Still obsessed with Arthur Conan Doyle’s letter to Bram Stoker gushing about how wonderful a book Dracula is, but particularly how it makes such a good template for leaving fic comments, so I’m gonna to a BREAKDOWN:
Just say you loved reading it – “I am sure that you will not think it an impertinence if I write to tell you how very much I have enjoyed reading Dracula.”
Comment on a detail of the craft or structure that impressed you – “It is really wonderful how with so much exciting interest over so long a book there is never an anticlimax.“
Comment on how it emotionally affected you – “It holds you from the very start and grows more and more engrossing until it is quite painfully vivid.”
SHARE YOUR BLORBO FEELINGS – “The old Professor is most excellent and so are the two girls.”
Show appreciation for them as an author – “I congratulate you with all my heart for having written so fine a book.”
Next time you don’t know what to say on a fic you enjoyed, just use the ACD method~
Don’t get me wrong, I don’t give two shits about the English Royal Family, but this PR crisis they’re in right now is just wild. Every time you think they’re done digging themselves deeper, they haul another bucket of shit up from the bottom of the well they’re in.
Is Kate dead? Of course not. Is the PR team still, for some inexplicable reason, acting like they’re covering up her murder? Yes! And I for one find that fucking hilarious.
What’s distressing, but also important to understand, about JK Rowling hitting the “Denying trans people were targeted in the Holocaust” point is that it’s kind of the last stop before she just goes full alt-right weirdo.
Joanne is denying the Holocaust (if a group was targeted, denying they were targeted is Holocaust denial) and that’s going to lead to pushback from historians and experts. But Joanne is too deep in to believe what anyone who disagrees with her says, so she’s just going to dismiss what those historians and experts tell her. And once she’s disbelieving them about that one thing, well it’s just a tiny step to start disbelieving them about other things.
This isn’t by accident either, transphobic circles are swarming with far right agitators, ready to use hatred of trans people as an in to recruit people into their causes. They have handbooks for this sort of thing and they are, unfortunately, good at it. I suspect Joanne will be spouting coded versions of Great Replacement stuff by the end of the summer.
This is not a plea to try and pull Joanne out. She’s too deep in, and even if she wasn’t, she’s already demonstrated an inability to examine her own prejudices, an unwillingness to hear criticism and a weakness to flattery. She is perfect recruitment bait for people who know what they’re doing, and my impression is she’s surrounded herself with people like that.
No, this is to understand two things: First is to use her as an example, to understand how a well meaning liberal can chase their own prejudices down a very dark rabbit hole. We are none of us immune to propaganda and even if we can’t change what’s happened to her, we can at least use it to protect ourselves.
And second is to understand that one of the main reasons you can’t pull Joanne out of the transphobic pipeline is cause she is the pipeline now. She is the transphobic banner bearer now, she is funneling money and attention to these groups, she is their most famous celebrity and she is helping recruit people. Being able to show people how far she’s gone, how deep into the right wing rabbit hole she’s going, is important to help other people who still think she just “Had some concerns” know where her path leads.
Remember how I used to show off my Fallout settlements on here? Well, about a year ago the XBox died and it took a lot of my settlement mods with it. My carefully created digital homes were ruined.
So on and off for the past few months I’ve been putting them back together again, and I like the results. A lot of the rebuilds aren’t exactly the same but they’re not bad at all.
Some things couldn’t be salvaged. My Vault 88 is completely gone which is a shame. But it made me think of how wrong those tireless “video games only teach you to destroy things” articles are.
It makes me think of that (apparently unattributed?) quote, “When you’re accustomed to privilege, equality feels like oppression”. It also makes me think of this picture I saw in a history book in high school while we were studying World War II. It showed a father and son walking past a huge heaped pile of coal behind a locked gate. Son says in German something like, “Why do we freeze when coal is piled up here?” Father answers, speaking of who he believed controlled the distribution of coal and thus Germany, “Because the hand of the Jew lies heavily upon the people.”
I heard many people calling this movie a feminist masterpiece until someone pointed out that at no point in this movie does Bella have a period or grow body hair, and that immediately threw me onto the “interesting movie, but not feminist” side. (This will probably only make sense to you as an argument when you see it, and all the sex contained within it.)
