✶ 天才的なIDOL様！

bro last night was a satirical deconstruction of the genre

i love it when characters are codependent. i love it when losing someone feels like losing a limb. i love it when two people "complete" each other so wholly and terribly that one can barely function without the other. i love it when the fear of losing the only person who understands them is so all-consuming they'll destroy anything to stay together, including themselves.

THE SHEET IS MADE OUT OF WOOD TOO

Wendell Castle, Ghost Clock. 1985

THAT IS MAHOGANY

I thought this was a joke until I read the description

WHAT HTE FCUK

It’s one of my favorite pieces at the Renwick. It’s a solid block of mahogany and you can see the impression of knobs under the cloth.

i hate viruses so fucking much. literally getting attacked by a fucking shape. a concept. consumes no energy. responds to no stimuli. its only existence is to fuck with you. like fuck offf

If you're having a bad day, just remember that it's going to be winter soon and imagine what will happen to all the Cybertrucks ❤️

Salt-rusted unprotected steel panels... Meltwater getting into poorly constructed and poorly isolated electronics... Stuck in snowdrifts that a real truck would have been able to deal with... Oh, those are indeed happy images. Yes indeed...

It's winter in the US is anything happening to all the cybertrucks

No snow here yet. Lots of Cybertrucks in my area, so I’ll keep an eye out.

Keep us updated I am so curious to see how they handle Normal Weather

There should be Cybertruck Winter, like Fat Bear Week. Where we see which cybertrucks fall first and which ones make it to the end in usable condition.

Dispatch from the far northern hemisphere and have witnessed a Cybertruck in the winter wilds.

We're early enough into the snow season in that the damage isn't obvious. My guess is that exposure to road salts are really going to destroy these ambulatory dumpsters, but we won't start to see that until spring. Road salt is difficult to impossible to get off in a regular car wash, and we know that Cybertruck can't handle even that.

On the one I saw, any metallic shine that the Cybertruck had was completely lost in a combination of cold winter temps, light street grunge, and lower ambient sunlight. It was the same color as my friend's early 2000s silver pickup truck. One of the big draws, imo, is that stainless steel panelling and to see it turn into the same shade of grey as one of the most popular truck colors twenty years ago would be disappointing to me. It's not special anymore.

Local Cybertruck enthusiasts who are salty dogs at winter driving have started vinyl wrapping their automotive basket cases. The trend seems to be to go from the door windows down, which gives them a beach cooler vibe that is similarly underwhelming.

They’re already having issues! The head lights are sunken in for some reason. This means there is a shelf to hold snow in front of the lights and block them.

Now, every car has to have the snow cleared off the headlights before you drive, but this is way worse. That shelf collects snow as you drive. People have to pull over and clear the snow off mid-drive because they lose their headlights.

WHY ARE THEY BUILT THAT WAY

【推しの子】完⭐︎

idk man. if ur response to a bunch of women callin u out as a misogynist is to insist that u & ur man buddies are the real feminists & all these whining bitches don't know what they're talking about then maybe u don't know as much abt feminism or misogyny as u think u do

I don't care if it's the best TV show of all time. I cannot be tricked into consuming a cartoon about league of legends.

i judge people by how they talk about aqua

rapidly unsheathes my katana and you immediately get a phone call from your wife asking for a divorce

“male loneliness epidemic” and “friendzoning” are similar concepts to me in that the conditions they describe are literally experienced by everyone at some point in their lives but when its men its some sort of profound injustice that needs to be rectified by checks notes giving them unfettered access to the public good that is Women

This point has been made several times over the course of Oshi no Ko's run but now with the full manga here I keep thinking about Ruby's arc and how the lack of letting her confront the dark realities of the industry she is a willing participant in ends up stagnating both her arc and the story's critique of the entertainment industry as a whole.

Ruby is introduced into the story as a bright eyed young girl wishing to be an idol due to her admiration of them and how Ai- her mother in this life and her oshi in her past life as Sarina got her through her time at hospital up until Sarina died. She wants to be an idol because it is a two lifetimes long dream of hers, a dream she desperately wants to fulfill. Even though she is somewhat aware of the less than rosy reality of being an idol, she wants to be one anyway. And she does! With the help of her family, she ends up forming an idol group in a safe environment and as a result ends up with a very different start to being an idol than Ai- safe and protected.

This is not a bad thing of course! Its good that she has a safety net that she knows will catch her to fall back on and it is definitely good that she was not subjected to how terribly another agency may have treated her. But what this does is also set up the fact that Ruby's arc SHOULD have been her reckoning with her own participation in this environment and system, tearing off the rose tinted glasses completely and then choosing to better herself and the environment around her along with finally seeing the person Hoshino Ai was in her entirety.

The toxicity and parasocialism of idol culture is in a direct clash with Ruby's naivete and enjoyment of idols as a method for her escapism. She is a "fan" but she is also an "idol" and she needs to be able to reconcile and grow past those two identities, as a fan who buys into the idol propaganda, projecting her own desires and fears onto them and as an idol who has to participate in this system of being a product for the masses.

Ruby and Ai are the main focus for discussing the toxicity and corruption in the idol industry because the two of them are major idols here. Ruby is paralleling Ai of B-Komachi's steady upward rise in the industry- we've known since the beginning her end goal would have been a concert at the Dome, the story is partly about her journey getting there.

And because Ruby is the main viewpoint through which we see the idol industry, that's why Ruby has to have meaningful interaction with the darker side of things because if she doesn't, then the whole commentary falls flat. Its been discussed before but because of her following in Ai's footsteps so to speak, that the differences between her and Ai in how they become idols, the way Ruby is a nepobaby who has everything from her group members to her first gig handed to her and Ai who received none of the protections Ruby did provides an implicitly victim blaming narrative on Ai as the story transforms more and more into "Ruby is the purest and most honest of all and thus is the superior idol" when the circumstances for Ruby and Ai's careers are completely utterly different in a way that makes a comparison like this impossible without placing inadvertent blame on Ai for not being a honest pure idol like Ruby.

Ruby has to discuss and interrogate the toxic and negative side of the industry as she experiences it! It can't brushed off with her because SHE is the one following in Ais footsteps as an idol and whose journey revolves around her dream of being one. Making Ruby brush off all of that and refusing to let her meaningfully interact with critique on the industry in order to perpetuate the narrative that she's the "best and purest and most specialest idol who will definitely surpass Ai because she just can okay?" accidentally invalidates OnK's critique on idol culture with Ai. Then the topic of discussion is not "how the misogyny and toxicity perpetuated by the idol industry and rampant entitlement over idols causes deaths and suffering for idols because humans are not meant to be pedestalled as a pure ideal" but instead becomes "Ai wasn't a good enough liar or idol and wasnt pure enough thats why she was attacked but Ruby is pure and good and perfect and she won't follow in Ais footsteps because shes just naturally that good." which is uh. Bad!

And because the story takes a swift turn into making Ruby the central focus of everything, that means her dream to be an idol also becomes the centre focus which means any sort of critique of that position becomes stagnant because the story is unable to reconcile that dirty reality with the rosy future it wants Ruby to achieve. Ruby won't have to deal with misogyny and toxicity because she's perfect and pure. Ruby's negative feelings towards fans that she explicitly says she sometimes sees as Ryousuke (c.123) are brushed away because she's a loving idol who never has any less than loving thoughts about her fans. Ruby's manipulations and horrible treatment of people during her BH mode are never resolved and the RBKN fight ends in Ruby graciously forgiving Kana for her outburst and jealousy and never allowing Kana or Mem to opportunity to properly air out their grievances with Ruby discarding them like leftover vegetable scraps in BH arc because can't you see? She's the story's specialest princess who has never done anything wrong in her life ever.

Refusing to let Ruby confront her own biases and participation in the toxic culture of the idol industry and the way she perpetuates that cycle of harm in BH arc as an idol and how she places Aqua and Ai on a pedestal that she never fully takes them off from as a fan, places a dam of any meaningful commentary and critique on the toxic reality of the industry that the story began with, thus stagnating both Ruby as a character and diminishes the lessons the story taught to begin with, as all those criticisms become retroactively invalidated in the eyes of the narrative.