jazzpunk64:

Social media interns and executives are literally paid to identify trends in online culture and exploit them to get you to reblog/retweet/or otherwise spread their brand name. This whole recent outbreak of brands becoming “woke” or pro-LGBT is nothing more than corporations adapting to the new social climate. It’s marketing, plain and simple. I know this may be hard to hear but please remember these corporations are NOT here for you (and arguably, never were). They, as always, simply want your money and attention.

Don’t screencap their posts. Don’t repost that epic clapback. Don’t spread their brand for them. It’s literally all part of their game.

When you are younger, you think loneliness is something that will change, will go away. You think you have time to improve, to find a path, find a tribe, a friend.  Every other sign reminds you that it will get better.  Even when 30 years have gone by and loneliness has been such a routine you no longer know how to behave around other people, even as you’ve watched your body decline and discovered those closest to you, like family, are too self-involved to have ever really cared about you, are more cruel than you remember, even though you’ve stood at the crossroads and been too overwhelmed to decide, even after a multitude of rejections, even when the ‘found family’ is too much of a fantasy, even when your own dreams and abilities have begun to erode, and the noise in your ears is like permanent static, even as the idea of death growing closer digs its claws in and begins to tear at your sanity, even as the tiniest glimmer of loveliness in the world turns shabby, even in the darkness that is never again quite light, even then, there is a song and there is hope and it is all there is between you and the unfound door, the undiscovered country from whose bourn no traveler returns

and the ghosts of want and need and longing, waiting, beyond. 

profeminist:

“Oh @Marvel. I was so going to let this one pass. But you HAD to end the year by launching a product that prohibits depicting gay people.

“No politics, including ‘alternative lifestyle advocacies’”

Tell me again how progressive this company is.

It’s like someone at Marvel said, “How can we top cancelling all of our queer-led books next week?”

“I know! Let’s ‘No Homo’ our fan fiction platform so they can’t even IMAGINE our characters as queer.”

Smooth.”

 – 

Matt Santori <– Read the full thread

Marvel, owned by Disney, who now owns, or will soon own, Fox.  

These people are not our friends. They supply an endless amount of opiate to the masses – an opiate that has long since lost its efficacy.  

When we outgrow these things, isn’t it time to stop buying into them, thus giving them power?  

We need to rebuild this world and it can’t be Disney’s version.  

I don’t know what to think of Capaldi’s exit.  I don’t think there was a story, just a sort of lingering dream-state that didn’t seem to follow all that had happened before.  It felt a bit lazy, writing-wise, relying too much on Capaldi’s ability to monologue and too little on any sort of plot. This episode didn’t bother (spoilers ahead, you are warned).

If The Doctor is going to be living such a state, revisiting old memories or friends, you’d think they’d have spent more time with Clara, learning what happened to her (and Me).  Let’s see Clara show up in her own Tardis, a ‘Doctor’ herself (and odd precursor to 13).  Clara was such an important part of the twelfth Doctor’s story, it seems wrong they only gave her ‘memory’ a few seconds with him (though yes, I’m glad he can remember her again).  Seeing her again should have been the big emotional moment, compare it to Smith’s Doctor seeing little then older Amy again before his regeneration: while just a few moments, we felt the weight of what she meant to him, but with Clara, it hardly registers. Flat.  

We last knew of Bill as an immortal reborn, so why were we meeting a ‘memory’ of her?  Why not just have the ‘real’ Bill show up?  Sorry, Moffat, I don’t agree that a glass-filled collection of memories constitutes the real person. Not sure anyone else should buy it, either. I’m not sure the Doctor did.  That said, I found Pearl Mackie’s acting here was her best: she was delightfully enigmatic (is it Bill or isn’t it?) and had some of the best moments, including one with the first Doctor where she confirmed that, throughout his lives, he never really did understand the universe (something plenty would argue about and argue whether this thread was even necessary to this story, just some random wobbly observation). It really underlined what we could have had with Bill and all that was wasted (not getting into the loss of all the character represented for a marginalised audience – it’s such a disappointment).  

And there’s nothing wrong with the Doctor encountering another species that isn’t a villain, but what was the point of this ‘adventure’ with them?  Just returning one person to their proper place in time is something we’ve seen over and over again, that the person is the Brigadier’s father could have been poignant, but it’s also out of nowhere (and why is it always an officer from the upper classes? What if the Brig’s dad had been an enlisted man from Birmingham?).  What if, instead, they’d chosen someone much closer to the Doctor, what if we got to meet Susan, instead?  Her photo was prominent on his desk this year past and with the first Doctor showing up, I’d had a little hope we might see her again. It all felt incomplete and without a sense of danger or consequences, flat.  

The appearance of the first Doctor was an interesting idea, but I’m not sure what the point was here.  Were they supposed to teach one another something?  I didn’t get the lesson.  Other than Capaldi being perpetually embarrassed by his former self and his chronic sexism (something I don’t remember about Hartnell’s Doctor), there wasn’t much going on. Was it just an excuse to build some hype?  What was the story?  

Moffat actually had Capaldi repeating dialogue he has said on and off over the years, a reminder of who the Doctor is; but how was it necessary? How was this a send-off?  I guess it doesn’t matter, really, but it felt lazy and uninspired.  

Compared to ‘Last Christmas’ where he built a clever story around dreams within dreams, the pain of loss and some actual Christmasy involvement, Twice Upon a Time had no heart, just felt like an empty exercise from a tired brain. The Christmas day ‘miracle’ of WWI is potentially moving content, but still flat as we’ve spent no time in the trenches with these men. Anti-war attitudes shouldn’t boil down to ‘war is hell, eh?’  What if the moment involved Lethbridge-Stewart actually catching a bullet just as Stille Nacht broke out?  Peace in the midst of death might actually resonate.  But the show never goes there.  No one dies.  Flat.  

 It’s a shame, as so many enjoyed what Capaldi brought to the role and wished him a better send-off, a better moment of transformation than something akin to Tennant’s overblown ‘I don’t want to go’ complete with nonsensical pyrotechnics.  

But we got our first good glimpse at 13, a promising smile and the further promise of an entirely new series, one that, I hope, doesn’t play on all we’ve seen before but really builds up and outward, reinventing the Doctor’s universe as something a little less English, not so reliant on its own history to see it through.  Would anyone be truly heartbroken if we never saw a dalek or a cyberman again?  I think we can move on.  

Someone needs to tell Matt Damon that no one is going to look back on their life and reflect how they should have just listened to Matt Damon.  

You are small, Matt Damon, and we are weary of you and those like you.  

Just wait, he’ll apologise by saying he’s proud to have helped generate a conversation we all need to have on the topic.  

Just ask Effie Brown.