Title

Actually this is insane I'm not even entertaining the rest of these points

Cooking is absolutely a skill that requires some effort in terms of time money energy. But like. It's a survival skill.

If you can only cook simple cheap dishes then you can put in the effort to find and learn simple cheap dishes.

But like. Cooking is a skill that pays off. Once you know how to cook something you can do it forever. You can learn meal planning and substitutions. You can make up your own recipes.

When my mom and I were poor as dirt when I was a kid, she'd just make buttered noodles because that's all we could afford. We didn't order takeout.

Now that I'm an adult that can cook anything your heart desires? And has fed crowds for Thanksgiving and Yom Kippur breakfast?

My go to meal each week is just... Baked chicken breast or fish. Whatever was on sale. Then some kind of roasted fresh veg or microwaved can veg. I cook for an hour on Sunday and eat for the week.

Yeah learning to cook on my own was hard and intimidating and it sucked and took me a couple years and sometimes I'd fuck up and make something incredible and end up wasting money and ordering pizza.

A complete dinner for like days, no cooking:

Rotisserie chicken

Thing of potato salad

Bag of salad mix

$20 for that is kind of a lot but considering that's like your tip and delivery fee

Fanfiction Club: The Rules

something maybe controversial that has been driving me BONKERS since the project hail mary book first came out that i finally just had to dig into my anthropology MA to bitch about:

it's fucking batshit that andy weir wrote the eridians as wearing clothes. there is no reason that eridians would ever develop something akin to human clothing.

like. do you know how long humans (not just hairy early hominin relatives of our, but straight-up anatomically modern homo sapiens) were rocking nothing but our birthday suits? LIKE NINETY THOUSAND FUCKING YEARS. HUMANS HAVE BEEN NAKED ALMOST THE WHOLE TIME WE'VE BEEN HUMANS, and we're famously leaky hairless apes, not hard-carapaced crab spiders with piston joints who live in boiling ammonia.

Doctor Who (Steven Moffat specifically)

Sherlock (Steven Moffat specifically)

Actually Steven Moffat is basically just this sentiment given human form.

A version of this happened with The Magicians, tbh. Though instead of expectation: men, reality: women it was expectation: smug nihilists, reality: mentally ill queer folks.

Arguably Game of Thrones.

If we broaden it outside of television…I think Star Wars falls into this, at least the sequel trilogy. Maybe the MCU as well. And I can’t help but think of every band that’s ever complained that their fanbase is mostly women. 5 Seconds of Summer comes immediately to mind.

In general, most white male creators seem to have this massively entitled mindset where they want–and think they deserve–the time, attention, and enthusiasm that creative fandom (i.e. the side of fandom more dominated by women) is known for.

They want our eyes for ratings, our word-of-mouth for free publicity, our metas for social media buzz, and our spending power for merch and cons. But they don’t want us. And they don’t really want the responsibility of telling a story to a thoughtful, engaged audience, regardless of that audience’s demographic makeup. They just want to be praised for whatever schlock they cough up.

Mind you it is perfectly possible to make the switch in marketing, but execs would rather throw it all out than have something that doesn’t perform well with male viewers. For example the Rey merch was not expected to be popular, for some reason, there had to be public outcry to get merch of one of the main 3 protagonists. A PROTAGONIST. The fact that she wasn’t a huge part of the 1st launch says a lot already.

And what happened when female fans got too invested in the Sequel Trilogy? The entire writers room didn’t necessarily lash out, but they sure forgot how to behave.

Young Justice

Paul Dini: Superhero cartoon execs don’t want largely female audiences

#WhereIsRey (initial)

#WhereIsRey (ongoing)

Simply, they’re trying to assert a particular worldview via fiction, and upon getting confronted with something else, begin foot stamping. It’s not just men wanting male attention and gatekeeping. It’s that the fiction in the first place was an attempt to curate dominance and whoopsie! they miscalculated.

“The real truth is, I would perform my show and I would meet kids after and young girls would come up to me and they understood what I was expressing in that bit onstage way more than guys my own age. Way more. So if there was a bridge between us that I had to cross to write the movie [Eighth Grade], it was built to me by them. I felt understood by them before I presumed to understand them.”

Behold! The ONE thing that bothered to relate its female audience with positivity:

Source: June 1998 issue of Newtype, in a special supplement/booklet titled 「まるごと富野」 (“Marugoto Tomino” / “All About Tomino”)

Clip from the NHK documentary where Tomino says this AGAIN and continues on to say that if they wanted a movie he knew they had to hold on to this part of the fandom. https://x.com/tayuta0079/status/1577387893135384577

For the time being it is TOGGLEABLE and you can TURN IT OFF!

However, we do not know if Twitch will force this to be on at all times like some other platforms, like X/Twitter, have previously done.

Regardless of IF YOU STREAM OR NOT you should TURN THIS "TRAINING FOR GENERATIVE AI" SETTING OFF IMMEDIATELY!

To do so you must go to: https://www.twitch.tv/settings/security

And then scroll all the way down near the bottom.

There you'll find the "Training for Generative Ai" setting, toggle it to OFF!

Be sure to keep sending messages to Twitch that you do NOT want this to exist.

They sleep at night, even in the absence of a light cycle, because that's when the temperature drops. Unlike humans, they don't use blankets. They don't try to preserve heat. They want to cool down faster, because because that's what their body needs shut down and rest! They RELAX in the cold!

Not only that, but their version of breathing is a constant influx of cool air. If they're without that coolant for even a few minutes, they're in serious trouble, and after half an hour, they're dead. Unlike us, they're at constant risk of overheating.

But not while they have a source of cold nearby. Like, for example, a human who lives at a fraction of their temperature.

On the Hail Mary, Grace spends a lot of time pressed against Rocky. Their temperature differences are extreme enough that xenonite can't entirely halt the heat transfer, so it's pleasantly warm. He feels like a cat curling up by the fire. It's relaxing. Of course, he also feels a little bad that he's draping his freezing raincloud of a body all over Rocky, but he figures Rocky puts up with the unpleasant cold okay.

Except: Rocky is chasing the cold just as much as Grace is chasing the heat.

Eridians' perception of the world relies on something that is completely absent in space — sound. They haven't been looking at the stars their entire existence the way we have. Their concept of aliens might only be as old as their discovery of astrophage. They made a bad ship, because it was their first one ever! Rocky himself says they rushed it, and that multiple (vital) things broke. Their mission was just as much of a Hail Mary pass as ours was — they had no idea what they were doing, if they could even travel in space safely. And, as it turns out, they couldn't.

Humans are the ones who have been doing it over multiple lifetimes. Mary is state of the art. We've been space farers longer than most humans have been alive. We can actually see through space. We are more likely to survive exposure to the void. We can encase our lighter, more flexible, more mobile bodies in a material that lets us walk outside of our ship, and, to a degree, we can get our bearings out there in a way Eridians just can't.

Everyone is going through shit. And it doesn't make it okay for them to treat others badly, but it also sometimes makes it difficult for them to recognize that they're treating you badly, like the person on the phone with 9-11 who no longer realizes that he's telling the operator about his day and not answering questions. When your friend of ten years who has a new boyfriend suddenly starts being a massive bitch to you about your weight maybe she's just being a cunt, or maybe she's internalized some bullshit. You don't have to take that, but you Can go "Hey, what the fuck?" And that is often more helpful than you realize. It is easy to assume that someone who does something cruel is acting with intent, but especially in cases where someone's behavior changed in a short span of time, they aren't, any more than the person who is convinced the beanbag chair is going to fix them.

And one could argue that conceptualizing how the characters would react to different circumstances than those presented in the source material is a form of engagement and character analysis.

Sure, it’s not always done well or in good faith, but that’s the reality of fandom.

Oh no this person over here likes fanfic AUs where 'nothing tragic happens actually' and this other person likes AUs where the characters get put through the 'angst and tragedy meat grinder' on repeat. The funniest thing to me is that usually the juciest head canons and character analayses come up when these two types of fandom peeps get together and yap. It's the heads and tails of character analyses in my opinion.

But my point is: Fandom is not a one size fits all situation. Because unless you pull shit like 'it's not that deep' or 'I don't think politics belong in stories', your personal take on any piece of art is unique to you and valid. Everyone reacts to a story differently, because our own experiences and feelings shape how we interact with it. No two fans are 100 percent the same in how, why, and in what capacity they enjoy a piece of media.

What I've noticed about fans in general is that how they interact with a story, who they latch onto, and what aspects/desires/flaws/relationships they engage with most, reflects not the media, but THE FAN. Like minded fans will get together to discuss their stuff. And what they enjoy often tells me a lot about them.

A fan who likes an AU where nothing sad happens isn't participating in fandom wrong. They are exploring the parts of the characters that are special to them. They ask what if this bad thing didn't ruin their plans and they got their peaceful life? A question so many of ask about our own real lives. Hell media often likes to shove the what ifs in our faces, how many shows and books give us a taste of what if x thing never happened?

And my final point: Any time we as a society engage in 'oh I don't like how that person is existing in the world(not harming anyone, just existing differently from you.) That is a problem. The whole reason humanity is in the current messes it is, is because we wrongfully assign morality to discomfort or dislike. It's why bigotry is so pervasive. Because the people promoting the problems are the people who usually have the most discomfort with people who are different than them. But they know attacking someone harmless isn't viable so apply morality to it.

You are the one having a crash out over "policing fandoms" or whatever.

Fuck me for using tumblr as it is made to be used and using a post chain to make a point.