Meow.

Don't think I've seen them all together in one big video like this before

God I love things doing the things that they do

even if billie joe was straight (he’s not) teenagers getting offended he used the word faggot in american idiot 16 years after the fact would still be some of the goofiest discourse i have yet to see on this website. if you were young and gay in 2004 that shit rocked your world bc we were living through one of the most powerful resurgences of blind american patriotism and anti-gay evangelical bullshit of the last three decades. i dont think most of yall understand how radical that song, that album, and green day’s overall anti-bush pro-gay stance was for the time. even though we were at the cusp of bush becoming unpopular by the time it was released, american idiot saw a fairly mainstream rock band condemning not just him, but the bigoted, ignorant american culture which created him. to remove all of this context from the song and act like green day was just throwing around homophobic slurs for the hell of it is exactly why people joke nobody has reading comprehension on this website lmao. he’s not weaponizing the term; he’s using it to identify with an alternative american society.

The lyric is:

Well maybe I'm the faggot America

I'm not a part of a redneck agenda

I don't know how to explain to kids these days what it was like to be young and queer in those days. People think I call myself queer because I've never lived in a small and homophobic town, never experienced violence or discrimination, don't know what it's like to have those words thrown at me with anger and hatred.

And it's hard to reach through the pain of those memories and say: there were no words for us that weren't slurs when I was your age.

I was 17 when this song came out. "Gay" was what the boys in my high school called anything they didn't like. "Pop quiz? That's so gay!" A (straight) girl in the drama club shaved her head for cancer and people started calling her a dyke. Her car got egged in the school parking lot and the eggs stayed there long enough to wreck the paint but somehow "nobody saw". The teachers and principal of my Catholic school didn't do anything about that, or about the abuse my gay friend put up with in the halls and every class except drama, because intervening would be "endorsing homosexuality." My gay friend got shipped off to conversion therapy by his family and I never saw him again. Conservative classmates tried to get the drama teacher fired, because she "wasn't supportive of Catholic values."

The only story I knew about gay people in a town like mine was The Laramie Project, about Matthew Sheppard's murder for being gay in a small town in Wyoming. That was the year I started but couldn't finish a play titled "The Lemon Tree" about two girls whose love for each other couldn't survive the homophobia of a town like mine, the same way a lemon tree planted there would be killed stone dead by its harsh winters. It was the year I decided to convert to Catholicism, because I had sincere faith and yes the Church was homophobic but having a real relationship with a woman was never going to be possible for me anyway so it wasn't like I was losing anything, right?

I didn't have access to the gay community or gay media, except through online slash fandom. A year later I found a second depiction of gay people in a town like mine: Brokeback Mountain, about two men whose love was smothered by society's homophobia until one of them was murdered for being gay.

(Now I know that kd lang and Tegan and Sara were openly gay in the 90s and come from my part of the world, although they all had to leave to be successful. Nobody mentioned kd lang's sexuality, and Tegan and Sara didn't get radio play here when I was young.)

And yes, "faggot" was worse than "gay". "Gay" just meant, you know, "bad", but "faggot" meant gay and soft and weak and about to get an ass-kicking.

So I remember those lines and when I first heard them all those years ago. I remember that I was cleaning my room and listening to the radio, and the DJ talked about Green Day's anger at cable news and the war in Iraq and played the song, and those two lines hit me, so hard I was incredulous and couldn't believe that for once somebody was on my side.

Green Day's image was tough and angry and loud, and it's an angry song—not unexpected, basically anyone left-leaning was angry about politics then—and them saying "maybe I'm the faggot" was them saying Come and get me. You can't scare me. This thing you throw out as an insult and a threat? Yeah, I'll own it, and I'll use it to lure you into punching range. You're wrong and I can fight you and win.

It was like a transmission from an alien planet. This was someone so much braver than I could ever imagine being. What that song said to me was that somebody was willing to stand up for me. I had viewed homophobia as an all-powerful cultural force I could either submit to or escape by hiding until I found a safe community, but pro-LGBT punk rock was what taught me that I also had the option to fight.

Okay, here’s my controversial opinion: if you’re writing for an adult audience, you don’t have to “show” that an evil character’s actions are evil, at all, period, outside of maybe like...portraying their consequences with a basic level of realism/honesty, and as an adult reader, you can’t read stories intended for adults with the expectation of being “shown” that bad things are bad/good things are good

stories written for adults generally presume their readers already have ideas about right and wrong, and good stories written for adults expect the reader to reason through and think about the characters’ actions using pre-existing powers of critical thinking

I mean, almost any story worth reading requires a non-zero level of mental participation of the reader. It’s not reasonable to expect stories to be completely unambiguous in their “portrayal” of actions as good or bad, because it’s a given that you, as a reader, are SUPPOSED to think independently about a character’s actions, and the fact that the lowest common denominator readers won’t does not mean you need to More Clearly Portray bad things as bad.

It’s often implied that you have a responsibility to make sure readers come away thinking and feeling the right ways about the actions your characters take, but you’re the writer. You can’t read the book for them. If you want to convey an important message, you have to meet the reader in the middle and give them the raw material to think about, but you can’t go farther and do the thinking FOR them.

A good story is supposed to make you feel and think in new ways. It can’t reach inside you and MAKE you do the right things with this, and the best stories are the ones that don’t try to, but that make that thinking process hard to resist.

Also: A story can have an important, valuable message and still not clearly lead the reader to a moral lesson. Like I hate even saying “message” because it sounds so packaged, but “message” is not a synonym for “unambiguous statement about the moral value of something.”

Like, “abusers use their power and authority to get away with abuse” is a “message.” “War gives young men a way of feeling like they can attain manhood, but leaves them unable to function in a peaceful society” is a “message.” “Poverty leaves people trapped in the patterns of behavior that they used to survive or to cope with it” is a “message.” As an adult reader, you do not need to be taught that “abuse is bad,” “war is bad,” or “poverty is bad,” as if you need to have a whole ass moral compass popped in like a VHS tape.

Books can convey shitty messages. If the book appeared to be portraying that “Poverty is the fault of people who are poor, because they are lazy” you very much could rightfully criticize that!

(And there’s nothing wrong with arguing about the portrayal of things in a story and hating or disagreeing with some aspect of it. Being able to think this way is GOOD. Doing it is good. Even with stories you like.)

But “shitty message about poverty,” for instance, is incredibly different than simply the lack of a clear message on how you’re supposed to judge the behavior of characters who are living in poverty morally.

Sometimes it’s not even that important whether you can personally excuse a character’s actions or judge them as moral or immoral, because the story’s meaning is not really “X is Bad/X is Good.”

also, your response to a character does not have to be a binary yes/no answer to “do I agree with everything this character is and does?”

A story is not necessarily trying to lead you to conclude that a character is either a Bad Person or a Good Person.

This is not the last judgment. We’re not deciding what afterlife to put them in. We are exploring ourselves and learning how to live.

It isn’t good to be so stuck on “excuse everything they have ever done” or “completely reject liking them, sympathizing with them, or caring about them” as the only two possible responses to a character in a book. This is a recipe for incredibly uncritical reading that misses most of the meaning in a story.

Are we supposed to sympathize with OR condemn Othello? Are we supposed to sympathize with OR condemn Odysseus? I mean, hell, are we supposed to sympathize with OR condemn Winston (the 1984 Winston)?

It’s both! The answer is both! The answer SHOULD BE both. We should try to write characters where the answer is both, because relating to a character that is fully rendered, flawed and human, should be conflicted and complex and uncomfortable. We should try to write characters that force us to confront our urge to excuse bad behavior in people we empathize with. That force us to evaluate the parts of us that protect us from our own flaws. That make us second-guess ourselves. That’s important.

I feel like so many (especially young) people here on tumblr were beaten over the head again and again with “believe the victims, stop asking them to prove their victimhood” and instead of understanding that this means “don’t dogpile victims because you like the abuser” instead took it to the no-nuance end of the pool and turned it into “if you hear something bad about someone don’t go looking for sources or context” and those are not the same things

You should look at sources. Always. Taking a moment to say “wait, who said that? what happened?” isn’t victim blaming, it isn’t siding with an abuser, its taking a step back to understand a whole picture, in its context. 

When you do this, 

This post is about political disinformation, but when people get away with making false allegations about abuse or racism or homophobia or any other gross behavior it undermines the positions of actual victims because people who are prone to bad faith can say “ah, that was a scam, victims are scammers”. When you make false claims about politicians, you undermine the political process and allow people who are prone to bad faith to say “see I don’t need to participate”.

I know we hate checking facts and sources here on the internet, but that’s the whole point of the internet. Information is available, and you should be checking your sources before you make claims about people.

i think one of my fave shark facts is this thing that some species of sharks do where they sorta peek their heads out of the water to see whats above the surface…..its called spyhopping and great white sharks do it all the time

This gave me so much serotonin for some reason.

Shark in films: hehe, I’m so dangerous and mysterious with my fin sticking out of the water. I shall kill them all! Real life shark: boop. Here I come. Just taking a peek.

I hate how the stereotype is that dolphins are good and sharks are evil, when dolphins are so smart that they have the capacity for evil but sharks are simple fish who can only be true neutral, so even if a minority of dolphins are evil there are still more evil dolphins than sharks

quality marine philosophy discourse

idk who needs to hear this but when your english teacher asks you to explain why an author chose to use a specific metaphor or literary device, it’s not because you won’t be able to function in real-world society without the essential knowledge of gatsby’s green light or whatever, it’s because that process develops your abilities to parse a text for meaning and fill in gaps in information by yourself, and if you’re wondering what happens when you DON’T develop an adult level of reading comprehension, look no further than the dizzying array of examples right here on tumblr dot com

this post went from 600 to 2400 notes in the time it took me to write 3 emails. i’m already terrified for what’s going to happen in there

k but also, as an addendum, the reason we study literary analysis is because everything an author writes has meaning, whether it was intentional or not, and their biases and agendas are often reflected in their choice of language and literary devices and so forth! and that ties directly into being able to identify, for example, the racist and antisemitic dogwhistles often employed by the right wing, or the subconscious word choices that can unintentionally illustrate someone’s bias or blind spot. LANGUAGE HAS WEIGHT AND MEANING! the way we communicate is a reflection of our inner selves, and that’s true regardless of whether it’s a short story or a novel or a blog post or a tweet. instead of taking a piece of writing at face value and stopping there, assuming that there is no deeper meaning or thought behind the words on the page, ask yourself these two questions instead:

1. what is the author trying to say? 2. what does the author maybe not realize they’re saying?

because the most interesting reading of any piece of literature, imho, usually occupies the space in between those questions.

Analyzing text is literally a life skill, y’all.

Also:

3. What are you, personally, bringing to your analysis of the art?

Art is, fundamentally, a dialogue between artist and audience. You’re going to have a very different take on the work if:

A couple of things you should ask yourself before dropping that hot take:

Analyzing the work, trying to guess the author’s intent, and backing up your arguments with evidence from the text are essential skills. However, recognizing your own role as audience and that you’re not necessarily a passive, unbiased observer is important if you want to take the next step towards more nuanced analysis and criticism.

Something a lot of the half-baked takes that everyone makes fun of have in common is that they say a lot more about the critic than the work itself, so that self-awareness can help you avoid falling into that trap. There’s no such thing as a totally objective critic, but recognizing and owning that your experience is subjective can lead to much more meaningful critiques of art because you can more clearly explain why a piece made you feel the way it did without pretending your take is The One True Take.

reblog this if you are a HUFFLEPUFF, support HUFFLEPUFFS, or just want to know the SECRET BACK ENTRANCE to the KITCHENS

My advice to people, but especially kids, who are invested in celebrities, be they actors, musicians, bloggers, youtubers, authors, whatever, is to keep your distance. No matter how happy their content makes you, no matter how strong the pull of a special interest/hyperfixation/obsession might be, it’s important to step back every so often.

Do you find yourself following them on all forms of social media? Do you follow their friends and family, who might not even make content themselves? Do you research their lives? Step back. Just because they are famous doesn’t mean it’s okay to engage in stalking behavior.

Do you find yourself getting anxious if you miss a video, or they upload off schedule? Step back. I know they can help you through dark times but you can’t rely on them all the time.

Would you be devastated if they turned out to be a not-so-nice person? Step back. You can only trust them as much as you trust any stranger. Don’t see yourself up to be shattered if they fall off that pedestal you put them on.

No matter how much somebody interacts with their audience, the relationship is still parasocial. Just keep that in mind. Don’t put all your trust in a stranger. It’s okay to enjoy these people and their content, but keep your distance and step back.

Words cannot describe what I feel. My heart goes out to all of the families who have lost someone dear to them.

This is an awful and tragic attrocity which I didn’t think I would ever experience in my lifetime in New Zealand, especially in my own city. My heart breaks for everyone effected.

I’m so sorry this has happened. Kia Kaha Christchurch. I send my love to the Muslim community in New Zealand and all over the world.