Inside the mind of a movie addict

“Most films made for children are flashy adventure-comedies. Structurally and tonally, they feel almost exactly like blockbusters made for adults, scrubbed of any potentially offensive material. They aren’t so much made for children as they’re made to be not not for children. It’s perhaps telling that the genre is generally called “Family,” rather than “Children’s.” The films are designed to be pleasing to a broad, age-diverse audience, but they’re not necessarily specially made for young minds.”

“My Neighbor Totoro, on the other hand, is a genuine children’s film, attuned to child psychology. Satsuki and Mei move and speak like children: they run and romp, giggle and yell. The sibling dynamic is sensitively rendered: Satsuki is eager to impress her parents but sometimes succumbs to silliness, while Mei is Satsuki’s shadow and echo (with an independent streak). But perhaps most uniquely, My Neighbor Totoro follows children’s goals and concerns. Its protagonists aren’t given a mission or a call to adventure - in the absence of a larger drama, they create their own, as children in stable environments do. They play.”

“Consider the sequence just before Mei first encounters Totoro. Satsuki has left for school, and Dad is working from home, so Mei dons a hat and a shoulder bag and tells her father that she’s “off to run some errands” - The film is hers for the next ten minutes, with very little dialogue. She’s seized by ideas, and then abandons them; her goals switch from moment to moment. First she wants to play “flower shop” with her dad, but then she becomes distracted by a pool full of tadpoles. Then, of course, she needs a bucket to catch tadpoles in - but the bucket has a hole in it. And on it goes, but we’re never bored, because Mei is never bored.”

“[…] You can only ride a ride so many times before the thrill wears off. But a child can never exhaust the possibilities of a park or a neighborhood or a forest, and Totoro exists in this mode. The film is made up of travel and transit and exploration, set against lush, evocative landscapes that seem to extend far beyond the frame. We enter the film driving along a dirt road past houses and rice paddies; we follow Mei as she clambers through a thicket and into the forest; we walk home from school with the girls, ducking into a shrine to take shelter from the rain; we run past endless green fields with Satsuki as she searches for Mei. The psychic center of Totoro’s world is an impossibly giant camphor tree covered in moss. The girls climb over it, bow to it as a forest-guardian, and at one point fly high above it, with the help of Totoro. Much like Totoro himself, the tree is enormous and initially intimidating, but ultimately a source of shelter and inspiration.”

“My Neighbor Totoro has a story, but it’s the kind of story that a child might make up, or that a parent might tell as a bedtime story, prodded along by the refrain, “And then what happened?” This kind of whimsicality is actually baked into Miyazaki’s process: he begins animating his films before they’re fully written. Totoro has chase scenes and fantastical creatures, but these are flights of fancy rooted in a familiar world. A big part of being a kid is watching and waiting, and Miyazaki understands this. When Mei catches a glimpse of a small Totoro running under her house, she crouches down and stares into the gap, waiting. Miyazaki holds on this image: we wait with her. Magical things happen, but most of life happens in between those things—and there is a kind of gentle magic, for a child, in seeing those in-betweens brought to life truthfully on screen.”

Blue/purple lips and fingernails is a symptom of low oxygen in lighter skin tones.

In darker skin tones you're looking for grey or white lips and fingernails. Other places where this may be not evidence is the tongue and gums.

Figured since everyone gets taught what low oxygen looks like on lighter skin. Everyone should know what it looks like on dark skin too.

i know it's long and it has a dumb skit throughout the entire video but it goes through the

different kinds of scientific studies

how reliable they are

I read from @ nzekiev on twitter that the day before yesterday it was very hard for Africans to get on any train in Kyiv, they were letting them in the last, many managed to get in only coz they started pushing African women into the train so they had to allow everyone in. Before that if they managed to get on the train they were sent back outside with the phrase "Ukrainians first", but nobody was checking anyone's passports.

Today, February 27, he says the Ukrainian soldiers at the Polish border were holding them at gunpoint if they crossed the border before Ukrainians. These are students, they can't be fighting this war!!! Other people of color share on twitter that it's harder for them to cross the border, a Nigerian medical student told @ stephheharty they were told Ukrainians go first and were sent to the back of the queue by Ukrainian soldiers on Polish border.

@ Damilare_arah shared a video where Ukrainian soldiers block Africans from getting on trains. (https://twitter.com/Damilare_arah/status/1497654141350522880?t=rkNx-B9TffKopCRtfgZodA&s=19)

I can't figure out how to download videos from Twitter so I'm attaching screenshots. (https://twitter.com/Damilare_arah/status/1497855205098106880?t=gi_dUgx8nFI36KqlH-CeEA&s=19) (https://twitter.com/nzekiev/status/1497805019311218689?t=hz-3gS0hFxwAZQddLZI85w&s=19)

We must help. They can't be denied shelter while every other white Ukrainian gets to cross the border right before their eyes. @ chylady and @ Damilare_arah share all the important information for Africans and Nigerians on where to find help and also donations.

@ korrinesky is actively sharing all the information. This thread increases to this day and time https://twitter.com/korrinesky/status/1496770898019303427?t=oheEMMWK2KecFzPFWb05iA&s=19

They also have a Telegram chat for African and Caribbean students who are in Lviv but I can't seem to be able to copy the link directly so I'm sending the link to the tweet: https://twitter.com/korrinesky/status/1497661192038453251?t=1bzZxfWvu-zf-zQhFk4BMw&s=19

Here's some of the information where Africans and Nigerians can find help:

RESOURCES FOR UKRAINIAN REFUGEES:

White women sent hate tweets to John Boyega because he didn't like their I Can Fix My Pet White Boy ship and then cried misogyny when he rightfully called them out on it. The erasure of Finn's character is largely ignored, or it's weaponized in their arguments that RoS was bad when what they actually care about is that Reylo got sunk and Kyle died.

White Voltron fans treated Allura like garbage, and talked over and ignored black girls and women who were uncomfortable with their Space Mommy headcanon. Klance shippers constantly erased her, and Sheith shippers either ignored her or performatively shipped her with Lance—a character they hated and loved to tear down, incidentally—to get her out of the way of their precious Wife Husbandry ship. Even now, her appalling death and Montgomery and Dos Santos's equally appalling indifference to it are ignored in favor of whining about fanon ships. (Klance shippers also frequently exotified both Keith and Lance with Korean and Latino stereotypes to make them sexier, incidentally, and created an entire AU around this after Season 7.)

White Starfire fans and Dickbabs fans alike sent racist harassment to Mame-Anna Diop when she was cast in the role on Titans, and fans are more interested in Raven and the pasty Batman characters than in either Kory or Gar (both of whom are played by nonwhite actors). The show repeatedly mistreats and sidelines both of those characters—two actual Titans, the team the show is supposed to be about—and fandom largely ignores this.

A vocal subsection of the Fire Emblem fandom erases the personalities and goals of the PoC from Three Houses, insisting that they are a hive mind who hate all white people and can only be shipped with each other, and ignore the fact that Claude‚ the only non-white main character, is biracial in favor of arguing that he actually hates all white people when his canon goal is to bring people together. This subsection of fandom regularly harasses fans of color who don't fall in line with this.

Brian W. Foster, a white man formerly associated with Critical Role, QRT’d a woman of color who criticized the show’s Campaign Three intro to childishly mock and dismiss her concerns. This led to his 183k+ followers dogpiling and harassing someone who was offering genuine, rational critique, with a wide variety of slurs thrown at her. His apology was half-baked and generic and made no reference to the specific person whom he used his platform to attack.

And Yennefer of Vengerberg is repeatedly erased and ignored in a show where she is unquestionably the female lead. Her actress, Anya Chalotra, received racist harassment bad enough for her to leave social media, and the character is torn down by fandom so that fans can fawn over—you guessed it!—their white faves.

Characters of color are disdained, warped, erased, infantilized, hypersexualized, and conveniently "have no chemistry" with the white characters. The fans of color are talked over, ignored, harassed, dismissed, or otherwise have their opinions used as a cudgel when they fit a white fangroup's narrative.

—

VIDEO TRANSCRIPTION:

[Brief clip from a previous video, which has the caption “When I have to send my husband to the store.” A white person is writing a shopping list. As well as listing the items and quantities, they are including what aisle each item can be found on, how much it costs and a painstakingly made little sticker showing exactly what it looks like.]

[The main video starts. A black person with glasses is standing in a bathroom, holding a toothbrush, talking to the camera.]

So that is a video of a woman, like, literally piece-by-piece word-for-wording what her husband’s trip to the grocery store for their household is going to be.

And I saw another creator stitch this video, talking about – I mean, they had a really dope word for it, and I can’t remember it right now, but it’s about performed incompetence and how, actually, what this husband is doing is exaggerating their own incompetence and exaggerating their own incapability, to force the labor that they don’t want to do (this husband) onto their partner, right – that their wife will hopefully be like, “oh my gosh, it’s just easier for me to do it myself so I’m going to do it myself, you’re good.” And now they’re absolved of the need to, like, contribute to the household.

So, actually, that performance of incompetence is an investment that that husband is making for his future self, if you know what I mean? It is like a patriarchal investment. And it’s two-pronged, right? One, you don’t have to do the thing that you don’t want to do, which is go to the grocery store, but two, you’ve set the expectations for your own capabilities so low that whatever you end up doing is incredible.

So now I’m going to do my favorite thing, which is to make it about race. And I’m actually going to say that in a parallel sense – like, that is a patriarchal investment that the husband is making into his future self, but I think that, actually, in the same way, mediocrity is a gift that whiteness gives to its own future.

You know what I’m saying? That whiteness performing mediocrity sets the bar so low that the generations that will eventually inherit the legacies of whiteness can do anything and feel entitled to, like, riches and fortune, right?

And we also accept that performance of incompetence, that performance of mediocrity, and then accept the bare minimum from whatever white person or whatever beneficiary of whiteness comes along and does [pinches fingers together] juuuuuuust more than we would expect from them.

And I think that, because of anti-blackness, it’s the opposite for black people. Right? Like, to escape the violence of whiteness you have to perform such excellence, and inherently the bar is constantly getting higher and higher, until you have all these superhuman black people who are just getting by.

Link to the Original Tweet Thread

Link to Maya’s PayPal if you want to support her research

It’s Lightsaber Week! This diagram is hilarious.

I especially remember the anti-Karen I helped once. After spending quite a bit of time helping her, she asked to see my manager. I had just started out a few weeks earlier, and let me tell you I got so scared hearing those words. I told her my manager wasn’t here but that if she had something to say, an older colleague was in charge of us interns. She went to him (I was basically dying inside), and told him that I had done tremendously good work, and that she wished he told that to the manager. It was so kind. 

I also remember the young man who, upon learning I was an intern, asked me what stuff I still had trouble doing and asked for just that. We both knew he had no intention of buying that plain stone, super expensive custom-made tabletop. But he thought it would be a good occasion for me to practice with no pressure. He let me take all the time I needed to get it right. That was nice.

The old lady I helped twice, and who wanted to add some details and order her furniture in a month or so ; when I told her I wished her well because my internship would be over by then, she seriously considered rushing a little because she wanted to keep working with me. It was nice.

The three 30ish friends who worked at some factory for what I know to be low wages, that I helped for two hours with some complicated kitchen layout. They wanted to give me a tip, even though tips are far from common in France, let alone in Ikea. I refused because it was against the rules. They insisted I was barely paid and did great work. Still no. They gave me some papers back, and I found 10 euros inbetween the pages. 

The lady who also wanted to give a tip -and let me know that I should check the third drawer in the exposition kitchen. I found 20 euros there. 

The woman who thanked me for making her very shy teenage daughter laugh to tears while working on their kitchen plan.