Angstbot

oh! I have to tell you guys a great story one of my professors told me. So he has a friend who is involved in these Shakespeare outreach programs where they try to bring Shakespeare and live theatre to poor and underprivileged groups and teach them about English literature and performing arts and such. On one of their tours they stopped at a young offenders institute for women and they put on a performance of Romeo and Juliet for a group of 16-17 year old girls. It was all going really well and the girls were enjoying and laughing through the first half - because really, the first half is pretty much a comedy - but as the play went on, things started to get quiet. Real quiet. Then it got up to the suicide scene and mutterings broke out and all the girls were nudging each other and looking distressed, and as this teacher observed them, he realised - they didn’t know how the play ended. These girls had never been exposed to the story of Romeo and Juliet before, something which he thought was impossible given how ubiquitous it is in our culture. I mean, the prologue even gives the ending away, but of course it doesn’t specify exactly how the whole “take their life” thing goes down, so these poor girls had no idea what to expect and were sitting there clinging to hope that Romeo would maybe sit down for a damn minute instead of murdering Paris and chugging poison - but BAM he died and they all cried out - and then Juliet WOKE UP and they SCREAMED and by the end of the play they were so upset that a brawl nearly broke out, and that’s the story of how Shakespeare nearly started a riot at a juvenile detention centre

Apparently something similar happened during a production of Much Ado at Rikers Island because a bunch of inmates wanted to beat the shit out of Claudio, which is more than fair tbh

honestly Shakespeare would be so pleased to know his plays were nearly starting brawls centuries into the future

I played Claudio once and I fully support this

“When we took Shakespeare’s “Measure for Measure” into a maximum security woman’s prison on the West Side…there’s a scene there where a young woman is told by a very powerful official that “If you sleep with me, I will pardon your brother. And if you don’t sleep with me, I’ll execute him.” And he leaves the stage. And this character, Isabel, turned out to the audience and said: “To whom should I complain?” And a woman in the audience shouted: “The Police!” And then she looked right at that woman and said: “If I did relate this, who would believe me?” And the woman answered back, “No one, girl.” And it was astonishing because not only was it an amazing sense of connection between the audience and the actress, but you also realized that this was a kind of an historical lesson in theater reception. That’s what must have happened at The Globe. These soliloquies were not simply monologues that people spoke, they were call and response to the audience. And you realized that vibrancy, that that sense of connectedness is not only what makes theater great in prisons, it’s what makes theater great, period.”

Oskar Eustis

Love that “No one, girl,” is the same response over 400 years later 😑

This. Anybody who thinks Shakespeare was “really writing for elites” or is “only for rich posh people” needs their head felt.

i think it's funny when people pull the "but they're scaring children!" argument when talking about trans and queer people presenting and being visibly queer in public. i need you to know as a genderqueer/nonbinary intersex person who routinely goes out in drag and has been actively trying as hard as possible to not pass for the past 2 years, i can tell you that the most heartwarming and gender affirming reactions ive ever gotten have been out of random kids.

ive never had a kid glare or run away screaming from me. i have definitely seen kids go ??? because i could tell i was definitely the first queer person they had ever seen and they've never had to try to process what someone else's gender could be before. most of the time their eyes light up or they look excited, like they realized that oh wow, people can be like that too! i never have kids be invasive, rude, or call me names.

i've witnessed curiosity, wonder, confusion, and joy, but i've never once scared a kid. even with my big beard, chest hair, deep voice, and hairy legs. what i do see, though, are doors to acceptance being opened and bigots desperately trying to slam them shut.

For the record, this is largely why conservatives are particularly targeting drag queen story hours and other family-friendly queer events, as well as queer people publicly existing in places where kids can see them. Kids have to be taught hate. Wariness of new things is natural in humans, but so are curiosity and empathy. Hate is not intrinsic, and when confronted with something new or someone different, kids will generally be either curious, or at most shy, and maybe some kids might be scared...but until and unless someone teaches them to, very few children will *hate* from the get-go. And you can't teach your kids to hate an entire demographic of people they've already met and know are fine. It's easy to get people to hate a group's existence when they've only seen them as toxic stereotypes on TV or never heard of them at all. It's much harder when people know them as "the person who read me books as a kid, the people running fashion shows on TV, someone in my community who I know is nothing like what these demagogues are trying to convince me of".

one tectonic plate approaching another

“so are you a top or a bottom?”

two tops? you get a mountain. two bottoms? VALLEY BRO

i don’t know anything about geology

Are you (Mg,Fe2+)2(Mg,Fe2+)5Si8O22(OH)2?

I had to google that and i swear to fuck I will kill you

alright this is fine

Good post everyone hit the showers

One of the oldest ploy on the books is "It's not YOUR fault this is happening, it's THAT thing over there!"

Followed immediately by "But fear not...I have the solution"

was this created based on the Tumblr userbase stats, or-

My favourite kind of poll is ones where OP clearly made a VERY incorrect assumption

The fun thing about having an account for over ten years is you can follow thousands and still only functionally follow a couple hundred.

Reminder that the Australian Government okayed the destruction of two 46'000 year old Aboriginal caves for iron ore.

One of the world's earliest human settlements destroyed forever for a profit.

Galaxy Quest (1999) (✚)

This is one of those moments that all great comedies have where it stops being funny for just a while and you have to take it absolutely, deadly seriously.

It’s heartbreaking, but I don’t think it’s dead serious. On some level, there’s still something camp and ridiculous about it (that line is inherently silly, regardless of context), and it’s the combination of silly and serious that makes it so poignant. We’re not doing something different than before, we’re just looking at the same thing from a different angle: “what if that objectively silly and camp thing made someone happy, and gave them peace in their last moments?” And that’s what makes it moving and powerful. That’s the whole point of the movie, and that’s why Galaxy Quest is the best Star Trek movie ever.

Whereas, in The Princess Bride for example, there’s NOTHING funny in the line “I want my father back, you son of a bitch.” It’s unambiguously raw. We shifted gears completely, we’re doing another thing altogether. We’re not repeating the funny line any more, and the funny line (“My name is Inigo Montoya. You killed my father. Prepare to die.”) was not funny inherently, only in the delivery (calm, gentle, with a smile) and the repetition throughout the movie. When you stopped saying it gently to the void and started saying it angrily to the actual killer, it stopped being funny. Shit got real.

Two different ways to accomplish the same thing, both wonderful.

Ha ha ha look at those people. Stuck in their 9 am Monday morning traffic jam.

While i am inside. On my soft chairs and wearing sweats. Looking out my window at them. Already “at work” since i am remote.

I could make coffee if i had a coffee maker if i really wanted to. Though obviously i don’t really care for it since i dont own one.

Where are all these traffic jam people going? If it is work then theyre going to be so late. I thought most people took the metro here.

I don't know if it's a big thing in the US yet, but there's this conspiracy theory running rampant in Canada about 15-minute cities

The entire concept is cities that are designed to be walkable, so that everything essential is within walking or cycling distance, to cut down on traffic

The conspiracy is that the cities will be broken down into 15-minute districts that will be under 24-hour surveillance and it will either be illegal to ever leave your district, or you'll only be able to leave with a vaccine passport or something similar lol

But like... the conspiracy theory is how I learned about 15-minute cities in the first place, and they sound like awesome ideas, and your post just made me think about it again... people think we're going to be imprisoned by the government, but like... we're already prisoners of capitalism... how do more people not see that being stuck in traffic is being trapped inside your car?!

... I also work from home so it's not an issue for me, but like... I couldn't imagine commuting every day

"Girls just wanna have fundamental human rights!"

Seen in Istanbul, Turkey

ONCE UPON A TIME 3.20, Kansas

"don't ship—" i will just be doing whatever the fuck i want actually

I'm fucking sorry what-

When they say the shipping discourse exploded, that is NOT usually what they mean