Gnawing Agnostic

Cats (2019) is worse than Doctor Who (2006) even though the show was made with the budget of a crisp packet

okay everyone buckle the hell up cause I'm gonna nerd out to you about the makeup they used for this episode.

Yeah that's right I SAID MAKE UP

Everything from the top of their head to the end of their neck

purely intricate, beautiful makeup

(by the very talented make up designer Sheelagh Wells who is the only one to have worked both on doctor who in '63 and new who)

Each shaped individually to each actors face and able to pick up each micro expression we still struggle to produce with cgi to this day without it looking wrong or plastic

everything from the small cheek movements to the eyebrows to the nose crinkle, the actresses is able to act as if she usually would.

By not having to restrain her face to act in one peticular spot or with nothing but small motion capture dots on her face, means she can actually bounce off the more realistic reaction to the other actors performance rather than if they just said "right well pretend she's a cat and we'll add it in later".

and sure, okay, I'm not gonna lie to you, the main reason the nun cats were made to be nuns was because it meant that they could cover up as much skin as they possibly could to save time in the makeup chair, because like op said, they truly did have the budget of a crisp packet

but hey, if it works

IT WORKS

Yes, each actresses sat in the makeup chair getting the extensive hair and make up done for HOURS, but ultimately the sheer amount of detail they were able to add to the characters by doing this made it worth their while.

THEY ONLY HAD A BUDGET OF AROUND £800K PER EPISODE at the time, in 2006 FOR EVERYTHING INCLUDING LOCATION ETC

Imagine what these make up designers would be able to do with A HOLLYWOOD MOVIE BUDGET

FINALLY SOMEONE WHO IS AS INSANE FOR THE CAT PEOPLE AS I AM

THEY DID IT MORE TOO GRIDLOCK IS ONE OF MY FAVE EPISODES THANKS TO THIS GUY

Thomas Kincade Brannigan (yes of course he's dressed like that for the same reasons come on)

YOU GUYS TALKING ABOUT MICRO EXPRESSIONS LOOK

This whole episode reeks of "we don't have money at all so we will film only tiny tiny interiors". It almost feels like the whole scenario was written BECAUSE OF THIS

Brannigan is also the proud father... Of... A... Litter of actual real life kittens 😐 ok I remember I laughed out loud while watching I loved this.

Anyway this to say OFTEN THE BEST THINGS COME FROM INGENUITY IN FRONT OF LIMITATIONS AND PASSION

NOT FROM MONEY (and rushing your workers to make more money faster 🙃)

This thesis is absolutely sound. (Do I have to mention JAWS? Every time that mechanical shark broke down, Spielberg wound up having to make that film better in some other way to compensate.)

Limitation is the lifeblood of art.

Genius

I love it when pets do the thing where they've clearly figured out that certain steps result in an outcome, but they can't quite DO it themselves.

The cat understands that their food is in this container, and that their human gets it, and brings it to the dishes, and then there's food.

But having no thumbs has prevented them from their triumph.

I on the other hand love that he insists on using the bowl even though he could probably just rip/chew a hole in the bag.

Which indicates that he's probably not quite sure WHICH of the steps are crucial so he's earnestly repeating them all.

(kids do this too - it's called overimitation and there are experiments on it.)

An attempt was made.

ok this tag really got me

...girl

immortalizing these tags

The alt-right's foothold into Gen-Z is frustrating and I can see from over here how they're doing it.

You've got a generation of young-adults who are learning to be adults for the first time and for so many of them it sucks. It sucks to be in your first shitty apartment where things break, and to have your first shitty car that needs maintenance, and to be working a low-paying service or retail job where you get berated all day and barely scrape by. And you go home and you have taxes to figure out and electric bills to figure out and a screen on your phone to rot into to destress.

And this is men and women, equally, in this spot. But the alt-right messaging gets to tailor their approach to gender.

And hey women, yes you working a shitty job for shitty pay, overwhelmed by financial responsibilities and car repairs, what if you actually didn't need to do ANY of that? You don't need to. And you don't need to feel guilty about it. (You're not quitting, you're not being lazy), you actually are just embracing the chance to be exactly who an ideal woman should be. You should actually be beautiful, and demure, and barefoot in a sunny kitchen, glowing, pregnant, hearing the joyful sounds of your children while you bake a roast for your wonderful husband (strong, protective, loves you, handles the finances, handles the jobs, handles all the things you hate). OUR ancestors (don't mind the dogwhistle) did this for GENERATIONS, and modern society has failed you instead!

It's offering to break women out of all the parts of their real life that suck, and do it in a way that promises they're actually being better, being more admirable, more moral, more respectable, more correct, can feel good about, can feel proud about, as a Woman as Feminine as Mother as Goddess.

And the thing being promised does not need to actually reflect reality. It's a fantasy. It is not real. For every "beautiful demure barefoot" day, you'd be having another one covered in shit changing diapers of screaming infants with screaming children while your husband ignores you because it's Women's Work (take pride!) But that doesn't matter. It just needs to sound better than the reality they're living.

Then the men are targeted too. And it's the same in that it's getting to them by appealing to pride in their gender, but the messaging is different. It's "those finances are hard but ACTUALLY you're leveling up, you're grinding, you're finance maxing." It's hard but it's the kind of hard that is a challenge you can WIN at, boast about, post about, prove your manliness. Knowing cars, knowing home repairs, knowing taxes, that's your MAN pride, and you are so elite, you are so sigma, you are the envy of everyone, you are a masculine man. Women love you. Women will defer to you. Strong, respected, moral, loyal, unshakeable. Unlike those pansy men (mind the homophobic dogwhistling) who will whimper and cry like girls. You are better.

The shitty retail job is actually humble beginnings because you're minmaxing your way to financial success (bitcoin, crypto, investments). You can sleep with any woman you want as long as you're confident, and then you'll find one who understands how smart and confident and strong and protective you are and she will defer to you as her man. She will birth your children and teach them good morals and you will make it. Our ancestors lived this way for generations (dogwhistle) and modern society took it from you.

And with that messaging it makes it clear who the enemy in all this is - modern society that has convinced women to torture themselves with high education and terrible jobs, turned them Ugly with Ugly opinions and bad hair and nasty attitudes, yelping about "rights" and "equality" (pitting them against men! TAKING things from men!) All the while, society has been trying to emasculate men--replace them with women, make them soft and emotional, make them gay, make them WEAK. We've been made WEAK.

The naive women hearing this go "I'm not ugly! I don't hate men! I DO hate my job and my finances. I've been tricked. I'm actually rebelling by declaring my goal is to get a Perfect (White) (Christian) moral husband who will make all our decisions and protect me and our children." (And when she's financially trapped in an abusive marriage...? When she's suicidal with PPD but her husband won't touch that because it's Woman Hysteria...? And when her husband leaves her for someone who was as hot as she was 20 years ago and now she's figuring out finances, health care, taxes, bank accounts for the first time in her life...?)

And the men go "They've been TAKING things from us for too long! It's time to be men again! It's time to take pride! I am strong and confident. I am in charge! I never show weakness!" (And when he's got a gun to his head due to the depression he's never been allowed to talk about as Women Feelings...? And when he's financially ruined from a crypto scheme that stroked his ego and robbed him blind...? And when he's dead from alcohol poisoning and none of his adult children notice because no one's spoken to 'Dad' in 15 years...?)

And it's so hard to fight because you're arguing against a fantasy. How do you disprove their fantasy? It's so hard to explain to them, hey you're working a shitty job where you have no future because the rich bastards took it all from you. And now you're doing their work for them. You hate society because of what they've done to it and now you're doing their work. Now you're targeting groups who've never done anything to harm you and the guys responsible are laughing to the bank. How do you explain? How do you disprove fantasy?

My approach to disproving the fantasy is to recite the actual reality about the lives of my grandparents and great grandparents who lived in this supposed "fantasy." To talk about how one of my grandma's sisters had to point a gun at her husband and tell him she'd kill him dead if she ever saw him again, because he was abusing their children, and how they were technically still married when they both died.

How when my great-grandfather died, he left behind seven children and a wife who didn't even have an eighth grade education, and how his family starved. She was too frail to work the fields of their farm on her own, and she had no skills or knowledge to get another job. Her eighteen year old son, who was brilliant and was going to go to college on a scholarship to become an engineer, had to give up all of that to run the farm then join the military to try to keep his family alive.

I tell them about how my grandmother slapped me when I was a child and complained about having to go to school, because she knew that going to school for a girl was a privilege, and she saw what happened when women weren't educated. She made her daughter go to college. She made her promise to never, ever be dependent on a man, and she made me promise the same. She was a typical 1950s housewife. Suicidal, young, and cripplingly addicted to Valium just to get through the day.

It doesn't really work. But I tell these stories because this is the story of not my family, but most poor rural families from this so-called "Golden age," and I hope for the love of God that someone will listen.

Chad just got roasted so hard he has third degree burns.

In this day that's already gunwale-high in the kinds of online and political drama nobody of good intent particularly wants to have to put up with, this is the kind of content I'm looking for. :)

does anyone wanna hold hands until we feel a little braver

the reblog map is all of us holding hands btw

We are each other's night sky. No one is alone here.

night sky continues to get brighter. theres always people here for you

When I was getting my associates degree I took a Mythology class that I loved. But one of the girls in class was absolutely off the rails conservative Christian which made things… interesting.

The professor started off the class by being like, “Mythology is stories associated with religion.”

This girl. Haaaated that. She was like, “No, Christianity is true. It’s not mythology.” Mythology was delivered in the same tone as someone trying to spit excrement from their mouth.

The professor raised her eyebrows and said laconically, “Yes, most people believe their religion is the real one, that’s part of it, and the stories surrounding religion are referred to as mythology.”

The girl stewed in a hateful sullen rage. I truly don’t understand why she didn’t drop the class but perhaps it was court mandated education. We all expected her to drop the class but she dug in like a tick and derailed discussions as often as she could.

On a different occasion the professor was drawing a comparison between social constructs like gender. The girl raised her hand. The class hushed to hear her announce, “It’s just a fact that women like domestic work and even though men are awful and stinky we just have to love them anyway. It’s biology, we’re just hardwired like that.”

I was sitting next to my friend a baby gay Jewish girl and our eyes met in mutual hilarity while the professor tried to pretend she hadn’t just been stricken with a stress induced migraine while she steered the class away from that landmine.

The next sticking point was a week later when the professor informed us that many mythologies have overlapping events like floods but these didn’t necessarily happen in such literal terms. It was a metaphorical way to process and understand the world.

This girls hand shot up. I watched the professor exercise extreme self control to keep her expression bland before calling on her.

“The world did flood. And Noah saved all the animals. Before the flood all the water was in a dome outside the earth and then the dome broke and the world flooded. All of it.”

The whole class stared at her as if struggling to comprehend the overlap of her acceptance that the world was round while also firmly believing that there had previously been a barrier that held up all of the earths water before god smashed it in a fit of pique.

She raged under the attention, glaring balefully at our astonished faces.

The professor stared at her blankly, unable to form words to such a bizarre belief. I wanted to ask clarifying questions- what they’d drunk before the dome broke, if there were rivers or lakes prior, or did the dome allow some rain in somehow, but then I really looked at her.

She had the eyes of a feral, cornered animal who regarded any deviation in worldview from her own to be a physical assault on her person. Like the professor, I said nothing, and after a wretchedly long pause class moved on.

evangelicals are literally taught to do this, btw. it’s not just a random personal quirk of certain fanatical people, it’s something fundamentalist christians are encouraged to do

they believe jesus/christianity in charge is the natural state of things & schools not explicitly & exclusively teaching christian teachings as history & science = “schools have banned god & christianity”, so they see it as not only a brave act of resistance against a world that is hostile to jesus, but actually part of their mandate to “spread jesus’s message” & reclaim schools (& the world) for jesus to derail any discussion of other points of view.

it’s the same mentality behind films like “god’s not dead”. another example that’s a little older (from the 90s) that i grew up with & lays it all out very explicitly is “america again” by carman (content warning for, like, all of the bigotry)

I remember when a friend explained to me how they were taught about the flood and I'm pretty sure my face went on a hell of a journey.

Their response, "yeah, it's all pretty much like that. "

Wait til they get to dinosaurs.

Oh yeah dinosaurs were a trip and a half.

adhd is fun bc everything I got taught is backwards

a good day makes good sleep

starting with a lil treat gets the work done

More things to do is less overwhelming

don’t make a plan just get in there

you’ll never take good care of what you don’t like so throw it out (this one is my favorite bc it’s easy to see what you don’t like)

Incredible addition

don’t put the thing on the shelf put the shelf under the thing

there is no work there is only fun there is no good it is only done

In regards of the Trump government scraping all trans inclusion in its queer information portion of its websites I have made this thing. Spread the word. Don't let them pretend we never existed.

P.S: Don't like! Reblog! <3

for me internet friendships are “we don’t talk all the time but I see you’re online and it makes me happy” and I really hope it’s like that for everyone

Please tell me that y'all won't go back to tiktok once Trump gets whatever nefarious concessions he wants from the company and "saves" it. Like, you all NEED to stay gone. Stay on Xiaohongshu or move to other platforms or create a new one or whatever, but don't go back to whatever Trump-appeasement monstrosity TikTok is about to become. Don't do it.

Keeping these

( @hubcaptastrophe )

Harding's heroic armor (non-rage) really is the most beautiful Easter egg

If you have posted videos to TikTok and you do not have them all saved and you would like to do that before they may shut off US access, here's how you can do that.

The process will create a page called archive.html which will basically replicate your TikTok page in your browser and show you each video and information about it including your original caption.

It's pretty obvious that this extension has largely been used by content thieves, because it downloads videos from an account that you're not signed into, and without any watermarks. But in the situation we are facing of losing access to TikTok entirely, using this tool to archive our own work seems completely reasonable. This would also allow uploading our content to another platform.

— Smith Considered Charging Trump With Insurrection. The Law Wasn’t Ready.

Many people who are loudly accusing Biden of not doing enough really are not grappling with the reality of the judicial branch.

When we say that Trump changed the judicial landscape of America for at least the next 40 years, we aren't exaggerating (and that was just in his first term).

Any time SCOTUS had the opportunity to interfere with Biden or protect Trump, they did.

Student loan forgiveness was hamstrung and turned into a dozen different small "legal" acts because SCOTUS decided his promised blanket forgiveness was illegal.

And as a nation, America truly failed to understand the assignment this year.

I'm not going to pretend that Democrats (including Biden) didn't depress their own voters, especially with regards to Gaza, but the number of people who unplugged from politics is terrifying.

I find it so funny, in light of TikTok’s imminent American demise, that even now they aren’t considering moving to tumblr. The last two social media refugee crises (Twitter -> X and whatever happened with Reddit) prompted a wave of wide-eyed new baffled tumblr users to flood this app and yet last I heard all of the tiktokers are flooding en-masse a Chinese social media app. That is entirely in Mandarin. Instead of moving to tumblr.

Like. People are learning mandarin to join this social media site. I’m not joking. There are tutorials going around to show people who don’t speak Mandarin how to sign up for this app. They’re all talking about how they’d rather learn a new language than join instagram reels and it is not a thought in ANYONE’S mind that tumblr is also potentially an option

To be clear im not mad about this. I’d rather see a generation of people learn a new language and engage in cross cultural connections than have a wave of tiktokers flood this app but I still think this whole thing is very funny

no because that is quite literally what is happening on Red Book right now like. All of the Chinese users went “hey why are there suddenly a gazillion Americans on here?” to which the Americans went “they’re banning TikTok and we’re moving out of spite” and the Chinese were like “oh cool send us pictures of your cats and help us with English homework and we’ll send you pictures of our cats and help you learn Mandarin” and as far as I can tell everyone is having a genuinely very nice time together.