she is a bad bitch made up of magic

favorite episodes project Buffy the Vampire Slayer 7.16 Storyteller

2023 album releases: The Rise and Fall of a Midwest Princess by Chappell Roan (for @hauntedwoman)

@networkthirteen Book Club editing event: 🍃 folklore 🍃

there's nothing that aggravates me more than performativre activism. than people who act like outrage about celebrities and pop culture is some type of praxis.

so many tweets and tiktoks about the "blackout" campaign to block celebrities who haven't talked about Gaza have hundreds of thousands of views and yet zero impact, because it's all performative shit designed only to gratify the people engaging in it. and the most annoying part to me personally as a Palestinian, is that they do these stunts under the excuse that "if these people posted there would be many more donations!!" yeah well, if you used your outreach and large followings to spread fundraisers yourself, that would've also increased donations. moreover, i think anyone who solely donates to important causes when a celebrity tells them to is stupid and has no independent thought or an actual moral compass but i digress.

on top of all that, watching the internet turn starbucks and mcdonald's into the poster children of the boycott movement has been so frustrating. sbucks is not even on any BDS list, and mcdonalds is on the "organic boycott" list but has never been an essential consumer target. the BDS committee is composed of lawyers, activists, humanitarians, economists - people who know what they're doing. all you had to do was listen and follow the very simple guides they provided.

so much more benefit would come from focusing on the consumer targets like HP, siemens, AXA, sabra, etc. but noooo, y'all had to go perform Online Praxis and bully and threaten the hell out of anyone seen with a starbucks cup, therefore forever turning them away from any pro-Palestine action in the future. sbucks doesn't even have shops in occupied Palestine. meanwhile, companies like siemens and HP design the surveillance systems used at every checkpoint in the country.

would it kill you to listen to us? to actually amplify Palestinian voices instead of this reactionary liberal bullshit?

I absolutely adore the (thinly-veiled) story in "Fortnight" because as I said on album release day, it's like "ivy" but in the suburbs.

I love the conceit of some sort of sanitized, suburban wasteland being a veneer for the seedy underbelly of these unhappy couples, acting out their secret fantasies as a cover for how unsatisfying their pristine lives are. It feels so "Desperate Housewives" turned on its head.

The narrator is drinking away her troubles, but nobody notices because everyone else is just as miserable and doing the same thing. (Or don't care.) The love interest moves in to the house behind hers, captivating her across the fence line. His wife upkeeps the perfect suburban duties, tending to her garden, and it drives the narrator crazy because her own home is in shambles on the inside. How dare she make something so beautiful that hides something so ugly? How dare she be happy when she has the one thing the narrator thinks she wants?

The would-be lovers circle each other, make pleasantries like good neighbours always do, sublimating their desires for each other over idle chit chat, which only highlights how that spark has gone out with her husband. And the image of their presumed perfect marriage to their neighbours is also a lie, because while she's feeding these fantasies about the other man in her mind, her husband is openly unfaithful. And the fuck of it all is that she knows and she isn't doing anything about it. The implied reading of "my husband is cheating, I want to kill him," to me is that this is an ongoing affair, but she's just put up with it, letting the resentment build but continuing to play the role of dutiful wife. (After all, good wives always know.)

The story is suburban gothic. The pressures of up keeping the day to day of the British? American dream do nothing but kill the spirit of the people inside them when they can't admit that it's wrong. The call is coming from inside the house: the danger isn't from some monster lurking in the shadows invading their neighbourhood, but quite literally in their own backyards. The only options are to stay stuck in the mundane reality of day to day in this sterile cage, or to break free and escape to Florida, the bastion of evading the law and lovers and time. You can buy the car (or the house or the boat or whatever), but it won't fill the hole inside you if you can't admit what's wrong and follow through.

I could soooooo see this playing out as a movie or TV show and I freaking love it. (I mean, it already has, it's a whole genre lol.) There's the whole ~real life~ situation filtering through these characters, being used as a cautionary tale that would probably veer a shade too far into speculation for another post. But I do love me some storytelling about the dark side of suburbia as a foil to people's darker impulses and psychological breakdowns.

Olivia Wilde as Remy “Thirteen” Hadley in HOUSE M.D. (2004—2012)

@tolerateit Prompt of the Month: Pink & 2023 Cinema: Barbie (2023)

There’s a drumming noise inside my head that starts when you’re around. I swear that you should hear it, it makes such an almighty sound.

I meant to post about this back when TTPD was released and never got around to it, but it's so touching to me that Taylor has peppered so many British-isms into the album, and not just in a jokey kind of way like in "London Boy" back in the Lover days.

It's such a beautiful, subtle nod to how much that was her life for years, and to the marks the city and the muse(s) left on her. Because isn't that true of any of us when we've been around a person for so long, or live in a place we've made into our home? You start picking up their speech patterns until they become second nature. (For instance, one of my best friends moved abroad for university, and before long she started dropping in words like "fortnight," "lorry,""shops" (vs. stores) into conversation when we'd speak, which only got stronger along with her accent shifting as the years went by and she stayed there.) Kind of a love language code switching.

It’s sprinkled throughout the album. “For a fortnight” in “Fortnight,” “blokes” on “The Alchemy,” “the shops,”* in “How Did It End?” I think my favourite use of it is in “The Bolter,” because it’s such a classic twangy yeehaw Taylor song, but she’s got these tiny turns of phrase that point to where she spent a large portion of her adult life. (E.g. “best mates,” “out the drive,”* “wish he wouldn’t be sore,”*)(*yes I know these aren’t like, specifically not-American, but as someone who has grown up with North American English in the same generation as Taylor, these definitely feel anachronistic/foreign. Like if I hear someone say “the shops” instead of “the store,” “drive” instead of driveway or “sore” meaning upset, I’m thinking they either watch a lot of 1950s movies or they’re from the UK. And yes I know it’s to make everything rhyme BUT THAT’S THE POINT SHE IS MAKING THEM RHYME ON PURPOSE ok I’m stopping now before the linguistics nerd in me jumps out) It’s such a cool merging of influences, much like the album as a whole fuses together experiences and muses and sounds.

And that gets back to the “I love this place for so long,”of it all. The place is the city, the place is her home, the place is the person, and they are all part of her. To me, these are part of the subtext of the album, of the big love she once felt for all of it, and how it changed her. And, why it hurt so much to leave it all behind. So she’s starting over back home in America, but she’s taking a little bit of London with her for its curtain call on TTPD.

🔥🥵 barbie emoji

[get it on redbubble - if you like my work, please consider donating to my ko-fi -I got some emergency expenses I'm trying to keep up with]

[my comissions are also open <3]

Matches burn after the other / Pages turn and stick to each other / Wages earned and lessons learned / But I’m right where you left me

@pscentral​ event 26: minimalism & 2024 album releases: The Tortured Poets Department: The Anthology by Taylor Swift

This wouldn't happen to me if i were a huge dragon

save me hot shower