"No, Ma. I don't wanna play soldier no more."

if I make these links clickable they'll get deleted so please copy and paste them:

Livestream: https://www.twitch.tv/enderempress

Like it's bad when a "tattoo is undulating" (as opposed to... "drawn in a wave like pattern on the skin"?), or when hair is "wet wheat from a late Summer field" (as opposed to "sort of brownish light yellow that dries lighter, but is not actual wheat stalks growing on someone's head but kind of reminiscent of the color and texture"?), or when when ice cream tastes like midnight at the fair" (as opposed to "ice cream flavour bringing back memories of undefined ice cream flavours that are individually popular but always tied to a memory of late evening at the fair ground and probably smelling vaguely like popcorn and sugar"?).

And that’s something I like about this movie! It’s a sandbox for theory crafting! I’ve seen so many different theories and even when they conflict, I can’t say any of them are wrong.

Is the SM-13 alive? Sure

Is the living SM-13 self aware and keeping Simon alive? Sure

Is the blood eel a benevolent god that was keeping Simon alive? Sure

Did a god perceive our universe through a pinhole and everything outside of that ceased to exist because it wasn’t being perceived by said god? Sure

Is the blood eel the mutated remains of thousands or millions or billions of people that were merged into one entity in the same way Simon begins to merge with the SM-13? Sure

Did a god create a vast and beautiful universe, its own sand mandala, its own Unus Annus, and now that it was done with it, it was time to destroy it and move on? Sure

The movie gives us just enough information that we can play with interpretations of anything outside of what we were told. It feels Lynchian in that way, that the point isn’t to be given answers but to engage with the art in a way that allows you to create your own. Because that is the point of art, to see and think and feel something as a result of experiencing it. That’s why fascists are so scared by it and want to erase it. Art means new and different perspectives, even when sometimes those perspectives are just being confronted with the horror that one day something incomprehensible and uncaring could just look at us and go, “nah,” and then we find ourselves melted into an ocean of blood on a distant moon where the lucky ones get to live on as a creature that swims around and lures in the people that the Quiet Rapture somehow missed. Or maybe Simon is right- maybe the characters in the movie all got sucked into their own cosmic anomaly, and everyone else is still out there wondering where they went? Doesn’t that make more sense?

Boyfriend: There are as many answers to this movie as people who saw it.

Last week, the Trump administration quietly released a sweeping new federal rule that would use funding threats to force institutions across the country to reject transgender people. The 400-page proposed regulation would codify the administration's anti-trans executive orders into binding federal policy, imposing a blanket prohibition on federal funds going toward "gender ideology"

The proposed rule, formally titled "Regulation for Federal Financial Assistance," rewrites the government-wide framework governing all federal grants across every agency. Among its most consequential provisions, it requires that before a federal grant recipient can receive money, the award must pass a "pre-issuance review" conducted by a political appointee—not a career expert or peer reviewer—to ensure it is "consistent with applicable law, Federal agency priorities, and the national interest." The regulation explicitly instructs these appointees to screen for "denial by the recipient of the sex binary in humans or the notion that sex is a chosen or mutable characteristic." [...] An institution that acknowledges transgender people exist—through its policies, its training, its healthcare, its bathroom access, its HR procedures, its name-change processes—could be deemed to "deny the sex binary" or to “support the notion that sex is mutable” and have its federal funding blocked.

This torches everything. And I do mean everything.

A very abbreviated list of its ramifications include (but are not limited to):

ending funding for ALL DEI related initiatives

allowing the government to terminate grants at any point for any reason

preventing researchers from publishing, going to conferences, and being part of academic societies

requiring that topics must support the president’s agenda.

What this means, and if anything I’m under selling it, is the death of science and research in America. It allows the government to restrict any topic they please at a whims notice, putting officials who have no background in the topic in charge of deciding funding continuity. It controls what gets researched and if/how researchers are allowed to share their discoveries. There are no books to burn if the government never allows them to be written. This is fascism plain and simple.

Public comments are not a vote, it is a chance for you to say "here is an issue with this law I think you need to address" and provide justification for legal challenges if it goes forward:

"Comments raise the bar that agencies have to meet when making a rule; “if an agency fails to adequately respond to significant, relevant comments in a final rule, members of the public may seek to challenge the rule in court on that basis and claim it could be struck down.ˮ"

Don't let fear or feeling doomed stop you. If you're overwhelmed that's okay, but take a break, take a breath, talk to someone about how you're feeling, and continue.