So Game Changer made a game that purposefully designed for Brennan to lose. Then it made a game that, while not intended with Brennan in mind, ended with him getting second place, the goal of the game and something he despised more than losing.

So now all Game Changer needs is a game to make a game where Brennan shouldn't WANT to win, force him into first place, and have him scream his head off about something along the lines of him despising being put in a game where trying your best leads to punishment. I want that trifecta of Brennan monologues to be complete.

They should make a game that's set up like a brutal competition but it quickly becomes clear that they're giving Brennan incredibly softball challenges. The opposite of the roseate spoonbill thing. Sam should act just a tiny bit surprised and congratulate him every time he beats the others and absolutely refuse the entire game to acknowledge that it's a bit. Pit him against Ally and Rekha, they would absolutely play along.

OP made the post unrebloggable but said it's fine to screenshot and I'm in love with this

@rhianthialritak

Broke:

Belle has Stockholm syndrome because she falls in love with the Beast, her kidnapper.

Woke:

Stockholm syndrome was coined to slander a woman who had been in a hostage situation but openly criticized the poor police response which recklessly put her in more danger and escalated the violence. She was then belittled and discredited publically by the police for this.

So. Yeah. Maybe Belle does have Stockholm syndrome actually.

If anyone is curious here is the wikipedia section describing this.

[ID: Gif image from Disney's Beauty and the Beast with Gaston leading a large group of villagers down the road holding a torch. The atmosphere is dark.

Wikipedia screenshot containing the following:

According to accounts by Kristin Enmark, one of the hostages, the police however was acting incompetently, with little care for the hostages' safety, which forced the hostages to negotiate for their life and release with the robbers on their own. In the process the hostages saw the robbers behaving more rationally than police negotiators and therefore developed a deep distrust towards the latter. Enmark had criticized Bejerot specifically for endangering their lives by behaving aggressively and agitating the captors. She had criticized the police for pointing guns at the convicts while the hostages were in the line of fire and she had told news outlets that one of the captors tried to protect the hostages from being caught in the crossfire. She was also critical of prime minister Olof Palme, as she had negotiated with the captors for freedom, but the prime minister told her that she would have to content herself to die at her post rather than give in to the captors' demands. Ultimately, Enmark explained she was more afraid of the police whose attitude seemed to be a much larger, direct threat to her life than the robbers.]

Hope the ID helps, it's my first time writing one.

Here are some other facts you should know about Nils Bejerot: He had a major influence (this involved founding the "Swedish National Association for a Drug-free Society") on Sweden's zero-tolerance approach to drug use.

And he wrote "Barn, Serier, Samhälle" (Children, Comics, Society), basically the Swedish version of "Seduction of the Innocent"; an infamous anti-comics book by Fredric Wertham that led to the Comics Code Authority.

This is the man who coined the phrase "Stockholm syndrome", guys.

There was one of those hyperspecific polls that had an option like “your grandfather told you war stories that he never told anyone else” and now I feel like I have to tell the story about how a spider saved my grandpa’s life in WWII and how my family doesn’t kill spiders because we owe our existence to that One Single Spider

So to set the scene, it's the height of WWII in France and my grandpa—a 6'3" 20 year old upper Michigan farm boy—has been separated from his company after their temporary camp was shelled. My grandpa (who, I have to add, was nicknamed 'the Suicide Kid' at this point because he worked in demolitions and bomb interception and kept taking the jobs no one wanted with the expectation that he was never going home anyway) is scared out of his wits, wandering around the French countryside alone. He has to move at night and sleep in barns and sheds during the day to hide from people who most definitely want him dead.

On one of these days, he finds a farmhouse of a very jittery couple who agree to let him sleep in the barn, with the conditions that he sleeps in the barn loft and if he's found, they disavow all knowledge that he was there. He agrees, because he's exhausted and will sleep in a hay pile if he has to. My grandpa manages to fit all six foot three inches of himself into a feed trough stored upstairs and tries to get some sleep.

However, right when he's half-snoozing, he hears motors outside and sure enough, here are some very angry officers of mixed Nazi and Vichy make confronting the couple saying someone up the road spotted an American soldier walking this way. They wouldn't know anything about that, would they? No, of course not.

All the while, my grandpa—now trying to figure out how to either escape the barn unseen or how to fight off six? seven? eight? people at once—freezes up and waits for the inevitable. While he does, a HUGE spider crawls next to his head and onto the loft railing. For one second, he thinks about swatting it away, but that would risk him being seen and killed.

So, instead, he lays there and waits to either fight to the death or get executed in a feed trough. And while he lays there, the spider starts making a huge web on the railing. My grandpa's transfixed by this thing. He watches her go around and around, building a solid web before plopping herself off to one side and waiting for breakfast. At the same time, the officers finally go into the barn.

My grandpa can hear them searching around, turning over crates and checking animal pens. Then, he hears one say to check the loft.

And then another say, "Don't bother. Look at the spiderwebs up there. No one's been there in a while."

And they leave.

Because my grandpa didn't swat the spider away and let her build her web, the officers thought no one was there and left him alone. They drive off and my grandpa immediately thanks the farmer couple and hauls ass out of there as soon as he can.

After this, my grandpa refused to kill any spider, and his kids did the same. Because if it wasn't for her, he wouldn't have lived and would never have had kids or grandkids. So we owe her one.

There's the man himself. Go grandpa!!

im gonna fucking cry

Wildcard meaning he says whatever random crap the ai throws in there.

my favorite calvin and hobbes comic is the one where his dad just rolls up and casually destroys his entire night by pointing out some neat trivia about record players

@nightcrawler-fan

#his expression in the last panel is black comic gold #the best part is that his dad was trying to be nice

are you sure. are you sure calvin’s dad is not a seasoned elder trickster. are you sure this isn’t the exact outcome he was hoping for

ok but that’s actually canon

You forgot this one

*looks pointedly at ETD*

Calvin’s dad is basically a Calvin who has learned that he can’t get away with running outside naked or throwing snowballs at neighborhood girls, but he is still precisely the same little shit under the thin veneer of civilization.

@lyricwritesprose Calvin and Hobbes has been one of my favorite things since I could read and Calvin’s dad one of my favorite characters, but that last comment blew my mind wide open. Of course that’s what he is. Of course.

one of the most subtly delightful things about calvin and hobbes is that you can SEE that calvin is his parents’ kid: his dad is so playful and imaginative, and his mom has a heck of a temper and a good sense of what’s right and wrong. calvin is a smart, passionate, imaginative kid who gets really upset when he thinks things are stupid or unfair. he drives his parents crazy sometimes because he’s a kid. but they were probably a lot like calvin themselves, when they were little. 

My favorite goddamn comic

Also didn’t Calvin make a comment once that apparently his grandma said his mother was just as much of a troublemaker as he is

my prof just explained on the syllabus that he’s included more pionts in the class than we needed to pass, so we could skip up like?? 20 small assignments/quizzes/participation!! and still get a very high grade!!

the idea was that we could focus on assignments that played to our strengths - only do the participation stuff if we like to talk out loud - only do the quizzes/readings if we want to do the class remotely - only do online discussions if we like to talk and share opinions but struggle with anxiety in class ect.

and that’s cool enough but then he pulled up DnD character sheets with drawings he’d done of these hypothetical student player classes and how our various accessibility needs could be gamified to ‘max out’ different aspects of the class to get high grades and like!!!!!

hell yeah!!!! let’s treat accessibility in higher education not just as a necessity but as the fun, engaging, and creative aspect of learning that it is!!! I love this!!

other profs: sobbing and screaming bc someone needs to take notes on a computer

this dude: I record and upload every lecture for the paladins, monks, and rogues, but barbarians can watch them too I guess. Bards you only get one participation point per class, even if you talk multiple times, it’s only fair.

People get so weird about John Oliver. They're so unwilling to accept that yes, this is the furthest left you're allowed to be on a talk show on a corporate network. They're currently mad he did a segment calling for a ceasefire in Gaza, something very few media people have done, something many outlets have discouraged, bc he...also said Hamas is bad, and he titled the segment "Israel-Hamas War". Like Jesus Christ, yes, a lot of what John Oliver says is radical by the standards of corporate media, and I don't know, maybe it's important to have that voice in that widely-accessible space and not hold him up as a failure bc he doesn't provide solutions for everything and isn't perfect.

"All he does is say the problem is capitalism, but doesn't suggest what to do" You realize HBO's other political talk show is hosted by a guy who spends each week raving about how woke college students and pronouns are oppressing him, right? The bar for John Oliver is not set where it is for a dirtbag leftist podcast; that's the bar. Why does he have to outline the revolution

It's like. When you discuss the Daily Show, you need to note that at the time, being anti-war got journalists fired from MSNBC (admittedly not a liberal-leaning network at the time)

When you discuss Last Week Tonight, you need to note that at the time (now), being anti-war gets journalists suspended from MSNBC (which is a liberal leaning network at the time [now])

Wish I could read the fucking article but like everything, it's behind a fucking paywall.

Here's the article, un-paywalled, for anyone who would like to read it!

"Hey, we all need a 55% raise. This is our union rep, Steve, and our unanimous strike authorization vote. Make something happen before we make sure nothing happens."

this is cinema

Pause this on each screen, because there's stuff in here I wasn't aware of and I'm sure I'm not the only one. This isn't just cinema, this is free education and I'm grateful for it.

The kids on TikTok think that just because he was a classic country singer, Johnny Cash was conservative??? My babies he covered a Nine Inch Nails song in his seventies.

Classic country singers (the majority of which came from poor roots) were always talking about how much The Man sucked because they were taking money from poor rural folk. You’re gonna tell me that’s conservative?? Get outta here.

And somehow on the opposite side of the scale with the same exact opinion the conservative kids say “I like the old country music, because there’s no politics to it” Woodie Guthrie’s got a “this machine kills fascists” sticker on his guitar? You think there’s no politics in 9 to 5 or Folsom Prison Blues?!

For anyone confused there was a sudden and dramatic shift in the country music genre. It used to be a genre fixated on the experiences of people. Lived or common experiences that resonated with the common people. It was music that you listened to and it thrummed in tune to your soul because you had lived it yourself. And a lot of that was about ordinary people getting ground up in the gears of society.

The hyper patriotism, beer, and trucks chimera we have now didn't show up until after 9/11 and the world is lesser for it

Allow me to post the entire lyrics to the Johnny Cash song "Man in Black", released in nineteen goddamn seventy-one and written about why he always wore black onstage:

Well, you wonder why I always dress in black

Why you never see bright colors on my back

And why does my appearance seem to have a somber tone

Well, there's a reason for the things that I have on

I wear the black for the poor and the beaten down

Livin' in the hopeless, hungry side of town

I wear it for the prisoner who has long paid for his crime

But is there because he's a victim of the times

I wear the black for those who've never read

Or listened to the words that Jesus said

About the road to happiness through love and charity

Why, you'd think He's talking straight to you and me

Well, we're doin' mighty fine, I do suppose

In our streak of lightnin' cars and fancy clothes

But just so we're reminded of the ones who are held back

Up front there ought to be a man in black

I wear it for the sick and lonely old

For the reckless ones whose bad trip left them cold

I wear the black in mournin' for the lives that could have been

Each week we lose a hundred fine young men

And I wear it for the thousands who have died

Believin' that the Lord was on their side

I wear it for another hundred-thousand who have died

Believin' that we all were on their side

Well, there's things that never will be right, I know

And things need changin' everywhere you go

But 'til we start to make a move to make a few things right

You'll never see me wear a suit of white

Ah, I'd love to wear a rainbow every day

And tell the world that everything's okay

But I'll try to carry off a little darkness on my back

'Til things are brighter, I'm the man in black

That right there is an anti-war, anti-bigot, anti-mass-incarceration, anti-war-on-drugs (Cash was an addict in various stages of recovery who was pissed as hell about how this country treats people with substance issues), eat-the-rich protest song. And it was arguably his signature song, his personal manifesto. Notice that even the Jesus reference, which today would be a signal that the song is about to drop some racist dogwhistles, segues immediately into a line about "the road to happiness through love and charity". As in "Motherfucker, our shared god said love thy neighbor and care for the poor and the outsider, and we both know he didn't fucking stutter." He's throwing shade at self-described Christians who use his religion as a cudgel to beat people with.

Johnny Cash wasn't a conservative. I'm pretty sure if he were alive and in reasonably good health today, he'd knock Jason Aldean's teeth out (or, failing that, write a song so devastatingly memetic about how much Aldean sucks that Aldean would never work in music again).

Johnny Cash was punk rock. He just happened to be punk rock in the body of a country singer.

Perception Check | Tom Cardy

Reminder that Tom Cardy plays all the music live for DnD podcast Dragon Friends, and has played characters in their main campaign and their side campaign, Gribbit's Detective Agency.

Otters will forever be the most dramatic creatures on the planet🦦

people on this website be like “it’s actually school’s fault that i don’t know how to read because i wanted to write my essay on the divergent trilogy and that BITCH mrs. clarkson made us study 1984 instead. anyway here’s a 10 tweet thread of easily disproven misinformation about a 3 year old news story and btw, who is toni morrison?”

i KNOW most of y’all are lying about being in the gifted program as children because none of you could pass the basic reading comprehension assessment they give third graders today

this post is mean and I never read divergent or whatever the fuck but 1984 sucks and is rape apologism so if somebody wanted to write about divergent or whatever good for them

this reply is like literally exactly what op is talking about lol. like firstly ops point isn’t “1984 is good”, ops point is that analysing complex stories teaches you how to form opinions and think for yourself. and like secondly in 1984 you’re supposed to think damn it’s fucked up that he’s thinking that way about her, i wonder if this ties in with the central theme of “a society like this will fuck you in the head”? (this is the thinking for yourself part). like do you think orwell just put that in for fun? do you think that just because winston is the protagonist you’re supposed to agree with everything he does?

You know I feel like this post just gave me an epiphany for what is wrong with how Tumblr Fandom/Internet Fandom responds to media-or not *wrong* but makes it very hard to respond to anything but a morally correct, and heroic protagonist. 

When an English teacher, or reader, taught or picked up 1984, it wasn’t with the intention they were going to love the protagonist. They picked it up with the intention of reading a whole story and trying to grasp the theme or catharsis from the story. If the protagonist was a *shitty* person it played into the the themes or the story, because it wasn’t about morally judging the book or *liking* or feeling attachment to the protagonist. Sometimes and often times, books were just about gaining another perspective. 

No one read Lolita expecting to endear, or like, or be inspired by Humbert. You are supposed to be upset by his behavior, you don’t read Lolita with the intention of being inspired. You read it to learn more about what the fuck is going on inside someone’s head when they behave like that. How children get sucked into abusive situations. Or read “The Great Gatsby” not because they want to fall in love with Gatsby or Nick, but to better understand and analyze the experience of the 1920s or destitution of the American Dream. 

A lot of internet and fandom culture has changed that though. When we say something like “I love the Great Gatsby” it comes with the idea or association that means you must *love* or relate to one of the characters. And maybe you do, but the first assumption is not longer about the quality of the work or themes, or cathartic impact-it’s about character admiration. And with that character admiration, in tumblr stan culture, or kin culture, or exalting characters with fanart/romance/so on you don’t just ‘admire’ or find that character ‘compelling’ it now translates to ‘you LOVE that character’ or you ‘DIRECTLY relate to that character.’ 

You can’t say “I love how Humbert is written, it’s so fascinating and dark”, without it directly translating you somehow relate to a child abuser or condone his actions. Taking in media has become an act of worship and connection. We no longer watch meant to just see the story as a whole, we watch expecting to connect to a character and if we offer them our “worship” as it’s become, as opposed to just attention or interest study as it traditionally was, it means we are condoning the character or saying we directly empathize with all their actions. 

I think that’s why there is often now so much fuss over *toxic* characters or not. Or whether that classical novel is showing good or bad things anymore. We’re treating the characters as people we should love or want to draw or write about. Sometimes a story is just about getting the the theme or catharsis or learning another perspective. We don’t NEED to like the character. Or we don’t HAVE to like a character to be impressed by how they’re written or intrigued by their behavior. 

I think if internet culture could learn to view stories as small insights into other lives or single takes of one perspective instead of purposeful moral inspirations we’d be a lot less worried about how toxic or not toxic they are. 

About… I want to say 20, 25-ish years ago?… the Big Fashion in writing advice became that you had to make your characters “relateable”, which many writers took to mean “as identical as possible to the target audience in terms of personality, morality and reason”. So making characters who the audience could agree with or at the very least sympathise with became practically mandatory in mainstream writing. I think a lot of people who started reading those sorts of stories exclusively started to assume that that particular choice is like, a mandatory part of writing, and if the main character isn’t Like You (or different for excusable and sympathetic reasons) then either they are badly written, or the author is trying to convince you of something. Humbert is a pedophile, and of course he’s supposed to be Relateable, so that must mean his morals are supposed to be your morals and the authors morals, so the author is a pedophile and the book “promotes pedophilia”! If you like the character, you find him Relateable (just like you), so you’re a pedophile, or at the very least sympathise/apologise for pedophilia. So we have this weird perspective that all stories must be direct morality tales where something being depicted means it’s being glorified/normalised (why else would you put it in, if you don’t want your audience to enjoy it and therefore think it’s a good thing?), and the protagonist must be Morally Pure or become that way over the story so that the audience can properly Relate to them and not become morally confused (because books are magical devices where the wrong fictional depiction in one of them can brainwash the audience into bigotry, and All Readers Except Me Are Stupid).

This isn’t *new*. When novels became popular among women in England, there was a lot of concern that they would corrupt their poor feeble minds and confuse them with their daring tales and illegal and improper acts. Humbert got this flak for Lolita, which was published in 1955. There have always been a crowd out there terrified that somebody might see something bad depicted and that means that the depiction itself is evil and the only way to stay Pure And Good is to avoid such literature and decry its very existence. Book burners aren’t new, and nor are moral crusade book haters. But I think this weird “all main characters are clearly intended to be Just Like Me, so if we disagree then their existence is morally wrong because why else would they be like that” perspective contributes a lot to the current trend.

Tom Cardy: Perception check

now that's a friend indeed

"Ignore the long Elmo" no I don't think I will

"It fits," you brought a Dutch Masters cartoon monster painting to the uncanny valley of the Muppets and expected what, lack of cohesion?