Rants of a Nobody

After mass protests, the President of Pakistan was forced to resign, along with many other members of the ruling party.

Worldwide, hundreds of people – many rich and powerful – were arrested.

Billions in stolen assets were returned to the people.

And 82 countries changed their laws to crack down on the wealth hoarding the papers revealed.

(Source here)

To say the Panama Papers accomplished nothing is an insult to Daphne Galizia’s memory. Her work, and the work of the hundreds of other journalists who contributed to the Papers, changed the world.

Disinformation like this is designed to discourage you, to make you feel you’re powerless against the monsters of the world. They want you to feel that way, because they are terrified of your power to make change.

Lyme disease can become very serious, it can infect the nervous system and cause neurological problems especially in young children who are often bitten on the head or the neck, undiagnosed it can cause chronic health issues that mimic other diseases. Without safe prophylactic measures beyond trying to minimize contact w ticks, this has driven people who have had lyme disease, have chronic effects from mass-disseminated lyme disease infection, or people who believe they have chronic lyme disease to go to quack doctors and undergo unsafe, unapproved medical treatment in an attempt to stop suffering.

This would not be happening on the scale that it is if antivaxxers didn’t straight up execute a supervillain plot to sabotage the lyme disease vaccine bc this happened the same year andrew wakefield published his fraudulent research on the MMR vaccine

https://www.vox.com/science-and-health/2018/5/7/17314716/lyme-disease-vaccine-history-effectiveness

This whole thing started with a fear of their kids turning out… like us.

Like when Amazon steals fucking 129 million dollars in tax rebates despite making 11 billion dollars in profit and not paying one fucking penny of tax.

This IS actually gonna ruin the movie theater industry. What Universal (and other movie studios, U is just the most vocal about it) wants to do is simultaneously release movies to theater and digitally. They want to have their cake and eat it too– get the profits from the cinematic experience of the theater while raking in the digital rentals. The exception they would make to this is blockbusters, which they would only release in theaters.

Now why is this a problem? It fucks over the movie theater, and thereby the movie theater consumer.

Movie theaters cannot exist on blockbusters alone. They need the steady stream of butts in seats throughout the year to keep going. As most of us have experienced, the prices of tickets and concessions have been climbing to keep theaters open in the face of digital streaming. The dual release would make those prices skyrocket. We’re talking $25+ a ticket. $100+ for a family of four, before tax or concessions.

“Well I won’t go to the movies, I’ll just stream from home.”

1. Not everyone can do that. Plenty of people don’t have reliable internet access and streaming/downloading isn’t an option for them.

2. We are teetering on the edge of another film industry oligarchy. In the old days of Hollywood, banks would buy up studios and movie theaters both, and shut out the indie competitor from showing their films at all. They then were able to hike up the price of a ticket because only certain theaters were connected to certain studios. So Studio “A” would only send their films to “A” Theaters, creating a false scarcity that drove up the price for the consumer. Also hella illegal. The film industry got monopoly busted hard, and now the studio and theater are purposefully kept separate.

In streaming services, we have an echo of that model. Studios are creating their own streaming services and vice versa (Disney+, Amazon Studios etc). One of the few things keeping them in check is the movie theater industry, which acts as an equalizer– all tickets cost the same, regardless if it comes from an indie studio or the Big Five. The second we lose theaters, the streaming services are going to jump in price, I guarantee it.

3. The theater isn’t just about the movie. It’s about the communal experience of going out with friends, family, strangers. Making a night out of sitting in a cool, dark room. Staring up at a giant screen, enraptured by the film for those 90 minutes. You don’t get that experience at home.

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So what are the movie theaters doing? AMC, movie theater monopoly and my immortal enemy, has fired back at Universal– if they want to dual release, no AMC theater will show Universal films. Ever.

Universal has of course backtracked and said that they have no concrete plans to implement the dual release, they’re just thinking out loud, blah blah blah.

Hot ticket films like say Avengers Endgame have distribution fees up to 90 percent.  That mean the studio keeps 90% of the ticket intake.  90 fucking percent.  This drops down over time, as demand is perceived to drop (how gracious of them!) so we usually peg it around 60-70%. Why are there so many ads?? why is the concessions stand so expensive???    Because the distributors aren’t paying cinema staff. They’re not paying to run the projectors, or the  players, or the media libraries, or scheduling, or anything else required for a cinema to actually run, but by god they will take that 90% ticket cut. 

Most of these “billionaires” that are “stealing” “”“"Chinese”“”“” art, AREN’T doing that. They are doing so on favor of the CCP to steal Tibetan art so it can be destroyed.

There’s been a long standing string of *Tibetan art goes on auction* and some unknown man from China in a suit and glasses out bids the fuck out of everyone else, gets the art, and the art is never seen again.

Why is this happening? The CCP actively tries to destroy Tibetan culture, to deny it’s existence and weaken it’s claim to the Tibetan Plateau to make it’s active military occupation look more “justified”.

Actual Tibetan refugees, including the mother of the Dalai Lama during the beginning of the military occupation WILLINGLY gave away prized Tibetan and Buddhist historical artifacts and antiquities because they knew the PLA had orders to confiscate them for destruction.

It’s incredibly frustrating to see “”“”“woke”“”“” Twitter and Tumblr actively shilling for the CCP in their effort to undermine and destroy Tibetan culture and spread news that only further shoves the Tibetan Genocide from the records, especially when I’ve spoken with western Tibetan Culture scholars, and seen all the art and culture that the CCP has had destroyed or has gone missing over the past 50 years.

this is probably the only sex gif i will ever reblog, because for some reason i feel like it’s more than just sex. i don’t know if it’s how they’re actually looking at one another or the way they can’t get close enough. he’s actually looking at her like a person and not just a sex object.

was he supposed to do a jump there

ASEXUALITY DOES NOT EQUAL AROMANTIC! Just because you are asexual does not mean you cannot have romantic feelings towards someone or engage in a loving relationship. Of course, he could be aromantic or he could not be, we just don’t know yet.  ( If you headcanon him that way, totally cool! But it’s not confirmed canonically. )

ASEXUALITY IS A SPECTRUM! There are asexuals who are sex repulsed, some who simply do not care for sex at all as a whole, and those who still engage in sexual behavior even if they do not have sexual attraction (  i. E. masturbation and, yes, even sleeping with their partners for a variety of reasons. Look it up if you are curious! ) On paper, asexuality is lack of sexual attraction, plain and simple. It DOES NOT mean you are forbidden from having sex and it also does not mean that you must be sex repulsed. All of these options are perfectly valid and do not erase asexuality!

If you are asexual and completely repulsed by sex and would like to see Alastor that way, that is a hundred percent fine. If you are an asexual who is not and shares another mindset, it’s just as swell to view him through a different lens. It might not be everyone’s cup of tea, but ASEXUALITY IS NOT RIGID. Just because you have a certain view on it does not mean that it applies to everyone else in the spectrum, and it pisses me off that so many people get shamed for their perspectives and interpretations when there is nothing wrong with them by definition.