Unmute !
IT IS VITALLY IMPORTANT THAT YOU UNMUTE!!!!
I pointed this out in a Discord server I'm in and thought Id share here:
Bob Iger announced that Disney is going to absorb Hulu, and Hulu will no longer exist next year. All shows will move to the Disney+ app.
Disney also announced they were going to remove shows and movies periodically from their streaming services.
I believe both of these moves are because of the Writers Strike.
Disney knows its going to lose the strike. There is too much public support. Specifically, the WGA is going to win writers getting more residuals from streaming.
So if Disney takes shows off of streaming, they dont have to pay the writers the residuals.
They are going to use excuses like "not enough funding for the server capacity" or "not enough views to warrent keeping the show". These are BULLSHIT. Its all greed. Its only GREED.
Pay attention to what happens in the following weeks.
And keep supporting the writers' strike.
This is similar to what happened with HBO - new owners merged two streaming services, and all of a sudden there wasn't enough server capacity for all the shows somehow. A total lie.
Time to start downloading EVERY Hulu show. Hoist the colors high.
And yell at your congresscritters about antitrust laws.
Download everything that isn't a major franchise. If its name isn't Marvel, Star Wars or The Simpsons, assume it's getting canned and get a copy in as high quality as you can store. Eventually your copy could be the only one.
This.
This is especially true for the weird stuff you’ve never heard anyone else mention. Lost media is a tragedy regardless of what it is.
But don't take a random tumblr's word for it, here's a verified source
Got into an argument at work so help me settle the debate
Lying, Wrong, and Mistaken are all interchangeable
Lying and Wrong are the same but Mistaken is different
Mistaken and Wrong are interchangeable but Lying is different
Lying, Wrong and Mistaken all mean something different
"wrong" can mean the same thing as either "mistaken" or "lying" or a couple other things, kind of like how blue can mean the same thing as several things such as cerulean or navy
"mistaken" requires not being aware the thing one said is not true, sometimes with and sometimes without an implication that one should have known better
"lying" requires knowing the thing is untrue and saying it anyway, usually with intent to deceive (though also usually knowing something is untrue and saying it anyway without intent to deceive is called something else, such as a shitpost, or whatever the word is for collaborative performance art projects such as Goncharov)
it's always so fucking funny to me when terfs are like "how can you say trans women and women are the same thing! being born as a man makes you different!" because like. yes. trans women and cis women are different. so are black women and white women. and straight women and queer woman. and women from different countries and different socioeconomic statuses. there's diversity in the experience of womanhood? what a wild concept
incidentally, this why terfs tend to be white women. from the combahee river collective statement, 1977:
...we reject the stance of Lesbian separatism because it is not a viable political analysis or strategy for us. It leaves out far too much and far too many people, particularly Black men, women, and children. We have a great deal of criticism and loathing for what men have been socialized to be in this society: what they support, how they act, and how they oppress. But we do not have the misguided notion that it is their maleness, per se—i.e., their biological maleness—that makes them what they are. As BIack women we find any type of biological determinism a particularly dangerous and reactionary basis upon which to build a politic.
(emphasis mine)
"To argue that transsexual women should not enter [women-exclusive spaces] because their experiences are different would have to assume that all other women's experiences are the same, and this is a racist assumption. The argument that transsexual women have experienced some degree of male privilege should not bar them from our communities once we realize that not all women are equally privileged or oppressed."
This. This is the core of it. This is why trans-exclusionary radical feminism is rooted in racism, colonialism, and imperialism. It excludes the idea that there can be any other type of “woman” except one very (white, colonialist, imperialist) definition.
listening to fleetwood mac is like. i don’t know this song but let’s give it a shot. oh wait i do know this song. i’ve heard it a million times and always liked it, i just didn’t know the name. on some level i kind of assumed that song was just an ambient part of the world the way the sound of the wind or birdsong in the trees was but apparently it’s by fleetwood mac. neat.
[ID
A photo of a man reading a neon sign on a tree that says “Healing also means taking responsibility for the role you play in your own suffering”.
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the rudest most helpful thing anyone ever said to me is "why do you keep hurting your own feelings long after [the person who once hurt you] probably forgot about it" like literally just dear god you've split me open so neatly my entire soul is just flopping around on the ground between us now but thank you
Just fyi if you're autistic/adhd and struggle specifically with this sort of thing, please know what what might be happening is something called perseveration, which is a common neurodivergent behavior that can include, among other things, revisiting emotions repeatedly and being unable to break loose from processing or managing stressful events.
Don't keep hurting your own feelings. But don't feel bad if you get stuck there, either. Something else could be going on.
You know, it occurs to me that the known internet phenomenon of Reddit “am I the asshole?” posts having completely misleading headers is actually a really great example of a far less known but far more common practice of extreme journalistic spin in cases where there are large monetary incentives to diminish the story in question.
Like, if you see a Reddit post titled “Am I the asshole for buying my wife a new dress?”, the post is pretty much always something totally deranged like: “I (48) really dislike the way my wife (20) dresses, because I think it’s too revealing and makes her look slutty, which was fine when we started dating five years ago, but it makes me feel like she’s going to cheat on me now that we’re married. I’ve politely asked her to get new clothes multiple times, and every time she refused because she said she liked her clothes, and didn’t want to waste money buying new ones. Yesterday I couldn’t take it anymore so I threw out a bunch of her old dresses and bought her a new one that was more modest looking. She started crying because one of the dresses I threw out had been left to her by her mom who died when she was a teen, but I couldn’t have known that it had sentimental value. She said that I should have asked, but obviously if I asked she’d have just told me not to throw out any of her clothes, including the ones that weren’t sentimental. Also, the more modest dress I bought was pretty expensive, and she never thanked me for it. Am I the asshole here, or is she being unreasonable?”
Similarly, whenever you see a headline like “Woman Wins Millions From McDonald’s Because Her Hot Coffee Was Too Hot”, if you dig a bit, you’ll almost always quickly find out that what actually happened was: A 79-year-old ordered coffee which, unbeknownst to her, was being served extremely dangerously hot, because McDonald’s was trying to have coffee that stayed warm over a long commute without spending any extra money on cups with better insulation. The coffee spilled on the old woman’s lap, giving her severe third degree burns over a huge portion of her body, including her genitals. She got to a hospital and they managed to save her life with skin grafting, but she became disabled from the accident, and her genitals and thighs were permanently disfigured. She tried to settle with McDonald’s for her medical costs, and McDonald’s refused to cover any portion of her medical expenses at all, and so she sued. At trial, the jury discovered that this same exact thing had happened seven hundred times before, and McDonald’s had still decided not to change their policy because paying out individual suits was cheaper than moderately reducing their coffee profits. As a result, the jury awarded punitive damages designed to penalize McDonald’s two days worth of their coffee profits, in addition to the woman’s medical costs.
I think it’s largely the same phenomenon, but I know a lot of people who are familiar with the first case, but don’t know to look for the second. If you see some totally outrageous “how could a person ever sue over this stupid thing?” case, you should immediately be incredibly suspicious that that’s all that actually happened, because a lot of the time, it absolutely isn’t. The people who have the most incentive to make their opponent look not only wrong, but completely crazy for having any sort of grievance at all, are often the actually unreasonable ones.
2nd degree burns actually heal pretty quickly and that’s in adults, children have a borderline superhero-level healing factor. Also the nugget was pressed against the child’s skin for a full 2 minutes. The mother is more at fault than McDonald’s here for giving the small child the food almost immediately after getting the order that was cooked at a fairly normal temperature and collected swiftly. Of course it was gonna be hot. Hot like the handle of a cast-iron skillet, you can hold it for some time but after a bit it’s gonna hurt, and for longer you could blister.
The chicken nuggets were being served at a temperature of ~200°F, despite McDonald’s supposedly having a policy of serving food at temperatures no higher than 160°F. The girl is autistic, and the chicken nugget remained in contact with her body that long because she was unable to communicate to her mother where the chicken nugget had gotten caught as it was burning her. She has a permanent scar from the experience. The family was only asking for $15,000, which is not for anywhere near the level of profit that we know that McDonald’s has made from repeatedly choosing cost-cutting tactics over the health and safety of their consumers and employees. And by the way? Most insurance companies require the victim to sue, and won’t cover any medical costs if they don’t.
Ronald McDonald isn’t going to fuck you, and if you want to pathetically simp for a multi-billion dollar corporation, you should do that on your own fucking post.
Wait what? 200°??? Permanent scarring? My info put it at a second degree burn at worst, even a pretty bad one typically heals relatively well.
Second-degree burns can range from quite mild to fairly severe - they can absolutely lead to permanent scarring if they are on the severe end of the spectrum. In this case, yes, the incident in question left permanently scarring - and the girl’s mother testified that her daughter (now seven years old, as this incident was three years ago) refers to the still-quite-visible burn scar as “her chicken nugget”.
And as for not having read anything that mentioned the “served at 200°F” part of this whole case? HMM IT’S ALMOST LIKE THERE WAS SOME EXTREME JOURNALISTIC SPIN APPLIED TO MAKE THIS CASE SOUND WAY MORE FRIVOLOUS THAN IT ACTUALLY WAS.
Wild how people will do that in cases where there’s a huge monetary incentive to minimize what happened, huh? Maybe someone should make a post about it.
Leverage had a lot of well-researched things to say about the real world, but the one I always come back to, from The Double Blind Job:
Sophie: These are not small fines. Last year, my department handled a case where the company had to pay out $2.5 billion.
Hoffman:
Oh, yeah. Everybody heard about that. But what the news didn’t tell you
is that that company made $16 billion on the same drug. That fine was
14% of the profit. 14%. That’s like tipping your waiter.
A non-paywalled link to an essay I wrote about a young man I met in Sierra Leone in 2019, what happened to him, and why.
hey guys, i solved it! optimistic fiction and pessimistic fiction have the same moral value! we’ve done it! we’re free
like, ok

i’ll just pass this on to kurt vonnegut and fuckin…elie wiesel shall i

lmao YES like…whether you’re fourteen and creating characters who explode the preps with their brains or you’re an adult writing existentialist french novels…there are SO many reasons to engage with those ideas and emotions that aren’t “i am a rampaging asshole who hates hope” the way apparently some people assume??
like, it’s even reductive of who is experiencing the (fictional) cruelty. “dreaming of the battlefield” in dark fiction is just as likely (or more likely??) to mean “processing feelings of despair by imagining MYSELF as a cursed foot solider in an unending war” as it is “processing feelings of helplessness by imagining myself as powerful and unaffected by emotion”
or like. “hey guys, i actually WAS a cursed foot soldier in an unending war and it sucked shit.” if those guys are pessimists, fine, they earned it
[ID: two screenshots. The first says “Media that emphasizes cruelty is written by those who dream of the battlefield. Media that emphasizes optimism is written by those who have survived the battlefield.”
The second is a reply by swamp-spirit that says “Thank you this post has been driving me up the wall. Like…even naive, edgelord pessimism is often an attempt to process intense emotions that are outsized to the current situation. Sometimes teens idealize the battlefield because then they’d understand why they wanted to die. And by that I mean sometimes teens need to write about being an evil lab experiment with heterochromia.”
End ID]