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I appreciate movies made by people who know exactly what kind of story they want to tell and how they want to do it. It's accessible to a non-Black audience if they want it to be, but it is very clear it is not for the dominant culture.

So I am unemployed and have been for a while, and I attended a webinar Sharon Parris gave about networking for introverts. Here are my notes from the meeting, which I hope will be useful to you.

(I found Sharon through her participation in a job hunting thing hosted by Future Community. While I do not have specific need of her services, she might be helpful for those of you who have been thinking about career coaching or need assistance with strategic or logistical stuff for your nonprofit/small business.)

Broadly: introverts are individuals who do not generally feel energized by being around people. It is not necessarily the same as being shy or socially anxious, although they can certainly overlap.

I am pleased to report it absolutely fucks and the soundtrack is banging. It owes a lot to John Wick, of course, but also Atomic Blonde and Hong Kong action movies. (They didn't even use all six shots in the revolver, which was a nice touch.) I would watch a whole John Wick-esque franchise with Dev Patel as an action hero.

If, like me, you are a fan of attractive men suffering and/or getting fucked up, this movie will feed you extremely well.

I'm extremely not familiar with Indian cinema, but it's real interesting watching this after RRR. (To be clear, this is a movie made by somebody of Indian descent, but it is not exactly an Indian movie.) Not just in political outlook (the evil politician and his party are clearly meant to evoke Modi and the BJP), but how they use Hindu religious imagery to frame the story.

[edit:] Netflix gave up the rights to the movie precisely because of the portrayal of the nationalist political party. Well then.

The best way to legally depress voter turnout is to make people feel like there's no point in voting. When people turn out in numbers, Democrats tend to win.

And there still is a fucking point. I know it doesn't really make as much news as it should, but a Biden administration has genuinely made people's lives better. None of it gets publicized well because it's not sexy, but not being able to report medical debt to credit bureaus? $35 insulin? Cracking down on robocalls? The climate stuff in the giant infrastructure bill? All of this is important quality of life shit.

Certainly nothing is at the level it should be, but some of us old farts have stories about how much worse it was before, and why we would absolutely not go back. And I'm real fucking sorry that change isn't happening at the rate any of us want, but it's not nothing.

In philosophy, there is a concept called Pascal's Wager, which says a rational person should believe in God because the rewards are amazing if God exists, and the losses are small if God doesnt.

Obviously voting still takes effort, but I think it's effort that won't be wasted regardless of the outcome. Now you know what to do for next time! You've learned a little about your local politicians! For the states where you have to vote in person, it's a little more inconvenient, but check if early voting is available in your area.

And if (god forbid) the worst happens, you still tried. You didn't take it as a given he would win. Brazil has mandatory voting, and despite having the button RIGHT FUCKING THERE between Bolsonaro and Lula, more people chose to opt out than do the thing that would have an actual effect. That's so fucked up.

I know that people get frustrated and vote for things that represent their feelings as opposed to actual rational consequences. And this literally kills people.

It has not been great. Stress fucks with emotional regulation and there's lots to be stressed about right now. Limiting doomscrolling helps, but it's something that requires constant vigilance and discipline, which really fucking sucks for somebody with ADHD because it takes forever to make something a habit. But I keep plugging along because what the fuck else can I do?

ANYWAYS. I have been listening to Exandria Unlimited, which is where you send all the people who want to dip into Critical Role but have no knowledge of the setting and/or can't do a 100+ episode campaign. Tonally they're very different but real excellent actual play.

The Prime and Kymal minis contain some of the stupidest bisexuals I've ever encountered in a TTRPG setting, which is a real high bar. It is truly incredible and I commend Aabria for giving a bunch of numbnuts like these an actual Vestige.

Aabria is a much looser GM than Matt, which I appreciate. She's willing to handwave rules if they get in the way of something absolutely dope happening, and it's a perfect mesh with players like Aimee and Robbie who are so new they don't actually know what's (im)possible.

Also, they are so fucking stupid oh my god.

Calamity and Divergence are real interesting to listen to back to back, because they span the breadth of what you can do with high and low level characters. Calamity is all dope-ass level 14 nonsense wrapped in tragedy and hubris and Divergence is characters with NPC stats and a 1/8 (as in a fraction) challenge rating whose reward is to get to level 1.

And Brennan is the perfect GM for something like Divergence. There's a very deep empathy in how he constructs this world, which is genuinely brutal and fucked-up and merciless, but that makes the kindness and compassion extended to people that much more significant.

The main bulk of the video is about James Somerton, a video essayist who I was only vaguely familiar with. I watched the Our Flag Means Death video he made and thought it felt kind of flimsy, and moved on with my life.

Turns out he's been lifting words from other published sources, many of them queer writers who were paid freelance rates or possibly nothing at all. This is a screenshot of the transcription of the video he did on queer horror (ID in alt):

I have legit never seen this level of plagiarism before. I am honestly surprised these videos sound thematically coherent at all, given the variety of sources he's cribbed them from. (There's a lot you can say about queer horror, and not all of it is going to overlap.)

The thing I don't understand is that given how much work it must have been to compile these sources, he could have done all the fucking reading himself and synthesized it in his own words. He could have just thrown up a Pastebin of links he consulted and nobody would have noticed.

One of the reasons plagiarists steal is because they have no respect for the effort put into the work or people who do said work. A (presumably cis) white man stealing the words from other queer people, many of them economically marginalized and/or of color? I'm going to say that probably figured into it.

I don't know how much he made, but it was a significant fucking amount. That's money he took from the mouths of other queer people who are probably way worse off. That's discoveries of ideas and words people have been denied because they thought they were his.

(Hbomberguy is donating proceeds from this video to as many people who Somerton ripped off as he can track down. It's absolutely not his problem, and I imagine it's going to be a bitch and a half to identify and contact all these people. It is a mitzvah, in both the colloquial and religious sense, to do this.)

And as marginalized people, we know that context (historical, global, personal) is important, sometimes essential. Removal of that information greatly hampers comprehension and understanding in ways we are already limited or denied.

Stede's fantasy sequence in E1 is obviously a send-up of not just silly romance tropes, but predictions about what people thought would happen. Y'all, everybody involved in this show is extremely genre-aware. Do you think they'd play it straight like that?

Everything about the previous order has been upset, making room for new combinations of relationships (Izzy and both crews, Izzy and Blackbeard's crew, Izzy and Stede), or inversions of previous dynamics (Lucius).

And Darcy's observation that sometimes you extend grace to somebody who probably doesn't deserve it (because it isn't always about them) struck me. It's such a kind thing you rarely see in media, for people not just to look past harm that's been done to them by a specific person, but to extend the hand they wish they'd been given in the same situation. To the person who harmed them.

It's not apologism or excusing the behavior. It's looking past what was done and extending empathy and community to somebody who is obviously hurting.