For a First Effort This Feels Kinda Last-Ditch

I love that the pandemic actually definitively proved a lot of those "hard" questions for us. Masking up reduced cases of the flu to almost nonexistent numbers and we had zero flu deaths for a time. The welfare and social service and unemployment programs helped keep people living paycheck to paycheck out of poverty, and those stimulus checks some folks keep complaining about actually massively benefitted the common man and the economy. Individual personal travel was so extremely restricted on a global scale that we basically have concrete proof that individual restraint in terms of driving cars or travelling means absolutely nothing by comparison because the mass pollution is coming from the fisheries and the corporations with private jets and container ships. Working from home actually has massive benefits for a company like productivity boosts and better mental health of employees while also saving gas

“The LEGO Movie was my favorite movie of 2014, but it strikes me that the main character was male, because I feel like in our current culture, he HAD to be. The whole point of Emmett is that he’s the most boring average person in the world. It’s impossible to imagine a female character playing that role, because according to our pop culture, if she’s female she’s already SOMEthing, because she’s not male. The baseline is male. The average person is male. You can see this all over but it’s weirdly prevalent in children’s entertainment. Why are almost all of the muppets dudes, except for Miss Piggy, who’s a parody of femininity? Why do all of the Despicable Me minions, genderless blobs, have boy names? I love the story (which I read on Wikipedia) that when the director of The Brave Little Toaster cast a woman to play the toaster, one of the guys on the crew was so mad he stormed out of the room. Because he thought the toaster was a man. A TOASTER. The character is a toaster. I try to think about that when writing new characters— is there anything inherently gendered about what this character is doing? Or is it a toaster?”

mogus show out of context, #3: