Theres this thing that happens with a few too many franchises, where the constant need to one-up and raise stakes makes each entry slightly more unhinged than the last. Until you reach a point where what started as a fairly simple/grounded concept has become completely ridiculous(see Dragonball, Fast and Furious).

Their whole schtick is: big blockbuster movie gets announced > make a terrible low budget version of it within 4/6 months > preferably release it just before the release date of the big budget A-movie. I think they did this with War of the Worlds and Aladdin but could be a different studio too(??)

hypothesis: when Flint and Thomas break everyone out of the plantation and start their own crew, it winds up being, percentage-wise, pretty gay

“I met a gorgeous girl last night but then I found out she, you know, serves on Rackham’s crew” “tough, better luck next time you’re on shore leave, mate”

or “we all went up to visit Mapleton’s girls, except for Harrison, ‘cos he sails with Flint”

Hiroshi Nagai's paintings need sunglasses to look at.

They look like how it feels to walk across a parking lot on a 98° summer day without a speck of shade in sight.

They look like heaven but also like you'd burn your bare feet on the ground.

Even when you can see shade you know it's not enough and the minute you step out you'll be burnt to a crisp like a vampire.

This feels like I could trip on that radio and fall right into that water, feeling the crystal waves as I drop in.

And this, a nice stroll down a resort strip, where my sunscreened skin could literally feel cooked if I leaned too close to the tiling.

And then a nice stretch of summer street, wherein you could see your face in the flushed red of that car provided it didn't blind you from its sunny reflections.

in aotearoa, june isn’t our pride, it’s theirs. marsha p johnson and sylvia rivera are their historical figures, not ours. the phrase that “you owe your rights to Black trans women” is true there, but here we owe our rights to (mostly) Māori historical figures. i have the freedoms i do because of the legacy of an entirely different set of people operating in an entirely different context at entirely different times.

But because of american cultural imperialism, most queer people in Aotearoa don’t even know our own queer history. Carmen Rupe, Ngahuia Te Awekotuku, the Dorian Society, Gillian Laundon, Georgina Beyer, and the Wolfenden Association are some of our queer history. We should know their names! we should know what they did for us! but because of the power of the american imperial machine, we don’t.

our national pride month should be july, the month that the Homosexual Law Reform Act passed in 1989. our two largest cities hold their pride festivals in february and march, respectively. american queer history has very little (or nothing, depending on who you ask) to do with our queer history. anecdotally, from my own queries, queer youth in aotearoa know more about american queer history than our own.

the most frequent reactions are from people from Not America agreeing that the cultural force of american pride has detracted in some tangible way from their knowledge or recognition of their own history. there’s so many links and references in the notes now, for so many different places. i had a scroll through some of them, that i could find versions of in english. the world has such a rich queer history, and i am inspired by all of the people saying they’re going to go and research more of their own histories. there have been resources shared from all six permanently inhabited continents (none from antartica, yet…), including a lot (relative to the usual zero) from the regions most frequently glossed over in our global queer histories; africa, the middle east, southeast asia, the pacific, and south america. every single person who’s shared a queer historical figure’s name, or a book or other source, or a historical event from their country or culture is doing an important thing by helping to dismantle the US pride hegemony.

the next most frequent reactions are from americans pissing on the poor, and claiming that either it’s not their fault individually because [nebulous reason missing the point] and/or that i’m racist (someone even said fascist lmao?) because the two people i mentioned were Black and latin american… it’s not the fault of those two women nor myself that americans have chosen their faces and names to put at the front of their imperialist pride. cultural imperialism doesn’t have to LOOK racist! you can be unintentionally culturally imperialist and look woke! a lot of the people who do this are queer and liberal or even leftist. the problem is forcing american queer history on the rest of us. shoutout to the Black and latine people in the notes who’ve rightfully pointed out that that’s a bullshit rebuttal. I’ve also noted the autocorrect typo on Marsha’s name, and fixed it, thanks for the heads up.

sort of the point of cultural imperialism is that the people doing it don’t notice it on an individual level. of course you don’t feel like you’re responsible! of course you struggle to see it when the rest of us point it out! that’s by design! if the rest of the world is saying something is a real experience that they’ve had, and you say “well i don’t see it / i’m not responsible for it,” that is blatant denial of a very real issue.

finally, for the love of god, stop using they/them for me, a trans woman who exclusively uses she/her. my pronouns are front and centre on my blog! funny how the people calling me racist and transmisogynistic for Using Examples are also frequently degendering me in the process, huh?

It's never done that before so I looked it up and turns out Roku TVs have added all sorts of creepy things in the privacy section since I last checked.

One of which being they take screenshots from what you're watching and send them to third parties to identify it.

Fucking hell! Remember when every fucking device in your life wasn't a spy implanted in your home and working against your interests to try and sell your data? Remember how nice that was??

Remember when the TV was just a tool that would play the things you plugged into it?