happy new year -------------_--------------------

Representation matters.

It’s #StarTrekDay, and I can’t begin to express how much Sisko and DS9 meant to me as a kid. Not gonna try, I’ll just repeat my fave story.

I got into basically every college I applied to, and when it came down to it I was choosing between Oberlin, Pitzer, and I think Occidental.

I was leaning heavily on Pitzer, which seemed like Oberlin with better weather. My parents didn’t want me to go to LA.

(caps) (LOL joke’s on them on Tuesday when I move there anyway, ain’t it?)

Anyway (end caps).

I was scrolling Wikipedia in my dorm room one night trying to look for facts that would convince them to let me go to Pitzer.

I got to the Oberlin page, basically looking for dirt, and scrolled down to the “famous alumni” section and saw Avery Brooks’ name.

I think it was like 10min later I called my parents and said “I’ll be okay with going to Oberlin, Sisko went there, write the check pls.”

My logic was that, as a famous alum, he’d probably come back and maybe l’d get to meet him.

And my logic panned out– Avery Brooks came back twice. Once to do Death of a Salesman. It was amazing.

He worked with the AfAm Studies and Theatre departments, and came back a second time to give a lecture during my senior year.

I met him the first time and cried (A lot) while trying to explain what he and Sisko meant to me.

He said, “I know. This is why I did it– so *you* could watch it.” Then I cried some more.

My favourite Avery Brooks quote is from one of his Oberlin talks: “Brown children must be able to participate in contemporary mythology.” End description.]

article: “I suspect that a bit of the steam has gone out of the LGBT thing,” Backman told the right-wing outlet, staying ahead of the issue. “There may be the odd protester, but if they have got armies of PR people laser-focused on that then I suspect it may be OK.”

me: no surprises there... fuck them

sandwich recipe

yes, India made legal gender change impossible but my friends have always gendered me correctly and stick to it even when it confuses other people and my friend's little sibling calls me older brother in Kannada yes, India made legal gender change impossible but my dog learned my new name quicker than the humans and she runs to give me a kiss when she's told to without being confused about who's being referred to

yes, India made legal gender change impossible but I can feel the Adam's apple growing in my throat and my muscles getting stronger, and my smile more real and I'm growing a beard, and I talk more freely

I would be reluctant to use fridging in this exact context, because this isn't some imaginary scenario to generate manpain for a white hero, this is a much more common experience of Native American and First Nation people, having their wives and daughters and sisters (in particular, but not exclusively) go missing. And never getting answers, never learning what happened, and not being believed that there's a problem in the first place.

This is like how being rescued from a tower by a prince is not particularly empowering or affirming to cis physically able straight thin perisex white women and girls, but can be for basically anybody else. Particularly black girls and women, who do not get a lot of cultural messages that treat them as people who are so valuable and precious, who may not have the strength to save themselves, or may wish that they didn't fucking have to save themselves (and everyone else) all the time.

White men have this story so often happen that we have a trope name specific to one specific and particularly egregious version of this, but you don't often see men who look like Robbie dealing with this type of story in fictional settings, even though it happens for men like Robbie in real life with horrifying frequency.

Whether you're a kid in school with classmates who won't take "no one" as an answer to who you have a crush on or an adult whose coworkers have picked up on the fact that you've never mentioned a romantic partner; after enough time, a lack or insufficient amount of romantic interest will raise the antennae of friends, family, coworkers, etc... They will notice and they will speculate and they will ask.

I am level two autistic. I am visibly autistic and always have been. And I still got misdiagnosed as not autistic four times for complete nonsense reasons.

I know what the dynamic between Steve and Natasha is, and what Steve and Tony is, but I don’t what Steve and Bruce relationship was like because it was never. Truthfully these characters only one single movie to be friends before Civil War happened breaking them up and in Infinity War they have rebuild from scratch and this time all in separate groups. Civil War meant that there was no time for characters to developed relationships off screen.

There are plenty of friends amongst the group, but I’d be hard pressed to ever call this a true friend group. They spend more time apart than they do together and again factor in-story mean there wasn’t a lot of time for even off-screen development to have happened.

That Cap3 should have been a buddy cop flick with Steve and Sam looking for Bucky, while Bucky was trying to piece together who he was and what was taken from him without getting caught.

The addition of Zemo and the “OMG we have to beat him before he gets to the 5 other Winter Soldiers who are way worse than me” plot was stupid- especially since we spent the whole damn movie on it, only for us to make it to the bunker, only to find that he’s killed all of them before they even left stasis. It’s a Deus Ex Machina except worse, because there was no hint at any point in the story that Zemo wouldn’t use the Soldiers. He went to great lengths to get Bucky’s notebook, so he could activate him. There was no reason to think he wouldn’t have used the others.

The narrative we’re given sets this up as the final conflict, only to yank the rug out-

to say, “actually the final conflict is Tony (the guy who started the movie claiming we need guardrails to stop us from making bad and dangerous choices) getting his feelings hurt and deciding that’s reason enough to commit the extrajudicial murder of someone who he KNOWS was a brainwashed captive (because he just made a joke about Bucky being a brainwashed captive five minutes earlier), and Steve trying to stop Tony from committing that murder… and we’re going to narratively frame it as Tony being the one who made the morally correct call.”

Civil War *hurts* in the comics and it has oomph specifically because the Avengers ARE friends. They’re not just coworkers, or people who mostly tolerate each other’s presence because they all have superpowers. And when they’re ripped apart, it fucking hurts.

It didn’t hurt in the movies because they weren’t fucking friends. It wasn’t earned.

Cap3 should have been the search for Bucky, and AVENGERS 3 should have been CW, not Infinity War. Save IW and Endgame for its own fucking mini-saga and phase of films, that way it wouldn’t have felt so rushed or had all these disparate parts thrown together.

Tony wasn’t Steve’s friend, I don’t care what he thinks. Every time I see the scene at the end of CW where Steve says “he’s my friend” and Tony says “so was I”, I’m always like “bitch WHERE?!” Where in the last half dozen movies were you Steve’s fucking friend?

When you treated him like an idiot in Avengers 1, despite him having far more combat experience than anyone at the table save for Thor? (Nat has years of experience, but her expertise is espionage and assassination, not combat. Same with Fury’s.) Or maybe when you consistently let your jealousy over your father’s adoration for Steve color how you saw him?

When you told him that the team needed a safety valve and needed checks and balances, because “a kid died” (who was 22yo, a fully grown adult, who made the choice to go to a war-ravaged country, fully aware of the risks, and ended up dying because TONY couldn’t stomach being told he was wrong about his Ultron idea)…. but the second it suited you, you blackmailed a fucking 15yo to fly halfway across the planet and threw him into the deep end of a fight between adult supers and metahumans?

Mr “how dare we put children in danger” Stark, who had zero fucking problems actively putting a child in danger the moment he was losing control of the narrative, is wondering why Steve might not trust you?

In order for CW to have the emotional payoff it needs to, it doesn’t work if the Avengers aren’t friends. It’s not a betrayal if they never trusted each other. When you set up these sweeping arcs, the dominoes have to be in the right order.

we're looking to create an AI policy, and when we were talking about this, my boss (older millennial) was genuinely shocked to hear that younger people do not (seem) to view AI positively (a la the recent commencement speakers being booed)

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