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oh you're in a horror film/book and your phone died/has no bars? how boring. I think phones in horror SHOULD work. they should ding only to have the protagonist check and find nothing. they should get calls from somebody you don't know but is still somehow in your contacts. google maps should lead you to one place, no matter what address you type in.

phones are such a big part of our daily lives, removing them from horror removes the horror from our experience. what if the horror felt like it could happen to you, right here, right now? what if it felt like it was already happening?

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Pirate jokes

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Ok but like. What the fuck is there to do on the internet anymore?

Idk when I was younger, you could just go and go and find exciting new websites full of whatever cool things you wanted to explore. An overabundance of ways to occupy your time online.

Now, it's just... Social media. That's it. Social media and news sites. And I'm tired of social media and I'm tired of the news.

Am I just like completely inept at finding new things or has the internet just fallen apart that much with the problems of SEO and web 3.0 turning everything into a same-site prison?

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I'm starting to get smile lines.

How lovely to have smiled so often that happiness permanently etches itself into your face

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Please observer the bush dog aka the organic dachshund

They have been observed! My favorite canid! Dog if bear + weasel!

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it's not anti feminist to enjoy ryan gosling's performance of ken. if i make a little joke abt him it's just a little joke and it's wild to even have to make that disclaimer after all the awesome insightful conversations about womanhood this film has sparked! you can enjoy the comedy of the film, because if not why is it even in there?

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Barbie movie: what if men were treated like women?

Also Barbie movie: what if women realized this and tried to give men equal rights?

Also also Barbie movie: what if men are just role-playing into the idea of the patriarchy but also feel stifled by it? Everyone deserves equality

Men: The Barbie movie is about hating men🤯

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the barbie movie really said "give me back my girlhood it was mine first" and i've never wanted to go back to being a girl playing with dolls on the living room floor more than right then

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I've seen a lot of people talking about how Barbie talks about how the patriarchy affects women and how well it does that, so I wanna talk about how Barbie talks about how the patriarchy affects men and how well it does that. Because it does that really well tbh.

At the beginning of the movie, it's made very clear that the Kens are constantly competing with each other, and trying to prove their worth, their Ken-ness, to both the Barbies, and more importantly, to the other Kens. In fact, multiple times through the movie it's shown that Ken seems to find the opinions of other Kens as a motivator for him to do things. He tries to show off to Barbie only after he sees the other Kens saying hi to her. He only starts dancing with Barbie when he sees the other Kens dancing with her. He only goes with her to the Real World after another Ken accuses him of cowardice and he decides to prove him wrong. Barbie says "Ken's not cool!" and Ken responds "He is to me."

This shows so damn well what the patriarchy is like for men. Because for the Kens it's not necessarily about Barbie, it's about what other Kens think of you. Being a man you are constantly, incessantly trying so damn hard to prove to the other men around you that you are a man, the manliest man to ever man, the best Ken to ever Ken. Literally doing backflips trying to prove yourself. And this is before patriarchy is even officially introduced to the story, there's no undertone of power yet, this is just what it's like to be a man around other men. It's toxic masculinity.

And when the patriarchy is introduced, that's increased tenfold. At first it looks like they've banded together to take power, but really they're still competing with each other, they're just doing it differently. Rather than competing to see who can get Barbie to fall in love with them, they're competing to see who can be the manliest, have the manliest stuff, wear the manliest clothes, have the manliest house and decorations.

And then they literally go to war. War is considered one of the few places where it's socially accepted for men to be more emotional, form deep and personal bonds with other men, and that's exactly what happens in the movie. They go to war, and there's an entire song where they bond and learn not to fight with each other anymore.

And that I think is the message from the Kens. For men, the way the patriarchy affects them is it forces constant competition and animosity, even around people that are supposed to be your friends. It makes it impossible to express your feelings unless they're with a romantic partner, and all of this turns you into a pent up ball of emotions with nowhere to go.

Which means that the message is: In order to fix the way the patriarchy oppresses men, men need to learn how to form close bonds with people, especially other men. Because like Barbie said to Ken, he needs to discover who he is without her. Men have learned to lean on women as a crutch, using them to figure out how to Be A Person and express emotions in a healthy way, but this can very quickly turn into a woman feeling like she needs too be his mother and teach him how to do these things. And Ken was 100% doing this, or at least he was trying to throughout the movie. Ken was so desperate for Barbie to be in love with him, not necessarily because he loved her, but because he needed a person he could just exist as himself around. Because he couldn't do that with the other Kens, the only person he could be himself around was Barbie.

And what's so great about the end of the movie is that the Kens did eventually figure out how to form close bonds with each other! They went to war, argued and fought, but by the end of the song they were holding hands, kissing each other on the cheek, telling each other they were enough. Even when Ken is up in the dreamhouse, crying and saying that he looks stupid, all the other Kens start shouting back up to him, saying that he looks cool. And Ken responds by giving one of his new friends his coat, which was clearly very important to him.

What the Kens did, that's what men in the real world need to do. They need to form close bonds with other men and stop competing with each other. Hopefully not by going to war the way the Kens did, Barbie isn't a blueprint for solving the patriarchy lol.

I'd be happy to do it through a song though.

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The Barbie Movie shows really one thing...

Which is, that some men are utterly unable to differenciate between "men" and "the patriarchy". (To be fair, some women somehow do not manage that either.)

Spoilers!

I mean, the movie is not subtle at all. It just goes in there saying: "Patriarchy is bad. Even for men." While also saying: "Actually, Matriarchy is not that great either." Like, it is right there in the movie. There is not even that much of a metaphor going on. The movie has a fucking narrator, just to clear up any misunderstandings.

Yet, somehow all those whiny movie review blokes all just hear "Men are bad", because they are entirely unable to differenciate between patriarchy and men. As if men were non-existent under any other form of organizing society.

And we actually get it pretty much called out how under patriarchy men still exist within constant competition with each other, because they gotta define themselves by what they have instead of who they are. They are not worth anything on their own. But their entire worth is defined by what they have. Their house. Their car. Their job. Their girlfriend. They need other things to reinforce their value, because the system is devaluing them as people.

But yeah, sure. The movie is "anti-men"... Totally. 🙄

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anyone else think that Barbie was gonna like apply for a job and not go see a gynecologist???

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i wanna know what greta gerwig was thinking when she made depression barbie wear sweatpants all day and watch pride and prejudice for the 27th time because that made me feel seen like no other barbie ever could

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the oceangate situation is really funny but i do want to take a moment to look at the fact that five people of their own volition decide to go two miles under the sea in something controlled by a $30 xbox controller with no beacon or way to navigate, go missing, and immediately a massive search effort is underway with people anxiously combing the ocean for any sign of these chucklefucks, but the greek coast guard capsized a boat full of hundreds of migrants, killing 80 with over 500 people still counted as missing, and the eu won't even investigate

you can and should hate rich people, but you also need to show up for the oppressed

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this whole oceangate submarine fiasco has actually led to a lot of interesting talks and debates about the grey area of human empathy vs the inclination to recoil at the bizarre behaviors of the ultra wealthy and how people struggle with both ideas and is actually very interesting to watch play out in different types of people

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I keep posting about this because it really shows what our country is all about.

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I think the long-running fandom argument over whether The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess is "grimdark" or not – e.g., yes it is, because it has tropes X, Y and Z, no it isn't, because what it does with those tropes is so deeply silly, etc. – is based on a fundamental misunderstanding of what a genre of media is.

Like, yes, genres of media typically have checklists of tropes, but a checklist of tropes isn't what a genre is. A genre of media is a dialogue, consisting of creators borrowing from and responding to and criticising each other. Insofar as it's possible to draw lines between genres at all, those lines are drawn between works that are participating in the conversation and works that aren't.

In this sense, Twilight Princess is absolutely a work of early 2000s dark fantasy – even a conventional one, in some respects. It's participating in the conversation, it's got something to say about it, and it's engaging with the tropes of contemporary dark fantasy in very specific and intentional ways. Those ways happen to be goofy as fuck.