Meme Time: Emulating an Animation Style
@banukaihelpme pointed out that Lois and Clark have the “woman staring at guy’s chest” meme energy on My Adventures With Superman and they were so right. I was compelled to draw it
I can’t possibly be the first person to draw this meme for them but it made me laugh while doing it anyway
You know when someone goes through your blog on a mass like-spree for a fandom? I love those like, 19 notifications in a row. it’s like “Ah, I see you’re well into a fixation. God bless.”
I like when your dash fills up with something incredibly specific from one poster and it’s like “oh you’re trawling a specific tag tonight”
Star Trek craft book, I am begging you to describe this craft project in literally any other combination of words
i've been thinking about hobie spiderverse since i came out of the movie theater, about how on a superficial level he acts like every other stereotypically alt character, stealing and instigating and bantering and being chaotic and rebellious and looking Cool™ but on a second look it's so so clear that every single thing he does is motivated by kindness and compassion towards his friends in general and miles in particular, and that's so viscerally truly punk of him
the already famous palm suggestion that makes miles break out of miguel's containment thing. miles initially reads this as condescending but hobie's genuinely trying to help
already he's looking out for miles by trying to keep him away from hq, a place where he knows miles isn't welcome and might be in danger
now, they get to hq and he immediately starts lifting stuff to homebrew a watch for miles, a guy he's known for five minutes (bc you can't convince me he didn't already have a bunch prepped for gwen and the other spider-people he trusts). he even lampshades it with the line above.
he's questioned miles' motives to join the spider society and he knows they're the same as his own: it's literally just to get a watch, to have a means to travel dimentions, to see his friends, to build community. he's already made the decision to grant that ability to miles without subjugating him to the oppressive restrictions and requirements of the spider society. at this point we know he's strongly ideologically opposed to the society and he later in this scene admits he's only there to look out for gwen, just like miles
this one makes me insane. it's a "are you safe at home in your dimension? do you have one? do you need a place to stay?" bc we know he's given one to gwen, who's not safe and does not have nice parents and has been crashing in hobie's dimension for the previous months
and then he tries again to warn miles off the spider society
and when push comes to shove and all the other spider-people are set on stopping miles from going home and changing his timeline he's the only one in miles' corner
btw notice how the palms thing is the first and last thing he says to miles in this film?
anyway. he was in this movie for like 15 minutes tops, showed up exclusively to hype up his friends and protect them by whatever means necessary, adoption papers and illegal interdimensional tech included, and he looked that cool the whole time while doing it. most character ever.
I used to work for a trade book reviewer where I got paid to review people's books, and one of the rules of that review company is one that I think is just super useful to media analysis as a whole, and that is, we were told never to critique media for what it didn't do but only for what it did.
So, for instance, I couldn't say "this book didn't give its characters strong agency or goals". I instead had to say, "the characters in this book acted in ways that often felt misaligned with their characterization as if they were being pulled by the plot."
I think this is really important because a lot of "critiques" people give, if subverted to address what the book does instead of what it doesn't do, actually read pretty nonsensical. For instance, "none of the characters were unique" becomes "all of the characters read like other characters that exist in other media", which like... okay? That's not really a critique. It's just how fiction works. Or "none of the characters were likeable" becomes "all of the characters, at some point or another, did things that I found disagreeable or annoying" which is literally how every book works?
It also keeps you from holding a book to a standard it never sought to meet. "The world building in this book simply wasn't complex enough" becomes "The world building in this book was very simple", which, yes, good, that can actually be a good thing. Many books aspire to this. It's not actually a negative critique. Or "The stakes weren't very high and the climax didn't really offer any major plot twists or turns" becomes "The stakes were low and and the ending was quite predictable", which, if this is a cute romcom is exactly what I'm looking for.
Not to mention, I think this really helps to deconstruct a lot of the biases we carry into fiction. Characters not having strong agency isn't inherently bad. Characters who react to their surroundings can make a good story, so saying "the characters didn't have enough agency" is kind of weak, but when you flip it to say "the characters acted misaligned from their characterization" we can now see that the *real* problem here isn't that they lacked agency but that this lack of agency is inconsistent with the type of character that they are. a character this strong-willed *should* have more agency even if a weak-willed character might not.
So it's just a really simple way of framing the way I critique books that I think has really helped to show the difference between "this book is bad" and "this book didn't meet my personal preferences", but also, as someone talking about books, I think it helps give other people a clearer idea of what the book actually looks like so they can decide for themselves if it's worth their time.
Update: This is literally just a thought exercise to help you be more intentional with how you critique media. I'm not enforcing this as some divine rule that must be followed any time you have an opinion on fiction, and I'm definitely not saying that you have to structure every single sentence in a review to contain zero negative phrases. I'm just saying that I repurposed a rule we had at that specific reviewer to be a helpful tool to check myself when writing critiques now. If you don't want to use the tool, literally no one (especially not me) can or wants to force you to use it. As with all advice, it is a totally reasonable and normal thing to not have use for every piece of it that exists from random strangers on the internet. Use it to whatever extent it helps you or not at all.
UPS has reached an agreement with the Teamsters union to equip its iconic brown delivery trucks with air conditioning for the first time for new units.
The agreement, announced by UPS on Tuesday, comes as the delivery giant and the International Brotherhood of Teamsters negotiate the terms of a new contract for more than 330,000 U.S. employees. (source)
Unions work, unionize.
thoughts and feelings about the line "i don't have to be better (stronger) than you, i just have to stop supplying you with power" in a fight where the villain is a walking example of a corrupt rich capitalist who only cares about himself, who earlier stated that nobody could trust superman to save them because "can we really trust a stranger to help us for free? of course we can't", who tried to get reporter clark kent to stay quiet about the corruption he witnessed by bribing him with "classier ladies" than lois, who abuses and berates the assistant who runs his entire operation.
and then, when clark saves him - "you ruined me. what's your angle? what's in this for you?" "...dr ivo, look around. is it that hard to believe that some people just want to help?"
this show really isn't shying away from the whole Rich Capitalists Don't Care About You And Society Is Corrupt thing and i'm so glad to see it - this is a superman story, after all. standing up to corruption and inequality is kinda the point.
