Product of Procrastination

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See, that’s what the app is perfect for.

Sounds perfect Wahhhh, I don’t wanna
kalelraejepsen
timemachineyeah

Imagine if we took the cop budget and turned it into a free ride service budget

timemachineyeah

Bringing this post back because I wanna talk about it more.

Read an article in the local paper submitted anonymously by a woman who got a DUI two years ago.

My first instinct was to hate her. Because I hate drinking and driving. Viscerally. Anyone who knows me knows how intense I can be about impaired driving of all kinds (drunk, high, tired). It’s not worth it. It gets people killed. I lost a good friend to a drunk driver. Don’t ever. I’ve gotten in fights with people! I have stolen keys!

“Don’t ever” was, in fact, the point of her writing it. But not because of the danger posed to others. Because of how much a single DUI had ruined her life for two straight years. This also didn’t garner much sympathy from me, because obviously the REAL reason not to drink and drive is because you could kill someone. What do I care if someone irresponsible is inconvenienced?

Anyway, this woman was pulled over after leaving a bar where she had two beers to drive a few blocks to her friend’s place. This didn’t really make me more sympathetic because I’m a hardass when it comes to drinking and driving, but she wasn’t pulled over for any kind of impaired driving. She was driving perfectly. It was clearly the kind of stop that happens late at night when the cops are just fishing. The cop made up something about her stickers being placed wrong or a faulty light, before making her take the normal physical impairment tests (as someone with dyspraxia these scare the shit out of me, but that’s neither here nor there) which she passed just fine. In fact, her driving was perfect, her reactions were perfect. But then came the breathalyzer. And her blood alcohol was just too high.

She got arrested.

And the rest of article was her detailing her attempts since to try to get her license back.

The for profit companies she had to take classes from, the for profit companies who make you pay to install the breathalyzer in your car, how if you are able to plead poverty to get aid for that installation you also have to commit to going once a month to a for profit company that will calibrate your discounted breathalyzer and how if you don’t go your car will get remotely bricked and how the pandemic interrupted the hours of these places without notice meaning her car needed to be towed when she missed an appointment after the place was closed when she expected it to be open, how this added to her sentence, how she lost her insurance.

As I read this, I thought, sure, about how much I hate drunk driving. About my knee-jerk, visceral lack of sympathy. And I asked myself:

Does any of this actually make me feel safer?

And it doesn’t. It doesn’t make me feel any safer at all. This woman was writing this article to say “Don’t drink and drive. Not even once. It’s not worth it.” But what I got from it was, these punitive measures aren’t preventing people from drinking and driving. They’re just… giving cops and for-profits fun new ways to mistreat and exploit normal people. People we, people I personally, can feel disinclined to protect because of judgments we have about them.

Meanwhile, people are still going to drink and drive.

And I thought about what would work. What would make me feel safer. And you know what would make me feel safer? If people who hadn’t planned ahead could still get a ride home. I’d much rather someone call the police (or a service that’s one of the many we institute to replace them) and go “I drove here but I don’t think I’m safe to drive home” and have the reply be “someone will be right there”. Then a pair of public servants show up, one to drive you home and one to drive your car home, and you get home safe.

I would love for traffic safety to be, like, the actual goal of how we manage traffic laws.

But more than that, punitive attempts to control people, blatant disproven behaviorism, doesn’t work. If your political philosophy is about finding the “bad” or “undeserving” and ensuring they struggle, I can’t identify with it. It’s hard to come up with a type of “common crime” that I have more disdain for than drinking and driving, but disapproving of the way this woman has been treated is not the same as justifying her actions. I don’t care! I don’t care if she learns her lesson! I don’t care if I like her! Everything you’re doing to her for a single breathalyzer failure is not keeping the roads safer!

The moment she failed the breathalyzer, you should’ve just given her a ride. That’s all I need.

kalelraejepsen
priscaren

image
🌵 Mochilas y Bolsos de la artesania wayuu 100% originales 🌵
➤ 🌵 Bienvenidos a la tienda online de mochilas colombianas 🌵 Te contamos la historia, tradición y cultura que hay detrás de estas mochilas w
t.co

https://t.co/tQNM37KsB0

Tienda de artesanias Wayúu
Tienda de artesanias Wayúu, Artesanias Colombianas, Bolsos Wayúu, Mochilas Wayúu, Venta de Mochilas Wayúu, Pulseras Wayúu, Tobilleras Wayúu,
Tu Tienda Wayúu
vrepit-salt

This is my tribe. Many of us in our home countries live off selling handmade goods, especially the mochilas. Weaving is an important Wayuú tradition. Every pattern and assortment of colors tells a unique story, and it's important to our cultural identity. And right now with the crises in Venezuela and Colombia, a lot of us are struggling financially. Please always purchase directly from indigenous communities!

fred-erick-frankenstein

[ID: a screenshot of a tweet by "lqg fans intl":

With Encanto now on Disney+ many people might want a bag like Mirabel's, so instead of buying from companies that mass produce, buy mochilas from the wayuu who make these types of bags by hands! (the prices are in Columbian pesos).

wayuurs.com

tutiendawayuu.com

Attached are two screenshots from the above linked websites, showing several very colorful mochilas (shoulder-bags). /end ID].

rad-is-more
fandomsandfeminism

One thing about fandom culture is that it sort of trains you to interact with and analyze media in a very specific way. Not a BAD way, just a SPECIFIC way.

And the kind of media that attracts fandoms lends itself well (normally) to those kinds of analysis. Mainly, you're supposed to LIKE and AGREE with the main characters. Themes are built around agreeing with the protagonists and condemning the antagonists, and taking the protagonists at their word.

Which is fine if you're looking at, like, 99% of popular anime and YA fiction and Marvel movies.

But it can completely fall apart with certain kinds of media. If someone who has only ever analyzed media this way is all of a sudden handed Lolita or 1984 or Gatsby, which deal in shitty unreliable narrators; or even books like Beloved or Catcher in the Rye (VERY different books) that have narrators dealing with and reacting to challenging situations- well... that's how you get some hilariously bad literary analysis.

I dont know what my point here is, really, except...like...I find it very funny when people are like "ugh. I hate Gatsby and Catcher because all the characters are shitty" which like....isnt....the point. Lololol you arent supposed to kin Gatsby.

chaosseeking
ayeforscotland

image

Nothing like a bit of royalist ecofascism.

ovenroastedtwerkey

I hope he gets so distraught over Granny Liz dying that he kills himself too

ororomunroedontpullout

No but let’s talk about how the British empire, while colonizing Africa, also started to create national parks to “preserve the land” all why displacing the people who lived perfectly fine on the land for hundreds or thousands of years. The idea of saving African land FROM Africans has a long history. Pure neocolonialism

dingdongyouarewrong
fairy-anon-godmother

Ok, here’s the thing. YA fiction features child and teenage protagonists because it is intended to be consumed by children, teens and young adults. If you’re going to browse the YA shelf looking for a rebellion against an evil empire, or superheroes in training, you just have to accept that the protagonists are going to be of a similar age to their intended audience. The genre they are in is literally called the Young Adult genre. It’s that simple. And the genre is not designed to support an adult’s recognition of the danger these young protagonists are facing when they go on their respective adventures.

If you find yourself going from ‘yeah! Fifteen is totally old enough to take on the evil empire!’ to ‘Oh my god who let these kids out on a school night they should have a curfew why aren’t adults handling this battle’, then you might want to look into adult fiction. If you feel like holding up a YA work and declaring that the mentors or guiding forces in the story are evil because they are training children for dangerous situations, then congratulations! You actually are ready to graduate to adult fiction! Where there might also be child soldiers, but that will be treated as a seriously bad thing. 

Don’t get me wrong, sticking with YA fiction as an adult is fine! The genre is easy, fun, features delightful adventures, and can offer a very relaxing and comforting escape. But when you find yourself recognizing that ‘kids’ handling large adventures means the adults around them have failed, take that as a sign that you’ve matured. The YA protagonists won’t, they’re going to stay young. And they’ll continue to have adventures at young ages, because kids younger than you are coming up behind you now and want to have their fun reading stories meant for them. If you find yourself reading YA and getting angry over how young the protagonists are, you might save yourself some stress by browsing the adult fiction shelves.

sunnyuto
prokopetz

Frankly, I’m concerned less about how the expanded list of blocked tags on iOS is going to impact fandom content and more concerned about how blatant Apple is getting with their horseshit. Like, it’s obvious to anyone with half a brain that the actual aim of banning the word “antisemitism” is to prevent discussion of antisemitism, not to prevent antisemitic content itself, and they’re not even bothering to pretend otherwise. As much as we’d like to believe otherwise, the people behind these policies aren’t stupid; Apple knows they’re creating a walled garden where posting hateful content on social media is more acceptable than pointing out that such content is hateful, and it’s difficult to imagine they’re unaware of exactly who that walled garden is going to end up being most welcoming to.

kalelraejepsen
hater-of-terfs

The pandemic still happening is literally not because of individual anti-vaxxers, anti-maskers, anti-lockdown people, etc. Like, don’t get me wrong, they have definitely killed people (though far, far more culpable are the media personalities who widely perpetuate these ideas), but even if everyone with access to them had worn masks this whole time and gotten the vaccine as soon as it was available to them, we would still have vaccine-resistant strains emerging from places like India and Botswana, because people in those places didn’t have as much of a choice about receiving the vaccine

The variants were directly caused by the exact thing epidemiologists have been warning us about since the beginning: patents on vaccines that were developed with government funding, and inadequate distribution to areas that can’t manufacture their own vaccines because of those patents. That’s what allowed the virus to circulate and mutate in those areas and produce new strains. This is a direct A to B causation that cannot be blamed on anti-vaxxers in the US or Europe - simply put, none of this will end until the vaccine patents are destroyed

And I feel like this should be obvious, but even if everyone in the US and Europe and wherever you live was fully vaccinated and quarantined and we somehow completely eradicated the virus in those places and you were able to go to comic book conventions again, the pandemic still wouldn’t be over, because a pandemic is by definition worldwide. You should care about people in other parts of the world because they’re people who deserve a good life just like you, not because they impact your ability to eat at restaurants

dathen
rnorningstars

There’s also a large grey area between an Offensive Stereotype and “thing that can be misconstrued as a stereotype if one uses a particularly reductive lens of interpretation that the text itself is not endorsing”, and while I believe that creators should hold some level of responsibility to look out for potential unfortunate optics on their work, intentional or not, I also do think that placing the entire onus of trying to anticipate every single bad angle someone somewhere might take when reading the text upon the shoulders of the writers – instead of giving in that there should be also a level of responsibility on the part of the audience not to project whatever biases they might carry onto the text – is the kind of thing that will only end up reducing the range of stories that can be told about marginalized people. 

A japanese-american Beth Harmon would be pidgeonholed as another nerdy asian stock character. Baby Driver with a black lead would be accused of perpetuating stereotypes about black youth and crime. Phantom Of The Opera with a female Phantom would be accused of playing into the predatory lesbian stereotype. Romeo & Juliet with a gay couple would be accused of pulling the bury your gays trope – and no, you can’t just rewrite it into having a happy ending, the final tragedy of the tale is the rock onto which the entire central thesis statement of the play stands on. Remove that one element and you change the whole point of the story from a “look at what senseless hatred does to our youth” cautionary tale to a “love conquers all” inspiration piece, and it may not be the story the author wants to tell.

Sometimes, in order for a given story to function (and keep in mind, by function I don’t mean just logistically, but also thematically) it is necessary that your protagonist has specific personality traits that will play out in significant ways in the story. Or that they come from a specific background that will be an important element to the narrative. Or that they go through a particular experience that will consist on crucial plot point. All those narrative tools and building blocks are considered to be completely harmless and neutral when telling stories about straight/white people but, when applied to marginalized characters, it can be difficult to navigate them as, depending on the type of story you might want to tell, you may be steering dangerously close to falling into Unfortunate Implications™. And trying to find alternatives as to avoid falling into potentially iffy subtext is not always easy, as, depending on how central the “problematic” element to your plot, it could alter the very foundation of the story you’re trying to tell beyond recognition. See the point above about Romeo & Juliet.    

Like, I once saw a woman a gringa obviously accuse the movie Knives Out of racism because the one latina character in the otherwise consistently white and wealthy cast is the nurse, when everyone who watched the movie with their eyes and not their ass can see that the entire tension of the plot hinges upon not only the power imbalance between Martha and the Thrombeys, but also on her isolation as the one latina immigrant navigating a world of white rich people. I’ve seen people paint Rosa Diaz as an example of the Hothead Latina stereotype, when Rosa was originally written as a white woman (named Megan) and only turned latina later when Stephanie Beatriz was cast  – and it’s not like they could write out Rosa’s anger issues to avoid bad optics when it is such a defining trait of her character. I’ve seen people say Mulholland Drive is a lesbophobic movie when its story couldn’t even exist in first place if the fatally toxic lesbian relationship that moves the plot was healthy, or if it was straight.                          

That’s not to say we can’t ever question the larger patterns in stories about certain demographics, or not draw lines between artistic liberty and social responsibility, and much less that I know where such lines should be drawn. I made this post precisely to raise a discussion, not to silence people. But one thing I think it’s important to keep in mind in such discussions is that stereotypes, after all, are all about oversimplification. It is more productive, I believe, to evaluate the quality of the representation in any given piece of fiction by looking first into how much its minority characters are a) deep, complex, well-rounded, b) treated with care by the narrative, with plenty of focus and insight into their inner life, and c) a character in their own right that can carry their own storyline and doesn’t just exist to prop up other character’s stories. And only then, yes, look into their particular characterization, but without ever overlooking aspects such as the context and how nuanced such characterization is handled. Much like we’ve moved on from the simplistic mindset that a good female character is necessarily one that punches good otherwise she’s useless, I really do believe that it is time for us to move on from the the idea that there’s a one-size-fits-all model of good representation and start looking into the core of representation issues (meaning: how painfully flat it is, not to mention scarce) rather than the window dressing.

I know I am starting to sound like a broken record here, but it feels that being a latina author writing about latine characters is a losing game, when there’s extra pressure on minority authors to avoid ~problematic~ optics in their work on the basis of the “you should know better” argument. And this “lower common denominator” approach to representation, that bars people from exploring otherwise interesting and meaningful concepts in stories because the most narrow minded people in the audience will get their biases confirmed, in many ways, sounds like a new form of respectability politics. Why, if it was gringos that created and imposed those stereotypes onto my ethnicity, why it should be my responsibility as a latina creator to dispel such stereotypes by curbing my artistic expression? Instead of asking of them to take responsibility for the lenses and biases they bring onto the text? Why is it too much to ask from people to wrap their minds about the ridiculously basic concept that no story they consume about a marginalized person should be taken as a blanket representation of their entire community?

It’s ridiculous. Gringos at some point came up with the idea that latinos are all naturally inclined to crime, so now I, a latina who loves heist movies, can’t write a latino character who’s a cool car thief. Gentiles created antisemitic propaganda claiming that the jews are all blood drinking monsters, so now jewish authors who love vampires can’t write jewish vampires. Straights made up the idea that lesbian relationships tend to be unhealthy, so now sapphics who are into Brontë-ish gothic romance don’t get to read this type of story with lesbian protagonists. I want to scream.      

And at the end of the day it all boils down to how people see marginalized characters as Representation™ first and narrative tools created to tell good stories later, if at all. White/straight characters get to be evaluated on how entertaining and tridimensional they are, whereas minority characters get to be evaluated on how well they’d fit into an after school special. Fuck this shit.                            

byeonqkwan
koreandragon

before my mutuals start watching snowdrop i think you should know that a lot of koreans are very upset about it and the representation of their history in the drama so thread lightly

koreandragon

https://twitter.com/gatamchun/status/1471205914174967808?s=20

here’s a thread about it

taehyungsoveralls

Just adding that before people get all “let people enjoy things!” this is revisionist history. I recognize most kpop stans know almost nothing about Korea, but your response to that should not be to perpetuate harmful propaganda that many Koreans are vocally opposing. There are repercussions for real people here.