So The Academy Is Reviewing Whether Or Not To Remove Will Smith’s Award And Here Are Some Interesting

Video essays that make me go "oh, so you're like smart smart"

Elon Musk and Grimes: A Retrospective

Bo Burnham vs. Jeff Bezos

The Systemic Abuse of Celebrities

Lana Del Rey: the pitfalls of having a persona

we need to talk about Call Me By Your Name

MYTH OF THE AUTEUR: Stanley Kubrick vs David Lynch

In Search Of A Flat Earth

Envy

The Commodification of Black Athletes

The Lies Of The Lighthouse

The Green Knight: The Uncanny Horror of Masculinity

Max Payne, Kane & Lynch, and the Meaning of Ugly Games

Time Loop Nihilism

How Bisexuality Changed Video Games

The Golden Age of Horror Comics - Part 1 (Part 2)

Weighing the Value of Director's Cuts | Scanline

The True Horror Of Midsommar

a few more -

You're Wrong About Cyberpunk 2077 | An Overdue Critique (this is such great critique of both the game and the genre)

Disney's Fast Pass: A Complicated History

It Has Come To My Attention You Don't All Love BIRDS OF PREY

Adaptation.

The man who almost faked his way to a Nobel Prize

Music Theory and White Supremacy

Here's the YouTube playlist! ill be adding more but that's all so far pls like and reblog xoxo 💕

also feel free to share your own recs in the notes!

For the book rant- Fahrenheit 451

ITS SO UNDERRATED and listen I don't know if there's controversy about the book or the author, probably, but HOLY CRAP THAT ENDING BLEW ME AWAY

I literally had to put the book down and cry because I was just so taken aback by how devastating and totally world ending that is for the characters. I mean come on, the whole city? A WHOLE CITY? The way it's described is beautiful and I read it over a year ago, that scene is permanently engrained in my brain. It's just so...real. I just felt so bad for them. I can't help how frustrated I get over the lack of love for it.

Its appreciated as a work of "classic" fiction but not for how emotional it is

Well this was entirely unexpected.

Let's all take a moment to bask in some positivity

Also, have you watched the movie? The one from the 60s, not the newer one. It's very good, and has a much nicer ending

Streaming now!

I fucking hate true crime so fucking much

Scrolling reddit and this bullshit showed up in my feed.

If I had a penny for every time I saw a true crime fan act like these real events, real actual tragedies, are just some fun little story....I'd be one of the richest fuckers in the world.

I don't know if there's an actual term for this. An actual term for when people become incapable of processing reality as anything other than media to be consumed. The only thing I can think to call it is media poisoning.

JonBenet Ramsey isn't a real person anymore, her family aren't real people, the victims of Oakland County aren't real people and neither are their families. They're just characters. What happened to them isn't real, the tragedy, the pain, the death, the soul-shattering grief....it's not real, it's just a story.

If they were real, you couldn't make posts like that. You couldn't have a podcast called My Favorite Murder. You couldn't have people dressing themselves or their kids up as serial killers for Halloween. You couldn't have a wildly successful youtube series casually discussing murders while putting on makeup or doing mukbangs.

So they can't be real. They have to be media that you consume. And that's all they get to be. A product.

Alright, I am back home. I have internet again. Let's see how things went

R*wling shows throughout the series that she believes that bad things are only bad when they're done by the Bad Guys. However, if one of the designated Good Guys does the same thing it's not bad.

For example, use of the Unforgivable Curses. When the Bad Guys use them it's horrific, evil, one of the Worst Things Ever. But when Harry uses them, with alarming frequency, it's fine. He's not a Bad Guy, so the things he does can't be bad.

Then there's Snape. He's awful. Just awful. He's an incel creep. He's racist. He bullies young children just because he can, and is outright abusive to them if he didn't like their parents (even when said parents died when the kid was an infant). And oh yeah, he's an incel creep who became obsessed with a girl who did not return his feelings, called her slurs, and was a-okay with her husband and infant son being murdered. You cannot tell me that he wasn't hoping to swoop in and try to manipulate her into a relationship when she was vulnerable due to extreme grief. But, because she for some bizarre reason unwilling to stand aside quietly during the murder of her family, he started working for the Good Guys, which totally means that he's a Good Guy and none of the horrible things he did actually matter.

And then there's Dumbledore! Oh boy, I could write at least an Order of the Phoenix sized book about all the terrible things he did. But I'll keep it short here. He knowingly left a particularly vulnerable child in an abusive situation, and didn't even bother to actually check in on him now and again to make sure that he wasn't being, you know, abused or anything like that. He also left the baby in a basket, outside, for hours, because that was for some reason better than knocking at the door? He then manipulated a young child into basically becoming his private soldier against an evil wizard so powerful that the entire magical world pissed themselves at the mention of his name. But all this gets glossed over and is forgiven as easily as if he had just lost a pen someone had lent him. Because, after all, he's the ultimate Good Guy. And a Good Guy can't do bad things. Therefore, none of the things he did were actually bad.

This got a lot longer than I intended it to be. The views on morality in this series really bother me.

Sometimes I just sit around and think about ways to improve the Harry Potter books. Not even in a fix-it fic way. Just like...there are some seriously dropped threads in Deathly Hallows especially.

Do y'all ever think about the thing with Griphook? Harry choosing to deceive him about the sword of Gryffindor? Well, I do. It bothers me that there are no negative consequences for this. Because oop- Griphook double-crossed them too! So we never have to think about Harry making that choice. And the characterization of Griphook is squicky, man. He relishes the idea of weak creatures suffering, he's obnoxious. We can't even REALLY examine wizard/goblin relations because Griphook is such an uncomplicated little asshole. Did Gryffindor steal the sword from the goblin king??? Harry is uncomfy about it for like two seconds and then oop--guess we never need to think about it again. It's a bad writing choice and when I think about a book like Terry Pratchett's Feet of Clay--a book that complexly and carefully and humanely examines racism--i feel super disappointed in the way the Harry Potter series just like...lets some things go.

This is, I think, one example of a handful of moments when Harry does a Bad Thing: lies, uses unforgivable curses etc. But there's no real examination of it. She nods at it a little like "harry was becoming as reckless a godfather and Sirius was to him" but then it just gets...dropped. There isn't even a "this is war; there is no moral high ground" moment. R*wling just seems to have no plan at all to examine any moral complexity in that final book. It makes me nuts.

Hey guys. Sorry, but I am not feeling well tonight. I'm not horribly sick or anything, no need to worry. But I won't be streaming tonight. I know I said I'd be back on tonight after missing last night, but please give me one more chance and I promise I'll be back to it tomorrow

leaving kudos on ao3 isn’t enough I need to be able to eat the fic

Work has been absolute hell the last few days. I am utterly exhausted