MamaToph

fuck i completely forgot i need to curl up on my couch and scroll my phone for six hours. can we reschedule

I think one of the most frustrating things about modern conservatives is when they hate something for the wrong reason. And then you have to defend something you also hate.

"I hate Disney!" "Yes, their view on labor has been..." "Because of their woke garbage movies!" "Oh."

"I am sick of these Disney remakes!" "Yeah, it would be nice if they focused on creating original IPs instead of copy/paste remakes of animated classics." "They cast a black mermaid!" "Oh."

"Facebook is evil!" "Yeah, selling user data without consent was..." "They deleted my post about whites being replaced!" "Oh."

“I hate big Pharma!”

“Yeah, there’s many people who rely on medication to live and price gouging…”

“They’re putting autism in vaccines!”

“Oh.”

When I was a teen, I went to a Christian youth group for a while. I was obsessed with musicals, particularly Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Cats. One day, one of the youth group leaders told me that it seemed I loved Cats the musical more than god, and urged me to give it up. Anyway, I decided after our conversation that I really did love musicals more than god, and I never went to church again. So that’s the story of how Cats made me forsake Jesus and turned me into an atheist.

We found it, folks. The one good thing Andrew Lloyd Webber did.

gritty both capturing the zeitgeist as usual AND educating me on the availability of free flow butter at american cinemas

fireflies lighting up a rural Pennsylvania field at dusk

As a european i sometimes forget furefkied are actually real and not american folklore/cryptids. Like you’ve got friendly little bugs that glow in the dark….. b r uh

in case europeans were worried: we love them very much! even tho they’re clumsy and slow and sometimes bump into you, no one swats fireflies here, or takes them for granted. even grownups sometimes reach out in the summer and gently catch a firefly for a minute before letting it go.

By “reach out” that’s meant quite literally–you just kinda. Stick your hand in their flight path and they land on you and will sit on your hand for a bit. Sometimes if you’re just walking or standing outside while they’re active you have to shoo them off you because they’ll just. Sit on you.

They’re harmless and very pretty and it’s always a treat to see because they’re out for a relatively short time each year.

stop normalizing the grind and normalize whatever this is

It’s so fucked up how tiktok culture has made clout-poisoned people turn the public into content, every day I see people minding their business have their entire faces put online for thousands of likes, a couple kissing on the train, a lady dancing across a cross walk, a guy nodding his head to the music at a club, a lady buying a banana at the store, ring camera footage of the neighbors kids being stupid. Just let people live jfc

I think I may have made it seem like this is about wholesome content (which my sentiment towards that is the same) but most of the time when I see this stuff people are being ridiculed for being completely normal. And I didn’t make up any of these examples btw, I couldn’t find the dance one but only because there are too many videos of people being recorded at cross walks

(Faces censored and additional text added by me)

Im gonna add this to every post about this i see im never gonna shut up about it. This will get people killed. This will ruin lives. More people live in hiding than you think. So many people are one post away from having to abandon their whole lives. Dont ever post anything of anyone without their consent, stranger or not.

I am a photographer. It is my job to go into schools and take candid photos for the yearbook.

The number of kids that are on a 'do not photograph' list isn't large, but it is a non-zero number. If that kid is even out of focus in the background, we do not use that photo.

If a child shows even the tiniest bit upset that there's a person in the room with a camera, I do not take their photo.

At pop culture conventions, I ask people if I can take their photo. Or if I take a candid of them, I track them down and give them my info and get th3ir consent before posting.

At events like parties, concerts, performances, consent is generally implied because these are photographed events, but if an attendee approaches me and tells me to crop them out then I crop them out.

This makes street photography tedious, but I learned in my very first job as a camp counselor that people have very good reasons for not wanting their photo publicized. There are kids in the foster system with abusive parents. There are adults with stalkers. There are people who might be a witness to a crime.

Even outside of this- I've seen how private persons become memes against their will just by going out in public. Some people are super not normal about meme fame.

Leave people alone. The world is complicated. Make your own content.

just a reminder - do NOT boycott streaming services or not watch new things. the unions have not called for one for a reason. for one, it affects residual payments, which as minimal as those currently are, actors are still getting them during this time, and for two, studios will use lack of viewership as an excuse to cancel shows because you are showing them there is no demand. it deeply affects the industry the writers and actors stand to come back to once the strike is over

Also: going to these places puts pressure and demand on the company. Demand they can't meet without actors and writers. That puts stress on them, and stress is good.

^^^^ive been looking for a rb with this addition because YES. if a customer wants a burger and there is no cook to make it, that puts pressure on the owner to pay the cook what they want so the customer will still give them money. if there is no customer, the owner has no reason for the cook to make burgers

Stop watching IF AND ONLY IF the unions call for a boycott. For the time being since they haven't, streaming the shows actually helps. You're not crossing a picket line to watch because that picket line does not exist unless a boycott is called for.

A note to all creatives:

Right now, you have to be a team player. You cannot complain about AI being used to fuck over your industry and then turn around and use it on somebody else’s industry.

No AI book covers. No making funny little videos using deepfakes to make an actor say stuff they never did. No AI translation of your book. No AI audiobooks. No AI generated moodboards or fancasts or any of that shit. No feeding someone else’s unfinished work into Chat GPT “because you just want to know how it ends*” (what the fuck is wrong with you?). No playing around with AI generated 3D assets you can’t ascertain the origin of. None of it. And stop using AI filters on your selfies or ESPECIALLY using AI on somebody else’s photo or artwork.

We are at a crossroad and at a time of historically shitty conditions for working artists across ALL creative fields, and we gotta stick together. And you know what? Not only is standing up for other artists against exploitation and theft the morally correct thing to do, it’s also the professionally smartest thing to do, too. Because the corporations will fuck you over too, and then they do it’s your peers that will hold you up. And we have a long memory.

Don’t make the mistake of thinking “your peers” are only the people in your own industry. Writers can’t succeed without artists, editors, translators, etc making their books a reality. Illustrators depend on writers and editors for work. Video creators co-exist with voice actors and animators and people who do 3D rendering etc. If you piss off everyone else but the ones who do the exact same job you do, congratulations! You’ve just sunk your career.

Always remember: the artists who succeed in this career path, the ones who get hired or are sought after for commissions or collaboration, they aren’t the super talented “fuck you I got mine” types. They’re the one who show up to do the work and are easy to get along with.

And they especially are not scabs.

*that’s not even how it ends that’s a statistically likely and creatively boring way for it to end. Why would you even want to read that.

more catradora scribbles from the archives 💌

"labour optimization" holy shit

this is in canada btw not the us. the analysis going in the notes of the us and capitalism and third world exploitation etc is true but i want people to know that this is happening in toronto canada because canada and canadian companies are not exempt from this, canadian capitalism is just as culpable in exploiting workers and imperialist outsourcing of labour, this is something happening in one of the so-called "most diverse and cosmopolitan and liberal progressive cities in the world" according to canadian liberal media. it's important not to let canada off the hook for this kind of shit either

It’s already happening. Like guys I cannot emphasize this enough the studios are going to make content creators the deal of a lifetime because they have a void to fill and those content creators will then be on the do not work list for the rest of their professional lives.

Do not scab. Seriously, if anyone following this blog works in any kind of creative sector right now, and honestly in any kind of sector at all: do not scab. Never scab. No matter how tempting the offer is.

Even aside any moral and solidarity issues, it will ruin your career, because not only did you show your potential future colleagues that you are fundamentally not on the same side and that your principles do not extend to protecting or supporting them, which will be relevant, you've also shown corporations that you can be bought. There is a price on your principles, and they've just found it.

By all that's good and holy and just, even if that's true, even if you have no shame in having a monetary limit to your loyalty to a cause, organization, or people, (which... you should, you should have at least a little shame, but if you're already are at that point, I am pretty sure you're not available for debate, so far be it from me to comment) you do not want corporations to have that information. You absolutely don't.

Because they will hold that shit over your head forever.

what black mirror episode are we in now

Some of you might remember a couple of years ago when Scarlett Johansson sued Disney because she was making significantly less money for Black Widow than was guaranteed in her contract because so many more people watched it on streaming than in theaters, how there was a massive misinformation campaign from Disney that a ton of people on this website (and Twitter and other social media) bought into: That she was a greedy bitch who didn't respect people who needed to stay at home during the pandemic (I believe the word "ableist" was thrown around with aplomb) as opposed to someone who just wanted to be paid what she was owed. What was literally in her contract!!! And where everyone who took more than a couple minutes to actually look into and think about the situation could figure out that her issue wasn't with streaming itself, but with how little streaming was allowed to get away with paying her and other actors. But of course, a lot of people just saw the chance to dunk on a rich woman, and didn't think about it beyond readying some snarky tags and hit reblog. And in doing so, threw their support behind a much wealthier, greedier studio head who is already using similar language to describe the current strike.

Anyway we're going to see a lot of that from studios now, especially now that actors have joined with the WGA and it's easier to sell them as rich and greedy than writers, because of this cultural stereotype we have of all Hollywood actors as celebrities. Don't fall for it. SAG-AFTRA represents people like Tom Cruise and ScarJo but it also represents the kind of people who played a Borg in two episodes of Star Trek: Voyager in 1997 or who had one line in The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel as an enthusiastic audience member. Most actors are not crazy wealthy, and in fact, if you're a big TV fan (especially older TV and genre TV) that likely includes some actor names that you know, who played supporting roles in your fav shows, or who were even a star in something decades ago but haven't done anything major since. The AFTRA side also represents people like radio broadcasters. But even beside that, all workers deserve to be fairly compensated for the work they do, and the threat of replacing them with AI, or real actors being required to sign contracts to allow their likenesses to be used by AI forever without paying them, is an existential threat to acting as a profession in general. The actors are in the right. The writers are in the right. The studios are in the wrong. The studios have exploited new technology to get away with horrifying labor practices for years and their feet need to be put to the fire. Circulate the articles about how poorly the Orange is the New Black cast was compensated for making one of the defining shows of the early streaming boom, and of the studios saying they want to force writers to starve and lose their homes. Don't get distracted by propaganda aping progressive-sounding language about wealthy celebrities. Focus on the real enemy, the truly greedy fat cats who care more about money than people and art: the studios.