ours is the honor of belonging to the universe

Finally got some time to do whatever this is happy late pride month

Like, what is her problem?

Bonuses:

Is this anything

I was meant to be yours We were meant to be one Don't give up on me now

"If we go on strike, then we are a union, right?"

im shocked shocked that i've baited tumblr's best pacers fan @radelulu

so okay the long version of what this is is my frustrations with how sports media talks about humility, which i think is routinely conflated with modesty or self-deprecation by talking heads for lazy reasons. i think what humility can be (or should be if it's worth anything to people who want to achieve greatness) isn't "looking down on yourself" but "looking at yourself from a distance" (and "looking at the shape of your story from a distance", which is probably more important). to the extent that i think ego ever interferes with an athlete, i'm thinking about it in terms of "i think they have zoomed in on themselves to the extent that nothing else appears in the frame, i think they have lost the ability to turn the chessboard around." the landscape frames a problem with someone's mindset as "too much self-love" when i think more often and more precisely it's "not enough curiosity".

so among the modern Garden Villains we obviously have to mention trae young, who has always had a very clear idea of himself as love-to-hate—he might have been too good at seeing himself from the garden's point of view and not good enough at seeing himself from atlanta's point of view, lmao, considering how things are working out for him

contrast hali, who is by all measures immodest, showy, dramatic, has an instinct for the effective theatrical gesture, and the instinct is perspective—is able to echo the choke gesture because his sense of historical perspective is so fine! what raises him above trae young as a performer is i think hali's ability to maintain double vision and work in double vision—i.e. from both pacers fans' pov and the opponent's pov, simultaneously, in the same gestures. he's able to maintain hali (face) hali (heel) tyrese haliburton (non-kayfabe) separately, because those do have to be separate, and operate them as a single entity.

and i feel confident taking this angle on him as an entertainer because it has a clear x's and o's statistically measurable translation in his court vision, his assist rate, his playmaking, his shot creation for his teammates. his ability to see the stage as a director sees it, in a scene in which he is a moving piece, is fantastic. & another situation where it's accurate, but frustrating in certain meta ways, that the name for the playstyle is "unselfish", when what's great about it is not the absence of self-interest (like... the ostensibly unselfish player gets something pretty good out of it...) but the presence of vision.

on wemby. kfs's jeff johnson says of both this year's pistons and this year's spurs, i think very incisively, "the problem is: what are you going to do when you run up against someone you don't hate?" i don't think wemby—or, on some level, spurs fans—quite knew how to define their identity once their enemy was no longer a team that everyone in the league agreed was the Big Bad.

hi maj oh my god you’re so right. she literally has the power of friendship & basketball…

Jeffrey Katzenberg pressuring Bob and Noni into making Sarah the love interest just for the sake of having one (rip Charlie, disney said no newsgirls)

Sarah's song What Will Become of the Boy? getting cut early in production because "it wasn't relevant to the story" (biggest lie ever told)

Sarah's stage song The Truth About The Moon getting cut along with her character and Harvey Fierstein generally disrespecting her in interviews.

Harvey Fierstein changing the Jacobses name to "Baum" making them less explicitly Jewish and somehow nobody went back to the film and went "hey actually they do have a surname" (assuming they thought they didn't have one)

Adding to the previous point, it has been said that their surname was changed to avoid confusion with the stage character Mr. Jacobi. You know. An entirely new character. But no, change the established family's name instead.

(On a similar note, I'd bet Racetrack's cigar on David being referred to as "Davey" 99.9% of the time so that people wouldn't confuse him with the David and Goliath references...)

Esther Jacobs being turned into "Ms. Baum" and then being cut anyways.

Mayer Jacobs being cut and his injury changing from his arm to his leg??? This one really gets me guys because in the grand scheme of things the specifics of Mayer's injury doesn't really matter so why change it???? It's such an odd detail to get wrong and if anything Mayer's leg being injured seems like a weird choice when one of your characters literally has a bad leg and is still able to work. (Mayer could have taken up piecework with Esther and Sarah while he healed if he still had use of both of his hands!)

David and Les surviving the Jacobs purge but at what cost?

Who stole Les's sword and who do I need to beat up for giving him a broken arm on Broadway?

David's role and importance in the newsical significantly diminished when he was originally the deuteragonist. His character arc was slowly and painfully cut down with a blunt axe.

No solo for David in the newsical when literally every other primary character including Pulitzer has one.

Sarah and David regularly being reduced to their relationships with Jack.

Sarah being the subject of so much undue hate dished out over decades and the lie that she was added to the film "last minute" because it was "too gay" continuing to be told when it is one of the easiest things in the world to debunk!! Sarah was created by Bob and Noni in draft one alongside the rest of her family and I'm tired of her very existence being disrespected in the name of Javid (both Jack and David would hate it btw)

Sarah being treated as an extension of David or as a plot device rather than as a real person.

David being regularly turned into a caricature of two or three traits that he may or may not even canonically display.

People pitting David and Crutchy against each other for the title of Jack's best friend??? You can have more than one best friend???

People still treating the Jacobses Jewishness as a headcanon or plain not knowing they're Jewish at all when it should be a very basic fact after 34 years.

And when the focus is on Owen it's like throwing up blood because he's been working with a broken rib for two days, brutally murdering some mild-mannered bureaucrat because he was ordered to, coups and blackmail and manipulation and coercion, with a dark, moody color palette like modern spy films, spy work as gritty reality