the problem is that being single is seen as the consolidation prize, and not the natural neutral state of being-a-person. at the end of the movie or the book or the poetry, there is a person waiting for you at the altar, and they love you. if the play is a comedy, everyone gets married. the metaphor is about how you are not-whole. the metaphor is about how everyone is going to be happily-ever-after. the metaphor is that romantic love is the most important resource on the planet, not just all-love. all-love is not a thing, that is a disappointment. the treasure is not the friends we made along the way. the treasure is the girl you landed.
the metaphor is that you cannot be alone, that means you are broken. are you getting over someone? that is acceptable, you can be getting over someone, but not for long. you must be single because you would rather not be single. you must be single and looking to not-be-single. you must want to date, eventually.
friendship and community are never seen as being equal-to or even-better than romantic connection. that person is your one! you need to find them. you need to hunt through the sand particles until you can shift out some kind of gem. this is regardless to your own experience of the beach and the sun. you need to be somewhere with someone.
if you are taking this time alone to heal, that is so sad. everyone gives you this little pitying look. the understanding is that you are not actually happier than you were before you were single. it is seen as a sort of pity - oh, you are choosing yourself, making yourself the priority? - that isn't quite right. you must mean that you are making yourself ready for the right person. you are just laying the bed better this time. open up your heart. you'll find them, we promise!
what do you mean you're really-truly genuinely-very happy? you are probably misremembering what it was like to be in a relationship. and besides, once you meet your person, that time will look grey and bland and wasted. your person is the only way for you to see in color. so what if you have taken this time - for the first time in your entire life - to actually-for-real do the fucking work. you can be proud of yourself, sure. but the way we need to know that you got better is that you get a partner. you're healed enough for the next bad part!
people don't choose to be single, they just say they're choosing to be single - they actually mean "nobody wants to date me." it doesn't matter how many people you have gently rejected or how many times you've talked it over carefully in therapy. what matters is that you are single, and by all accounts - that means you are something worth our pity. your successes and life all seem pale in the sunlight. sure, you have done amazing things and finally found your way in life. what matters is that there wasn't a person in the room with you while you did it.
you want to tell them - that's the whole thing. i didn't know how to be alone in the room. i didn't know how to handle the silence. every moment was so sharp, and i kept choosing the wrong way to close the door. i have spent my entire life in the empty well, living in the ricochet of someone else's cruelty. for once i have built myself a ladder. for once everything i taste is all mine, every bite of sunshine and laughter. i have learned how to sleep out in the open with my memories. recently, they have started to purr.
your father rolls his eyes. listen. this isn't about you. i just want a grandchild in my future.
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i genuinely don't care how good a piece of ai generated art or writing looks on the surface. i don't care if it emulates brush strokes and metaphor in a way indistinguishable from those created by a person.
it is not the product of thoughtful creation. it offers no insights into the creator's life or viewpoint. it has no connection to a moment in time or a place or an attitude. it has no perspective. it has no value.
it's empty, it's hollow, and it exists only to generate clicks (and by extension, ad revenue.)
it's just another revolting symptom of the disease that is late stage capitalism, and it fucking sucks.
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i'm still so disappointed that potd wasn't a bodyswap episode. think about it. think about it. the master turns on the machine. the machine suddenly stops and the doctor stumbles out. "everything is fine," she says. "the master's plan, it didn't work!" yaz believes this because her faith in the doctor is so absolute that she believes that the doctor would just magically not be affected by the master's plan. they fly off in the tardis together as the doctor smiles. the camera lingers on her smile for just a moment too long. over the next few scenes, as they deal with the cybermen or whatever, it becomes increasingly obvious that this is not the doctor. the things she says, the actions she takes, hell, even her simplest mannerisms aren't hers. and yaz realizes. they're the master's. his plan did work. he lied to her, and now she's in real danger. yaz having to defeat the master somehow while they wear the face of a person she adores, commandeering the tardis from them, and going back to the machine room. and there's the doctor, the real doctor, in the master's body. together they figure out how to reverse the effects and swap back again, but something went wrong. the forced regeneration was too much stress on the doctor's body, and now she's regenerating for real. as she realizes this, yaz looks at the doctor and realizes she will never truly be able to trust the her again because of how the master lied to her, and asks to be taken home.
just think about it. yaz having an actual reason to leave other than the doctor going "bye now!" giving thirteen a reason to regenerate that wasn't "hit by large, slow moving beam". not to mention that whittaker and dhawan playing each other's characters would be so fucking delicious. chibnall i will never forgive you for this absolute waste of an opportunity
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So, I cannot show support to Palestine at my university (flyers for protest, the colors and the flag, you get it...) because it's "encouraging violence and antisemitism" but when my university was tagged with antisemitic symbols, they did NOTHING. When the students union was targeted with threat of violence and their office was destroyed, covered with neo-nazis symbols, they did NOTHING.
The Neo-Nazis student association (which has been multiple times reported for their hate-crimes) were distributing flyers at the entrance yesterday WITHOUT ANY ISSUES, because they support Israel.
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Okay but I need to know what the people who have only watched c3 think about Beau and Caleb because I've been rotating them in my head for three years too long to be objective anymore but like. Getting to see them through the eyes of a new party just reminded me that even though so much of our delight in C2 was focused around the constant indignity of the Nein, they are objectively a flickering metronome between "how the fuck are these people alive" and "this is the most hyper competent group of mercenaries I've ever seen" and I just. Do they know. Do they know that Beau is so fucking cool. Are there people who learned these two npcs have a whole campaign and want to learn more about them. I look at these two and see a montage of tiefling dicks and red eyes and promising to kill the other if something goes wrong. I see Caleb smearing mud and bat shit on Beau's face and Beau just resigned even as she makes the most aggrieved and annoyed sounds, Beau hauling Caleb's dissociated ass over her own skinny shoulder and walking him to safety. I look at them and see 500 hours and more of the empire siblings. The weeks and months they spent going from hating the parts of themselves they saw in each other to loving in the other what they still struggled with in themselves. I see chosen siblings, best friends. What do other people see?
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[ID: a digital drawing of characters from the owl house based on the song "up the wolves" by the mountain goats. At the top of the drawing there's a rectangular panel showing Camila and Eda. Camila looks out at the boiling isles at night with her bat. Eda mirrors her pose, with her arm covered in feathers. Shadows form to look like the collectors face, covering Eda's eyes and parts of Camila. Beneath this panel is a star with King and the Collector inside of it, holding hands and spinning midair. Beneath this is the archway portal from thanks to them, which is glowing, and at the bottom of the image is the hexsquad lined up in their designs from for the future, lit by the portal light and looking determinedly into the distance. The lyrics that span the image are "our mother has been absent/ever since we founded Rome/but there's gonna be a party when the wolf comes home". The background is black. End ID]
I knew I couldn't say goodbye to this show without redrawing one of my favorite old pieces, this lyric comic based on Up The Wolves by the mountain goats. I made it pre-ttt and was honestly really vindicated by all the wolf imagery that ep, lmao
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mission launch for minkowski's crew was in march 2013. ostensibly, they were put through some mission training, though the extent and effectiveness of that is kinda dubious. pagliacci takes place in 2013, exact date unspecified. but it has to be early. let's say... mid-january.
eiffel thought he had ruined the rest of his life before he'd even turned thirty. he probably spent his thirtieth birthday in jail. and then... for some number of days, weeks, maybe even a couple of months, he exists in this state of, well. of limbo. cutter gets him released from prison, and flies him out to canaveral. he doesn't speak to his family, obviously. they don't want to hear from him, and don't even know. he's still a prisoner, but no one around him knows that, either. at some point in this time frame, goddard first exposes him to decima, before hilbert even knows who he is. and he lives wherever goddard is accommodating him, and he has to go about his day-to-day life in this transitory state between a 26-year sentence he'd just started really grappling with, and the very immediate reality he's now about to be sent into deep space instead.
they give him a certain amount of freedom; it's not like he can go anywhere. he doesn't do much, anyway, is not feeling appreciative for his momentary second chance at life, given the circumstances. he blows off most of his mission training, and they're surprisingly lax about that, which in retrospect probably should have been a sign. he sits around and smokes, mostly. gets takeout food. but he goes to see movies, as much as he can. as much as he wants to punish himself, he needs to do something, or he'll go crazy, and it's not like he'll get a chance to see a movie in a long time. he was already resigning himself to maybe never going to a movie theater again.
the film adaptation of les misérables was released in december 2012. it's entirely feasible it could've been one of the movies he saw in this time period. i think the idea adds some resonance to his shared reference with minkowski in the finale, at least, in the way it pulls things full circle. intentionally or otherwise. and, incidentally, the 2012 film adaptation of les misérables, a story that notably features an ex-convict protagonist seeking redemption, was released on december 25th. call that serendipity.
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