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So many films these days call themselves "Daring" but I don't think I've seen any of them that push the boundaries of acceptability as far as or with the sophistication of A24's newest film The Drama.

This is a movie that I go back and forth on spoiling the main twist on because I do think going in blind is incredibly valuable, but at the same time the subject matter is serious enough that I don't want to be cavalier about it and come off as flippant or edgy for doing so.

The movie itself is incredibly careful about avoiding the edginess. It fully understands the subject matter at hand and makes no attempt to grab greater audience share through cheap shock value marketing. It's trying to explore a serious issue, not make you giggle because it violated a taboo.

The movie is funny to be sure. It's a black comedy that refuses to cut away from excruciating embarrassment, but it handles it masterfully. The frenetic energy is on purpose, the disorganization deliberate, and the topic at hand directed with poise.

And the critics hate it. I think much of this may be pearl clutching, but almost every critic I've seen talk about this film derides almost every aspect. The critics hate it so much, and I (alongside wider audiences) don't agree.

While I don't think this film beats out Citizen Kane by any means, I cannot deny the craft and quality with which it was made. It's a well done movie, a fun Dark Rom Com, with solid performances from Zendaya and RPatt, and for all the controversy boiling behind the twist, I think it handled the topic with a gentle touch but remaining in control of the narrative rather than being scared of it.

Pronouns

An accent

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)

please rb for larger sample size!

Question 1/3

Thank you for helping with this data collection. Please rb for as big a sample as possible!

Let’s play the biggest game of kick the can on the internet.

She wants to kill people because like she’s bored and lonely. That’s genuinely it. And she sees no real irony or falsehood in her becoming a gun control activist because it’s as genuine as the first thing.

She really does seem to be immediately past that. She’s over it. It wasn’t about hurting people, it was about looking cool and having an impact on others. Being an activist fills the same role in her life.

It’s still terrifying that it was that close. As Charlie points out, if there are thousands of mass shootings a year, how many people in this country are there who wanted to or almost did but didn’t go through with it? No one at her school knew, except, like, didn’t they?

In middle school biology, we did an experiment. We were given yams, which we would sprout in cups of water. We then had to make hypotheses about how the yams would grow, based on descriptions of yam plants in our books, and make notes of our observations as they grew.

Here’s what was supposed to happen: we were supposed to see that the actual growth of the plant did not resemble our hypotheses. We were then supposed to figure out that these were, in fact, sweet potatoes.

What actually happened was that every single student in every single class lied in their notes so that their observations perfectly matched their hypotheses. See, everyone assumed the mismatch meant they had done something wrong in the process of growing the plant or that they had misunderstood the dichotomous key or the plant identification terminology. And, thanks to the wonders of a public school education, everyone assumed the wrong results would get us a failing grade. We were trying to pass. We didn’t want to get bitched out by the teacher. Curiosity, learning, science - that had nothing to do with why we were sitting in that classroom. So we all lied.

The teacher was furious. She tried to fail every student, but the administration stepped in and told her she wasn’t allowed to because a 100% fail rate is recognized as a failure of the teacher, not the class. It wasn’t even her fault, really, though her being a notorious hard-ass didn’t help. It was a failure of the entire educational system.

The literal cofounder of queer theory as an academic field says that abandoning trans people is fascist logic.

The voices in our community trying to exclude us may be loud, but they are not right, and they do not speak for the community as a whole or our history or anything at all.

I have been more appreciative of the rough edges of human communication since chatGPT came to be. The misspellings and turns of phrase that real people produce.

character: NO

thought about this because it's so frustrating when people argue that 'dying in childbirth' is a historical sort of event that doesn't happen nowadays (false) and therefore is irrelevant to the legal status of abortion, since it's not a real danger.

except it super is, and i think a lot of people haven't noticed that this argument in addition to simply being incorrect is basically the same as when people say we don't need vaccines for deadly diseases because no one gets those now anyway.

Grace, haltingly on the keyboard Rocky built for him: Wassup bitches. Fucking jazzed to—