I Should Really Edit My Desktop Theme

Anyway apparently Mr. Eclipse made 5000 years' worth of solar eclipse graphics, which you can find the simpler versions of here

Ive never seen it in reverse like this!

... how's that going, Sara? Any uhhh any progress there? Have you put any paint on it other than the white / oil wash you've already done?

also you are never going to be safe for people for whom english is their second language. if someone clarifies their meaning and apologises and you can't accept that over the original wording then don't bother pretending to be autism friendly.

and like part of my autism is that i become convinced that the way i interpret words is the way that they're meant. my autism is disabling to my communication abilities. i have poor emotional regulation, i jump to conclusions. a lot of my reactions are informed by prior negative experiences. i can and probably have been overly defensive in the past.

and i've been misinterpreted so much and had my words picked over and mocked for saying the wrong things and mocked for being unable to say anything at all and it always feels devastating. it's ironic that the same disability that has me treated poorly would have me react poorly to a similar situation, but that's just how it is.

The sommelier from John Wick 2, drunk af: we're having a clearance sale.

This is not metaphorical. I mean actual, literal pieces of paper/plastic/metal/whatever explicitly erected to inform the public.

“How did you know this was the right trail?” I read the sign.

“Wow, how did you know what that flower is?” There’s a SIGN.

“How did you know we needed to use the side door?” THERE IS A SIGN POSTED ON THE FRONT DOOR.

Just…why are we having such different experiences of the world? People can read. I KNOW they can read. There’s nothing wrong with their vision.

Just. READ. THE. GOD. DAMN. SIGN.

This also applies to:

Syllabi

The very first experience it has with the base crew is that they save it from people shooting at it, give it warm hugs, and kill the people trying to deatroy it. After that it attacks and impersonates an unknown (at the time) member of the crew. After that it gets surrounded by dogs who are angry but too scared to approach, then it changes, then it attacks the huskies, and only then does anyone in the base camp treat it with hostility.

The entire first act of the movie is devoted to establishing that they know each other with an Intimacy so deep they can anticipate one another's actions and attitudes. They have been in an isolated arctic base for months and months where they can barely leave the same building. They are in one another's personal space throughout the movie. It's a vital plot point that the Thing can immitate people down to memories and personality traits. It's a vital metaphorical point as well. It's so deeply and fundamentally superficial and factually incorrect to call them unfamiliar with each other that it implies total inattention to what is happening on screen.

The Thing is, at heart, not a movie about any singular decision or behavior creating a bad outcome. Baked into the 1982 movie is failure, death, entropy, inevitable loss. It's not a movie that's meant to have a right solution, or a right decision - but when someone comes at this very bleak story without a good grounding in horror, there's a kind of urge to treat it like a puzzle. If only they were closer. If only they communicated.

That's not meeting it where it's at, because it rests on a situation where none of those elements really exist. People acted the best they could in the circumstances with the tools and information they had - and it simply was not enough. Nearly everyone dies. Even with the ambiguous ending, whoever is human is going to die, because it's winter in Antarctica and he is hundreds of miles from anywhere with no shelter and no food and no transportation. That's the sort of horror it is, the idea that when faced with extinction humanity's best efforts won't succeed. Creating an interpretation where if we had "just" this or that is shying away from the bleakness. But at the same time, not facing up to the idea that some things really might not be solvable, that the worst can happen in spite of it all, is a necessary skill. Not one we need to indulge in constantly, but we should have that knowledge.

In brief, fandom seems to be predominantly comprised of people who only want to talk about what isn't in the media. There is a fandom for The Thing on tumble, and it's very much about ideas that come from the movie, but not about anything innthe actual film. The few times I've had the misfortune to enjoy media with a large fandom, I find almost exclusively shipping, fantasies about specific characters antithetical to the subject matter, and an almost oppositional distaste for any of the actual intended or unintended meaning in the media. None of those are a problem per se, because the world is a big place and it doesn't matter in the grand picture what people want to pretended about a book or movie or TV series. This is mostly a me problem, where I can be perfectly fine and ignore what comes across my dashboard, but this is also a me post, which means I can complain about the phenomenon.

Anyway, where I find it frustrating is the encroachment of fandom focus on what isn't in the media into my little wading pool of enjoying digging through the ideas that are in the media, when a "what if it was completely different" idea inspired by the media gains so much traction that it begins to be treated as a reflection of the text, sometimes even exiting its primary fandom, like The Thing, into general circulation. Which is how you get people discussing the "creature is misunderstood" not-present ideas of The Thing by fandoms, while effectively ignoring the vastly more significant elements of the film relating to the Reagan era 1980s, cold war paranoia, and so on. Once a fandom non-textual idea propagates far enough, it not only occludes the ideas inside the original media, in my experience it almost invariably excises anything that was challenging about it. For example, how rapidly fandom's latched onto the idea of Remmick in Sinners as a misunderstood tragic figure - rather than anything to do with what the film is saying about systemic racism. It feels like a companion behavior towards people whose take away from media like Breaking Bad, Fight Club, or Obsession is that the male protagonist is meant to be viewed in a positive light - because that is an easy and more comfortable option than for example treating any character who isn't a guy or isn't white or isn't straight as a vital, human person at the center of the film.