I want a story where a character can say of their relationship (queerplatonic, or amatonormative, whichever):
“Yeah. We get along like Chocolate and Salt.” or: “We get along like Strawberries and Black Pepper.”
In other words: a relationship that makes the conventionally-minded people turn up their noses in disgust. But actually, the people in the relationship enhance the best in each other.
Quoted tag:
#Big fan of paprika in my hot chocolate
Ooh! color me intrigued. Sweet? Hot? Smoked? Any? All?
This winter, I’ve also been lacing my cocoa with ground ginger.
It was a Tuesday in 1981 when the San Francisco police kicked in the door.
Inside the small apartment, they expected to find a hardened criminal. They expected a drug kingpin. They expected resistance.
Instead, they found a 57-year-old waitress in an apron.
The air in the apartment smelled sweet, thick with chocolate and something earthier. On the kitchen counter, cooling on wire racks, were 54 dozen brownies.
The police officers began bagging the evidence. They confiscated nearly 18 pounds of marijuana. They handcuffed the woman, whose name was Mary Jane Rathbun.
She didn’t look scared. She didn’t look guilty.
She looked at the officers, smoothed her apron, and reportedly said, “I thought you guys were coming.”
#i didnt reblog the first time #because i wanted to verify this #and now that i have? hell yeah brownie grandma
Can you please share how you verified, and give alternate sources, so we can maybe quiet the accusations of “A.I. slop” in the comments?
I’d be only too happy to do that. I was suspicious to start, too. It seemed a bit on the nose to have the weed brownie grandma named “Mary Jane,” but also, that’s a very common combination in a certain place and time, so I thought it was worth the extra effort.
What I did was find sources that made the claim (in this case, that a woman named Mary Jane was a medicinal marijuana activist in California, USA in the 1980s and 90s.) I checked the dates to get some certainty those sources aren’t AI slop, then checked that the sources are generally reliable.
Then I followed useful details about the place and time, and other people involved, to explore it more fully.
The first thing I did was search for “Brownie Mary” and see if that turned anything up at all. It turned up a LOT of results. Predictably, some of them were recipes, but not all of them.
ALT
Next up, I checked sources and dates. Wikipedia can be dodgy for academic use, but their policy on LLM-generated input is very clear: they don’t want slop. I started by reading that page and then went on to read others.
The Atlas Obscura article is from 2018. I found another one from SFWeekly from 2017.
Both of those are decent sources - Atlas Obscura gets a High factual reporting rate from MediaBiasFactCheck, and while MBFC doesn’t have a rating for SFWeekly, the verbiage in that article is very close to what GastroObscura has. (Also to what the post itself has, right down to the choice of pull quote.)
Now, we can stop there and feel pretty confident that articles published before the wide availability of LLMs are not, in fact, LLM generated.
…or we can go deeper, and run this all the way back to source.
I spotted references to a Chicago Tribune imterview of Mary Jane Rathbun, published in 1993.
My search string of “Chicago Tribune 1993 Mary Jane Rathbun” hit it in the top 3 results. That article includes some fun new details: she wore a cannabis leaf shaped pendant to her trial!
She also objected to being portrayed as a cuddly grandma up against The Man, so I must retract my flippant tags, above.
The evidence now strongly points to Brownie Mary being a real woman who really went to court for giving AIDS patients weed brownies. But can we get closer? I’ve now seen several mentions of a 1980 attempt at convicting her too.
The articles have mentioned Sonoma County and a nonprofit called the Shanti Project, so let’s hook onto that and see what we get.
Searching for “Mary Jane Rathbun Sonoma County 1980” gets me an article from a law firm; that mentions the prosecuting attorney by name, and points to a book: Lust for Justice: The Radical Life & Law of J. Tony Serra, by Paulette Frankl. It even has an excerpt!
We can run the book down too, just for fun (now we have a primary source.) My favorite used book site has a copy for $1. Amazon gives a view of the back cover, too:
…wow. I should see if my library has that!
The excerpt on the site has a mention of a candelight vigil held for her death in 1999. It took some hunting past things I’d already read and a bunch of shops giving written tributes, but I found a news report about that, too.
There’s a lot of information out there, and it’s worth digging into. Otherwise it’s altogether too easy to think something real and worth knowing is just another bit of slop.
Back to Mary herself, I read something once where people here on Tumblr were like âAllies are inherently not Queer because they are Allies. They do not belong in <I donât remember exactly what, perhaps the abbreviation, but it was basically because theyâre not actually us, theyâre not US>â
I want you to read the story of Brownie Mary. Read it and I DARE you to tell me she doesnât belong, sheâs not One Of Us.
I have read a number of accounts of cishets who have served our community tirelessly, esp. during the early days of the AIDS crisis. If you dedicate yourself and your life to us, and esp. if you put yourself in danger in service of us, YOU ARE ONE OF US. You belong.
Brownie Mary is as Queer as any of us, and she belongs in the Queer community not (just) as an Ally, but one of us. It is her community, too.
Thank you for your Service, Brownie Mary.
It’s easier for cishet people to call themselves “an Ally” because they frown and shake their heads when they read an anti-Queer editorial in The New York Times, or wherever (no matter how sincerely they think they feel it), than it is to actually be an ally, and get in the trenches and fight alongside us.
The people who do, Like Mary Jane Rathbun, are the true allies.
As with people who fit anything in LGBTQIA+ (Q for Questioning) who exclude themselves from queerness: entirely up to them what identity umbrella they stand under, if any, and there’s plenty of room under the queer umbrella should they change their mind. Which Brownie Mary can’t anymore, obv, but that’s beside the point. To the best of our knowledge, this queer hero was never queer herself.
Also as with etc: when shit’s hitting the fan, the queer umbrella is a shield. Anybody in the line of fire is ours to protect. Anybody who protects us is also ours to protect. Brownie Mary is queer because she’s a queer hero.
“Also as with etc: when shit’s hitting the fan, the queer umbrella is a shield.”
I want a story where a character can say of their relationship (queerplatonic, or amatonormative, whichever):
“Yeah. We get along like Chocolate and Salt.” or: “We get along like Strawberries and Black Pepper.”
In other words: a relationship that makes the conventionally-minded people turn up their noses in disgust. But actually, the people in the relationship enhance the best in each other.
The Queen's Embroiderer: A True Story of Paris, Lovers, Swindlers, and the First Stock Market Crisis did quite a good job of giving me historical context around the lives of artisans and upwardly mobile bourgeois in 17th and early 18th century France and only a mediocre job IMO of convincing me of its central argument, but I was reading it for the former and not the latter so I can't say I was disappointed per se ...
As the author, historian Joan DeJean, introduces her narrative, she was browsing the National Archives when she came across two documents: the first, appointing Jean Magoulet as official embroiderer to Queen Marie-ThÊrèse of France; the second, decreeing that Magoulet's daughter Marie Louise should be put in prison and deported to New Orleans on charges of prostitution. DeJean immediately dropped what she was doing to Get To The Bottom Of This and went on a deep dive into the entire Magoulet family as well as the family of Louis Chevrot, the young man whose involvement with Marie-Louise resulted in the charges above.
In order to write this family saga, Joan DeJean has pulled out every relevant family document -- marriage licenses, birth certificates, guardianship statements, criminal charges, recorded purchases, etc. etc. -- and she does a clear and interesting job of explaining what we can learn from them, what these kinds of documents normally look like and what their context is, what the specific features of these family documents imply, and letting you follow her logic with your own brain. I appreciate this very much! I had no idea, for example, that it was standard in 17th-century France for the court to appoint a guardian for any child who lost a parent, even if they still had the other parent living, to ensure that their financial interests were protected, something that came up often in this narrative where a lot of kids were losing parents in situations where their financial interests were not particularly protected. It's a really good example of historical detective work, how you can draw a picture of a family through time through the bureaucratic litter they leave behind, and I appreciated it very much.
On the other hand, Joan DeJean also occasionally slips into writing like this --
In the course of their attempts both to get rich quick and to save their skin when they got into bad straits, the Queen's Embroiderers became imposters, tricksters, con artists nonpareil. They lied about everything and to everyone: to the police, to notaries, to their in-laws. They lied about their ages and those of their children, about their professional accomplishments and their net worth. They caroused; they philandered; they made a mockery of the laws of church and state. The only truly authentic thing about them was their extraordinary talent and their ability to weave gold and silver thread into the kind of garments that seemed the stuff of dreams. In their lives and on an almost daily basis, haute couture crossed paths with high crime.
Savage beauty indeed.
-- which made me laugh out loud every time it happened. So, bug, feature? who could say ....
Anyway, Joan DeJean makes a pretty good argument for most of the family gossip she pulls out about the Magoulets and the Chevrots, but the center of her argument about the Great Tragic Romance between Marie-Louise Magoulet and Louis Chevrot rests on a really elaborate switcheroo that I simply do not buy. In drawing out her family saga, DeJean has become obsessed with the fact that there seem to have been two Marie-Louise Magoulets, one being more than a decade older than the other, and, crucially, also more than a decade older than Louis Chevrot; ( I guess this is technically spoilers for a three hundred year old scandal )
But a.) context about material culture and craftsmanship is what I was here for and context is what I got, in spades, and b.) if you're going to invent a historical conspiracy theory, make it as niche as possible, is what I say, so despite the fact that I don't BELIEVE DeJean I still spiritually support her. Has she perhaps connected a few more dots than actually exist? Perhaps. But I still certainly got my money's worth [none; library] out of the book!
Well, this is far later than intended because someone unfortunately gifted me with a miserable headcold for Christmas and I've mostly been laying around watching youtube...
But all is not lost - it is only Monday and we are still firmly in the weird week of the year.
What's lingering?
We all have that book. The one we'll get to later. The one that doesn't get chosen. The one that's well-intentioned. (It's been sitting there for a long time.)
While it doesn't have to be the absolute oldest thing on your TBR shelf, if you even know what is, this is the week to read* something that's been waiting for awhile.
I'll try for a follow-up around the 5th. Nudge me if I've been buried under bookpiles.
*read/listen/watch/play. Whatever media you choose is fine.
If you want to stand up for transgender Canadians, then there’s a petition to ask the federal government to repeal the acts signed into law that restrict transgender medical care for transgender youth:
You need only be a resident of Canada, not a citizen to sign. Please help us give transgender youth a fighting chance. Their medical care decisions should be between the handling physician and family only. This isn’t a matter for politicians to decide.
hey, so I would he grateful if people living in Canada could sign this and if non-Canadians could signal boost, please.
Signal boosting as a not!Canadian Person.
(I checked, and the petition Closes on 26 February, 2026)
It was a Tuesday in 1981 when the San Francisco police kicked in the door.
Inside the small apartment, they expected to find a hardened criminal. They expected a drug kingpin. They expected resistance.
Instead, they found a 57-year-old waitress in an apron.
The air in the apartment smelled sweet, thick with chocolate and something earthier. On the kitchen counter, cooling on wire racks, were 54 dozen brownies.
The police officers began bagging the evidence. They confiscated nearly 18 pounds of marijuana. They handcuffed the woman, whose name was Mary Jane Rathbun.
She didn’t look scared. She didn’t look guilty.
She looked at the officers, smoothed her apron, and reportedly said, “I thought you guys were coming.”
#i didnt reblog the first time #because i wanted to verify this #and now that i have? hell yeah brownie grandma
Can you please share how you verified, and give alternate sources, so we can maybe quiet the accusations of “A.I. slop” in the comments?
I’d be only too happy to do that. I was suspicious to start, too. It seemed a bit on the nose to have the weed brownie grandma named “Mary Jane,” but also, that’s a very common combination in a certain place and time, so I thought it was worth the extra effort.
What I did was find sources that made the claim (in this case, that a woman named Mary Jane was a medicinal marijuana activist in California, USA in the 1980s and 90s.) I checked the dates to get some certainty those sources aren’t AI slop, then checked that the sources are generally reliable.
Then I followed useful details about the place and time, and other people involved, to explore it more fully.
The first thing I did was search for “Brownie Mary” and see if that turned anything up at all. It turned up a LOT of results. Predictably, some of them were recipes, but not all of them.
ALT
Next up, I checked sources and dates. Wikipedia can be dodgy for academic use, but their policy on LLM-generated input is very clear: they don’t want slop. I started by reading that page and then went on to read others.
The Atlas Obscura article is from 2018. I found another one from SFWeekly from 2017.
Both of those are decent sources - Atlas Obscura gets a High factual reporting rate from MediaBiasFactCheck, and while MBFC doesn’t have a rating for SFWeekly, the verbiage in that article is very close to what GastroObscura has. (Also to what the post itself has, right down to the choice of pull quote.)
Now, we can stop there and feel pretty confident that articles published before the wide availability of LLMs are not, in fact, LLM generated.
…or we can go deeper, and run this all the way back to source.
I spotted references to a Chicago Tribune imterview of Mary Jane Rathbun, published in 1993.
My search string of “Chicago Tribune 1993 Mary Jane Rathbun” hit it in the top 3 results. That article includes some fun new details: she wore a cannabis leaf shaped pendant to her trial!
She also objected to being portrayed as a cuddly grandma up against The Man, so I must retract my flippant tags, above.
The evidence now strongly points to Brownie Mary being a real woman who really went to court for giving AIDS patients weed brownies. But can we get closer? I’ve now seen several mentions of a 1980 attempt at convicting her too.
The articles have mentioned Sonoma County and a nonprofit called the Shanti Project, so let’s hook onto that and see what we get.
Searching for “Mary Jane Rathbun Sonoma County 1980” gets me an article from a law firm; that mentions the prosecuting attorney by name, and points to a book: Lust for Justice: The Radical Life & Law of J. Tony Serra, by Paulette Frankl. It even has an excerpt!
We can run the book down too, just for fun (now we have a primary source.) My favorite used book site has a copy for $1. Amazon gives a view of the back cover, too:
…wow. I should see if my library has that!
The excerpt on the site has a mention of a candelight vigil held for her death in 1999. It took some hunting past things I’d already read and a bunch of shops giving written tributes, but I found a news report about that, too.
There’s a lot of information out there, and it’s worth digging into. Otherwise it’s altogether too easy to think something real and worth knowing is just another bit of slop.
Back to Mary herself, I read something once where people here on Tumblr were like âAllies are inherently not Queer because they are Allies. They do not belong in <I donât remember exactly what, perhaps the abbreviation, but it was basically because theyâre not actually us, theyâre not US>â
I want you to read the story of Brownie Mary. Read it and I DARE you to tell me she doesnât belong, sheâs not One Of Us.
I have read a number of accounts of cishets who have served our community tirelessly, esp. during the early days of the AIDS crisis. If you dedicate yourself and your life to us, and esp. if you put yourself in danger in service of us, YOU ARE ONE OF US. You belong.
Brownie Mary is as Queer as any of us, and she belongs in the Queer community not (just) as an Ally, but one of us. It is her community, too.
Thank you for your Service, Brownie Mary.
It’s easier for cishet people to call themselves “an Ally” because they frown and shake their heads when they read an anti-Queer editorial in The New York Times, or wherever (no matter how sincerely they think they feel it), than it is to actually be an ally, and get in the trenches and fight alongside us.
The people who do, Like Mary Jane Rathbun, are the true allies.
im not particularly persuaded one way or the other that opheliaâs death was witnessed by courtiers of elisnore and was deliberately not prevented vs no one saw what happened and it was just like a horrible thing that happened. but horatioâs âTwere good she were spoken with, for she may strew / Dangerous conjecturesâ about ophelia is like oh. the elisnore court wanted her dead dead
And after Horatio says that line about dangerous conjectures, and then exits, Gertrude says this when she’s alone on stage:
To my sick soul, as sin’s true nature is, Each toy seems prologue to some great amiss: So full of artless jealousy is guilt, It spills itself in fearing to be spilt.
Those are the only rhyming lines in all of Act 4, scene 5 (other than the song lyrics Ophelia sings. But that’s when she’s quoting something else, not speaking spontaneously as herself). Moreover, they’re rhyming couplets. Shakespeare hardly ever wrote rhyming couplets into his dialog. If that’s not him deliberately underlining Gertrude’s guilt in the whole affair, I’ll make myself a paper hat and eat it.
Also, consider this: Hamlet had to be told what happened by his father’s ghost, since he was away at university. But Ophelia was there at court, the whole time. She might even have been taking a stroll through the garden when Claudius did the deed, that day. Either that, or she (through being in Gertrude’s close circle) figured it out after the fact.
But who pays attention to silly teenage girls who walk around with their nose in a book of poetry, amirite?
I don’t even think she went truly mad. Yes, she had a breakdown triggered by the murder of her father. But if you pay attention to the lyrics she sings in her “madness” scene, she’s basically walking up to King Claudius and saying to his face: “I know what you did.” I think she did lose a sense of reality, in that she forgot how dangerous it was to do what she was doing (or maybe her grief was so intense, she no longer cared). But other than that, I’m certain she was lucid.
The sad thing is, Leartes was there during part of her madness act, and he didn’t pick up the clues she (his own sister) was laying down.
Paging @annabelle–cane. Care to share your ideas about how the “Get thee to a Nunnery!” scene might be acted?
Excerpt from the introduction in the Wikipedia article:
HumanLight is a Humanistholiday celebrated annually on December 23. HumanLight was first celebrated in 2001, and was created to provide a specifically Humanist celebration during the western world’sholiday season. The New Jersey Humanist Network founded the holiday in 2001 to aid secular people in commemorating the December holiday season without encroaching on other adjacent eventsâboth religious ones such as Christmas and secular ones such as Solstice.
Now, see, if I had been at that meeting in 2001, I would have argued in favor of keeping the holiday festival on the Solstice.
Because the Solstices (Winter and Summer) are simple physical phenomena of how our planet actually fits into our home star system – there’s nothing supernatural about them. And we know why they happen, and when they happen, because of centuries of Humanist and Scientific inquiry.
Tiptoeing around the day of the Solstice itself because some people who are believers in Magic, and polytheistic* also celebrate on that day, is to give those religious / magic beliefs too much power. It’s stepping aside and saying (in effect): “Pardon me. ‘Scuse me. I don’t want to take up too much space. I’ll just be over here and celebrate on the day you’re not using.” There’s only 365 (and a fraction) days in a year, and 8+ billion human beings. Some important dates are inevitably going to overlap. People sharing the same day to celebrate different things in different ways is fine. It’s Great, even. It’s Wonderful.
*Wiccans and other Neo-Pagans – one quibble I have with that Wikipedia article is that, for many of those who do celebrate the Winter Solstice, it’s not secular.
Full transcript is up at the link (for some reason, I’m not able to select text to copy/paste; maybe later I can).
Realization I had, after posting this:
I was 26 years old when this Act was signed into law, and 27 years old when it (supposedly) went into effect (1 January, 1991; so this coming Thursday, is this law’s second thirty-fifth anniversary).
So I’ve lived more of my life with the A.D.A. than I ever lived without it…
And yet. And yet. We are still fighting For the Same Old Shit.
birdfeeding is a community started on January 1, 2023. It's all about birdfeeding, birdwatching, and other topics relating to birds. It also touches on nature in general, and observations that may effect bird activity such as local weather. Both text and image posts are welcome. Now is a great time to join as hungry birds are easy to attract with a feeder.
Community resources include posts about birding events, nurseries that sell seeds or plants attractive to birds, bird identification apps, the benefits of birdwatching, and other useful materials. Check out the anchor posts from Three Weeks for Dreamwidth.
im not particularly persuaded one way or the other that opheliaâs death was witnessed by courtiers of elisnore and was deliberately not prevented vs no one saw what happened and it was just like a horrible thing that happened. but horatioâs âTwere good she were spoken with, for she may strew / Dangerous conjecturesâ about ophelia is like oh. the elisnore court wanted her dead dead
And after Horatio says that line about dangerous conjectures, and then exits, Gertrude says this when she’s alone on stage:
To my sick soul, as sin’s true nature is, Each toy seems prologue to some great amiss: So full of artless jealousy is guilt, It spills itself in fearing to be spilt.
Those are the only rhyming lines in all of Act 4, scene 5 (other than the song lyrics Ophelia sings. But that’s when she’s quoting something else, not speaking spontaneously as herself). Moreover, they’re rhyming couplets. Shakespeare hardly ever wrote rhyming couplets into his dialog. If that’s not him deliberately underlining Gertrude’s guilt in the whole affair, I’ll make myself a paper hat and eat it.
Also, consider this: Hamlet had to be told what happened by his father’s ghost, since he was away at university. But Ophelia was there at court, the whole time. She might even have been taking a stroll through the garden when Claudius did the deed, that day. Either that, or she (through being in Gertrude’s close circle) figured it out after the fact.
But who pays attention to silly teenage girls who walk around with their nose in a book of poetry, amirite?
I don’t even think she went truly mad. Yes, she had a breakdown triggered by the murder of her father. But if you pay attention to the lyrics she sings in her “madness” scene, she’s basically walking up to King Claudius and saying to his face: “I know what you did.” I think she did lose a sense of reality, in that she forgot how dangerous it was to do what she was doing (or maybe her grief was so intense, she no longer cared). But other than that, I’m certain she was lucid.
The sad thing is, Leartes was there during part of her madness act, and he didn’t pick up the clues she (his own sister) was laying down.
So here are Minimally edited excerpts from the auto-generated captions/transcript:
Every December, this story comes back around. It gets adapted, quoted, parodied, turned into cartoons, musicals, and stage plays. And because it’s everywhere, it’s easy to miss what it’s actually about. [âŚ]
When Charles Dickens wrote it in 1843, he wasn’t trying to create a cozy Christmas tradition. He was mad. Furious, really. Furious about poverty in industrial England. Furious about how the poor were treated as statistics instead of people. and furious about how comfortably the wealthy explained that suffering away.
So, he wrote a ghost story because fiction is sometimes the only way to get people to listen to the truth.
One of the most important things to understand about Ebenezer Scrooge is that he isn’t some cartoon villain enjoying cruelty for its own sake. He has a very tidy moral framework that just so happens to allow him to feel virtuous.
He reflects the ideas of the rich at the time and believes he’s earned what he has. He believes poverty is the result of personal failure. He believes charity interferes with the natural order of things. And when asked to help others, he responds within that logical framework. That’s what makes him dangerous. He’s not a monster. He is just a man. A person who can explain away suffering without ever raising their voice.
[âŚ]
Dickens is saying that poverty isn’t invisible. It’s ignored. The suffering Scrooge dismisses as inevitable is happening right in front of him every day. Supported by the very system he benefits from. And when Scrooge tries to retreat into his cold logic, the ghost throws his own words back at him. But that’s not redemption, just exposure.
The final ghost doesn’t threaten Scrooge with cosmic punishment. There’s no heavy chains for Scrooge here in this vision. There’s nothing really, just indifference. A death no one mourns. A life that leaves nothing behind. A world that adjusts quickly to his absence because he gave it nothing that couldn’t be replaced.
The moral lesson I’ve always seen isn’t be good or else. It’s this is what a life built solely on extraction looks like when it ends.
Dickens understood something modern audiences sometimes forget. The most frightening future isn’t punishment, it’s irrelevance.
When Scrooge changes, Dickens doesn’t let him wallow in shame. Scrooge simply acts. He pays people fairly. He gives generously. He shows up. He becomes part
of the community he once treated as an inconvenience. That’s the final moral lesson. And it might be the most important one.
[âŚ] A Christmas Carol endures because it doesn’t argue that kindness is nice. It argues that cruelty is a choice. It challenges the idea that markets absolve morality. It challenges the fleeting notion that suffering is natural and therefore acceptable. And it insists that wealth creates obligation, not exemption.
Every generation creates a new version of Scrooge because every generation builds new ways to distance comfort from consequence.
And Dickens keeps reminding us the ghosts aren’t supernatural. They’re perspective.
So when this story comes around each year, it isn’t asking whether you feel generous. It’s asking whether you’ve mistaken self-interest for wisdom. It’s asking whether you believe the world is better when people look away or when they choose to see. And it leaves us with a final uncomfortable truth. The future is shaped less by villains than by people who decide not to care until it’s almost too late.
Quoted tags:
#he was a guy who owned a (small; local) business and some property and believed he Made It With His Own Hard Work #So Why Should He Help Anybody ELSE? #like. you know guys like Scrooge. everybody knows this type of guy
When you put it like that, it strikes me that maybe the most accurate modern interpretation of Scrooge is Mr. Potter from It’s a Wonderful Life.
A tangent I almost put in This Post about the treatment of Steve Rogers in the MCU’s Endgame
(But it was longer than my primary comment, and I realized it belonged in its own post)
A couple years ago (I think it was a couple years ago) I had a quasi-anxiety dream of trying to navigate a mostly inaccessible vacation/resort (?) place, walking on forearm crutches (having to navigate around sunbathers lying in my path, narrow walkways, wet slippery tiles around the edge of a swimming pool, etc.).
I somehow ended up in the middle of an audience of a pop/rock concert at an outdoor stage. I didn’t vibe with the music, but I still had a fun time, because the people in the audience were nice, and fun to be around. And they made the frustration of the first part of the dream worthwhile.
That’s basically my relationship with 99% of all current pop culture, these days.
———
I think that’s where my idea of “The Fifth Wall” comes from. If “breaking the fourth wall” is the author acknowledging the fiction, parting the veil, and speaking to the audience directly, then “Breaking the fifth wall” is members of the audience acknowledging their fellow ticket-buyers in the theater, and gossiping about the story as it unfolds.
Ugh, just when I thought this might be one of the rare winters without catching some sort of crud, it arrived. Felt fine Friday morning; at 3PM I noticed my sinuses were sore, and by 5:30 PM my throat was on fire. Spent today alternately napping and poking through the 2025 Yuletide Collection; my face hurts too much to read, but I can skim and mark things for later! I must have at least three pages worth of "later" reading stacked up now, which is exciting to think about. Let's hope that, whatever this crud is, it goes away as fast as it came.
Between being busy and getting sick, it looks like my annual Cards & Tea post may have be postponed to the New Year - I definitely don't want to be handling comestibles, or even cards, in the state I'm in now.
I've been too busy to crack the pages on either my newest purchases, Stars of Chaos volume 2 and the first book of Married Thrice to a Salted Fish, but I'm still looking forward to them. I did finally finish watching Mob Psycho 100's 3rd season last week, and greatly enjoyed it! Yesterday, when I wasn't feeling quite as awful, I started a Tiger & Bunny rewatch, and got 7 episodes in; no progress on that today, but maybe tomorrow.
If you participated in Yuletide, what gift(s) did you get? If you're just reading, has anything caught your eye? Any new fandoms you're eyeing for 2026, or rereads/rewatches you're planning?
The Steve news from the Doomsday trailer is so rad (derogatory).
Iâve had this running internal theory since Endgame that the MCUâs treatment of Steve Rogers accidentally follows societal trends in the United States over the last century (aka, after making some genuine progress thereâs a reactionary regression based on nostalgic fetishization for a non-existent past).
If you wanted a metaphor for this process, Steve Rogerâs arc is basically perfect. They wrote a character who is explicitly framed as a âgood guyâ who:
- fights his way into the Army in WWII, putting his body on the line for an experimental procedure that might give the US an advantage
- becomes disillusioned to the propaganda side of the US political machine while still choosing to sacrifice himself to save millions of people
- wakes up in a future he doesnât understand, but still tries to protect
- creates new ties in the future while destroying the organization founded by people he respected because it became authoritarian
- literally becomes a rogue agent wanted by the entire UN after choosing to put his faith in people over systems after years of being shown the corruption of those systems
To write that character, then have him choose to abandon his current found family to go back in time so he can be with a woman he had vague chemistry with (who, it must be noted, eventually married someone else, and is therefore being stripped of at least some of her autonomy) in a literal regression to nostalgia is so insane. Itâs tragic.
Of course the MCU is bringing him back in some form. After writing that ending, they faffed around for half a decadeâtoo afraid to make interesting creative choices at the risk of not being hyper-consumableâand are now digging up the metaphorical corpse of the character(s) they know audiences remember fondly in a desperate attempt to cash-in on nostalgia.
Itâs a tragedy. Itâs perfect. Someone should make a movie about it.
I’ve never consumed MCU media, except through fandom’s collective meta-commentary, here on Tumblr. But I’m reblogging this post for the following line:
reactionary regression based on nostalgic fetishization for a non-existent past).
This isn’t new. The German court system ruled about a decade ago that violence against Jewish synagogues isn’t antisemitic if they were done by “protestors” claiming to be against Israel (and nevermind whatever else they may say or do).
And this is why the IHRA definition is actually helpful: it names holding all Jews, or any random Jews in the diaspora, responsible for the actions of the Israeli government as an example of antisemitism. It’s also just insane that anyone would consider that anything other than obvious antisemitism. We can all recognize that attacking mosques or random Muslims to protest Islamist organizations or governments is Islamophobic, and attacking random Chinese people to protest the Chinese government is racist. Even if the government you’re protesting is democratically elected (as Israel’s is), it’s racist to attack people of the same ethnicity who probably aren’t citizens of that country: it would still be racist to attack anyone of Japanese descent because you’re mad at the Japanese government. Why is this so difficult to apply when it’s Jews and Israel??
And that’s why these people hate the IHRA definition so much.
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