Discourse is my aesthetic

Well I saw it. I wish I could say it was everything I expected it to be but it was worse. To summarize everything in one fluent and well-arranged thesis is too daunting a task because there’s simply too much to say about this blaspheme and so little time to properly convey it all. so here’s the main points on everything you need to know about this film

-i thought the Wreck It Ralph comparisons were bad enough but we find out Jailbreak was formerly a princess emoji but she rejected her status in favor of something more spunky and rebellious like holy shit they’re just unabashed in ripping off the beats of a superior movie. -Sony hates millenials despite the fact that this movie was tailor-made to pander to them in the worst ways possible. Case in point, at one point the main human contemplates texting his crush and his frind tells him to only use emojis before saying in the most dude-bro way “words aren’t COOL”  at one point the teacher is talking about hieroglyphs and has to liken them to “the original emojis” because the students don’t want to learn any other way! they’re too obsessed with their phones! they have no attention spans! get it? GET IT? -ADDING ONTO THAT! what is the message of this film? it doesn’t have one! there’s a scene where we see the main human deleted an email of lyrics/poetry he wrote for his crush but he deleted it because as his friends say WORDS AREN’T COOL. and you think “oh. the message will be that teens need to actually talk to each other more and express their feelings whatever” but oh no no no this is THE EMOJI MOVIE we’re talking about and the climax of the film is resolved by Gene (the main emoji) using his multiple faces to make the first emoji composed of multiple feelings back to back and gets sent to the crush who says “wow! I loved your emoji! it’s so nice to see a guy who’s willing to express his feelings” WHAT THE HELL? SO YOU’RE GOING TO MAKE FUN OF YOUTH FOR USING EMOJIS BUT ULTIMATELY EMOJIS SAVE THE DAY? -ALSO THE HUMAN IS A FUCKING NERD WHO DECIDES TO TAKE HIS PHONE TO THE TECH STORE TO DELETE EVERYTHING JUST BECAUSE ONE EMOJI DOESN’T WORK -There’s a stupid subplot about Gene’s meh parents having a falling out but it’s okay because they reconcile inside Instagram by hijacking a romantic photo and using the right filter -TJ Miller touted the film as having a feminist positive message and let me tell you this is what it is. In Candy Crush, Gene finished one of Jailbreak’s sentences when she has an idea and out of nowhere Jailbreak yells “MEN ARE ALWAYS GETTING CREDIT FOR WOMEN’S IDEAS AND I’M SICK OF IT!” it comes immediately and ends abruptly. Gene doesn’t respond to it and Jailbreak doesn’t build onto that. the subject ends there. 10 minutes later Jailbreak says out of nowhere that in the early days emoji women only had the choice to be “princesses or brides” but that in the cloud she can be whatever she wants to be. again, this is never brought further or built upon. it feels so tacked on and barely even surface level like fuck they patted themselves on the back for this progressive-ass movie -speaking of progressive, an internet troll calls the Just Dance lady a g***y. so yeah, add a slur usage to the list of offenses -they go to Dropbox? Becuase kids love using Dropbox???? -Gene creates a new dance. The Emoji Bop. yes there is a dance party ending.  -Someone tells Poop that he’s going soft. Patrick Stewart had to say the following line. “Not too soft, I hope”  -Jailbreak in her princess form whistles and summons a twitter bird -they go into youtube which has viral videos that are in live action and it’s super disorienting -because this is a Sony movie, everyone uses Sony smart phones -the 15 year old human has one of those fake-out apps that looks like a dictionary to his parents but it’s meant to hide like porn and illegal downloads so yeah fun for the whole family  -if there’s one and I mean ONE good thing about the film it’s short. like barely 70 minutes. and yet that still feels like too long

…Honestly, people are exaggerating about the suck. There were some pissy people yelling and bitching and booing, and the majority were dissatisfied with the server issues at the start, but the overall mood for the weekend was exasperated enjoyment. 

TLDR; Y’all underestimate the technological miracle they were trying to pull off. They actually did pretty good. Don’t compare this to Dashcon, the media is sensationalizing things. Niantic tried their best to do good, and most people walked away still playing pogo. 

Legendaries were released. All the tickets were refunded. There WAS unlimited free, cold water available all over the parks. There were a ton of rare spawns - including some regional-specific spawns that you could only get by traveling to another country. - Niantec DID NOT say ‘Oh its fine because here’s rare pokemon’, they were already spawning before things started going wrong. 

There were ambulances on-site and a well-stocked med-tent in case of heat stroke or other injuries. There were shaded tents and hundreds of charging stations. A lot of really cool props. 

The blank screens and youtubers being cut off were because of HECKLERS shouting over everything. Trying to be on stage just seemed to encourage them to be noisier and more aggressive.

They HAD free wifi in the beginning, but there were too many people and it shorted out all the wifi. (One of the festival volunteers said it was because they didn’t realize there was a specific specialty type of wifi router that was needed to be able to handle that level of traffic) After that, all the connection issues were due to local cell towers not being able to handle the strain of such a data-heavy program being used by so many people in such a densely concentrated area.

The Niantec exec who came on stage to apologize for what was going on sounded like he was on the verge of crying, and this was early in the day. They all knew things were fucking up. 

They expanded the area of rare spawns to 2 miles out from the fest site, and encouraged people to go spread out to ease the strain on the cell towers AND IT WORKED. Once the majority of those 20,000+ people were outside of that ONE park, the app worked again. 

People were catching pokemon, doing raid battles. It was fun! It felt like the first summer of pokemon Go again. Groups of people were sprinting across a field because someone shouted that a Porygon spawned, and I met a lot of really great people who generally seemed a bit frustrated that Niantec hadn’t been more prepared, but overall understanding and having a good time. 

“Pay thousands of dollars” is sucky, yes, but the tickets themselves were 20$ - everything else was travel costs and lodging. They refunded the tickets, everyone who attended the event got a 100% catch rate on the legendaries (which, now that this catch rate is back to ‘normal’ - is ridiculously difficult to obtain) and promised everyone who attended the event would get 100$ worth of in-game coins. As soon as they announced this, pretty much everyone chilled and no one chanted anymore. 

Would I go to a Niantec-hosted event again? Yeah, honestly, I would. 

I think they’re a company of nerds who didn’t hire a proper team for event planning who would know about the technological strain this would cause on the local infrastructure, and how to mitigate it effectively. This is NEW. This kind of cellphone-centered festival, the kind of requirements to pull this off, is INCREDIBLY NEW. 

Anyone who has ever attended a big music festival knows that your cell reception basically shrinks to zero, because cell networks are incredibly inefficient. Niantec HAD Sprint and Boost Mobile on-site to help boost up cell reception, but it wasn’t enough. The app RELIES on a strong cell connection, and the idea of having a festival that relies on a strong cell connection is basically asking for a miracle. 

They put in a billion times more effort and money and love into this event than the whole dashcon disaster. 

Aside from a couple shouty assholes, I honestly feel like the majority of people I met at the event still love pogo, and will continue to play it. 

Inside a handful of public kindergartens in Sweden, toys are never divided into traditional gender camps. Dolls and baby strollers mingle freely with cars and wooden blocks. In posters, dump trucks haul around beaded jewelry, a bionic robot wears a tutu, and it’s not a female or male Barbie who does the dishes—that’s left to a skeleton.

These are Sweden’s gender-neutral kindergartens, administered by Lotta Rajalin, who shared photos of the toyscapes and posters described above in a recent Tedx Talk. She also explained that at her schools, children can dabble in all kinds of activities, and are encouraged to explore their full range of emotions. Girls are not expected to suppress anger, and boys are not pressured to swallow their tears. All students are welcome to be as messy or tidy, rowdy, or passive as suits them.

“What we do in our schools, we [don’t] put labels on the children. We don’t say, ‘Frida, she’s so beautiful, cute and helpful,’ and ‘Mohammed is so wild and tough.’” Rajalin tells the audience.

Teachers are also trained to avoid talking about boys or girls, and instead speak of people, kids, humans and friends. “Hen,” a still rarely used gender-neutral pronoun that first came into use in the 1960s, but only made the official dictionary two years ago, has replaced han (he) and hon (she).

Such efforts are probably paying off. In a small study published in Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, researchers at Uppsala University in Sweden report that children who attended one gender-neutral preschool were more likely to play with unfamiliar children of the opposite gender, and less likely to be influenced by culturally enforced gender stereotypes, compared to children enrolled at other pre-schools. Tests showed that the kids from the gender-neutral school were as likely as other children to group people by gender, but didn’t attach traditional associations to the concepts of “male” or “female” children to the same degree. During a matching task, for instance, they were less likely to make choices in line with cultural norms when shown images of boys or girls and jeans or dresses.

‘Together the results suggest that although gender-neutral pedagogy on its own may not reduce children’s tendency to use gender to categorize people, it reduces their tendency to gender-stereotype and gender-segregate, which could widen the opportunities available to them,” Ben Kenward, a researcher in psychology at Uppsala University and Oxford Brookes University, and lead author of the paper, explained in an Uppsala news release,

Future studies would be required to establish whether a gender-neutral kindergarten education will lead to greater success, he further elaborates in an email to Quartz, but the evidence points in that direction. “What we can say is that based on the beliefs they show when we interview them, they seem more open to certain experiences than children from more typical schools. Given that children develop through play and through interactions with peers, and that many play activities (like playing with blocks) that promote development are traditionally gendered, then it would be reasonable to assume that this is likely to improve these children’s development and future success.”

Plenty of research has explored the ways gender assumptions in the classroom are equally harmful to boys and girls. In the study, for instance, the authors point out that just as boys, not girls, are usually encouraged to play with blocks, which develops spatial skills, girls are expected to comply with an adult’s direction, a trait that’s connected to better academic performance. Psychologists have also determined that when a teacher or student believes most boys can’t sit still long enough to read, or might not have the self-discipline required to thrive in a structured setting, it appears to negatively impact boys’ grades.

Kenward acknowledges that the Upssala study’s sample size is small. Gender-neutral kindergartens are rare, even in the country rated as the fourth-most gender-equal society in the world. The researchers interviewed 80 students, aged 3 to 6; 30 were enrolled at the gender-neutral school and 50 at two other typical preschools.

Previous research would seem to support the study’s conclusions. In a 2010 paper published in Child Development, for instance, children paid more attention to gender and were less likely to play with children who were not their own gender when their teachers took pains to highlight the differences between girls and boys.

In 1998, an amendment to Sweden’s education act required that public schools at all levels begin promoting gender-neutral policies and teaching styles. Rajalin has since taken the lead in pioneering norm-conscious policies for her kindergartens, “but they are not the only preschools that are moving this way,” Kenward tells Quartz. “All Swedish preschools are pretty right-on from the perspective of most other countries,” he says.

Naturally, Rajalin has faced some criticism for her progressive approach. “There are a lot of letters, mail, blogs,” she told The New York Times in 2012. “But it’s not so much arguments; it’s anger, basically.”

There are two different faucets on that sink. Two spouts. One only has a “hot” knob and one only has a “cold” knob. Two streams of water come out of this type of sink and neither can come out lukewarm. Here’s another photo of one:

They apparently do make it difficult enough that you can buy adapters for them and some people just make their own:

There are also lots of British people complaining about them in memes:

type alignment chart: pencil case edition.

I love this shitty right-wing meme for two reasons:

1) They think the movie is named after the year it took place in.

Decided to draw a little comic. Thought of the idea of a little trans deerguy getting stoked about tiny antler nubs and thought I’d share.