselves that these approaches with no demonstrable record of making people healthier and which very closely resembled something that everyone knows kills people were the only thing that could help the sick.
And then I wonder if people in the future will look back on today’s culture of weight loss and think, “obviously you need fat to live and you should’t starve yourself.”
why is the video game violence post silly? seems reasonable that [media form] causes [behavior], but that video games arent exceptional with regards to violence
i think it is simply very silly to start with a big hot-button question and frame yourself as an iconoclast saying what people Don’t Want To Say and then to clarify that what you mean by it is something completely different and (within the social circles the post is clearly aimed at) anodyne. like, substituting “do video games cause violence?” for “are cultural products influenced by the society that produces them” isn’t, as the op claimed, “rejiggering the question” it is “answering a totally different question with a totally different answer”
But you don’t understand—if we:
take the clearly loaded moral-panic-inflected question of “do video games cause violence?” and
ignore the fact that under normal circumstances it is understood as meaning “is the medium of video games uniquely responsible for violent crime in the global north?” and
instead interpret it as meaning “can a cultural product such as a video game have a role in explaining a particular violent act?” and
take as a premise the reasonable assertion that telling stories about correct use of violence is one way that a dominant culture directs hegemonic violence, ignoring the fact that this requires us to understand video games as (1) not a cause of violence ex nihilo but a factor in who is and isn’t targeted by violence, (2) not distinct from other forms of art in this capacity, and (3) part of a system of violent cultural hegemony rather than an external source of violence that threatens said hegemony, all of which contradict the normal assumptions raised by the question, and which taken together implicate the very cultural hegemony that those assumptions are meant to exonerate,
