Contrarian Anarchist Dipshit

i find it really interesting that terezi is characterized at first as being facetious with most of the silly shit she does, only to show later down the line (with all her grief over latula being "cooler" and more "confident" than her) that this was mostly just deflection due to her insecurity with being herself, with being weird uncomplicatedly. she's a very layered character who likes to be openly odd and off-putting and fuck with people and yet is still sort of reliant on their respect for her as a person with feelings, and doesn't like when she doesn't get that level of understanding from people. loves living by the bit, cannot stomach dying by the bit

it's like.... when terezi projects a strong image of herself, it gives her control of the situation and of how people see her; she gets to be the one to build and define the reality around who she is, as a sort of scaly, iridescent hide to protect her soft and mushy core.

when she roleplays with nepeta, she tells herself she's doing it facetiously, as if she has something to prove by doing so and not that she just enjoys playing in the space with a friend who similarly delights in skewing the lines of identity. having to face the truth of the matter — terezi having a deep and embarrassingly genuine personal connection with her lusus, and the things that implies for her true identity — would be far too difficult.

when she messes around with karkat and later dave, she uses an abrasive and flirtatious mask as a means to assume control of the social battlefield, in order to keep things in a realm she deems comfortable. ultimately, this leads to both her and their feelings getting hurt when they try to get any sort of realness from her and she shies away due to her learned fear of intimacy.

when she flarps with vriska, she claims to use it as means to forward a personal and sanctimonious ideal of justice, but finds herself backing away from it all when it turns out her code of morals is faulty in the wake of material circumstance, of vriska needing to do terrible things just to get by. when her control over the perceived reality of things fails her she would rather run away than be forced to admit why she really wanted to be a part of all this — if it ever came down to the knowledge that she was only ever in it for her attraction to vriska, it would be far too damning in all the ways she herself has constructed. she'd be a criminal, through and through.

terezi always keeps this distance, detaching herself from things in a way that lets her be able to bail when it gets too real, and never look guilty in doing so. she's so deeply scared of being herself and being rejected for who she really is that she will pretend she doesn't like the things she does/put on a show of being a weird and alienating freak to discourage eyes that might pry further into her/die on the hill of a false ideal taught into her by the legacy she lives under. all of these things lead her so far from the truths of herself that it gets her on the wrong end of her own blade for her trouble.

i don't really want to see this retconning of neil gaiman's writing where people are re-analyzing stories like "look...you can see the message under the surface...showing how he was actually abusive IRL...it's all there..."

idk maybe we should just listen to people when they speak up and say they were abused and try to foster a culture of respecting victims and actually enforcing justice against perpetrators instead of doing this weird fucking da vinci code-esque picking apart of his stories. stories which everyone was fine with for decades!! because we understand that the content that people write and produce does not have a 1 to 1 correlation with their real world actions!!!

i fully support people who cannot engage with his work anymore and i do think that because he's a still-living person it's imperative to not give this guy another cent, but we cannot pretend that everyone was just "too dumb" to see the secret clues and turn this into another case of "what you write is what you endorse." plenty of dogshit people write good stories. plenty of good people write dark stories. that's all.

Watched The Menu and during that scene when

Julian Slowik (a celebrity chef who owned an entire private island for his restaurant and made his staff literally live there and work 24/7 in a cult environment)

tries to tell Margot (a sex worker whose client was fully ready to kill her)

that she was just like her rich, asshole clients. Basically implying that of the two of them, he was the "exploited worker" and she was the "privileged consumer"...

All I kept hearing in my head was the rant from Sydney Adamu in The Bear, like:

"Sorry, um, are you the new face of The Working Man? Congrats, that is huge. Okay, well, if there's confusion, let me help clarify some things. Okay, um, [you] all work in a restaurant, right? [You] make food in the restaurant. [Staff] all try to do a good job. I don't know about you. But anyway, people come, and they buy their food with money, and they spend their money. And then, uh [staff should be able to] take [their] earnings and um, just, you know, live [their] lives. That's it. It's business. The point of this is that it is a business. Not, uh, some sort of a hollow shell you can project your dying fantasies or whatever."

HOLY SHIT THIS!

Another note: Throughout the movie, despite being "evil" in other way, the other customers never treat the staff with anything like the disrespect you'd see in any restaurant; no entitled yelling or groping. The closest we get is the Critic nitpicking the broken emulsion, the actor being kinda obnoxious during the initial tour, and Tyler not asking the name of the cook he talks to. You know does get abused during work, gets treated as a piece of property being rented, rather than a human being with feelings, deserving of respect? MARGOT, the sex worker, who gets insulted for not agreeing with client, and then told to her face that she deserves it and can't complain because she's being paid.

And when Slowik comes in, he doesn't care about her being minimized or having to balance self-respect with safety and money while working in a job that could land her in jail. He cares about her not liking his meal, centers his own pain, and refuses to engage with her on a human level or respect her privacy. He doesn't care about her problems, he cares about her as a prop for his own self-pitying narrative. He is fully aware that she is innocent, above even the thin justifications for every other guest, and still does not even consider her life worth ruining his grand vision.

Everyone keeps talking about The Menu as if it was making big statements about the creation and consumption of Art or abuse in the Restaurant Industry when the point of the movie is that Slowik is a petty tyrant pretending that his ego trip is about Art and Class. He runs his restaurant like a cult, gets fame, massive praise and financial success, but wants to kill everyone because he isn't appreciated in the right way.

The ending is her massaging his self-image in order to escape. It is the exact opposite of a movie about Art being under-Appreciated; Despite his insistence to the contrary, he is a conceited Auteur who has no respect for what people actually want.

i'm like actually legitimately loving that the result of the tiktok ban is decimating decades of propaganda against china in record time. everyone is flocking to the actual chinese-owned version of tiktok called rednote where they are being welcomed so warmly with the silliest jokes like "i'm your assigned chinese spy! i've been waiting for you! welcome!" alskdjgsld. folks are already making attempts to learn some mandarin to better interact with the chinese users. everyone realizing what our own government collects on us is twice as harmful as anything ccp could do with it. everyone waking up to the fact that every fucking facet of the american internet is designed to harvest and sell personal data off of you so what the fuck does it actually matter anyway if one more entity does it. us government managed to speedrun undoing their own fucking brainwashing it's so goddamn funny.

I dreamt that there was a new meme that went, “If I dids it, I dids it. If I didsn’t, I didsn’t.” There was a third line, but I forgot what it was.

happy to report i’m back on my bullshit

and a rare variant

HOW DID YOU KNOW THEY WERE CAT MEMES IN MY DREAM

>:3€

THAT’S IT, THAT’S THE MEME FROM MY DREAM

Terezi being like "aw man my facade can't possibly measure up to my dancestor" and Karkat being like, "you shouldn't feel bad about the dancestors they're a bunch of posers and you're so awesome and genuine" doesn't stop being funny to me

Random headcanon: the reason that Peach and Bowser don’t seem to get a lot of respect in some Super Mario games is because the Mushroom Kingdom is kind of a rural backwater and isn’t terribly important or influential politically, so people tend to regard Bowser as a C-list villain for being so hung up on such an insignificant conquest. Nobody really expects Bowser to be a serious threat – that would be like expecting a guy whose main claim to fame is repeatedly failing to conquer Wyoming to be a serious threat – so they get taken by surprise every single time.

So what you’re saying is that Bowser is more or less on the same level of villainy as Dr. Doofenshmirtz?

Oh, quite the opposite – point him at any target that isn’t the Mushroom Kindgom and he’s this massive outside context problem that rolls over entire armies and cracks planets in half. It’s just the Mushroom Kingdom in particular he can’t seem to figure out, and that bothers him terribly.

The obvious implication is that, like, Mario is an A-tier hero who happens to live in a C-tier nation.

Like, if Clark Kent hadn’t moved to the big city for a reporting job, he’d still be Superman. And there’s be some villain who tried to knock over a bank in Bumfuck Kansas and wound up having a very bad day.

(And eventually we have Lex Luthor spending a huge amount of time trying and failing to run some penny-ante scheme in rural Kansas and failing, and no one can take him seriously despite the fact that he’s just as competent as he would be in canon.)

In Oregon there lives a species of snake capable of surviving tetrodotoxin doses strong enough to kill animals thousands of times their size. This is because they evolved alongside a species of poisonous newt which they consume regularly, which produces ludicrous amounts of a poison thousands of times stronger than cyanide. They got to this point by fighting each other in the same bumfuck nowhere habitat for millions of years. The newts got more toxic to fight the snakes. The snakes got better immunity to keep eating newts. Now we’re left with snakes capable of eating some of the most poisonous creatures alive, and newts so deadly that they are inedible to anything other than these snakes.

What I’m trying to say is that Mario and Bowser are the result of two evenly-matched overpowered idiots fighting the same battle for decades. The consequences only become clear when you square them up to literally anything else.

These are the outlandish and logical takes I want on my dash

the us banning tiktok over fears of chinese influence prompting americans to flee to xiaohongshu (which translates to little red book - the same name as the famous red book of mao zedong quotations) and form instant connections with the chinese… you can't make this kind of irony up

Incredible

Those fuckers in Nebraska can't keep getting away with calling themselves the corn state. That's Iowa's thing goddamnit!

I am so fucking sick of Nebraska's valor stealing horseshit

When your favorite liberal democrat starts talking about doing bipartisanship and working across the aisle to "get things done," your immediate response should be - repeat after me:

WHAT THINGS?

Because I promise they're not crossing the aisle to save the whales.

Like, do we remember how we survived the first Trump presidency? Democrats stonewalled the Republicans at every turn. It was 4 years of holding the line. He's not even in office and they're already talking about all the ways they're ready to work together!

I don’t want to be completely pessimistic and I wish I could find some joy in this, but the ceasefire deal isn’t something I can bring myself to be happy about. Palestine is destroyed. An estimated 300,000 people martyred and towns obliterated. And Israel faces absolutely zero consequences… I genuinely continue to be amazed at how they’re allowed to do that. If ‘Israel’ really wants a ceasefire, they need to give the Palestinians real aid. I’m not talking about bags of flour but means of rebuilding their beautiful country. They need seeds and tractors and doctors and hospitals and schools… not a tin of beans

All I mean to say is don’t forget Palestine after the ceasefire deal, because nothing has changed

Oh boy I can't wait for Trump to get all the credit for the ceasefire deal he actively sabotaged for months because it happened close to his presidency and then immediately declare war on Gaza as soon as he gets bored.

Like Nixon and Reagan at least did it backroom because they knew that sabotaging negotiations would be a bad look, while Trump actively brags about it because he knows he'll get zero consequences. Everyone either celebrates him or is willing to stand by and let it happen.

FROM THIS

Tbh the funniest possible DC crossover to me is always one in which someone kills the joker because that's just what happens to Bad Guys in their universe. They don't angst about it. They don't even wait long enough to hear that people have been not killing him on purpose.

Dave Strider kills da joker with a regular sword. He knows what Batman is but he thought he was in a weird dream bubble.

I really love jade. And the color green.