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themanicgalaxy · 3 years

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SPN 7X16 Out with the Old

les go

ah ballet dancers

ah no she's gonna die

yeah she's bitchy, but I think she should get to be bitchy

Swan lake of course

oh that was

intense

like really interesting, but INTENSE JESUS CHRIST

SHE'S DEAD??SHOULDN'T SHE BE ALIVE??

damn...he literally only knows America

don't read into that At All

ah just COFFEE

I relate Sam

DEAN WATCHED A TOXIC FEMININITY BALLET MOVIE

TWICE

NERD

ah no not the fancy cursed ballet shoes

oh shit not the kid please no

SAFIHS OH MY GOD THEY JUST APPEARED

OH GOD NO

AND THEY FIT PERFECTLY NO N O

SHE KEEPS KICKING HIM

*kick* SORRY! *kick* SORRY!

they…they come to DEAN??

THEY’RE TARGETING D E A N ??

they trace it while DEAN KEEPS WANTING TO PUT THE SHOES ON

YEAH MANS ISN’T AS MASCULINE

oh god not cursed KNIVES

NO CURSED TEAPOT THAT’S WORSE THAT’S SO MUCH WORSE

STOP DRINKING HOT TEA STOP STOP THAT OH MY GOD

Jesus fuck

yeah they’re too late

“I wonder how old porn kills you” Lmao

HEY TIMMY

This honestly is so funny if it weren’t so fucked up

like your heart sinks each time because apart from Sam and Dean, no one is safe

KID DO NOT STAB YOUR MOTHER

LMAO BITCHY TIRED SAM

Dean must have had fun with the wrangling old porn for some old guy

move on, keep them in your memory awwww

and again, right after bobby died

ah the “sell sell sell” lady

ah sell because of dick roman and then kill whoever’s in your way

damn she’s a bad boss

and they would know about torture wouldn’t they

STOP GOING FOR KIDS P L E A S E

BAHHAAHA

SAM WITH NO WIFI GOING "NO CANNOT BE ALONE WITH MY THOUGHTS NO CANNOT

oh god poor Sam

Frank and Dean are hilarious

jesus christ he almost got hit with a car

ah and he sees the winchesters

I feel like the leviathans are some kind of comment on toxic work culture, just a bit

mY silEnce is yoUr Cue

they’re hilarious

“call me if you don’t die” lmao Frank

“he’s singing stairway to heaven rn” “good song” “Not 50 times in a row” AHAHHA

no lucifer this time tho

ah he got to Scott

and here we go

AMONG US IN REAL LIFE

I still

the cgi is so funny

ah george! good for you!

“sure you can uproot your life. It’s not that hard” DEAN

“thank you..I guess”

he convinces them

damn

good for you george

gooey son of a bitch

Cure cancer?

it’s gonna have caveats

aw sam sleeps to soft rock

AW BAD MOON RISING

AND THE UHAUL

oh god

oh no frank

oh shit they got him

Needle drop: been a while, but I like it in theory. It’s acute concept, the “always knocks you right out” I wish It was a bit more emotional but also watching it at 1.5 speed doesn’t help

Once more, the Bi Dean agenda rises, the man just wants to do ballet

The corporate commentary is…is there I think. Like about the leviathans, I think it’s there

damn no luci this time. I assume budget cuts but still. A lil wacky to have him implied. I think they should have done it more

Also pretty horrendous scene with the cursed objects, those were Well Done, I think the fact that this wasn't a monster of the week was bad for it, ultimately.

damn I hope frank is ok

#pawswatchesspn #7X16 Out with the Old #good things #but overall it as too many things #I think this one should have been monster of the week #dig into the cursedness #still 3 behind but #some watching was done

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toomuchcoffeebye · 5 years

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Aight so I’m going to drop some bullshit on everyone because I have recently gotten on meds and worked through this, so. It’s pressing on my heart and I wanna vent. Reblog and comment if you want, but, this is personal.

[TW: suicide attempts (non-descriptive), depression, anxiety, sexual harassment, ignorance, heavy religious reppression, sexism, aphobia, homophobia, and minor allusions to racism (I am white, it hasn’t affected me personally, but it comes up a bit in this via general ignoance)]

K, so, Let’s start with my family background. White, Church of Christ or Catholic, Military, and in general, reliant on both the church and the military economy. I dunno if y’all know anything about the Church of Christ, but it is exclusionary, insistent on being the ONE TRUE CHURCH and ultimately pretty cultish, in their controlling of information, insistence on maintaining higher level education, and distinctive beliefs that they are following the First-Generation Christians despite being founded in the early 19th century. (http://www.theexaminer.org/volume8/number6/leftcoc.htm for more info [TW:religion and repressive religion specifically.)

ANd I was raised in it. My grandparents are wholeheartedly involved in one of those huge ones in the buckle of the bible belt, middle Tennessee. My mom likes to tell the story of when I was born, the week dad came home from Iraq so he wouldn’t miss my birth, they tried a new Church of Christ and she felt that I was coming Right Then and they had to leave halfway through the sermon. We went kind of inconsistently, but we lived the way Coc wanted, more or less. We (my family) sang a whole lot, (my dad used to be a member of a military chorus) as the church encourages A Capella worship (if a church has instruments, it is not a church of Christ). Coc encourages the father as the head of the household with a really specific tenant: the father of the household is responsible for the faith of all his children and his wife. and all of their children. ad nauseum. He prays for all of them, and they tell him what they want to pray for. This means, of course, that as a human female, your spiritual connection to god is always mediated by a man. forever. So Coc(k) has a patriarchy problem. ABout SPIRITUAL HEALTH! wtf. I never really understood what god WAS, and I guess the inconsistent church going saved me from their indoctrination, cause I’ve considered myself an atheist since I was like 12 and understood what that meant. I got baptized at 15, which in Coc is in a way signing over your body to god, for my dad. He really looks up to his father, they share a name and lots of features, and he respects G-pa for his spiritual conviction, which for him was broken a little by his time in the military. My dad wants to ensure that all of his children get to heaven, like his father wants to, and he was pressuring me because my older siblings got baptized earlier, at like 13, when they were ‘old enough to decide that’. Personally, I don’t think anyone should be allowed to sign themselves over to a deity when they can’t go on Disney.com without parental permission. I recently told my dad I was an atheist and he didn’t believe me because “you’re baptized!” and tbh I can’t believe I had to apologize for lying to my father about something he very much pressured me into. but Wtv. all of this was just set up for:

For the longest time, (ok, like 5 years wtv) I considered myself Asexual. It made sense, I could describe myself as that with ease, and it felt right. I’m only now beginning to unpack the feelings I held in unhealthily. Asexual is a valid and real sexuality, but I am not asexual. I’m pretty sure I’m bi, but tbh I have doubts about even that. I don’t trust myself to know what I want, partially because my family situation drilling into my head the idea that I have to have a boyfriend until I have a husband, and then I belong to him spiritually at least. I told my mom I was asexual, and explained it, and she first decided everyone felt like that, and when I pressed her that I was VERY sure that wasn’t true, she pulled over and ranted at me for Not Giving Me The Grandchildren I Deserve and it just sucked. I was pretty out at school, but around the time I told my mother I was being sexually harassed by this guy, call him Q, because of it. Q believed it ‘was a waste’ for me to be ace, and ‘no one is like that’, ‘everyone wants it’. He had a habit of grabbing me, touching me but I believed he was my friend. One day though, he slid his hand too close to my actual genitals and I sprained my hand punching him, and my friend reported him for sexual harassment after I ranted about him, and I didn’t press charges, because Q Was My Friend. Along side all that bullshit, I had lots of boyfriends through the years because my parents had made it very clear that I was to tell them if and when I had a boyfriend, and I took that to mean I had to have a boyfriend, and if I didn’t I should be looking for one. You can probably see how all of this compounded to make a bit of internal strife. Buckle up, Bois, I’m not fucking done.

So, I’m not going to out my siblings, no names, no specifics, but it should be made clear that we were going through similar shit, because not everyone is straight. (Or white, as it were. My sister brought home a Puerto Rican guy (I think? it’s kinda fuzzy by now, but not white) and my dad made a joke about ‘thinning the gene pool’. (caveat: he may have been talking about height, but I’m not sure. Again, fuzzy.) ) I didn’t learn that not all my siblings are straight until a long while after they knew about each other because I’m both a dumb rock and 2nd youngest. So, along with all the secrets being the 3rd of four came with, I was hiding this. I was hiding secrets for each of them, from each other, for my parents, from the siblings, for the siblings as a whole, for my older sister specifically, she had lots of lies for me to hide. And damn, that hurt. My parents focus a lot on honesty, and it’s worse in our household to lie than it is to do something bad. It’s worse to show emotions, though, so I guess it’s just fucked up. So there was I, overburdened by half-clear secrets and the need to shield what was left of my emotional core. This was compounded by the fact that everyone I met when I was little thought I was ‘odd’, if they were being polite. My older sister thought I was insane and I believed her because for no other reason would I be having so much trouble ‘controlling my emotions’ as my father puts it, having so much trouble holding what I assumed were a normal amount of secrets and being told I wasn’t fully human to the God I didn’t believe in.

This might sound trivial to some people, but it has left me fundamentally scared of expressing cheerfulness, sadness, anger, or anything but blind complacency and fear. I have severe Depression and Anxiety, no one can really read my emotions except for maybe my closest sibling and a few people who read what I write when I write expressively. I am scared to cry when I’m not alone, because I’ve been hit for less. I’m scared to cry when I am alone, for someone might hear me. I’m scared to show fear to the extent I apologize to my friends when I have a panic attack they caused by shoving their hand in my face repeatedly in a crowded and confusing party.

Recently, I was upset my sister wanted my company after I was sick and tired form surgery, she broke a promise she’d made, and she invaded my personal space. He threatened to kick me out because I was being so rude to her, he said ‘go pack your bags’ and everything, meaning it fro shock value, and I did. I went and packed my bags. He called me back down and asked the real question: Do I feel loved at home? I answered him honestly, and I told him I’m and atheist, It wasn’t just a phase, and I was serious. I didn’t tell him that I really wanted to leave, for real, because anyone who says that to their child probably means it, and if they don’t they shouldn’t be saying it at all. I didn’t do this because he’s in charge of the funding I get from his military benefits for college and I didn’t know what I would do without those. I was scared, and I lied. My own mother doesn’t fucking want me and she complains that I’m ‘hard to read’ when she has told me I’m an evil, emotionally-manipulative child for crying when she yelled at me for dropping a plate. I’m not sure I feel loved anywhere, to be honest. I guess that’s dumb, but you know. That’s how it is sometimes. My family says ‘I love you’ a lot, a lot- a lot, but I have never been sure they meant it, especially when it is said the most emphatically when dad is holding and comforting a child he just beat. He forced us to cuddle up to him after he beat us and he held us, telling us he loved us. I can’t trust that man saying ‘I love you’.

Again, I suppose this is trivial to some, but I have attempted suicide six times. I have had to give my knife to my friends, all that stupid shit. I’m not going to describe how, because that would be irresponsible. However, I’m going to do something radical and explain why I don’t want to anymore. Item one: It hurts. I have a high tolerance to pain, but the physical pain of a failed suicide attempt is dwarfed only by the gnawing regret, guilt, shame, and reminder that you’re Still Here. Item two: there are, really, things that I enjoy. They’re stupid and mundane, but I like breakfast. Eggs, bacon, the sunrise and the cool dew. I like baking, though I don’t do it often. Something about sweets and the making something always appealed to me. I like writing and drawing and handicrafts, though I am not very good at any of those things. Something about making something for others or something physical to hold always appealed to me, because it’s proof that I exist and manipulate reality. I never put any stock in that whole every-life-has-a-purpose bullshit, because if you were out here to do something, you can fuck it up, and I believed I had already fucked it all up. Item Three: While, even now, I don’t want to exist, there’s something mathematically implausible and cosmically coincidental about the fact that I do exist, that a consciousness inhabits this collection of atoms that tricked itself into becoming alive. I like the rebelliousness of it. The sheer existential power I’m flexing on every speck of dust that’s not currently alive. I DO exist, and there’s nothing more improbable or insane than that.

[TL;DR: I had a fucked up childhood and am now broken as a result. Don’t kill yourself for the status points you have above non-living matter.]

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theconservativebrief · 6 years

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As a former journalist who went to work at a startup, solicitations for tech industry events show up in my inbox with some frequency. But this was a new one:

“We are bringing together the sacred plant medicine Ayahuasca with leaders at the world’s most innovative startups,” the email said. “Together we will go on a journey to deeply explore our individual and collective purpose.”

Over the subsequent weeks, follow-up pitches about the Costa Rica retreat offered testimonials about the benefits of ayahuasca from the likes of the bestselling author and entrepreneurial figurehead Tim Ferriss and pro surfer Kelly Slater. “Every participant will be positively transformed. The lives they live, companies they build and examples they set will transform the world.”

My first thought is that I would love to be a fly on the wall at such an event. But there’s a point that gets lost in the sensationalist glee surrounding the idea of a bunch of tech bros tripping in the jungle: “Counterculture,” whether that means partying, looking down on mainstream religion, or embracing a hodgepodge of eastern religious values, is the norm in “Silicon Valley” — a catchall term I’m using here to broadly describe the technology workers not just in the Bay Area but also in New York and Los Angeles.

If you don’t fit into that — whether because you’re older, belong to a traditional religion that comes in conflict with countercultural values, or just aren’t that into partying — it can be hard to fit in. And that matters in an economically dominant field that’s hard enough to penetrate even without cultural obstacles.

Working in the industry, especially as a former Googler, when I hear allegations that tech companies have a baked-in bias against conservatism or claims that conservative employees didn’t feel comfortable being open, my immediate reaction has been: Well, of course they don’t. And such allegations have become a chorus on the right. But I think the kind of conservatism that Silicon Valley is hostile to has less to do with politics and far more to do with lifestyle.

Julie Fredrickson, a longtime tech entrepreneur and conservative Christian, tells me she frequently feels her religious beliefs are out of place in the tech world. “I’m confident that discovering I’m a Calvinist would lead to some awkward conversations I don’t necessarily want to have with Silicon Valley folks,” says Fredrickson, CEO of the cosmetics company Stowaway. “People who have actually, very carefully considered belief systems, whether religious or otherwise, don’t always feel safe expressing it.”

“What, really?” is a typical reaction among the entrepreneurial class when she mentions her religiosity, which she avoids bringing up unless asked, says Fredrickson. She added that she feels the need to explain her faith to reassure previously skeptical parties that she’s “rational.”

Fredrickson also was not raised Christian and frequently mentions how she came to it on her own terms and in tandem with her love of math (“a long story,” she says). It’s a stark contrast to the industry stereotype that anyone who adheres to organized religion must have had that belief imposed on them by their family.

At Google, few co-workers would blink an eye if you told them that you spent the previous weekend attending an electronic music festival in an otter costume, but you might get some funny looks if you admitted you went to church every weekend. I used to prowl around on a listserv of Googlers who considered themselves agnostics, atheists, and skeptics; the responses on a thread about the revelation that a small group of Christian employees had booked a conference room for a weekly prayer group ranged from, “We employ people who pray?” to “Is that really appropriate to do at work?” (Note: This is a company that hosted Justin Bieber concerts and pie-eating contests at the office.)

Religious conservatives aren’t the only people who find themselves shut out of Silicon Valley’s hegemonic culture. Thanks to its well-documented worship of youth — which ties back to the same ’60s-inspired counterculturalism — ageism is just as pervasive as one might expect.

It is, I think, the industry’s most insidious “-ism,” in part because of how little attention it gets. There was no hashtag activism movement launched when nearly 300 people joined an age discrimination lawsuit against Google, or when a report found that job opportunities in Silicon Valley started to dry up when employees hit their late 40s. It was even revealed that cosmetic surgery treatments were soaring in the Bay Area on behalf of employees who were afraid of looking their age.

Silicon Valley’s biases reveal a deep distaste for anything that could be considered “square.” The euphemistic HR term “culture fit” is meant to ensure employees are comfortable with a company’s ethos and attitudes. In reality, it’s a concept that’s more often used to exclude employees, regardless of age, who would prefer a quiet dinner at home rather than join their co-workers for Thirsty Thursday.

An obsessive attention to culture fit becomes an even bigger problem as the tech industry expands and continues to be a major driver of job growth, and companies like Amazon and Apple announce enormous new headquarters that may wind up in parts of the country that — the horror! — may have voted for Trump in 2016.

That’s why, upon reading about James Damore’s decision to bring a class-action lawsuit against Google for discriminating against white male conservatives, my mind jumped not to aggrieved Trump supporters, but rather to culturally conservative people, particularly those who follow traditional Western religions.

In Silicon Valley, to be perceived as inadequately open-minded — as defined by the norms of this peculiar culture — induces awkwardness at best and, sometimes, outright hostility. It’s a place where that false binary of “rationality” versus “faith” is often accepted as truth.

Half of tech workers identified as atheist or agnostic, according to a survey by the Lincoln Network, an organization dedicated to advancing principles of economic conservatism in the tech industry. That’s compared to just 7 percent of the US population who identify as atheist or agnostic (although an additional 16 percent identify as religiously unaffiliated, but without either of those two labels), and the respondents in this particular survey skewed slightly conservative.

At Google, I spent every day in a work environment with a specific cultural uniformity — one with its own rituals and deities that come to feel decidedly contradictory for a population that so fervently rejects “faith.”

One quick scan through the email from the ayahuasca invitation, and a pattern of vocabulary emerges: “Sacred,” “purpose,” “transformation” — with this kind of language, you may as well be in church. Companies profess to be driven not by mere secular profit but a belief in changing the world; until his death, a speech by Steve Jobs was treated like a sermon.

Yet tech’s avowed rationalism and skepticism has some very obvious contradictions. There are prominent factions in Silicon Valley who would scoff at anyone’s belief that Jesus Christ could really perform miracles but who would have no problem believing a tweet that read “Just turned water into wine!” if it came from Elon Musk.

And as proved by tech’s reaction when Musk claimed he was pivoting from electric cars and batteries to selling flamethrowers and space cars, there are plenty of people who don’t question him when he’s joking. This, in turn, willed Musk to take himself seriously: He was joking at first, but enough people took him at face value that he ultimately sent one of his cars into space and sold 20,000 flamethrowers in around 100 hours.

It’s because Elon Musk sounds like he’s grounded in the language of science and invention, even when he’s being ridiculous. In recent years, Silicon Valley, or at least a sufficient number of prominent people in it, have shown themselves to be highly susceptible to some pretty irrational behavior if an idea somehow sounds scientifically valid.

In his forthcoming book Super Natural, which was previewed in an opinion piece for the New York Times called “Don’t Believe in God? Maybe You’ll Try UFOs,” psychology professor Clay Routledge argues that faith is a fundamental part of human behavior. Routledge explained to me over the phone that rationality and irrationality don’t exist in a binary. “Every person experiences both sides of these neural systems.”

For Routledge, people who are religious understand that they can switch between both sides of their brain — the rational and the more intuitive. He believes that people who flat-out deny that they have a more intuitive side have a tougher time distinguishing between the two. “The irony is that a lot of times it’s people who actually are religious explicitly, and know that, that are better at switching between the two modes,” he explained.

Everything I’m calling out about Silicon Valley comes with a caveat: I’m guilty of participating in much of this. I have gone to my fair share of counterculture-inspired events at the invitation of tech industry colleagues and thought little of it. I’ve also generally felt welcome and comfortable amid tech companies’ relaxed corporate cultures that encourage employees to bring their personalities and identities to work, blurring the line between the personal and professional. My thinking had always been, well, who wouldn’t like this?

But perhaps there are few more important mantras in Silicon Valley than the simple reminder that not everyone is like me.

Last month I ended up going to a tech retreat in hipster beach mecca Tulum, Mexico — the kind of event where the agenda included both sunrise meditations and parties until 4 am and was likely to draw the kind of crowd that felt it had the stamina for both. Much to my relief, it wasn’t like that: Many attendees were visibly older than the millennial demographic, and though there was an open bar every night, there were also alcohol-free meetups for those who were sober or in recovery.

Some people had even brought their small children along for the weekend. Yes, there were those late-night poolside parties with DJs, sweat lodge ceremonies, and talks about astrology too. But there were plenty of people there who I couldn’t imagine signing up for a Tim Ferriss-endorsed ayahuasca retreat any time soon.

The people who don’t fit today’s stereotypically freewheeling Silicon Valley mold, whether due to religious faith, family status, or simply a distaste for partying with their co-workers, are likely in the majority. As my former Google colleague Adam Singer tweeted in the wake of a notorious (and likely sensationalized) Vanity Fair piece about alleged “sex parties” in Silicon Valley, “99.999% of folk in Bay Area don’t go to sex parties, microdose LSD at work or drink water from the toilet.” (That last item a reference to a New York Times article about an outlandish trend of drinking untreated “raw water.”) Singer concluded: “But they make for good media stories to talk about the fringes.”

He’s right. But when the fringes have enormous influence over the culture and its perception, there’s a problem. Silicon Valley holds vast economic influence, and it needs to be open to hiring and retaining employees who don’t fit its image. Without it, paradoxically, an industry and culture that professes progressivism, open-mindedness, and a devotion to science and empiricism ends up becoming the most exclusionary and prone to magical thinking.

Caroline McCarthy recently finished the residency program at TED, in which she researched the advertising industry’s role in political partisanship. A former journalist and Google marketer, she now works in digital advertising.

First Person is Vox’s home for compelling, provocative narrative essays. Do you have a story to share? Read our submission guidelines, and pitch us at [email protected].

Original Source -> Silicon Valley has a problem with conservatives. But not the political kind.

via The Conservative Brief

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