first of all cringe, second of all red flag

rotate your ankles in each direction ten times in each direction or until satisfied,

At times, Gatwa’s casting in those projects has been dismissed as an exercise in ‘box-ticking’. Gatwa scoffs. ‘First of all, you don’t know anything about me. Secondly, tick fcking boxes! People need to be fcking seen. What are you going to do, tell the same stories? Have the same people fronting things for all of eternity? Representation and inclusivity and branching out… it enriches us all. How embarrassing. You people with your tiny mindsets – open a book, look out the window and then f*ck off.’ (source)

What do I mean by the Third Argument? Well, I'm not sure I've ever made a post about this directly, but as far as I can see it, there are three main arguments for greater diversity in popular media. The first two are the most common, and they go like this:

It is good for media to be diverse because it is good for people to see people like them on screen. That is, the beneficiaries are marginalized people.

It is good for media to be diverse because it is good for people to see and learn about people who are not like them through art. That is, the beneficiaries are non-marginalized people, who then (hopefully) pass on the benefit by treating marginalized people better.

These two arguments are the source of a lot of debate here on ye olde tumblr. Despite both being arguments for representation, they pull in different directions. What counts as 'good' representation for the purposes of Argument 1 often would not be good for the purposes of Argument 2, and vice versa. Authentic versus sympathetic. Ugly or over-sanitized. You see this debate play out constantly. It's really hard for a piece of - say - queer media to do both at once.

But these debates tend to leave out Argument 3, the one that Gatwa is making above. And that argument cuts through a lot of this debate.

3. It is good for media to be diverse because art needs variety. The beneficiary of representation is art itself, absent any social effects that may or may not be present.

For this argument, diverse stories are intrinsically good. It is good to make art that's not just the same thing you've seen a hundred times before. Putting the kinds of people who don't often make it into mainstream media into your art is an extremely efficient way to make that happen. It's not the only method, but it's a really good method.

For representation to be 'good representation' according to Argument 3, all it needs to be is interesting. A story you haven't heard before, at least not in that medium. That which counts as 'bad representation' by the lights of this argument are stock characters, like the Eternally Patient Mother, the Gay Best Friend, the Wise Black Advisor. Perhaps there was a time in which these characters were new, but that time has long passed. There's no art in pulling a bog-standard character trope off the shelf. Show us a new kind of guy. The world is infinitely diverse. You're not going to run out. Telling the same stories with the same voices for all eternity, as Gatwa says, is boring. Even if there was nothing else wrong with it, this would be. Art isn't supposed to be boring.

The office immediately split into two factions over it. One says that if anyone falls in the spike pit it's their own fault for being so stupid and not watching where they're walking, so we should remove the sign. The other says that the sign is an insult, there shouldn't be a spike pit in our office at all, and having the sign up like that is just normalising the existence of the spike pit, so we should remove the sign.

Lemon Pepper Shrimp

Recipe: https://sweetandsavorymeals.com/lemon-pepper-shrimp/

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The third image is of a text-based reaction form, with several "check all that apply" lists with parentheses representing the checkboxes, here represented by dashes, with the "checked" answers underlined and preceded by an X:

Your post advocates a technical - X legislative - X market-based - vigilante approach to fighting spam. Your idea will not work. Here is why it won't work. (One or more of the following may apply to your particular idea, and it may have other flaws which used to vary from state to state before a bad federal law was passed.) - Spammers can easily use it to harvest email addresses - X Mailing lists and other legitimate email uses would be affected - X No one will be able to find the guy or collect the money - It is defenseless against brute force attacks - It will stop spam for two weeks and then we'll be stuck with it - X Users of email will not put up with it - Microsoft will not put up with it - The police will not put up with it - X Requires too much cooperation from spammers - X Requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once - Many email users cannot afford to lose business or alienate potential employers - Spammers don't care about invalid addresses in their lists - Anyone could anonymously destroy anyone else's career or business Specifically, your plan fails to account for - Laws expressly prohibiting it - X Lack of centrally controlling authority for email - Open relays in foreign countries - Ease of searching tiny alphanumeric address space of all email addresses - Asshats - X Jurisdictional problems - X Unpopularity of weird new taxes - Public reluctance to accept weird new forms of money - Huge existing software investment in SMTP - Susceptibility of protocols other than SMTP to attack - Willingness of users to install OS patches received by email - X Armies of worm riddled broadband-connected Windows boxes - Eternal arms race involved in all filtering approaches - X Extreme profitability of spam - X Joe jobs and/or identity theft - Technically illiterate politicians - Extreme stupidity on the part of people who do business with spammers - X Dishonesty on the part of spammers themselves - Bandwidth costs that are unaffected by client filtering - Outlook and the following philosophical objections may also apply: - Ideas similar to yours are easy to come up with, yet none have ever been shown practical - Any scheme based on opt-out is unacceptable - SMTP headers should not be the subject of legislation - Blacklists suck - Whitelists suck - We should be able to talk about Viagra without being censored - Countermeasures should not involve wire fraud or credit card fraud - Countermeasures should not involve sabotage of public networks - Countermeasures must work if phased in gradually - X Sending email should be free - Why should we have to trust you and your servers? - Incompatiblity with open source or open source licenses - Feel-good measures do nothing to solve the problem - Temporary/one-time email addresses are cumbersome - I don't want the government reading my email - Killing them that way is not slow and painful enough Furthermore, this is what I think about you: - X Sorry dude, but I don't think it would work. - This is a stupid idea, and you're a stupid person for suggesting it. - Nice try, assh0le! I'm going to find out where you live and burn your house down!

And then he said, “The important thing is to find something you feel good about doing.”

That phrasing struck me. “Something you feel good about doing”. Most people would have phrased it as “something you enjoy doing”. Or “something you’re good at doing”. But Mr. Rogers’ subtly different phrasing leads to a profoundly different connotation. “Something you feel good about doing” may not be enjoyable–people who work in hospitals or in disaster zones might not enjoy much of their day, but they probably feel good about helping people. “Something you feel good about doing“ may not be something you’re particularly good at–you may be a terrible artist by any objective standard, but if you feel good about making your art, then it’s a worthwhile endeavor. Looking for “something you feel good about doing” can help you find a truly satisfying life path.