He modeled for that last one himself, which is just great.

After the Bath, 1908, Joaquín Sorolla

“[pitching the proposal for Mononoke-hime (1997)] There cannot be a happy ending to the fight between the raging gods and humans. However, even in the middle of hatred and killings, there are things worth living for. A wonderful meeting, or a beautiful thing can exist. We depict hatred, but it is to depict that there are more important things. We depict a curse, to depict the joy of liberation. What we should depict is, how the boy understands the girl, and the process in which the girl opens her heart to the boy. At the end, the girl will say to the boy, “I love you, Ashitaka. But I cannot forgive humans.” Smiling, the boy should say, “That is fine. Live with me.” ― Hayao Miyazaki

over a million people in houston alone don't have power and its largely the same across the state. most people across houston reported losing power at 2 AM Feb 15 and never regained it (my neighborhood included) despite energy companies swearing its rolling blackouts and not mass outage.

this is a map of the power outages in texas before they stopped updating the maps/stopped letting people report:

this is absolutely insane. just completely freaking unprecedented. I haven't seen any national news about this but I swear if I see anyone bringing up texas being a red state and deserving this I'm going fucking batshit.

it's also affected covid vaccine supplies, since at least one facility with 8k doses lost power

the worst part is pictures of downtown houston right now, this picture from a local reporter

The hedge funds never actually owned these shares to begin with because they were short selling so they never actually paid for them.

Redditors saw this and decided to buy up all these shorted shares to gamestop a company that wasnt failing that the hedge funds would then be forced to buy back as they never actually owned the shares.

rich hedge funds have the ability to sell stocks they havent paid for yet that other people actually own and then pay for them after a certain amount of time. they can sell these stocks trade them whatever but they will eventually have to buy them back.

So they shorted gamestop shares from 20 dollars all the way down to 3 dollars, meaning they borrowed shares to then massively sell.

they sold shares at like 20 dollars and then 18, etc. and because when investors see massive amounts of shares being sold they get nervous and then sell their shares which drives the price of the stock ever further down.

so they took something worth 20 that they sold for 20 dollars and all its downward prices and instead of paying for it at $3 dollars they thought theyd CONTINUE to short the market, meaning they kept driving the prices down because apparently this obscene amount of money wasnt good enough.

Redditors who dont say the stock market is magic and mystical astrology saw this very obvious evidence that these hedge funds would be forced to buy back all these fucking gamestop shares and decided to drive the price of these shares up knowing that the hedge funds would then be forced to buy back the shares they have yet to pay for at increasingly wild prices.

what they were looking for was over 100% of all stocks shorted on a company that wasnt even failing or in complete disarray

they used this knowledge to bring stock that was 20 dollars brought down to $3 all the way back up to $140

the hedge funds still have to pay for all of those shares they never technically even owned in the first place which these redditors knew so they held onto these stocks they bought in a company whose shares were oversold.

INSTEAD of acknowledging this they decided to have media campaigns lie and make the stock market look even more mystical and crazy to people who dont know shit about finance so that your average folks wouldnt catch them in the act of just getting a fucking 2 billion dollar bailout for being greedy fucking pieces of shit.

They also dont want your average person to KNOW they do this shit especially when they drive shares so deep into the ground ($3)

TL;DR: Every time you call the stock market magic and mystical and ooo makes no sense, you pretty much allow these motherfuckers to get away with robbery of the average person (given a government bailout is paying for this)

Understanding how these things happen and knowing what to look for allows people to work together and not only stop it but rob back from the billionaires when they pull this shit.