as my own direct immediate list of game grievances i hate that stardew valley expects you to side against a wheelchair user who is upset that he was moved without his consent. i hate that the mass effect trilogy gives you visible scarring as a direct result of choosing mean dialogue and heals it if you’re nice. i hate that the vampire the masquerade ttrpg has a monstrous player class that can appear as horrible vampiric monsters or as visibly disabled people and both of these appearances are mechanically the same. i hate that dark souls games have a difficulty level implemented in a way that cannot be adjusted for disability. i hate that i can play as a mermaid or a werewolf or a horse in the sims games but can’t use a wheelchair. i hate that the ace attorney games have so much flashing and not all of the games can disable it. i hate that disability is constantly something that happens to teach a lesson, i hate that disability is something that happens as a punishment, i hate that disability is either compensated perfectly with no drawbacks or something that is endlessly sought to be cured. i hate that no character customization will ever include the mobility aids i use, that the player avatars that represent me will never look like me. i am so goddamn annoyed and so goddamn tired.
Every time self taping comes up in SAG- AFTRA discussions I just remember that Lukas Gage clip where an unmuted director complained about having to look at “poor people in their tiny apartments”
/end ID]
[Video Description:
a recording of a self-taped zoom audition. Lukas Gage’s screen is pinned, showing him in front of a small section of his apartment as he prepares to deliver his material.
Tristram Shapeero: [not pictured] “These poor people live in these tiny apartments, like, I’m looking at his- y'know, background and he’s got his TV, and y'know-”
Gage: [pained expression] “Oof, yeah, unmuted-” “I know it’s a shitty apartment, that’s why- give me this job so I can get a better one.” “Alright. Ready?”
Shapeero: “Oh my god I am so, so sorry, Lukas- [unintelligible] I’m so sorry.”
Gage: [overlapping, jokingly] “No, it’s totally-” “Listen, I’m living in a 4x4 box, it’s fine, just give me the job and we’ll be fine.”
Shapeero: “No I’m- I’m mortified.” [overlapping a burst of awkward laughter from another participant]
abled people talking about mobility aids: “oh heavens, he’ll be forced to use a cane, or a walker… or worse, a chair! anything but that!”
disabled people getting mobility aids for the first time, literally every single time: “oh my God I wish I had gotten one of these sooner, this is so much easier, now I can do more things, I think I will go for a walk around the park now that I can go that kind of distance again”
tell me where it hurts, oil and gesso on canvas, 48x36, 2022
[ID: A painting of a thin person on their hands and knees. They are facing the blurred shadow beneath them. They have short brown hair and they are wearing a brown suit. There are amorphous concentric white lines painted over them, emanating from approximately the chest area. The background is composed of muted blue squares. /end ID]
my toxic xennial trait is that i believe something should either be software (in which case after i download it i shouldn’t need to be connected to use it) or a web page (which shouldn’t require me to download anything to use it, however badly, in a browser). fuck your mandatory single function constant connection apps
You’re so right. Say more
Double fuck subscription models for things you used to just buy. I’m not subscribing to the little word Tetris game I like. I will pay you 2, 5, or 10 $ ONCE. I am not adding Word Welder to my list of monthly bills like water and gas.
Something I really wish every internet user across the board was better at is recognizing when a post is made by someone who is clearly experiencing acute mental or emotional problems and in response being like “i hope that person gets the help they need. let me move on and not interact with their post though bc it’s none of my business”
male gaze is not ‘when person look sexy’ or 'when misogynist make film’
death of the author is not 'miku wrote this’
I don’t think you have to read either essay to grasp the basic concepts
death of the author means that once a work is complete, what the author believes it to mean is irrelevant to critical analysis of what’s in the text. it means when analysing the meaning of a text you prioritise reader interpretation above author intention, and that an interpretation can hold valid meaning even if it’s utterly unintentional on the part of the person who created the thing. it doesn’t mean 'i can ignore that the person who made this is a bigot’ - it may in fact often mean 'this piece of art holds a lot of bigoted meanings that the author probably wasn’t intentionally trying to convey but did anyway, and it’s worth addressing that on its own terms regardless of whether the author recognises it’s there.’ it’s important to understand because most artists are not consciously and vocally aware of all the possible meanings of their art, and because art is communal and interpretive. and because what somebody thinks they mean, what you think somebody means, and what a text is saying to you are three entirely different things and it’s important to be able to tell the difference.
male gaze is a cinematographic theory on how films construct subjectivity (ie who you identify with and who you look at). it argues that film language assumes that the watcher is a (cis straight white hegemonically normative) man, and treats men as relatable subjects and women as unknowable objects - men as people with interior lives and women as things to be looked at or interacted with but not related to. this includes sexual objectification and voyeurism, but it doesn’t mean 'finding a lady sexy’ or 'looking with a sexual lens’, it means the ways in which visual languages strip women of interiority and encourage us to understand only men as relatable people. it’s important to understand this because not all related gaze theories are sexual in nature and if you can’t get a grip on male gaze beyond 'sexual imagery’, you’re really going to struggle with concepts of white or abled or cis subjectivities.
My apartment building has coin-op laundry in the basement, and on the shelf where people store detergent there are also just enough quarters to start one load in the washer. This is the collective “oh shit I forgot my quarters” bank that anyone can borrow from to start laundry without having to climb all the way back up the goddamn stairs first. These quarters have been steadily used and replaced for multiple years now, and every time I see them I think about how upon such small foundations rests all of human society.
I need to emphasize that I told my offline, normie mom about the whole “peasants had it better than we do” shit and she literally didn’t believe me at first. She didn’t think people could possibly be that stupid and ahistorical. I had to stress that no, I wasn’t making this up and yes, people are serious about this and it’s a popular discourse topic that keeps popping up from time to time. Then she said, “you need to stop ruining my day by telling me about things you read on the internet.”
Exemplifying my point about how Terminally Online this all is, I love how out of all things, this post has lost me followers over the past few days.
Sorry you work a 9-5 office job with nights and weekends off but that’s actually not worse than the instability and hunger that came from sustenance farming, risking dysentery and lethal parasites by drinking untreated water, no vaccines or modern medicine (including something like antibiotics, meaning people died of infections much more often), a high infant mortality rate, women dying in childbirth much more often and generally getting pregnant until menopause or death due to no safe and effective birth control, no showers, and no modern toilets. You can still be depressed in the 21st century without lying about the past lol
[ID: A tweet by lady eva (of misrule) @ _glorianas that reads: “the way "medieval peasants had better lives than 21st century people with office jobs” has taken off among certain leftists is absolutely surreal and totally, totally incorrect". End ID]
I didn’t realise this until adulthood but handmade birthday piñatas are the apex of parental devotion. I spent the week cooking for my ravenous teenage cousins and felt a bit crestfallen at times that I was spending so long making something that was going to disappear within minutes—but with piñatas it’s so much worse, they exist to be savagely maimed. Year after year my father asked his kids what shape they wanted this year’s piñatas to be and he spent weeks painstakingly making them in the basement after work, only to watch a bunch of oversugared bat-wielding kids gleefully destroy them in less than 10 minutes.
I mentioned this to him and he said he remembered researching tarantula anatomy for the giant spider piñata I asked for when I was 4, trying to make the fangs the right shape and to cut the crepe paper into very thin ribbons so the thing would look appropriately fuzzy, and I was like “and I don’t even remember it because I was four!! spending so long building a beautiful object only so your kids will have fun destroying it, knowing they won’t even remember it, is such a selfless endeavour” and he said “my other motivation was that you said you wanted the spider to look real & scary so the kids at your birthday party would be terrified of it and you’d get to scoop up all the candy and I wanted to support your slyness & ambition”
the second you say something like “its Your fault there’s stigma against you, actually,” youve shoved the boot so far down your throat its coming out your ass
this has reached “i’m on my own dash” levels of circulation so i need to clarify: this post was about somebody claiming that stigma against NPD is deserved because we’re all selfish and awful. i don’t know how far this post will go but if you agree with the original message of the post but ALSO agree with the stigma against NPD up to and including calling your mildly shitty dad a narcopath or whatever, i am shoving my boot so far up your ass that you’re gonna lick it since you love boot so damn much
No matter how progressive or well-read you are, there are always going to be moments in your life where somebody pushes back against something that’s so culturally ingrained you never even considered it before. And you’ll say “Huh, it never occurred to me to challenge this but you’re right” and that doesn’t mean you were “morally toxic” before, it means you’re a non-omniscient human capable of growth.
