It is inherently fun and sexy to say statements that swap the traditional genders of pronouns and terms mid-statement, such as:
"I'm going to make him my wife"
"She's my boyfriend"
"Who says a guy can't be a pretty princess?"
"That girl's the coolest dude I've ever met"
"She's a madman who has to be stopped"
"It's not his fault he's a material girl"
Gender is a set of watercolors and the prettiest shades come from mixing the paints together.
“And I don’t think anybody should feel bad if they get diagnosed with a mental illness, ’cause it’s just information about you that helps you to know how to take better care of yourself.
“Being bipolar, there’s nothing wrong with it. Being bipolar is like not knowing how to swim. It might be embarrassing to tell people, and it might be hard to take you certain places. But they have arm floaties. And if you just take your arm floaties, you can go wherever the hell you want.
“And I know some of you are like, ‘But Taylor, what if people judge me for taking arm floaties?’ Well, those people don’t care if you live or die, so maybe who cares? Maybe fuck those people a little. I don’t know.”
Just heard about the mess that YA author Maggie Tokuda-Hall has been dealing with. tl;dr, Her publisher offered her the chance to be part of an initiative that would’ve put her work in a lot more stores and libraries. It’s an initiative specifically aimed at amplifying Asian voices... but only if she removed the word “racism” from her author’s note. On a book about the Japanese internment.
I am very glad she rejected this offer, and I 100% agree with her that this is pure cowardice. I’m appalled at Scholastic -- or any other publisher who’s doing this but whose authors can’t take the risk of speaking out. This is the kind of crap that marginalized writers have to deal with all the time -- and it is also how fascism takes root: “just business” decisions that perpetuate injustice, systematic erasure of targeted groups from their own damn stories, institutions choosing to do what’s easy over what’s right.
(I have been very fortunate to never have a publisher do this to me. Plenty of disrespectful bs from institutions and individuals within the industry, but never from the people who signed my checks. I’m also somewhat insulated from the book ban bullshit because my work is genre and isn’t aimed at kids -- though that’s coming, of course. Fascists don’t stop until they are stopped.)
Anyway. Pop over to Maggie’s blog to read the full story -- or better yet hop on a retail site and buy her books. It’s up to readers now to support marginalized authors, since it’s clear nobody else will.
You can change your name, it doesn't matter how often you change it, it doesn't matter however many names you go by, if you want to, you can change it, you could change it every week, every month, every year, it doesn't matter, you can change your name, don't feel bad about it
the reason critical role is so good is because every campaign features at least one cast member creating a character that they intend to be doomed by the narrative and matt and the rest of the cast going don’t be an idiot, Our Love Will Undoom Them. like in the explanation of percy’s final playlist, taliesin wrote, “Cheers to a happy ending for a character intended by his creator to be karmically irredeemable. May we all be so fortunate.” and just, Yeah.
Human: *crying, in pain, experiencing minor neurological symptoms* This is delicious, what's in it?
Alien: ...our strongest, deadliest poison.
Human: How much for a bottle to send home? My mom would absolutely love it.
Alien: If you let a team of our finest scientists deliver it and study her reaction, it's free.
Human: Sweet, I'm sure she'd be up for that, let me give her a call--
I keep seeing posts on social media thanking the OFMD cast and crew for their work and not mentioning Taika, and it's driving me to distraction because Taika is absolutely fundamental to the existence of this show.
There's a huge chance the show wouldn't have been picked up at all if Taika hadn't attached his name to it. And he didn't just attach his name and walk away - he played a key role in developing the show. David has said that he was looking at the history with Taika and they both went 'omg Stede and Blackbeard were fucking' and decided to centre the show around that. Taika pushed for Rhys to play Stede. Taika saw Nathan's comedy on instagram and went 'yep that's Lucius'. Taika was desperate to play Ed, and fought to play him. Taika has spoken about how much he loves playing Ed, how it made him fall in love with acting again, to the point where he wears some of Ed's jewellery and has gotten some of Ed's tattoos actually inked on him. He poured everything he has as an actor into Ed (some of the stuff he had to perform, particularly at the beginning of S2, is difficult) and the show simply wouldn't work without it. Taika directed the pilot. He loved the show enough to juggle filming S1 with post-production on Thor: Love and Thunder. When the show's budget was slashed by 40%, and could no longer afford to film in LA, Taika would have been key to moving production to New Zealand - and if that hadn't happened, S2 wouldn't have happened. When a director went off sick with Covid during S2, Taika jumped in to direct half an episode and then didn't take a director's credit on it.
You do not have to like Taika. You do not have to agree with everything he does/says. But what we are not going to do is erase the absolutely key fundamental role that Taika has played in OFMD. This show simply would not exist, probably not in any form, but certainly not in the form we see and love, if not for Taika's continuing and multi-level contribution.