About the Elections

I’ve seen people who are angry, people who are frustrated, people who are miserable. I haven’t seen a lot of happy ones, but clearly they’re out there too.

If you were to judge everything by how the Internet acted during these elections, Trump had no way of winning. There’s one lesson to be learned from this: the Internet, and social media sites, do not reach nor reflect the full reality of a nation or demographic. You can’t assume that because everyone online says one thing is good or one other thing is bad, everyone offline will follow the same trend of thought.

My point about this is, though, is that you can accept what happened without loathing everyone who made it so. Third-party voters had the same right as anyone who voted for the major parties, and that, as well, is something that needs to be accepted. People who identified with one or other candidate while being a supporter of the opposite party were also part of this result. And in the end…

In the end you have a country divided practically in half by blues and reds. Do NOT make the mistake of thinking your half to be more important, or that the other half are demons who need to be purged from this world over what’s happened. I know how frustrated you are, because believe it or not YES, I KNOW, go look up Venezuelan electoral results and you’ll see what I mean. Heck, in 2013 it was literally 50% vs. 49%, again a map divided in half by blues and reds. Wanna see? There you go.

I’m speaking of experience when I say that a country divided by hate and by the strong feelings I’m sensing from so many of you is a very unhealthy and dangerous thing. It’s impossible not to feel frustrated when the man who won the presidency has proven to be a terrible person overall, and you may think the result reflects something that’s inherently rotten in your country, maybe? But you have to understand: the minute you turn him and his supporters into villain cartoons, you get stuck in the most sickening political divisions that could ever exist. Again, I speak from 18 years of experience in a country that has driven the biggest rifts of all between people only because of their political stances. Families have shattered because of that rift. Friends broke off for good from one another. Seeing the “enemy’s” symbols in the streets makes your blood boil because you cannot for the life of you understand how these people are letting their leaders deceive them as they always do.

I’m telling you right now that you cannot let yourself fall prey to hate. And no, criticism is not hate. You are absolutely allowed to disagree with people, you can be completely against one candidate or the other, you can dislike people, that’s fine. But when you grow to hate everything you disagree with, you lose the one possibility you have to actually make your country choose a good path on the next elections.

Why do I say this? Because labeling every Trump supporter as racist, misogynist, genocidal maniacs (or whatever else is being said these days) will result in a single thing: THEY’LL WANT TO BE MORE OFFENSIVE, MORE POLITICALLY INCORRECT, IF JUST TO SPITE YOU.

And if this cycle of hatred carries on? The country remains divided in half for ages. New voters can possibly make a difference eventually, but which side they’ll lean towards depends on a few things: 1. Their education and understanding of the problems that are corroding your society 2. The approach either side would take to reeling  in these new voters (you’ll attract more bees with one drop of honey than with a jar of vinegar, as someone said…) 3. Trump’s performance as president.

There’s only two things you can affect directly, and it’s factors 1 and 2. Do your best to educate, not only new voters, but also those who voted for Trump without even knowing why (many of those were interviewed on TV just yesterday, so yeah, I know that some people don’t even know why they voted for him, even people involved in his campaign, but they still did) on what your country is suffering from and think of proposals to heal your nation. Interact with people who aren’t in your comfort zone, who have completely different understandings of the world than you do: and don’t just TALK, you also have to LISTEN! 

For instance, Trump gained a huge number of latino voters in the last weeks because he said he’d go back on Obama’s relaxation on the economic blockade in Cuba. Why would any latino want that, you wonder? Why, Cubans themselves want it for a simple reason: the Cuban regime is a dictatorship that hasn’t relented in their persecution and violations of human rights to any dissenters for the last decades. It’s not that the Cuban immigrants want their fellow countrymen punished: they just don’t want the Cuban government rewarded for doing NOTHING and not changing their ways whatsoever yet regaining their full economic rights without deserving it. So when Trump said he’d go back to the way things were? A lot of latinos approved and decided to vote for him.

This isn’t to say that Trump’s ideas on Cuba are better than Obama’s or otherwise: I don’t know how to deal with the Cuban problems because it’s a complicated issue that I simply don’t know nearly as much about as I should. But what I mean is that Trump said something that made latinos stand for him DESPITE ALL HE ACCUSED THEM OF BEING THROUGHOUT HIS CAMPAIGN. Was it a lucky hit of Trump’s, or was it that he actually found out what people wanted and offered to give it to them, regardless of whether he’ll keep true to his word or not?

If Trump’s people have stopped to listen to what those latinos had to say, there’s absolutely no reason why any of you should refuse to do the same. There’s no reason to be scared of reaching out in a friendly manner to talk to someone who’s standing on the other end of a political spectrum. If you can sit down and talk with them, and find out where they’re coming from, you can easily understand the specific needs from each of those people. If you have empathy you can make a difference, and surely you can help people see not only the social crisis your country is in, but you can also help them by hearing them out and understanding that their needs and wants are valid too. Because that’s what Trump made them feel, even though I think most of us were sure he was lying (still am, really). The “deplorables” are half your country: if you turn your back on them, you become elitist, you become unapproachable, you become undesirable in your own way: they’ll never want to join your side and, just as it was this time, you’ll lose the next elections. 

So, I repeat, if you refuse to acknowledge people because of whom they voted for, your country will remain divided in half.

I’m not telling you to go hug it out with the first Trump supporter you see today, I absolutely understand the low blow of post-election days and I know acting in any way other than the instinctive rejection of EVERYONE who supported the candidate you disliked is just… well, very hard to avoid. I’ve been there ever since I was 8. I remember every single election day we’ve had and every single low blow of defeat that made me feel hopeless (to the point of locking myself up in the bathroom and crying for hours back in 2012). And yet… 2015′s elections resulted in the second victory for the government’s opposition here, when everyone was expecting otherwise. It took forever, yes, but it still happened and it was quite a meaningful victory, too.

My point is… don’t make it forever. Do your part. Enough of the Internet activism that ends up turning into witchhunts because this or that person aren’t perfect enough for your tastes, because while you’re busy alienating all these unknowns online, you could actually be using your understanding of social problems to reach out to someone who does need guidance far more desperately than someone who said one or two “problematic” things ten years ago. If you care about the fate of your country and the state of its society, you have to start reaching out for those who supported Trump within your close circles. You have to hear them out, empathize with them, and then show them your points so they may understand you, too. So that maybe the next time, regardless of how red and blue that map may look, you won’t feel the same sense of division and intolerance that is permeating your country right now.

Trump winning is not the end of the world, folks. He’s not the first non-politician to become a president, he probably won’t be the last if the world keeps spinning the way it does. My current president? He barely graduated from high school. His actual job was as a bus driver. And yet he’s president now, no higher studies, no real understanding of economics (as shows by the worst economic crisis our country has ever faced), basically there’s NOTHING to be said in his favor because his rule has been a living hell. He’s Chavez’s “heir”, has been in power for 3 years, Chavez was in power for 15.

It took us EIGHTEEN YEARS to get to the horribly low point where we are now. Do not make the same mistakes we did. LEARN of other country’s politics so you can know that there are precedents for these sorts of situations in other places, such as in Venezuela. And please, do not give in to hate. Feel bad for now, but do NOT make your differences irreconcilable in the long run. Those differences have the power to destroy your country as a whole so DON’T LET THEM.

I don’t know if anyone’s actually reading anything I post. I could just be calling into the dark. But please, anyone who’s listening, please take this with you.

I’ll leave it to you guys to come up with a name and power.

Might I suggest [Flash (a-ha, savior of the universe)] as a Stand name?

The song is just called Flash, you candle-sniffing fuckfence.

Fandom Count (not really)

I wanted to do this for awhile: reblog or like if you are part of Teen Titans Go! fandom. 

I decided to try something new. If everyone hates this, I’ll never do it again. If people like it, I’ll probably do it once a month. AND AWAY WE GO!!  Check out my Behind-the-GIFs. Or don’t, whatever.

To 25000!

u have been visited by the S of 90s kids nostalgia. u must reblgo this if u are a true nineties kidd or time will crumble around you

Not risking it

Reblogging even though if I ever knew what this stood for I've long forgotten.

Sign me up for skeleton babe hell, thanks

I have the spookedest boner.

Okay, so if people are angry at videogame journalists in general, why is there so much hate directed at Zoe Quinn? Just because she is the one that was “caught” doesn’t necessarily even make her part of the issue.

Journalistic integrity is important, but not “Yell at target’s dad over the phone and send target+relatives death threats” important.

The treatment of Zoe Quinn by gamers+internet entities has been appalling and needs to stop.

What treatment? This stopped being about her ages ago.

Laugh at it all you want, but KYM's page on the GamerGate clusterfuck is very informative.

"You know, I sometimes get asked why Camelot of all films is my favorite movie. And the reason is because it actually changed my life or at least focused my beliefs into something that was a good solid foundation for personal philosophy.Those who have power should use it to do good. That violence...

The real foolishness is butthurt rabid bronies who can’t take a negative opinion.

The only “fuckwads” here are butthurt rabid bronies who can’t take a negative opinion.

It’s basically saying “DON’T AGREE WITH HIM BECAUSE HE HAS AN OPINION THAT’S NEGATIVE AND ME NO LIKE THAT!! WAH!!”.

So yeah, I still like CR and I’ll still defend him. Don’t like that? Tough titties.

P.S. What video is the fanbrat talking about?

Just another point on the long-ass list of reasons to fucking hate bronies: the moment a male Internet celebrity pointed out that show took a major decline in quality and stopped identifying as a brony, he became the “Fuckward”.

And no matter how right his review is, apparently it’s a crime for bronies to agree.

Chad didn’t renounce being a brony because of how bad brony culture is, he threw a tantrum over Faust leaving and proclaimed the show ruined forever. He declared himself done with the show, but then continued to watch it and complain on twitter about how everything sucks now and how Megan McCarthy has ruined everything. He’s an entitled brony to the core.

>entitled

You people keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.

"You’e weak! And I’ve outgrown you."

My brother called me yesterday with a stunning revelation he’d had about this scene: intentional or not, this is a perfect commentary on the superhero genre of today, and about one of its greatest weaknesses.

He’s calling Mr. Incredible weak here because the man refused to do one thing—and that was to kill someone. And because he sees him as being unable to kill, he sees him as weak—and childish. “I’ve outgrown you.” Now he is in the realm of “mature” superheroes, where Superman has to snap a man’s neck and Catwoman has to shoot Bane, where the purity of a woman forged by clay is unrelatable and marriage is nonconducive to an interesting story. His is a world where superheroes die to make villains seem impressive, a world where a dark and gritty realism is more important than a fun and adventurous fantasy. 

In the end of this movie, though, the Omnidroid isn’t beaten by Mr. Incredible finding Syndrome and beating an explanation out of him to stop the robot; they solve it through brainwork, audacity, and a fun and creative action sequence. Syndrome dies in the end, yes, but that’s primarily because he keeps trying to push his view, and ends up destroying himself.

But this is Syndrome being Zack Snyder or Frank Miller, and believing that the fun adventures of yesteryear are childish fantasies that need to be left behind: ours is a world where to relate to a superhero, we have to see that superhero be unable to accomplish his task completely, where he has to settle and accept a compromise in order to preserve the greater good. We can’t admire them for being able to do what we cannot—we have to grow up and see that they’re just like us, they’re nothing special. Not really. And that is what true maturity is. A truly mature Avatar would kill the Firelord, a truly mature Superman would have no choice but to fight in the middle of a city, and video games need to be about cover-based shooting and military combat in the real world. With quick-time-events!

And of course, that’s all complete bullcrap, and the sooner that mentality gets sucked into a jet engine, the happier I’ll be. 

Yes, YES, absolutely. I love the philosophy behind this movie in celebrating the light, warm, wholesome side of superheroism.

And I love how well Syndrome represents basically ‘toxic nerd culture’. When he can’t see superheroes as people he relates to any more, he regresses and sees them as playthings instead. He acts like these real people are action figures for him to do with as he pleases, as visually demonstrated by the scenes where he holds people in zero-point stasis and moves them about, frozen in stationary action poses.

He refuses to accept any perspective but his own. He talks about the superheroes like they’re comic book characters to him - like when he finds out Mr Incredible and Elastigirl got married, or in the interrogation scenes where he seems to be critiquing the ‘new’ Mr Incredible and berating him for having let him down. He talks about it like it’s a character reboot he doesn’t agree with. Plus his whole mantra of providing (selling) superpowers to everybody, so nobody will be ‘special’ any more, entirely designed to take away the specialness of what he coveted and couldn’t have, just as many guys entrenched in nerd culture refuse to let anyone else share it and act like it’s a secret club only for them.

Syndrome represents arrested fanboy development in which he refused to grow up. He carries this resentment from childhood all because his favourite hero actually had other things to do with his life than to cater to him. Mature people have responsibilities, actual jobs, they age and have families of their own, that’s what mature means and it’s what Mr and Mrs Incredible stand for, and everything that Syndrome echews in favour of being somebody’s ‘arch-nemesis’. He still thinks that maturity is dark, brooding, sexy (I mean the person he picked as the front for his scheme, not him), and about how much collateral damage you can cause. But he’s just a manchild living out a comic book dream, creating his own fictional life story (his robot is designed to be impervious to superpowers and stage a disaster that only he can defuse, thus saving the day - the whole thing is playing pretend and endangering thousands of people’s lives). Kids like to play at being heroes and stopping disasters, but because he refused to grow out of any of this, he acquired the means to do it for real and became a murderer in the process. All because he couldn’t accept that he was, essentially, wrong. By refusing to believe that his childlike hero-worship was over the top, he buckled down into it and continued to play pretend as a child would. Another aspect of maturity is natural change and Syndrome rejects it just as Mr Incredible and all the other supers accepted their reprimand (by having to go undercover and live as normal people) and adapted to it even though they didn’t want to.

My favourite line in the whole film is when Bob threatens him and Syndrome shrugs it off saying, “Nah, that’s a little dark for you,” because he’s all at once criticising Mr Incredible’s ‘character’, evaluating a real person in front of him as though he has him pegged on a morality chart, and you know he could back it up with some creepy nerd facts like “In 1964 you said the same thing to Lord Heatwave and you were totally bluffing”, as though Bob is predictable, unchanging, completely fictional to him, AND he’s being dismissive of Bob’s personal life, he thinks Mr Incredible’s gone soft, weak, become a family man, because he thinks his former hero needs to be cool and gritty and running away from explosions, not an actual person with depth and goals and feelings - which is, of course, why we as an audience like Mr Incredible and his whole family, thereby proving Syndrome and the Dark Gritty Reboot culture wrong simply by having watched and enjoyed the movie they were in.

I don’t agree with this at all. Comics are still about the fun in individual doses. Yeah if you read an entire arc you’ll realize that each little fight and warm-hearted encounter ended up being part of some giant conspiracy to do something evil. But that just means the villains are getting smarter. They’re getting better at being evil and they’re grinding down the finite strengths of most heroes. And they’re selling! They’re selling more than they ever have. This Dark Knight trilogy sold more than any Batman movie before it. So sorry if you don’t like your gods being worn down, but the fall of Olympus was a lot more intriguing to watch than 40,000 years of stagnation

On a similar note to all that...

I'm sorry, but am I the only one who gives a damn about the context in Man of Steel? Zod and the gang wanted to kill all the humans. All of them. They got to choose where the fights happened, not Clark. Luring them away from the city couldn't have happened because they weren't there for Clark, they were there for the puny Earth men. If Clark had moved away, they wouldn't have pursued. They would've gone right back to killing the Earth monkeys unopposed. And as for why Zod had to die? He made it abundantly clear in his little speech that by this point the only way he'd stop is if he died. This isn't friggin' Silver Age DC, where you can throw a big cellophane S at Zod and the gang and knock them into a bottomless pit to die where the audience doesn't have to see it.

If you like the Christopher Reeve movies more, that's fine. I disagree with your tastes, but I won't whine nonstop about Lex Luthor the cartoonish evil real estate magnate and Planet Houston and Superman flying around Earth so fast he goes back in time so that EVERYBODY LIVES HAPPY END. Just... PLEASE, for the love of Christ, stop whining about how ALL THE BUILDINGS FALLED DOWN! SUPERMAN SHOULDN'T HAVE THE BUILDINGS FALLING DOWN!

That said, fuck the inevitable half-assed Justice League movie, FUCK Jesse Eisenberg as Lex, and long live Michael Keaton and Christian Bale's Batmans.

P.S.: Energybending was a Deus ex Machina with zero foreshadowing created solely so Aang could bring Ozai to justice without killing him.

I’m very close to the 1000 follower mark on the tumblr’s 3 month anniversary.  So let us see if that milestone can be met before the day is over!

So here’s my plan:

If I hit 1000 followers by tomorrow, anyone that reblogged this post will be entered into a raffle.  I will only pick 1 person as a winner via random number generator like previous raffles.  The prize is a full coloured single character request. 

Remember, the raffle will be only conducted if I hit 1000 by 12:00 am EST.  Good luck to everyone