violsva | Entries tagged with what they do to valuable natural resourc

So basically all of the dystopic takes on superheroes I've seen have the supers, or at least most of them, employed by either the government or a single shadowy organization and acting as law enforcement.

But why? Clearly their skills are more useful in the private sector.

Superhero teams are mercenaries organized by major corporations. Their celebrity status raises the companies' public image, they can attack other companies to distract them/discredit them/steal trade secrets, and of course then everyone needs their own team to fight off rivals.

This is all very inconvenient for the general public but of course the superheroes also do photo-ops cleaning up litter and volunteering at animal shelters. So that's fine.

Also there are reality TV shows, media interviews with the heroes, corporate award ceremonies, etc., etc.

And every so often a superhero team will deal with an actual threat to a nearby area, like cleaning up after a natural disaster, or stopping some terrorist whose exact plans and location the team just happened to find out about just in the nick of time. (The city is billed later.)

If a non-combatant sustains injuries during a superhero battle of course the company responsible will pay compensation! As long as you can prove that it was definitely one of their superheroes, that you could not possibly have known there would be a fight at that place and time, and that you were taking reasonable precautions to avoid it.

Each team's media releases claim that most/all of the other teams are full of supervillains. Alliances are constantly shifting.

The thing is, when I entered this living situation I knew it would be bad for my mental health. I did it anyway because I had very few alternatives and they were not necessarily better, but I set up ways to ameliorate it and deal with it.

And they were working. It actually worked really well. I was doing fine for six months, and then in February Mom was in Florida and I had a great month of not needing to put that much effort into dealing with it. Then at the beginning of March I was a little off balance because I went from that to an excellent weekend with my sister and Pixies and then I suddenly came back to here again. But I could have managed it and got back onto a level baseline. I was trying.

And now most of my coping mechanisms are suddenly unavailable.

I could sit down and think up more ways and set up a schedule, but I am back to not trusting my ability to follow a schedule. That kind of specific, deliberate deciding on coping mechanisms works better when I have a baseline of decent mental health to start from.

And what this mostly is is lack of options. Part of what helped last fall was the variety of different spaces I had access to. It's still not much above freezing most days, and soon it's going to be raining a lot. There is nowhere else indoors to go. And mental distance just is not as effective as physical distance.

From

thefridayfive:

1. Did you enjoy your senior year of high school?

Certainly more than the other ones.

2. Did you have a senior trip (high school) and were you able to go on it?

A what now?

3. Was graduating (from either high school or college/university) a big thing with your family or just another day?

Well, I and my parents actually went to my high school graduation, so there's that. I did not attend my university graduation ceremony, mostly because the default was that you could have two guests and apply for a limited number of extra invitations, and there were at least four people I really wanted there and a couple others who would expect to be invited, so it was easier to just avoid the issue.

4. What were you looking forward to the most after graduating from either high school or college/university?

After high school I was looking forward to university. After university I ... wasn't really.

5. Knowing what you know now, what advice would you give your graduating self?

For god's sake go see a fucking psychiatrist. And the campus employment centre.

So, there’s a sort of long ongoing argument where one side says “Why is there no femslash? :(” and other people say “we just write what we want to write, and male characters are better developed and written to be more interesting” and the first people say “but isn’t fandom about reinterpreting canon and exploring things the creators don’t” and it just keeps going around and around and eventually someone says “why are you putting the burden on fanwriters when mainstream media has so much more power?”

This is solely in response to that last point.

Women have money. Historically ‘geeky’ fandoms haven’t been eager to take that money, but they’re starting to realize it exists and they might want some.

But all media still assumes that their core audience is straight white men 18-35. And they will not lose that audience if possible. And they assume that not writing about male characters will lose them.

But there’s a solution! If you write a show with no significant female characters, you can, they believe, still get women to watch it if you just make sure you have two pretty white men with lots of sexual tension. And straight white men 18-35 will still watch it, and probably deny that there’s any sexual tension at all.

The problem with saying that it’s on the creators is that we have so much evidence that if they can get away without writing lead female roles, theywill. And if they see that there is huge demand for shows with two pretty white men as the leading characters, they’re going to ignore any demand for anything else and then say that they are just giving female fans what they want.

If you object to any new female characters in a show about these two white boys, the creators of that show don’t know that you also watch Orange is the New Black. They hear “Women don’t want more female characters anyway. Actresses are sent death threats for playing love interests! Clearly there’s no point to focusing on the women in this show.”

And I’m not saying there’s an easy way to fix this. But there are reasons why we need to celebrate female characters in fandom, as much as we can. We need to say we want female characters, and show that we like female characters* or else we will be invisible in fandom, and women will be invisible in media.

The burden is on fandom because if we don’t show that we care about it, no one else will care. This sucks, but it’s what we have to deal with.

*Translation: that female characters will make more people watch the show, and that a lack of female characters will make existing fans say 'screw it’ and leave to watch something else, rather than also watching something else

Finished and backed needlepoint from November. Let's see if I can get that here from Tumblr.

( Crappy webcam image )

Cleaned bathroom.
Filled in literal accounting for the last two weeks.
Wrote more than 300 words.
Went out with

knumpify and talked about stuff and bought books and felt better about self and work prospects, and may have helped with his stuff a little too.

I feel like I did more than that. Well, woke up at seven, for a start.

Yuletide fic up, yay!

It had to be up this weekend because I don't get a next weekend. Merry Capitalism.

The latest in irresponsible reporting: "Collisions, snow squalls shut down highways. See where." from a link on the Weather Network's site. This is not how we headline warnings. Warnings are important. People need to know where the hell they can't be driving.

Does anyone else find that the drive for multimedia on news websites makes them avoid news websites? I don't just mean that there are ads everywhere and the images and videos make everything ridiculously slow to load. I mean that images and videos are actually a pretty ineffective means of finding the kind of information one went to the page for. I don't want to watch a video, I want to skim an article and actually leave with the information I want.

For once I agree with BBC Sherlock: I prefer to do my own editing.

Not to mention slideshows. One page per soundbite is the least efficient information layout I can think of. Which means, of course, that there's more space for ads.

Fred Clark mentioned that the newspaper he used to work at had an online policy the staff unofficially called "Fuck the Capricorns": split up the horoscopes over two pages so the last few signs have to click twice, and look at more ads.

We need to figure out a new model here, and no one's even come close to one yet.

The hilarious part, of course, is that our eyes are trained to ignore image ads already. I suppose making content look like ads is more ethical than making ads look like content.

Enemy of Perfect says everything I think about Google.

I like using gmail. And Youtube. And Google. As separate things. I don't want one account connecting them, and I definitely don't want a completely useless (for me) social media site hammered onto it. I quit Facebook because of the privacy concerns, but at least Facebook wasn't trying to take over my whole internet.

But I don't want to stop using Google services.

And I do understand that that means I have to let Google services use me, at least as a pair of eyeballs. But I liked our previous arrangement, where they showed me ads and I ignored them.

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I just don't actually think we need more media about shadowy government organizations
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The icon should be interpreted in an artistic and optimistic manner today
eeeeeeee posted eeeeeeee
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We Can't Rewind, We've Gone Too Far

Entries tagged with what they do to valuable natural resourc

I just don't actually think we need more media about shadowy government organizations

Other people are complaining so possibly I can too

(no subject)

(no subject)

The icon should be interpreted in an artistic and optimistic manner today

eeeeeeee posted eeeeeeee

Griping about information density

(no subject)

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May 2025

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