Librarycraft.
Reporters Without Borders built an enormous library in Minecraft to store censored news articles.
Also asides from anything else the build just looks really, really awesome…
Conveys an emotion.
Hey you remember that guy who used to have a website of him doing emotions for the camera? I wonder what happened to that guy…
Tumblr wisdom.
So I find it kind of wild to come across, in the wild, a post about Lord of the Flies that seems totally oblivious to the story’s origins as a satire and criticism of English boarding school culture.
See, kids! Tumblr is good for some larnin’ after all!
Not everything is awful.
The WikiHow page for how to short sheet a bed is just so… earnestly endearing, though?
Transhorror.
A really fascinating look at the way horror films co-opt the narratives of trans men.
It specifically deals with Hereditary, a film I quite liked and that now honestly reads as kind of subversively positive—I mean, still a horror story, but in the kind of Ginger Snaps vein—if you reframe it as the story of a dude’s transition…
Black Mirror is bad.
As someone who got through like three episodes of Black Mirror before realizing it was racist, sexist, Gen X pearl-clutching drivel, I am extremely on board with this examination.
“Progress”.
“What’s amazing is that not only has J.K. Rowling positioned herself as the female Orson Scott Card,” said comparative literature professor Nicole Mathews, “but she has also done so in a fraction of the time. It took Card decades to fully explain his deeply upsetting hatred and many more years to face backlash. Rowling is managing to accomplish this in a matter of weeks. That’s powerful. That’s progress.”
“And just like Orson Scott Card, Rowling included a ton of pro-trans symbolism in her books without realizing it,” Mathews added. “What was once Ender’s soapy naked bathroom fight with another boy is now the magical Sorting Hat that places you into a category when you are born into the school, forcing you to figure out your own place for yourself.
… lol.
The furry side of history.
The anime avatar is shorthand for an elite community that prizes itself on exclusive and being a specific and obsessive (usually male) fan. The anime avatar is closely aligned with the Gamergate movement, which posited that their is a correct way to be a gamer (again, usually male).
The furry avatar, conversely, signals an openness. The furry community with its many quirks and proclivities (some of a sexual nature) is often aggressively accepting of all types of members. (Which is not to say that there aren’t right-wing furries that can occasionally lead to some admittedly funny online posts and cognitive dissonance.)
In 2018, the known unknown regarding k-pop stans, rabid fans of Korean pop-music groups, was on which side of the anime-furry fence they would land. […]
Based on events over the past few days, however, it seems safe to conclude that the k-pop contingent has fallen on the Furry side of history.
Brian Feldman on history.
Welcome to 2020, everyone.
Also as a professed fancam hater, I confess the mulch fancam has soften my opinion of the genre somewhat.
Too little, too late.
No, these filmmakers [for Rise of Skywalker and Endgame] are instead content to get in just before the finish line, waiting until the very last movies in their respective franchises to throw the dogs a bone. The only way to talk about these benchmarks is dismissively: too little, too late. But we’re of course supposed to celebrate. Never mind the incredible trove of LGBT representation you do see in, say, fan fiction; never mind all the ways fans have taken the mere idea of Finn and Poe as lovers and done more with it, with more creativity and sympathy, than any Disney property will likely ever do. Never mind the fact that, accordingly, LGBT representation in Disney’s art does exist—among its fans, not its creators.
The idea that these laughably minor wins are something to celebrate goes hand in hand with Disney’s broader attitude toward film history, which the company has long seemed to think is something better off locked up in a vault somewhere—the better to exploit the art’s value, after all. Let’s just say it straight: The company that won’t even let Baby Yoda memes flourish without losing its shit over copyright will never be a beacon of representation of any sort, let alone queer representation, which, among other things, has often made sport of appropriating and messy-ing the firm sexual boundaries in ostensibly straight, copyrighted art. Disney is too concerned with representation as product to be a beacon of anything. And the fans who care will still, even as of these two movies, largely be left to their own creative, imaginative devices—and they are probably better off.
K. Austin Collins on disrepresentation.
Make 2020 the year you say “No!” to corporate art!
Small art.
Mass media is, of course, produced by the rich and the privileged. It bears the stamp of their worldview (the odiously sentimental material about the family having to pull together to support the dad’s tech start-up in Pixar’s Inside Out comes to mind) and the clean, unadventurously crowd-pleasing aesthetics which are the typical result of the focus grouping process. To some people, the slickness of that production—the glossy cover of an official behind-the-scenes art book, the breathtakingly realistic but eerily lifeless CGI of Disney’s recent spate of live-action remakes—has become synonymous with art itself as an idea. Even as they earnestly discuss the necessity of representation and the pain of its absence, they learn not to seek out or accept it unless it’s handed to them from on high by one of perhaps four recognizable branded corporate entities.
The sad irony is that the representation so many are so hungry for already exists. Outside the tiny, blinding spotlight of corporate media, there is an entire world of small, independent media made by marginalized creators and outsider artists of all kinds and reflecting their unique and idiosyncratic worldviews.
Gretchen Felker-Martin on small art.
I have been trying, not always successfully, to consume more “small art”1 and would strongly encourage everyone else to do so, too…
- Or, at least, less mass-produced corporate entertainment product. [↩]