Incredible art from @demoncyborg of my fursona!
god i love watching these train wrecks from a distance
I've walked past the Barbie branded selfie booth, sat through the reel of old commercials that precede the previews, and watched Margot Robbie learn to cry, and I’m still not sure what “doing the thing and subverting the thing,” which Greta Gerwig claimed as the achievement of Barbie in a recent New York Times Magazine profile, could possibly mean. This was the second Gerwig profile the magazine has run. I wrote the first one, in 2017, which in hindsight appears like a warning shot in a publicity campaign that has cemented Gerwig’s reputation as so charming and pure of heart that any choice (we used to call them compromises) she makes is justified, a priori, by her innocence. This is a strange position for an adult to occupy, especially when the two-hour piece of branded content she is currently promoting hinges on a character who discovers that her own innocence is the false product of a fallen world. But—spoiler alert!—the point of Barbie’s “hero’s journey” is less to reconcile Barbie to death than to reconcile the viewer to culture in the age of IP.
“Doing the thing and subverting the thing”: I haven’t finished working out the details, but I think the rough translation would be Getting rich and not feeling feel bad about it. (Or, for the viewer: Having a good time and not feeling bad about it.) One must labor under a rather reduced sense of the word “subvert” to be impressed with poking loving fun at product misfires such as Midge (the pregnant Barbie), Tanner (the dog who poops), and the Ken with the earring, especially given that the value of all these collectors’ items has, presumably, not decreased since the film opened. Barbie may feature a sassy tween sternly informing Robbie’s Stereotypical Barbie that the tiny-waisted top-heavy billion-dollar business she represents has made girls “feel bad” about themselves, but if anyone uttered the word “anorexia,” I missed it. (There was a reason Todd Haynes told the story of Karen Carpenter’s life and death with Barbies, and it wasn’t because an uncanny piece of molded plastic has the magical power to resolve the contradictions of girlhood and global capitalism.) There’s a bit about Robbie going back into a box in the Mattel boardroom, but Barbies aren’t made in an executive suite; they come from factories in China. On the one hand, it’s weird for a film about a real-world commodity to unfold wholly in the realm of ideas and feelings, but then again, that’s pretty much the definition of branding. Mattel doesn’t care if we buy Barbie dolls—they’re happy to put the word “Barbie” on sunglasses and T-shirts, or license clips from the movie for an ad for Google. OK, here’s my review: When Gerwig first visited Mattel HQ in October 2019, the company’s stock was trading at less than twelve dollars a share. Today the price is $21.40.
Christine Smallwood, Who Was Barbie?
when people act like Large Beverages are the thing thats wrong with america as if thats not the only thing keeping me from driving off a cliff... ohhhh Those greedy americans slonking away at their Large Beverages. we're literally all working in the hamburger mine to afford rock and roll disc . Beverage is all we have
Anonymous asked:
is there a label that ACTUALLY means 'attraction regardless of gender' and doesn't have transphobic origins?
783-remade answered:
yes it’s called “bisexual”
you will have a much healthier relationship with your own mental health if you stop seeing disorders as essential modes of being that you fall into or don't and treat them instead as models through which to view your experiences and put exactly as much stock in as you find they have useful explanatory power to you
stop thinking 'am i X' and instead ask 'is it useful to me to understand my behaviour Y in terms of X'
A British sailor throwing a lance bomb from a Royal Navy Drifter.
The lance bomb is exactly what it looks like. roughly 15 kilos of explosives on the end of a stick, to be thrown directly at a submarine that has surfaced alongside a ship.
Apparently one thrown from the small auxiliary ship the HMS Gleaner of the Sea (a repurposed fishing boat) hit the German submarine UB-13 and sank it in April 1916.
A Royal Navy Drifter similar to the HMS Gleaner of the Sea.
Cuba does not have a higher life expectancy than the United States. Even if it did, the Cuban government does not allow dissent to the regime and routinely harrasses pro-democracy activists.
Cuba does have a higher life expectancy. Cuba also allows dissent, so much so that they just voted to rewrite their constitution. Meanwhile in the US when you stand outside a government building with a sign:
ALTGlass Witch Kieln, a glass maker and artist
Her entire body is made of glass and bundle of glass fibers woven with her hex
Those enchanted glass fibers won't ever naturally fall out or crumble so you don't have to worry about inhaling glass particles or how fragile her body would be. Instead you better watch out to not touch her without some proper protection since those sharp fibers will definitely shred or punch holes in your meager flesh
Other than that she's a pretty chill and amiable character to get along
Having fun imagining alien abductions as higher dimensional beings rescuing us from some sort of comical superspatial hazard we can't even perceive or comprehend, like having to hold a raccoon down and put grease on its neck to get its head unstuck from a peanut jar
"Fuck, man, I know we're not supposed to touch these things but did you see him? He was totally covered in a Neuemann-Andrugtshang Field and he didn't even know. Just drenched. Did you see how fucked up he looked? Poor thing, scared half to death. I need to go wash my hands."