listener

1) the U.S. entertainment industry (especially animation) is run by older conservative types who make up offensive terms and get really mad about them.

2) the people who run Disney would be the first to fall in line with a fascist regime.

3) most of the media we consume is tailor-made and watered-down to appeal to the tastes of older, deeply religious conservative audiences.

And published it in Penthouse, to force those same censors to buy a skin mag. The editor there asked, why Penthouse?

That one is from his autobiography, Becoming Superman. See also:

When he was making Pulp Fiction, he was worried that the MPAA would object to the high level of violence in the film, so he shot a bunch of extra-gory stuff that he didn’t actually want in the film, and added it in before submitting it to the MPAA. Predictibly, they asked him to cut most of it (without even commenting on some of the things that had him worried, like the bits of Marvin’s skull that lodge in Samuel L. Jackson’s hairpiece). The resultant cuts were actually more permissive than he’d expected, so he cut a little more and submitted it, and it got passed with an R.

The second story is about that artist on Morrowind whose name escapes me (I’m not a big ES fan tbh) who figured out that if he made two creature designs, one weird and what he wanted, and one even weirder, he could get Todd Howard to agree to just about anything by showing him the whopper first, then going back and “working” for another few hours on a second, “toned-down” version, and it worked every time.

The reason I bring these up is that the thing that drives censors isn’t some extant physical rubrick of what is and isn’t acceptable, it’s the idea that they can have absolute power over someone else’s creative work. It’s about the social dominance of the interaction.

There is nothing so innocent, so clean, that a censor will not find some fault with it. Because they must find something wrong with it to justify their existence, and because it makes them feel powerful.

The original concept that humans complete the act of creation by making bread from wheat is from the Talmud! And the specific "wheat but not bread, grapes but not wine" phrasing is from Jewish theologian Abraham Heschel but it is missing "clay but not bricks".

And among trans Jews the sentiment was already popular before I ever started seeing this specific phrasing so I knew, knew, knew a Jew and likely a trans Jew was involved.

As it happens, Ortberg's friend Julian is Jewish and they have strongly negative feelings about the way the quote has been removed from the context of their life as someone trans and Jewish. They used to have a thread up on xwitter about it but have since made their account private and only have a very terse FAQ online from which you can glean the treatment they likely received when being more open about their Jewishness, relationship to transness, and the interaction of both.

1) Set off your smoke alarm or play the sound on your phone (if your home has no smoke alarms, pease get some!)

2) stand BY THE FRONT DOOR to hand out treats

Do this a couple times and then keep it up NO EXCEPTIONS. Accidentally set the alarm off cooking? Treats by the door. Smoke alarm sound on TV? Treats by the door. Changing your smoke alarm batteries twice a year like you’re supposed to? Give them a test run and your pets get treats by the door.

Most dogs and cats will clue in VERY quickly that hearing that specific sound means go to the front door and wait for treats.

If there’s an emergency and even if you leave by another way, you will still know the most likely place your pet(s) is and can direct first responders to help.