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Odysseus: Regret it why?

Cassandra: You won’t believe me if I tell you. If I prophecy, nobody believes me. That is my curse.

Odysseus: … I’m Nobody. Fill me in. 

*A couple of months later* 

Odysseus: HELLO PENELOPE, I AM HERE PRECISELY ON TIME AND NOT YEARS LATE incidentally I rescued and adopted a Trojan seer while I was away, she’s great, got me home really fast, Cassandra this is your new mother who’s not going to treat you like shit. 

Penelope: … I’m going to need more details, but okay, sure. 

[ID in alt text]

"Tutorial" on how to draw an OC with dwarfism (well, some of it).

Boring tired disclaimer: Keep in mind that this is an introductory "drawing" "tutorial" and has some generalizations in it, so not every “X is Z” statement will be true for Actual People. Which happens to be true for everything in general.

You are heavily encouraged to do your own research because this does not contain everything you should know before making a character with any type of dwarfism.

Consider supporting me on ko-fi if you find this to be helpful.

I was told by my professors that Kitty Genovese was a 28-year-old unmarried woman who was attacked, raped, and brutally murdered on her way home from her shift as manager of a bar. I was told that numerous people witnessed the attack and her cries for help but didn’t do anything because they “assumed someone else would”. Nobody intervened until it was too late. 

What I was not told was that Kitty Genovese was a lesbian who lived more or less openly with her partner in the Upper West Side and managed a gay bar. 

Now… is it likely that people overheard Kitty’s cries for help and ignored them because they thought someone else would deal with it? Or, perhaps, did they ignore her because they knew she was a lesbian and just didn’t care?

Maybe that’s not the case. Maybe it was just a random attack. Maybe her neighbours didn’t know she was gay, or didn’t care.

But it’s a huge chunk of information to leave out about her in a supposedly scientific study of events, since her sexuality made her much more vulnerable to violent crimes than the average person. And it’s a dishonour to her memory.

RIP Kitty Genovese. Society may only remember you for how you died, but I will remember you for who who were.

One shouted out his window for the attacker to leave her alone, which did successfully scare the man off temporarily.

Another called the police but, seeing her still on her feet, said only that there had been a fight but the woman seemed to be okay.

And when Kitty Genovese was finally attacked in a vestibule where she couldn’t be seen from outside, Karl Ross, a neighbor, saw what was happening but was too frightened himself to go to her rescue–so he started calling other neighbors to ask what he should do. Eventually one of them told him to call the police, which he did, and the woman he called, Sophie Farrar, rushed out to help Kitty even though she didn’t know whether the attacker was gone.

Kitty Genovese died in the arms of a neighbor who tired to help and comfort her while they waited for the police and ambulance to arrive. Kitty was in fact still alive, although mortally wounded, when the ambulance reached the scene.

The man who saw the final stabbing? Who panicked and called other neighbors first instead of the police? The man who said, infamously, that he “didn’t want to get involved” because he was reluctant to turn to the police for help? He was thought to be gay himself. He was a friend of Kitty and Mary Ann’s. After being interviewed by the police he took a bottle of vodka to Mary Ann and sat with her, trying to comfort her.

So, no. I don’t think the evidence indicates that Kitty Genovese’s neighbors let her die because she was a lesbian, because Kitty Genovese’s neighbors tried to help.

See also: Debunking the Myth of Kitty Genovese (The New York Post)

A Call for Help (The New Yorker)

At the time, the NYPD was coming under quite a bit of criticism about rising crime rates and the seeming ineffectiveness of the police’s response to the problem. In the Kitty Genovese case, even though people did in fact call the police, it took about an hour for them to show up and the first detectives didn’t arrive until three hours later (at which point they mostly spent their time interrogating Kitty’s girlfriend about their relationship, because for “some reason” they considered her to be the most likely suspect for the murder. In fact, the police wouldn’t catch the actual killer until six days later when he was picked up for having a stolen TV in the trunk of his car, at which point he admitted to having committed a total of three murders). It’s not an accident that one of the things to come out of the Genovese case was the establishment of the 9-1-1 system, because at the time that the attack happened, you had to call the specific number of a particular police precinct and it was up to the duty sergeant on the desk to take action - which was usually to send someone out from the precinct to the address reported, because cops on foot patrol wouldn’t be outfitted with two-way radios for several years. It’s more than a little convenient that at a time when the NYPD is coming in for public scrutiny about its ability to do the basic job of responding to reports of crimes in a timely fashion, the Police Commissioner happens to hand the City Editor of the city’s most prominent newspaper a story which puts the blame for the slow response on the apathy and inaction of New Yorkers, neatly absolving the NYPD for its ridiculously poor performance in this case in particular and its response to the rise in crime in general. 

The office immediately split into two factions over it. One says that if anyone falls in the spike pit it's their own fault for being so stupid and not watching where they're walking, so we should remove the sign. The other says that the sign is an insult, there shouldn't be a spike pit in our office at all, and having the sign up like that is just normalising the existence of the spike pit, so we should remove the sign.

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

I think this is going to be the last Marvel cinematic movie I ever watch.

I walked out of the theater with the most enthusiastic thing I could think about it being "That was certainly a movie with SpiderMan in it".

And the more time passes since I watched it the less I like it.

This movie is a sequel to a movie that never happened. It's a live action adaptation of the recent video games. It tries to be both, succeeds at neither, and expects me to just roll with it.

Peter has some kind of handler and the entire "mission-giving mcguffin" from the video game. The handler doesn't know who he is, just that he's SpiderMan and the thing on his phone gives him alerts of in-progress crimes with no real explination how.

The movie starts with Spiderman walking into a building and reacting to some red ninjas in shock, getting told "no, no, they're good now. They've reformed and are on our side", and then relaxing, and toward the end of the movie they predictably turn on him and that's supposed to all mean something, except it doesn't because we've never seen them before. They don't even have any fucking lines they're so meaningless. People speak for them or through them, but they never actually say anything.

The movie has a brief cameo-style bit with Scorpion where he's broken out of jail, then mind-controlled and his powers used to fight SpiderMan and this is supposed to be be impactful, except it doesn't because we've never seen these two interact before or fight.

This movie NEEDED another one before it. Maybe two.

A movie (or two) where Scorpion and the ninja people are major threats that Peter overcomes and defeats, putting one in jail and the other on the path to contracting with the business guy they're obeying. A movie where Peter establishes himself as a solo SpiderMan, the friendly neighborhood superhero; where he's offered and considers joining the Avengers full-time now that he's lost all his people and then spurning the position in favor of "small potatoes" to support regular people and then having the handler set up for him.

The trailer teased an interesting plotline of his spider powers growing and getting out of his control and him having to wrestle with himself and train, maybe reaching out to the Avengers for the first time since the memory wipe, maybe learning along the way that even if he isn't remembered he can form new relationships to lead him back to MJ and Ned, and then accepting himself.

Nope. Just a couple gimmicky moments where he wakes up in odd places and him being too hormonal from super-power puberty (wtf?) to lead not into character development, but to set up the creation of a "universal power inhibitor" mcguffin to take out the overpowered villain to set up the predictable as hell twist that the corporate guy with the non-verbal ninja "former" villains as minions is the real villain.

That SpiderMan growth is only ever hinted at in a half-hearted way.

It gives the overall impression of a confused fanfiction by an enthusiastic first-time writer who played the games more than they watched the movies, and randomly mashed the two together enough to tag their fic with both to "draw in a wider audience". And then aside from him taking off the inhibitor and accepting his true power so he can get a "powerup" at the last second to win, it means nothing.

The voice in the trailer I thought was maybe a mentor or someone giving advice he would take to heart later about how spiders undergo the most drastic change as they shift to adulthood is the narrator of a spider-documentary that's onscreen for a joke moment and has no impact or callback.

Nothing means anything. It's just there to be there.

This is the most soulless, empty SpiderMan movie to-date.

For real I think this killed my interest in the MCU dead.