Since it’s been a while, I decided to take some fresh pics the other day and relive the magic to show off how far I’ve come!
See this scruffy person here?
Boring, boring, boring. Nice sweater, though.
But there is a secret.
The secret is FUCKING SORCERY
BAM.PRESTIDIGIFOUNDATION!
WITH JUST A LITTLE EFFORT, YOU TOO CAN PRESENT AS ANY GENDER YOU NEED TO BE.
DON’T LET ANYONE TELL YOU OTHERWISE. YOU KNOW WHO YOU ARE, AND THEY CAN SUCK A DUCK.
Remember how I said it had been a few years since I made the older post? Back then I wasn’t out in public, just to my closest friends and family. When that post exploded, I was afraid of backlash. But aside from a few shitheads, the response was overwhelmingly positive. It eventually gave me the strength to come out as trans publicly, and the support from people I care about was amazing. It’s not for everyone, but it was definitely the best thing I’ve done recently for my mental health.
Seriously though, all of you deserve to be happy, and part of being happy is the freedom to be who you are. So if you’re in the closet about your identity, or If you ever feel like no one is in your corner, remember I’m rooting for you. I want you to be happy.
I love you all, you little cuties. Each and every one of you. So go out there and kick the world’s ass~
If you have the time could you please reblog this? I hate asking for reblogs, but I want this to reach those who need it. I know there are people out there that feel invisible, and I want to show them that they aren’t, and that you don’t age out of being nonbinary.
Me, internally:
everyone has forgotten, but I haven't. I haven't forgotten uptown funk. I can't hear those words without getting an unexplainable urge to say 'hot damn.' Maybe nobody forgot. Maybe we all think this. I feel like we need to talk about the influence this song had on all of us.
I’ve noticed this revisionist Greek myth is common wherein Persephone loves Hades and eats the pomegranate seeds in order to evade her overbearing mother, and that’s all well and good. You know, sometimes I’m in the mood for it and sometimes I’m not. But hear this: as long as we’re doing this, why is no one wondering whether Aphrodite might really love Hephaestus?
Think about it. All the gods in their immortal splendor are lining up to marry her, doing everything in their power to impress her, the goddess of love and beauty, and she choses…that guy. A god in technical terms only, a social reject who’s ugly and malformed and um, no fun. Always slaving away in his workshop when everyone else is quaffing nectar and having their eternal beach party up on Mount Olympus. They can’t believe she’d give up all of them for that.
So, because the gods do not take rejection well (looking at you Apollo), eventually they start to say to each other, well, we all know Zeus made her do it anyway. He’s gotta feel guilty for throwing Hephaestus off Mount Olympus that one time. And it quickly becomes thatpoorgirl, stuck in that workshop full of sweat and dirt and cyclopses when she could have had one of us. Because of course they’ve got love all figured out; it’s entirely technical and dependent on who’s the most charming and good-looking and not at all variable and strange and notoriously unpredictable, right?
Meanwhile Ares, only the most arrogant and brainless of the crew, can’t take a hint and is still showing up wherever Aphrodite goes trying to hit on her, so eventually she and Hephaestus decide to rig up an elaborate mechanical trap for him, using her as bait. When all the gods have laughed at him for getting caught he huffily attempts to regain his dignity by telling them, whatever, guys, you want to know the truth, I was meeting her for an assignation. And they all kind of know he’s full of it but they just accept it as the unvarnished truth from thereon in, because they’d love to believe she’d cheat on Hephaestus with Ares. They’d love it. Come on, Aphrodite, get off your high horse and admit you’re just as shallow as the rest of us.
So they talk, but Aphrodite doesn’t really care about their collective jealousy because she dotes on her misshapen genius of a husband with his sooty hands and his sweaty brow who always takes her seriously and is always so hard at work inventing astonishing new things to make her happy, and she loves the volcano they live in with its internal pressures so conducive to the formation of precious stones and its passages lit with glowing lava that so gorgeously offsets her cheekbones, and all the cyclopses worship her because even with one eye apiece they’ve still got more depth perception than most men do where she’s concerned. True it is that as a couple the two develop a reputation for not getting out much, because all those Olympian parties bore them to death and they’d rather spend time with each other (poor Aphrodite, she’s such a vivacious young thing and her husband is so grasping and insecure that he won’t let her go out and have fun), but they do all right.
THIS IS THE KIND OF CONTENT I’M LOOKING FOR
love <3
Ok, ok, wait, but it doesn’t end there. Because Aphrodite features pretty heavily in the story of Eros and Psyche. She’s painted as the villain, her jealousy causing her to send her son to curse the girl, but that’s just not true. She knows what it’s like to be clamored over for your beauty, knows the lies that are spread, the way it sets you up as a target and discredits your mind. Aphrodite hears the mortals whisper that this human girl rivals her in beauty, and one day she gets around to seeing what the fuss is about.
She finds Psyche’s home all but besieged by suitors, but she notices the girl isn’t falling for their flattery, that she is still kind, no matter who she’s dealing with. She sees a bit of herself in this girl who aches to be spoken to, not at, and who wants most of all to be heard.
When she sends her son to the girl, she is less than truthful about her motivations. She knows if she tells him she hopes he will fall for this mortal girl it will make things awkward for him, that true love must be discovered on its own and cannot be forced. When he comes away from the encounter with her name on his lips, searching for excuses to talk to her again, Aphrodite whispers into the soothsayer’s ear to tell Psyche’s father that she is loved by a god. Frees her from the hoards of shallow admirers and gives her son the opportunity he needs to see her again.
When a year of late-night conversations fails to convince her son that it’s time to reveal himself to his beloved, she puts a bug in Psysche’s ear to ask for her sisters to visit, whispers in their ears to convince Psyche to take matters into her own hands, ensures the two can finally meet face to face. She is saddened when Eros flees, believing Psyche had betrayed him.
The four tasks Psyche must overcome to be reunited with her son aren’t laid forth out of spite, but rather to help the girl find herself. Aphrodite knows this girl hasn’t had a choice in the path her life has taken up until this point. Knows that everything was in the hands of her father, and of Aphrodite herself. She wants to make sure Psyche means it, wants Psyche to know what she’s getting into when dealing with the Olympians. Wants, most of all, for Psyche to question her own motivations, fully evaluate the situation, and then make her own choice.
Her frustration at the Olympians aiding the girl isn’t because she hates being tricked. No, she wants Psyche to break out of her shell, wants her to have the option to decide this isn’t worth it and walk away.
When the final task ends in Psyche laying unconscious on the roadway, Aphrodite searches the girl’s heart and knows her intentions are true. Knows she is ready to join the family. She kicks Eros out of the house to ensure he would find Psyche, to ensure he would come to his senses and forgive her, realize that he had been unfair to her and to ask her forgiveness in turn.
They say Aphrodite was sour about the whole ordeal until her granddaughter was born, but the truth was she hadn’t stopped smiling from the moment her son had first come home, whispering the girls name in reverence.
With Windows 10, Microsoft has made their family account settings more visible and easier to access than ever before. These settings have been available since Vista (requiring separate downloads in Vista and 7, natively available in 8), but somewhat more obscure and not as feature-rich as they are now, and, for the most part? These are really smart, fantastic tools for parents, including things like screen time limitations, web and application filters, and prepaid balances for a child’s Xbox/Microsoft account to allow them to make purchases without having unfettered access to their parent’s credit or debit card.
Unfortunately, the family settings also include (and, again, have always included) activity/web reporting, and there is a very justified concern that this kind of reporting could lead to the careless (and dangerous) outing of LGBTQIA kids to bigoted parents.
To be honest, the way this information was presented made it sound somewhat Orwellian in scope, so I decided that I would investigate by setting up an old throwaway Live account I made to share pictures of my daughter with family as a child account.
Most of the administration is done through the web interface at account.live.com, under the family tab. Once you click through to the child’s account, this is the first screen you see, exactly as it appears on a new child account:
As you can see, both Activity Reporting and emailed reports are enabled by default. Parents have to intentionally turn these features off if they are using a child account.
Somewhat more surprising, web filtering (under the web browsing tab) is NOT turned on by default. I went ahead and enabled it for my tests to see what was allowed and blocked by default (whitelisting and blacklisting sites is very easy).
For some strange reason, my child account would not allow me to take screenshots, but I captured screens with my phone.
This notification greets child accounts EVERY TIME THEY LOG IN, which immediately made me feel better about what MS is doing (more editorializing in a bit). Any time a child logs in to their account, they know if they are being watched, which is a big deal.
Next, I decided to do some testing of blocked and reported content. The parent account had already installed Chrome and Firefox, so I loaded up all three browsers and tried visiting various webpages.
Major news sites largely loaded with no issue, and visits to most of the common gaming sites were no trouble. Strangely enough, Kotaku must have been flagged as having potentially objectionable content, because I got this screen when I tried to visit:
Other sites that were more likely to be outright blocked, such as Reddit, did not return any error at all - they simply did not load. Google.com also did not load (I presume this is because because Microsoft can’t force Google to load only “safe search” results), though Google accounts loaded just fine, as did Google ad services.
Because I wanted to get a good idea of what the parental controls were and were not capable of, I tried to go into InPrivate/Incognito mode in all three browsers. The keyboard shortcuts were disabled, and any options to open new windows in these private modes were simply missing. I didn’t expect so simple a workaround as using a different browser to work, but it’s always worth checking for the basic vulnerabilities in a system first.
Next, I tried to download and install the IPVanish VPN client. I did not actually try to visit any websites with it active, because installation AND program use both require admin privileges, which the child account does not have, so a child wanting to use a VPN would have to either know their parent’s password (in which case these family settings could be bypassed anyway) or have their parents supply the password every time they logged in. Even if the VPN hides their activity, the necessity for parental involvement makes it worthless as a tool to avoid parental invasions of privacy.
Finally, I tried a few web-based proxies (specifically: hide.me and proxfree). Bing will happily search up free proxies for restricted accounts, and using the proxies, I sailed right through to previously inaccessible sites with ease. Kotaku and reddit both loaded right up.
PARENTAL RESULTS
With a nice browsing history worked up, I logged back in to my parental account to see what my snooping eyes could see and found out something interesting: parental accounts do NOT get real-time web reports. All night long, my parental account had a blank screen for web history. The next morning, it had populated the previous day’s activity. This means that parents can’t just sit and monitor a child in real time, so no “catching them in the act.”
The following morning, the parental account had a full history
You’ll notice that it shows attempts to visit questionable websites that require permission, but it does NOT show attempts to visit sites that it simply refused to load, like reddit. You’ll also notice that in the right-hand bar, there are “block” and “allow” buttons that enable instant white and blacklisting.
Here, you see that the hide.me visits are reported. The good news is that, since this reports shows EVERYTHING, including EVERY SINGLE AD AFFILIATE, a parent who doesn’t know what they’re looking for could very easily miss this proxy in the noise. Parents who DO know what they’re looking for, though? Chances are good they’ll see the proxy visits if they take the time to actually sift through the entire report.
Each root site listed can be expanded into a more detailed view. Fortunately, hide.me was as good as its word. Here is the detailed view from those 4 visits:
Parents can block proxies as a child uses them, but there are a LOT of proxies out there, so that is a Sisyphean task, at best.
Another important thing to note is that, while unique URLs visited are reported, a child’s search history on Bing is kept private.
Past the web history, these are the other stats collected on a child account:
There is no explicit data given to parents here (no screencaps or DVRed activity), but parents can easily block apps their children should not be using, and the screen time limit is a very good tool for younger children.
Tim’s Theory:
Once I saw that Microsoft warns child accounts at every single login that they are being watched, I started developing a theory:
Microsoft understands the privacy concern of spying on kids, and they’re trying to get in front of it and give kids the power to protect themselves where they might not otherwise have it.
There have been tools to allow parents to spy on their kids for as long as there has been internet access for parents to spy on. A lot of these tools are just prettied up versions of spyware that you would never, ever want on your computer, but a parent who is determined to spy on their kid usually doesn’t care.
By integrating parental controls that include spying by default, Microsoft can give parents a “safe” monitor while also warning kids that they are being watched. This means the computer and its users are safer (no keylogging, screencapturing, or camera hijacking for third parties to gain back-door access to), a child’s privacy is safer (passwords, even for logging in to the computer, are not revealed to a parent).
By not turning on web filtering by default, MS may be trying to subtly suggest that, rather than blocking your kids, you should be talking to them.
By not blocking even well-known proxy servers when web filtering is turned on, MS is giving kids an escape route from watchful eyes.
I would be far more comfortable if the spying were not turned on by default, but I feel like MS turns it on by default (and makes it sit right at the top of the page in the family controls) to make parents think about what they’re doing to their child’s privacy.
Everyone has to learn how to protect their privacy online, and, unfortunately, that includes kids. There are ways to be smart about “forbidden” websites. Kids at risk of having secrets exposed to their parents need to be made aware of how to be safe.
The biggest and best advice to keep yourself safe when being watched? Do a LOT of “not secret” browsing. Flood that report with “normal” websites, and keep your proxy visits to a minimum. Make it look like noise in the report. When you are on the proxy for something, make sure you go to a non-proxy tab every so often and click through to a new thing.
Also, don’t use just one proxy. Make yourself a list of proxies. Here are a few to start with:
Valkyrie can’t be sure that this hasn’t been happening for days, weeks, perhaps even months. After all, one day amongst the shifting sands of the dunes is much like the one that came before and the one that follows. At some point however, she realises that the sensation of those few seconds where she loses the power to move…act…decide…is familiar. And at some point when she wakes because the first light of dawn is creeping beneath the edge of her blanket she knows that sensation was only a few instants earlier.
She starts to notice things. A particularly fine, meaty lizard that she kills with a dart appears at around the same time each day. She starts to observe more closely. A distinctive cloud is in the sky each time she pushes back the blanket in the morning.
She never knows when the blackness will overtake her though. Most days it comes later and later, although nothing Valkyrie does or doesn’t do seems to affect it.
The first time she makes it to dusk seems significant. The night is falling. Surely if she gets through the night, when she wakes it will be a new and different morning. But the stars are scarcely visible against the night sky before the familiar pull exerts itself on her again and she resets once more.
She begins to reach the night most days. Sometimes she even finishes her watch before Smithy relieves her and sends her to take her turn sleeping. But still she wakes and it is the same morning.
For a while she tries to stay awake during the night, but all that changes is the fact that she is aware of the moment when she is pulled back.
At last there comes a morning when she wakes and the cloud is not there and the only lizard she sees is a runty thing that is scarcely worth the effort of chewing. And it is most definitely a different day. They haven’t seen a dust plume in the distance for weeks says Keeper, although Valkyrie is quite sure that for her (at least) it has been more days than that.
Her bike is hidden behind the dunes. Her clanswomen lie in wait. And Valkyrie climbs the pylon to bait their trap. The dust suggests something bigger than a motorbike and that would be a rich prize for the Vuvalini, especially if it’s not running on fumes.
She screams her lament and pleads for help, and cannot believe her ears when she hears the words recited by the figure who steps down from the truck.
Valkyrie calls her tribe. She slides, she shrugs into her wrap, and stumbles across the sand in disbelief towards her Furiosa.
Another night passes, and they turn back but it’s still a new day. There’s another night, another morning, and still no slice that disconnects Valkyrie from the progression of time. Things have changed.
Then Valkyrie finds out what anchors her to the loop. She watches the War Rig overrun by Warboys and Polecats faster than she can reload and when she sees the headshot that claims Furiosa her two thoughts as she is yanked backwards once more is that at least it was quick and now she knows what if not why.
At least that gives her a strategy she thinks. The days when she sees the cloud, kills the lizard, goes to sleep, and waits for a plume of dust that never comes only to wake again are agony. But some days are good and the truck rolls to a stop at the bottom of the dunes.
The look of fragile hope on Furiosa’s face is the same every time, and Valkyrie can feel that the hand threading through the thickness of her hair is doing it for the first time. She tries to run faster than the bikes, to get to Furiosa, to tell her that she knows her, to end the doubt even one second earlier.
Then she tries to work out what she needs to do to stop it repeating.
Sometimes they get close to the canyon before Joe stops them and Furiosa’s life ends along with Valkyrie’s temporality. Sometimes they’re not even within sight of it when the Gigahorse becomes their main obstacle and Furiosa dies when she tries to remove it from their path.
Valkyrie realises that the two are connected. Furiosa needs to live. Furiosa also needs to kill Joe.
Keeping Furiosa alive, keeping the nameless fool alive to keep Furiosa alive, is Valkyrie’s new focus. It still doesn’t work. She tries every position on the Rig. Takes out every person who hurt either of them on a previous iteration. And still the cycle repeats.
Finally she disagrees as they plan their run. She needs to be on a bike, be mobile, take out threats unexpectedly. Furiosa argues against it. She explains how motorbikes are good for a few hits but are the preserve of War Boys reaching their half-lives because they rarely make it back. Valkyrie insists.
It seems like Furiosa was right when Maadi takes a harpoon to the face and they topple to the ground. Valkyrie takes aim at the Gigahorse and watches four shots fair and true leave mere cracks in the glass. As the monstrous vehicle passes over her, she jumps to her feet and keeps firing.
Valkyrie isn’t stupid. She knows there is an entire War Party coming up behind her, but she keeps firing at Joe’s car. The last thing she remembers is one of the Imperators on the back falling to her rifle as she keeps firing. She hopes it’s enough.
The next morning is a new day, but Valkyrie doesn’t wake to see it.
Oh my god THAT’s why she’s willing to sacrifice her crew, because she’s tried any variation of telling them, of asking their help, and there’s always somehow a weak link, they’re not good at secrets, at acting. They don’t even come away from the Citadel, or her crew is suddenly replaced by Joe, or she’s taken off the War Rig, or– In desperation she tries not telling them one time, and it’s gut-wrenching, but then she gets much further, and now she has to get them killed over and over again, punch Ace off of her running board like he’s one of the Wretched over and over again–
She only ever reaches the other Vuvalini once, on their final run, which is why it was so crushing when she found out that there were only a few left, and that her home was gone. The run through we saw was the furthest she ever got, after hundreds of times watching her crew and the sisters die in different ways. Maybe she even killed Max many times before, or left him to die in the desert.
What. Make him stay?? That would probably make him run faster, especially given the ‘I just known you for three days’ thing and ‘who is this wierdo’ and ‘wtf is there about me to like, they’re clearly looking for something’ and ‘what the hell kind of person even says those things’, and y’know, instant escalation of doubt and distrust.
But what if more things happened in one of those runs than just what we saw. Is what I’m getting at.
But wait…what if the new loop doesn’t restart with him offering her his hand on the Plains of Silence? What if it starts with “can I talk to you?”
That means she’s had endless versions of this conversation. That little half-smile she has on her face when he says “I’ll make my own way” is because she already knows he’s going to say that. Because he says that every time.
Maybe she learns that if she’s too honest about wanting him to stay, it scares him off and he doesn’t come back the next morning. In some of those versions, they ride across the salt until they run out of food and water. In others, someone figures out they have to go back–maybe Furiosa figures it out herself, or Val suggests it, or Toast does, or Nux and Capable have been talking on the back of their bike and come up with the idea. But it never works without him there.
Then, one time, almost by chance, she says the right thing and he catches up to them the next morning, and they get much further, and she realizes, oh. She can never make him stay, but if she’s cautious and lucky, he’ll figure it out himself and come back to her. It’s still a hard day, a really hard day, and she does it hundreds of times over, and she always dies, but slowly she learns all the other pieces that have to fall in place.
She doesn’t realize until the last time through that the reason he needs to be there is not as an extra fighter, although that helps, but so he can give her his blood and keep her alive to reach the Citadel. Because the part at the Citadel never works without her.
And she still can’t make him stay.
….I hate all of you.
And every so often, she says/doesn’t say just the right thing under the blazing stars in the safe shadow of the war rig. And he does come with them, even though he knows it’s probably fatal; he’s given up hoping for any other outcome than death, and he’s okay with that - in the company of these people he’s okay with letting go of hope.
So gradually - as they ride for days across the glaring salt, spend nights cold under the thousands of cold stars - his guard comes down. And gradually - in quiet minimal conversations over water-breaks in the desert, watching meteors leaning back on the sand - she gets to know him. She gets the opportunity to value him for himself, not just for his abilities or his strength or his damage. And day by day she gets to see him heal, just a little, in the quiet companionship of everyone around him.
And then they run out of water.
And she’s standing behind him, as he tucks away his map, in the sheltering dark of the war rig, carefully crafting the words she’ll say this time. This is the moment, this is the fulcrum, this must be where she can change the outcome to life rather than drying to husks in the desert sun…but words that make him stay end in that outcome, words that make him come with them end in that outcome; and she doesn’t know, she can’t imagine what this fulcrum moment hold within it that will bend their destinies to some future without endless circling back through death to past-life to death again.
And this time, in her despair, she doesn’t bother bargaining with him or needling him or soothing him or gentling him or any other other strategies she has tried over the cycles. And when he chases them down over the hot salt…he has a plan.
And this is utterly new.
god damn you
There’s one version–
There’s one loop. A loop where he leaves with them across the salt.
They keep to their course, and they get to know each other, and they
save their water and their fuel and they balance it, speed before they
run out of water and steady before they run out of fuel. They gentle to
each other, and he speaks more and she touches more and Valkyrie holds
them together when she can’t, and they manage it. They reach a new green
place.
The cliffs are high, and they have to keep going around, until they
find a place where they can go up onto the green. There is a weathered
sign saying ‘Tapotupotu camping place’
There’s sweet water and green and they cry like they didn’t know
their bodies still could. They have made it. They set up camp on the
bank of the stream and can’t comprehend their fortune. It takes a long
time to fall asleep that night, she, Max and Valkyrie curled around each
other.
When the loop resets and it’s dark and desert and Furiosa feels
herself form the words ‘Can I talk to you?’ she holds them back. Walks
into the desert instead and screams at the sky for the next three loops.
*flings self on the sand*
*screams*
why? whyyyyyyy did it reset? were they all bitten by vipers or something? was there a flash-flood? whyyyyyy?
this fucking fic man…
[I’m sticking this here, cause it originated in my tags but could be the set-up for that AO3 entry someone (cough I’m lookin’ at you primarybufferpanel & bonehandledknife :D) could will compile:
I’m really loving all the different options for where/for whom the cycles happen. I like to imagine they ALL happen - maybe sequentially, maybe simultaneously - they ALL happen and repeat and repeat….until they converge on the life outcome, and all the cycles cease.
This whole fic contains within it no contradictions in that case - it ALL HAPPENS.]
It reset because what breaks the loop isn’t them all surviving; it’s overthrowing Joe’s reign.
Which means the convergence of all the cycles that finally breaks the loop is not the same combination as “everyone lives.” Maybe it’s impossible to have both.
Oh THAT - now that is PERFECT.
Max says it himself: if you can’t fix what’s broken, you’ll go insane (..with having to relive things over and over..)
I randomly want to see groundhog day fic in Fury Road but have no idea what that would even look like.
I’ve been following this thread with great fascination! I started thinking about what would happen if the loops begin much earlier and only happen when specific conditions are met, and realized it starts resolving backstory questions in interesting ways. Here is an opening bit:
____________________
The first time Furiosa runs away from the Citadel is seven days after her mother dies. She doesn’t have any time to prepare, she just sees her chance, kicks a war boy in the crotch, and fangs it for the horizon. On foot, no water, no weapons. She sprints through the crowds of the wretched, faster than the war boy, trying to plan. She has no supplies. Even if she can outrun them, she can’t survive in the desert without a few tools.
She trips over a wretched woman and they both go sprawling, and the answer presents itself - the woman has a knife tucked into her belt. She grabs it, jumps up, and runs on, ignoring the woman’s yell. The wretched have very little - she may have just taken a survival tool that meant as much to that woman as it now does to her. She doesn’t let herself think about it.
She takes an empty water bladder from another wretched. Furiosa knows how to collect water in the desert from dew or from plants, all Vuvalini do, it’s slow but she can do it. She runs into the desert until she hears motorbikes - the war boy and friends, coming to find her. She scrapes frantically at the side of a dune and curls up where the wind will pile more sand against her, and it works. They go past her.
That afternoon, a storm blows in. With no water supply and no shelter, she does not expect to survive it. I’m coming to find you, Mother. She thinks as the dark sand closes in and her world shrinks down to her body, her knife, and the water bladder. She’s not sure if it’s sleep or death that takes her.
She wakes up in the breeder’s pens in the Citadel. She blinks, confused, and then shakes her head vigorously. Hell of a dream, Fury.
The day plays out exactly like her dream, as best she can remember. The same war boy - she remembers the motorcycle chain carved into his skin - takes her from the breeder’s pen and past an open staircase that leads down. She can smell fresh air coming up it, and she almost kicks him again.
She doesn’t. Her mother’s last words were that she would protect her, even after death, and Furiosa isn’t going to disregard her warnings. The war boy takes her on to the healer, a man with a shock of white hair who laughs at his own jokes and looks between her legs. No-one’s looked there since she was old enough to bathe herself. She bites her lip and reminds herself to wait. The storm hits the Citadel that afternoon.
If you change your URL with the new tumblr update(that happened September 2015) be aware that any post you made as the old URL will stay as the old URL on all old reblogs and not automatically change to your new URL. For example, if you post a gif as ilovechocolate and change your URL to ilovevanilla… that gif’s username will stay ilovechocolate on all the reblogs done before the URL change, which means if they want to find that gif maker… they can’t just click on the URL because it will bring you to the blog ilovechocolate and not your new one ilovevanilla
So…. that means if someone changes their URL and doesn’t save the old one and someone takes your old one… all the reblogs of your original posts done before your URL change are gonna link to that person’s blog and look like they posted it
Oh my god THAT’s why she’s willing to sacrifice her crew, because she’s tried any variation of telling them, of asking their help, and there’s always somehow a weak link, they’re not good at secrets, at acting. They don’t even come away from the Citadel, or her crew is suddenly replaced by Joe, or she’s taken off the War Rig, or– In desperation she tries not telling them one time, and it’s gut-wrenching, but then she gets much further, and now she has to get them killed over and over again, punch Ace off of her running board like he’s one of the Wretched over and over again–
Oh god it got better worse.
This time isn’t the first time she’s encountered the Fool, although he often doesn’t show up. The life of a bloodbag, well - “life” is the issue, isn’t it? He only started appearing after she got out of the Citadel, and at first she hadn’t paid attention, so she doesn’t really know how her choices affect his survival but she knows it’s not good. Unlike everyone else in this infinite Hell (but at least she’s doing something, at least these three thousand days have been each different, each unlike the previous three thousand - and when she says “plus the ones I don’t remember” it is hard to know if she means the blur of this endless day merging into itself or the blur of the thousands of days before, each sameness so like the previous that she forgets, she forgets) - unlike everyone else, the Fool is unpredictable.
Imagine a villain getting injured and losing their memory and the heroes finding them and taking them with them and taking care of them and the villain gets their memory back after like a week but doesn’t want to say anything because the heroes are being so nice to them and nobody has been that nice to them in so long and they don’t want it to end and they’re maybe getting fond of the heroes but don’t tell anyone shhh. But eventually something happens and the heroes are in trouble and they’re trying to get the villain to run away because they still think they’re an amnesiac with no idea how to defend themself and they’ve grown to like them and don’t want them to get hurt but the villain just pushes past them toward whatever is trying to hurt the heroes and just fuckin goes guns blazing and destroys them
“A Roman man went to see Cicero speak, and didn’t get home til very late. His wife asked “what was his speech about?” and the man said, “I don’t know, I didn’t stay for the verb.””—a terrible, terrible Latin joke. (via wheretoyet)
Oh my god THAT’s why she’s willing to sacrifice her crew, because she’s tried any variation of telling them, of asking their help, and there’s always somehow a weak link, they’re not good at secrets, at acting. They don’t even come away from the Citadel, or her crew is suddenly replaced by Joe, or she’s taken off the War Rig, or– In desperation she tries not telling them one time, and it’s gut-wrenching, but then she gets much further, and now she has to get them killed over and over again, punch Ace off of her running board like he’s one of the Wretched over and over again–
She only ever reaches the other Vuvalini once, on their final run, which is why it was so crushing when she found out that there were only a few left, and that her home was gone. The run through we saw was the furthest she ever got, after hundreds of times watching her crew and the sisters die in different ways. Maybe she even killed Max many times before, or left him to die in the desert.
STOP THAAAAAT
*claws at face*
And he never once told her his name.
and the thing is, furiosa doesn’t think it’ll be the last run. she got unlucky with three war parties trailing her, she wasn’t able to kill the war boy which means he’ll show back up with a gun or a knife eventually, the fool shot angharad and now she’s fallen, gone under the wheels. she’ll keep playing along because giving up isn’t an option but she’s really just biding her time, waiting for the night to dissolve back into the walls of the citadel or a lucky bullet to land true and blot it all out.
it’s not until the sun rises and the fool come up swinging that she realizes she’s still driving. she’s still in the rig, in the light of a brand new day, and for the first time in countless days home is on the horizon
But that means that everything after that is final. No fifty different ways to find a path where Valkyrie lives. No alternate solutions to losing all but two of her people. What happens now is what happens. And she should be glad for that…
But lets get to the most controversial scene in Mad Max in terms of feminist theory, the infamous Water scene. I’ve been frankly putting this off because if you get into the larger visual, narrative, and thematic context of this scene, this post will never end. This is even before delving into the the meta-context of genre and tropes. So I’ve decided to narrow the scope of this post down as far as I can in terms of pure composition and practical concerns. However, if you have meta on these topics, please let me know by ask or via reblog and I will add as a footnote below the cut-tag.
Let me first point out though that we have spent the few minutes prior to this scene with Max waking up from the sandstorm (having flashbacks), getting freaked out by the needle in his skin, and about to shoot a man’s wrist off to get free.
He then has another flashback, notice the sound effect, but the flashback is triggered by a very specific thing:
Girl’s voices. Like Glory. Like, say, voices he finds when he turns around the corner, of the Wives:
A note on why I use both Golden Rule and Rule of Thirds: The Golden Rule, while is more effective/precise is ridiculously hard to eyeball on-the-go and while filming moving images. Rule of Thirds is often ‘good enough.’ Film as a medium is not photography or painting, it’s a medium intent on capturing moving objects, and sometimes the demands of the shoot means that you end up with the ‘best try,’ especially if it’s an action shot containing either internal or external movement (ie. either in-camera objects moving or the view itself moving). What is more likely to be specifically composed are still shots, wide shots, or the beginning/ends of shots/pans.
Which you can see here. Look at how BOTH the Rule of Thirds and Golden Rule lines up with the landforms at the horizon. Look at how precisely the War Rig lands on the major diagonal.
Now look at what happens when the camera lands in it’s final position and the Wives come into focus:
Nothing lands on any of the 8 major sweetspots (the crosshairs of the Golden or the Third. The Dag’s back bent over the boltcutters is centerframed. And check out what falls on the horitzonal Golden:
The water. Angharad is bent over and covering her face, Toast’s head is blocking Capable’s chest. Look at that space between the vertical Third. It’s the chastity belt.
I am telling you right now that it would be easy as pie to take that belt and put it past the lower third where it wouldn’t be seen or to the far left. If they really hated it they could have told the people who erase wires in visual fx to erase the belts or to move them. It’s position is not an accident.
For some comparison here is some concept art of the scene (found in The Art of Mad Max Fury Road):
Even if they were more clothed, look at how more objectifying their poses are, how the butts are subtly (or not subtly) turned towards the viewer instead of slightly away from our gaze (compare Toast and Angharad to the two wives on the right in the art) and how Furiosa was supposed to have been freeing them, instead of the wives freeing themselves.
Here’s the full picture:
Notice the absence of the belts and the placement of the hose. Look at how Furiosa and the gun are on the Golden.
Let’s go further into the movie itself however. (warning, lots of pictures)
I feel like if you look at the body language in the (potentially) problematic shots, it is made very clear that sex or seduction is the furthest away from any of their minds. They could have had any of the women act it like they thought seduction might give them an edge, but it’s clearly not present at all
Aries —
oh, my sweet, sweet child, what has the world done to you? you were a bright promise,
the tomorrow we had hoped for, holding flowers in your mouth without crushing them
and trusting blindly in those around you. and then came the blood; and now your fire
is a quiet thing, a crackling murmur hidden in the shadows. you’ve curled into yourself
like a newborn babe, held your heart tightly to your chest and began the tedious healing.
and all the salt in your tears made the deep wounds sting; was it this what kept you pure?
I wonder, oh, I wonder. before you, I had never seen an anathema so full of innocence.
(the world tried to cast you down from paradise; and it succeeded. but the fall couldn’t
maim you, for fire cannot kill fire – it simply shrunk you, much like a mimosa bloom.
I hope one day you’ll feel safe enough to flower, for there is so much beauty in you.)
Taurus —
I wish I could wrap my hands around your shoulders and hold you close for a while,
because oh, what sad things they are, your bones. I am so sorry, beloved; so very sorry.
and I am well aware these apologies cannot change anything, but I want you to know
that there is someone who sees you as you are – even when all the others see is your
superfluous frivolity and your desire for riches, I see the thoughtful mind, the gentle
gestures, each and every of your heartbeats. the song of you is imprinted into my memory
as the change in seasons is; you are unforgettable, something so precious and so very dear.
(don’t let them shame you for your greed – those who try to do so cannot wrap their
all too little minds around the fact that sin is not necessarily negative. your love for gold
has root in the same place as your love for others; you only want it so you may share it.)
Gemini —
it’s lonely, isn’t it? not being the way all others are. they tell you you’re a forgery, that your
smile is a mask and your composure an act, simply because they cannot accept the idea
that people are supposed to be multidimensional. on and on they go, pinning their ignorance
to you under the name of blame, seeing in you only that which they wish to see. sometimes,
you wish you were like them. I know you do. you shouldn’t. it might be lonely where you are,
but that doesn’t mean it’s a bad thing; lonely doesn’t mean secluded. there are others like you,
with minds like diamonds. others like you, who are only habitual in their tendency for change.
(you will find someone who can make sense out of you, one day, you know. they’ll know you
better than you yourself do – every single aspect of you, every single frantic facet and feeling.
and when you do, the wait will be more than worth it. I promise you won’t die nor live alone.)
Cancer —
you poor, poor, poor thing. it’s been a thousand years since you’ve curled into yourself, hid
your heart deep in the cradle of your ribs and let yourself sleep; then the time came for you
to awaken, and you found the world unchanged – it was as if everything had stood still.
reality swept into you like saltwater into gaping wounds, and every fiber of your soul wept.
fearful, you took the broken glass road still, walked it fully aware of what laid in waiting;
like a bride the night she is wed to a stranger, you swallowed your terror and saw it through.
often, those ignorant make you out to be such a bumbling coward. you’re not. you just aren’t.
(in fact, you’re on of the bravest people I know; it takes so much courage to let the world
see you weep – and it takes even more of it to wipe your tears and keep moving forward.
above all, it takes immense courage to allow yourself to love even when you know it’ll hurt.)
Leo —
the size of your heart puts to shame both Jupiter and your own pride and ego; to this day,
I am not sure if you would have been better off with one much smaller, but I know for sure
the world would have been emptier by far. you see, your touch is one of gold; whomever
you decide to invest your time and love into grows the size of Atlas, and so, without you
as you are now there would have been much less in the world. that is your downfall, isn’t it?
always has been. the way you’ve always put others first, giving them all of you, never asking
for anything to be given to you in return. you are a gardener, dearest, and people are your roses.
(it breaks my heart that all your selfless effort was almost always repaid in hurt and sorrow;
know that you are not to be blamed for any of it. you have done nothing wrong – sometimes,
things simply fall apart. don’t shut your heart. I’d hate to see your love rot and turn to hatred.)
Virgo —
you have endured well the contempt of others, my dear; you have taken every blow with open arms.
they have called you frigid and prude and arrogant and everything in between, but you knew better.
tell me then: if you can endure so well the slander of others, if you don’t care what they make of you,
why do you worry so? why do you see only blemishes when you look at yourself in the mirror?
your hesitance to trust others stems in your fear that if you let them in they’ll see your ugliness, all
the imagined imperfections you see in your reflection. you can’t trust others because you don’t trust
yourself; and I wish so badly that you would have a little more faith in who you are, in your beauty.
(being unable to forgive, jealousy and lust do not make you terrible. hate is human nature as much
as love is; emotions, be they bad or good, are intrinsic to mankind. you are such a passionate being,
despite your outward delicacy, and that, my dear, is simply stunning. please try to love yourself.)
Libra —
darling child, didn’t the gods tell you the mob sees dancers as something of the devil, especially
when their preferred stage is the sharp edge of a sword? few in this world love truth, and fewer still
are fond of things like righteousness and justice. your ability to remain indiscriminate in the face
of contradictory realities and deny none of them is both a blessing and a curse. your mind, I fear,
is the Pandora fate has crafted specifically for you; a beautiful gift that hides such doom and sorrow.
and you are aware of all of this – how you were meant for greater things, with your noble mind
and your true heart, yet on you dance, fighting against the windmills of adversity. how brave you are.
(know that your effort will not go without reward. know that you won’t be forever unloved, nor
will you be forever misunderstood. there will be those whom, like you, have the makings of just men,
and they will understand. keep your eyes open and search the crowd; that is what you do best.)
Scorpio —
I look at you and my heart grows small; there is so much sadness in you, from the flower
of your eyes to the slouching arch of your shoulders. you have been misjudged
and falsely accused for so long: whore, they said; monster, perverter, sickness of the soul –
and all of it because you like sex, as if somehow they are the virgin mary reborn,
the goddamn hypocrites. this, too, is something they have misunderstood; it is not sex
that you crave or are interested in. it is intimacy: it is the vulnerability that comes with having
your soul completely bared and lain before another; you crave love, in its’ purest of forms.
(and I know they have convinced you that someone of your kind is not “worthy”; fuck that.
your love is priceless, and one day someone will call your battle scars a masterpiece.
one day someone will love you as wholly as you deserve to be loved. they will love all of you.)
Sagittarius —
there is such wanderlust in you – you’ve made a home out of the long, long roads,
walked the earth to its’ ends and bathed in the oceans of the horizon; the sky was
your sole companion, its’ stars your map, the wind a spellsong to ward off the passing
sadness and melancholia that threatened to dim the flame of your heart. oh, my child;
how very wonderful you are, a barefoot nomad forever in awe of the world. the feeble
minded call you rootless; how wrong they are. having a voyager heart does not make you
afraid of commitment. it simply means your roots lie elsewhere, splat across the world.
(do not let their malice plant doubts into your mind’s garden; your gypsy heart is worth more
than all their empty ones combined. keep daring the world, sate your thirst for journeying;
only exploration can ever lead to discovery, so let your feet and head both walk the world.)
Capricorn —
good god, you’re so tired. life has worn you down to the marrow of your bones,
took everything from you until you were bare-handed; and yet.
and yet you’re still here, standing before me, your spine hardened to titanium,
a delicate thing that can withstand even the most apocalyptic of sieges;
you still find it in you to smile, bitter-bloody-all-teeth and still happy, somehow.
know that I am proud of you; of your bravery, of your resilience,
of how you’ve clung to life by the skin of your teeth. I am proud of you.
(and know that you deserve happiness – you may feel like you don’t, you may feel
that it is above the likes of you, but you deserve it; you have earned it.
know that one of these days, the sun will shine down on your lane, too.)
Aquarius —
there’s so much of you inside your skin I am often surprised it has yet to come apart at the seams;
there’s so much of everything inside your skull I am left in awe of your bones – often I wonder,
how are they strong enough to contain the exploding universe inside? my god, this world of ours
has seven wonders and you are all of them. the fortitude of your bright mind ceaselessly
surprises me; I know what to expect, and yet I am still thrown off by your ingenuity and your
ability to remain rational in your abstract ways. nobody but you is open enough to accept it all;
nobody but you can see through the prism of all eyes and walk away with their sanity intact.
(I know they call you “cold”, an ice queen of the Siberian tundra. let them be. those who cannot
see your white-hot warmth are not worthy of your brilliance. you are the brightest star, my dear,
someone accepting and embracing of it all. do not settle for anyone that is blind to your light.)
Pisces —
and how terrible it must be for you, who lives always halfway, to be stuck in a world
that demands certainties which you will never have to give. it is not to say you don’t want
to be resolute – you simply cannot. your world does not have truth, nor does it have falsity;
all that your world has are colors, swirling, forever mingling anew like the clouds in the sky.
one day you are overflowing with everything that blooms inside of you, and lilies
are spilling out of your ribs; the next, you’re empty, and you can’t for the life of you
find something that is all-encompassing enough to fill the growing abyss south of your sternum.
(know that it is okay. the most humane thing you can be is full of contradictions;
as maddening as it can be, each paradox gets you closer to the entity your peers call god.
it was never the devil that built his home on the crossroads, you know. embrace your nature.)
”—
poetry for the signs: the “you’ve done well” edition,
#hugs if you want them, I’m so sorry you got this victim blaming, that’s so horrible
I was just…like…what do i even do with this woman. Oh my God I just want to wrap her kids in blankets and be like “No, you don’t get these back until you get over some of your patriarchy bullshit.”
Also, I realized that the company was the same one from that post going around with the picture of a truck with the regular logo and then a smaller, pink, “Princess Packers” truck. Apparently the “Princess Packers” are college aged women who come and pack up your house for you and the company donates $1 for every box they pack towards the Cinderella Fund (which enables them to continue moving those escaping domestic violence for free)
I seriously wish this would have existed when I was thrown out by my abusive husband last year. Share to save a life.
It’s about this dude Henry who’s an artist living in New York,
and he has to go back to his hometown in Montana to take care of his grandfather who just recently had a stroke and is wheelchair-bound.
Things are all fine and dandy until Henry finds out that his old best friend from high school, as well as object of his unrequited affections that he’s never really been able to let go of is also back in town. His name is Dean. He’s there with his two sons to recoup from a recent divorce from his wife.
Henry is extremely frazzled by seeing his long-time crush after so many years, but they spend a lot of time together over the passing weeks and seem to fall into their old friendship very easily. Perhaps a little too easily….??? hmmm???
And with everything with Dean happening, Henry can’t be blamed that he’s entirely oblivious to Pike, the man who runs the local general goods store.
It’s obvious to us (and the whole damn town) that Pike’s been head over heels for Henry since high school, but is painfully shy. He can barely talk to Henry at all and it’s the cuTEST GODDAMN THING oh lord help me from this movie.
Throughout the movie, Pike can’t seem to help himself from wanting nothing more than to make Henry happy from afar. He’s supposed to be delivering food cooked by one of the older ladies in town to Henry and his grandfather’s house to eat every night, but Pike cooks his own, exceptionally better meals, and delivers those instead and tells no one.
Now, Henry does notice Pike, and something about him catches his attention. Even if he doesn’t understand why yet. He tries to invite him to stay for dinner almost every night in an attempt to get him to open up, but Pike only becomes more closed off when he notices what’s going on between Henry and Dean.
I’ll stop there, as I don’t want to give the whole thing away, but I can’t leave this without talking about the town’s residents in this movie. This place is 100% one of those little towns where everyone knows each other as well as their business, you have nosy little old ladies, dudes who do nothing all day but sit on the porch of the corner store and smoke a pipe, and they all go to church on Sundays.
AND YET, not only is this movie void of any homophobia from any character, basically the whole freaking town is all up in this whole love triangle. They support Pike so much that there’s even scenes where they all play matchmaker with him and Henry. They root for them in the goofiest, most loveable way.
SO BASICALLY, this is a silly romantic comedy, except gay. It’s all super lighthearted comedy with tiny bits of drama thrown in. No one dies!!!! No one is killed or commits suicide and has a 100% happy ending!!! The three main guys are just normal guys!!! There’s not a stereotype to be found here!! anD ONE OF THEM IS NATIVE AMERICAN. No seriously guys it hurts me that not everybody knows about this movie. I discovered it when I was in middle school in our video store’s tiny little LGBTQ section, and must have rented it 20 times throughout the years before I finally bought it. I know this movie almost frame by frame I’ve watched it so many times because it’s just so disgustingly cute and always makes me happy. NOW, this movie isn’t perfect. It’s got some clunky acting, weird.. I guess artsy moments that don’t make sense, and crosses into the line of cheesy quite a few times, BUT, that’s really not important. This is treated exactly as if it were a het romantic comedy. Their being gay has nothing to do with the overall story, and is never brought up save for a small plotline where Henry is guilty with himself for never coming out to his grandfather. But overall, more LGBTQ movies need to be like this, it’s just way too rare.
GO WATCH IT YOU’LL BE GLAD YOU DID. Sadly, the only way I know to get ahold of it is to just buy the DVD. But it’s fairly cheap on Amazon! And even cheaper if you buy it used on there, but either way I promise it’s worth it to own. Like I said, I think I kept our video store in business from my renting it so many times.
Oh, and I hope you enjoy country music to some extent because this has the countriest soundtrack of all time.
“The ceramics teacher announced on opening day that he was dividing the class into two groups.
All those on the left side of the studio, he said, would be graded solely on the quantity of work they produced, all those on the right solely on its quality.
His procedure was simple: on the final day of class he would bring in his bathroom scales and weigh the work of the “quantity” group: 50 pounds of pots rated an “A”, 40 pounds a “B”, and so on.
Those being graded on “quality”, however, needed to produce only one pot — albeit a perfect one — to get an “A”.
Well, came grading time and a curious fact emerged: the works of highest quality were all produced by the group being graded for quantity.
It seems that while the “quantity” group was busily churning out piles of work-and learning from their mistakes — the “quality” group had sat theorizing about perfection, and in the end had little more to show for their efforts than grandiose theories and a pile of dead clay.”—
Art and Fear- David Bayles and Ted Orland (via qweety)
Perfection is intimidating. I think most artists blocks come from the fear of creating something imperfect.
putting it even more simply: just make shit. eventually it’ll be good shit. maybe most of it will just be shit! but you can’t make good shit if you’re not making a lot of shit.
So funny story. I hear people tell me that I’m excessively paranoid a lot of the time–mostly guys, but the reason I’m making this post is because of a conversation I recently had with a woman who’s been friends with my dad a long time. I love my dad a lot and he’s mostly pretty on top of his shit (he’s also going to therapy to get more on top of his shit, so PROPS for that, Dad), and this woman (we’ll call her Janie) is nice enough. She has a daughter who’s just starting high school and a son who’ll be in college next year. I was talking with her about my college experience and she asked if I went to parties and stuff. I don’t. At all. I told her as much and she asked me why, and I said because I’m busy, because I’m an introvert, because of any of a number of reasons, and I finished the list by admitting that I don’t trust a lot of the guys on my campus.
She asked why.
I hemmed and hawwed and said ‘uh’ a lot, and then I told her that my campus of four hundred people had five sexual assault cases last semester alone. My freshman year there were at least two people outright expelled for it.
Janie, mother of a teenaged boy about to go into college and a teenaged girl just going into high school and already growing up into a stunner, wrote it off by saying “well, most of them must have been misconceptions; you know, it’s easy to miscommunicate when romance is involved; I’m sure there were a lot of overreactions and morning-after regrets.” I stared at her for a moment and went “Actually, one of the reports last semester was mine, and I know two of the other people who filed them. It’s usually pretty obvious when someone’s trying to force the point.” I gave her a summary of what happened to me (look, it’s a long story, some dude came over to watch a movie with my roommate and me and the day ended with him pinning me to the floor while I jammed my thumb into his throat and my roommate helped pull him off) and she kept at it, talking about how I had probably just given him mixed signals, how people probably didn’t listen when I told them not to touch me because I go from zero to sixty real quick (if I say ‘stop touching me’ and you don’t, my next statement will be ‘stop touching me or I’ll break your finger,’ and I expect people to thereafter stop touching me).
And all I could think was “My god, you’re raising a daughter, I’m so scared for her right now.”
I’ve become aware of late that I’m a statistical outlier, whether it’s from poor luck or because I attract a certain kind of trouble or because I act a certain way. Most girls don’t have five (six depending on how you reckon it) assaults committed against them by their eighteenth birthday. I hope to God that Janie’s daughter is as lucky as Janie evidently has been, that she’ll never know how terrifying it is to know that the person holding your down is twice your size, or that if you scream for help no one will believe you (fun fact, no one except my parents believed me four times out of five). I hope that she never asks herself “do I grab my roommate’s switchblade and go outside and check on that freshman sitting outside in the dark, or do I go get an RD because that’s a very tall young man.” I hope she lives a safe enough life that she never finds herself sitting there in the aftermath of violence, whether it’s just an unwelcome hand groping her thigh or something much worse, and wonders to herself who the hell will believe me.
But most of all, I hope that, in the event she’s ever in the position I’ve been in, or worse, her mother doesn’t fucking tell her she’s overreacting and making shit up.
