This is my Good Blog.

last two letters of your first name

middle two letters of your last name

first two letters of your mother’s name

last letter of your father’s name

PS, youth of today: you’ll be saying the same damn thing about art from this time before too long, for good or for ill. Terminology will, in fact, change. Definitions will, in fact, shift. It always does, they always do. 

PPS, it is pretty much impossible to overstate how life-alteringly important this movie was to kids who didn’t conform to standard expectations of gender and sexuality, back in the day. Especially when back in the day was the mid-to-late 1980s, when the only queers you saw on TV were neutered AIDS tragedies, Bowie was playing straight, and even Elton John was married to a woman, and midnight showing of RHPS were pretty much the only place that felt like home. It was mental life raft for a lot of people.

Mentally, yes, but also literally. We found community and passed resources, we found roommates and bought each other post-show food at diners. It was a way to network in places where there weren’t Queer Centers.

I’m not saying the show doesn’t have its issues. It does, and the things which are keeping you alive? They have issues, too. Nothing we make is perfect.

and I think, I hope, that the second season has the reverse of that. we already see it at the end: with Stede being deliberate about his choice, finally. He deliberately gives up his wealth and goes into piracy knowing what it means. He deliberately chooses his crew. He is going to have to be deliberate about loving Ed, choosing Ed. He's going to have to look at his life and choose all of it for any of it to work: the violence and the poverty and the family and the love.

And I'm sure that Ed, who has already chosen, already been deliberate about loving Stede in those final episodes, is going to have a steel-lock on his emotions. So Stede is going to have to woo him on purpose. Break down those walls he cracked already on accident but this time again with intent. Once more with feeling. Once more with purpose. After all love is so often falling in love with the accidental and sticking around for the intentional.

Mary's definition of love in episode ten was beautiful, and everything Stede needed to hear to put the pieces together and have his closure. But it wasn't *entirely* accurate.

Love *is* like breathing. Natural, unavoidable, and sometimes? If something has gone wrong, if something doesn't quite fit properly, if some piece of someone is injured? Painful as fuck. And Hard.

First of all, the entire caption industry is contractors, just like Uber. And each company has a specific way they want those caption to be written. One of the easiest ways to tell which company had the contract for an episode is to see what punctuation is used for sound effects and speaker tags, which should clue you in that we are judged even on something as stupid as when exactly an ellipsis is allowed.

We are not allowed to transcribe foreign audio, even if we do know it. Because of the rushed timetable we are expected to keep, it’s not like we’d have time to look up words even if we were allowed to. Heck, we aren’t even allowed to *label* the language unless we are absolutely positive and sure 100%. And that file is ours. We are the only ones who see it, because otherwise they’d actually have to pay wages to real employees.

And then we get graded. Not even by actual employees, just by other trusted contractors. If our ratings drop below the threshold, our account is closed and that’s it. Done. Try another company. And here’s the thing.

Captioning is work done by people who can’t get anything else. I’m disabled, I have the stamina to work 10 hours a week, and no one will hire me for that short a time at a real job. I’m not artistic and I can’t write my own words, which left me with transcription and captions. Transcription make 10 cents per minute of audio. Captions make 50 cents per minute of audio.

I use captions as often as I can, I love them. And it breaks my heart every time I see a set where someone decided to get through it as fast as possible and cut every corner they could get away with. But it’s the industry that is broken. The industry that set itself up to move things as fast as possible, take advantage of the community it was serving TWICE, and resist any change that did not directly relate to their profit margin.

The fact that Icarus and his father used the wings to literally *escape prison*? Isn't part of the story you hear repeated. Sure it's there, but it's not discussed. It's not the focus. The Captivity, the *experience* of The Captivity is all but left out of the narrative. Hell, most people probably don't even remember Icarus' father was *with* him when he fell because they only know the name from the symbolic references.

I had noticed a trend in some of Alex’s characters recently, and I just had to make a collection of what I had heard.