This Explains A Lot - Tumblr Posts
Just a little PSA for all our mental health (and chronic pain*) spoonies out there! A lot of doctors neglect to mention this little side effect, which means a lot of us are suffering extra from the heat without knowing why.
*Many psych meds are used to treat chronic pain as well, if you didn’t know!
This explains so much about why 20 somethings are just unable to read to any level of complexity beyond a tweet. The miserable failure of US pedagogy
Kind of crazy that Steve is one of the most beloved and iconic characters on the show, for better or for worse, but we actually know the least about him out of anyone in the main line up. We know more about characters only introduced in season 4 than we do him
We don't even know his parents' names?? We know the names of Robin's parents, even Eddie's and Barb's... We barely know a thing about Steve outside of that he's from a rich upbringing, good at sports, babysits the kids, is fucking feral and should probably relax a bit with Nancy.
I think this explains why there's so many fics out there about him secretly being a Number. Of the main line up if anyone were to turn out to be a surprise Number he's the most plausible because genuinely what the fuck do we even know about him that would dispute that theory?
(I'll also always point out what a striking resemblance Steve has to one of the original MKUltra test subjects, Ken. Who I'm not saying could be his dad but they could at the very least be related. Ken talked about his whole family being gifted, and how he'd be drawn to places; ending up in the right place at the right time as related to his abilities, and Steve sure does have a way of walking in on things right as he's needed, however farfetched the circumstances may be.)
me with my classes starting at 7:00am 👀
Getting rest is an A+ idea.
minusthenegative.com
Ok,listen. I've just discovered a very important detail.I'm very obsessed with the birthday dates and I've noticed :
ANDDDD
They have one year and one day of difference. They are both Virgos so they have 💯% affinity. OH. MY. GOD.
I was today years old. That is disgusting.
No Child Left Behind is one of the worst things to ever be incentivized in schools. It was signed into law when I was 14. Reading Rainbow was my show as a kid. LeVar Burton played a big part in why I became an avid reader to date. The joy of it. It's an adventure around the globe and through different time periods without stepping on a plane or time machine.
Children parrot behavior. In grade school, I always wanted to read the same amount of books as my teachers (50 books) and managed to double that each year. Before No Child Left Behind, book fairs and Scholastic catalogs were a serious matter like your grandma's Fingerhut catalogs. Libraries were (and still are) a wonderland.
Reading comprehension and proficiency in schools has been declining for decades. A crisis. The joy of books isn't pushed anymore and I'm always saddened by it. It's one of the reasons why I post my book reviews and recommendations on here, as well as posts from others to encourage reading and (novel) writing. Kids will parrot your behavior while the education system sadly fails to return as that example.
I recently came across a discussion on Tony Stark as a queer-coded character in the comics (which I’m not going to link to because many of the threads were already deleted, ergo I’m assuming that the participants didn’t want the conversation to be spread), and I found it very interesting. For years I have read Tony Stark as subtextually bisexual in the comics, which hasn’t really translated to the films – at least not to the extent that the character of Captain America has been coded as bisexual in them. There has always been a borderline homoerotic relationship between Tony and his armor especially. But adjacent to this conversation, there was also an interesting thread in which Tony Stark as the most female-coded superhero was discussed that I found fascinating.
Someone commented on the concept stating that while it may be true for the comics, movie-verse Tony Stark is certainly not female-coded.
But isn’t he, though?
We’ve discussed before how hypermasculinity sometimes seems to go so over-the-top that it does a full 360, coming out the other side seeming rather feminized, the hypermasculine male presented as a sexual object with assets on display (slim waist, thick thighs, full chest) for the consumption of the male gaze. But that’s not the case with Tony Stark; it isn’t his hypermasculinity that makes him seem female-coded, it’s the question of agency.
Tony does seem to possess many traits that we consider culturally feminine, female cliches, such as talking a lot and talking fast, using a rich vocabulary, a short and petite stature as compared to other superheroes, the narrative passing jugement on his promiscuity, the narrative passing judgement on his desire for junk-food, his passive demeanor, his self-consciousness about his body and having to wear underarmor in public to manage his chest, his avoidance of interpersonal conflict, looking for daddy’s love and approval, the way in which he conceals much of his intelligence because he knows that if people saw him for how he really is, they would be off-put by it ie. giving the appearance of being smart-but-not-too-smart, the eroticizing of his appearance in the narrative, the focus on what he’s wearing, his obsessive-compulsive behavior, meticulous grooming habits, delicate features, dressing to impress professionally, carrying conversations, his weakness being his heart, the fact that he has to dress into a suit that conceals his identity, his true self, to interact with the world, a hard outer shell that conceals his soft inside. There are aspects to Tony Stark in the films that are female-coded.
I think that some people might find these aspects difficult to see because there are three distinct personas to the character: there’s the Tony Stark that he projects to the outside world to hide who he really is that is his true armor, there’s Iron Man that is a prosthetic, an armor that shields him and allows him the protection of being who he really is, and then there’s Tony Stark, the person he is in his heart of hearts that we see only when’s alone with the artificial intelligences he created for himself, as his friends, the only friends that really, truly get to see him, because he knows that they won’t judge him (outside of him being alone, we see glimpses of the ‘real’ Tony Stark in Afganistan, in his interactions with Natasha and in two scenes with Steve: while they’re cutting wood and Tony asking Steve whether he knew).
These are the three sides to Tony Stark, and I see a lot of fans confuse his Tony Stark armor, his protective persona, with who he is because that is, by design, the loudest, most visible side to him.
There are many sides to him that are female-coded, but it’s the limited agency that he is given in the narrative that is the most telling. Most of his stories seem to revolve around the stripping of his agency and his struggle to regain it. This character – a genius, billionaire, playboy, philantropist – who ought to be the ultimate male power fantasy has all of his stories constructed around his lack of agency and his need of a prosthetic to claim agency for himself. It’s easy to assume that an able-bodied, rich, good-looking, well-educated, white CEO of the American upper crust has all the power and control in the world, but the narrative begins disabusing the viewer of this notion right off the bat. The narrative deconstructs his agency.
What I appreciated about the Iron Man films was how they subverted the role of the damsel in distress in Pepper Potts. Especially the end of the first film in which Pepper marched through broken glass in her stiletto shoes to save Tony Stark was something that made me stop and think for days afterwards. The third film basically recreated this subversion of the trope louder for those in the back that hadn’t caught it the first time. It was Pepper Potts that was the knight in shining armor, not the title character.
And it is Tony that we see as the damsel in distress, particularly again in the first and the third films. The first film contains the iconic scene of Obadiah Stane literally removing Tony’s agency in a scene that is filmed like a sexual violation, a none-too-subtle air of erotic violence in the air as he uses his date rape technology to incapacitate Tony. This is a turning point in the film. The third film contains a scene in which Tony Stark is zip-tied to a bed frame with the villain taunting him. It is implied that Tony is similarly submissive in bed. The main villain in the scene acts like a spurned lover, a definite air of seduction to his conduct toward the tied-up hero.
That is two cases of villains making eroticized advances toward a physically incapacitated Tony Stark. And it isn’t the violence or the incapacitation that makes the scenes female-coded, it is the eroticization of it. It is female characters that are subject to eroticized violence, generally speaking. The second film does not follow the pattern, but it could be interepreted as an obsessive, spurned man making unwanted advances toward our hero.
I wrote about the interaction between Natasha and Tony previously, on how she allows us to see a side of him that we usually don’t get to see. Some people have described Tony’s hiring of her as sexist, undoubtedly influenced by Pepper’s interpretation of his behaviour as he tried to figure her out (“And she is potentially a very expensive sexual harassment lawsuit if you keep ogling her like that.”), but his interest in her was never that kind of interest. His eyes don’t track her sexual assets. Tony saw something of himself in her, especially in the way she was playing a role, but even more than that, I think Tony saw in Natasha Romanoff something that he wanted desperately to be. In control.
Natasha Romanoff gives the air of being in control even when she gives up control, and in this she is the opposite of Tony Stark.
With this in mind, and I don’t remember whether I wrote about this before, I was quite disturbed by the way the climax of Civil War was shot not unlike a pornographic sex scene, Tony Stark being double-teamed by the super soldiers. The ending of the scene especially, with Steve straddling Tony, pounding on him, grunting, finishing it off with breathing heavily as he falls off Tony having penetrated his arc reactor with his shield, having incapacitated Tony’s prosthetic. Tony spits out blood as the super soldiers walk away from him. It’s rather symbolic, the implications of the scene very uncomfortable.
While Bucky Barnes is another character whose storyline heavily features the stripping down of agency, the female-coding of the strong, stoic silent-type is largely absent. Bucky Barnes and Tony Stark share similarities, and in this he offers a contrast to Tony.
So, yes. I do see Tony Stark of the movie-verse as a female-coded superhero because his story revolves around desperately grasping for agency. Among these hypermasculine heroes, the genius-billionaire-playboy-philantropist is at a disadvantage, so Tony Stark invented, constructed, and put on a suit that hides his true identity in order to have a measure of agency in a hypermasculine world, that allows him to assert himself. And in Civil War he was willing to sign off on his self-created agency because the establishment had managed to convince him that as a person with near unlimited resources, he was a danger to the world that he had risked his life and the lives of his loved ones to protect.
I think one of the most telling aspects of his character vis-à-vis Civil War is that, convinced that it is too dangerous for him to attempt to influence the outside world and other people in it, Tony Stark instead turned within and attempted to modify his own internal world, to (literally) influence his own internal state instead – to accept what he can’t change. This is a classic strategy of the disenfranchised.
Tony Stark is the most female-coded of the male superheroes.
To understand what's going on here, know these things:
OpenAI is the company that makes ChatGPT
A spider is a kind of bot that autonomously crawls the web and sucks up web pages
robots.txt is a standard text file that most web sites use to inform spiders whether or not they have permission to crawl the site; basically a No Trespassing sign for robots
OpenAI's spider is ignoring robots.txt (very rude!)
the web.sp.am site is a research honeypot created to trap ill-behaved spiders, consisting of billions of nonsense garbage pages that look like real content to a dumb robot
OpenAI is training its newest ChatGPT model using this incredibly lame content, having consumed over 3 million pages and counting...
It's absurd and horrifying at the same time.
Obscure autistic experiences that I didn’t realize were autistic experiences
(These aren’t diagnostic criteria for being autistic, just things that autistic people relate to more often than allistic people do)
• Making PowerPoints for fun (peak entertainment when I was 12 years old fr)
• I can’t eat my dinner, it’s too hot outside
• Someone has shown up to my house unexpectedly; I have to ignore them until I mentally adjust to the fact that they’re here
• Stop giving me light, tickly hugs—I need you to crush me
• *in a friend’s house* Ok I have no idea how formal or familiar I am supposed to be so I’m just going to not touch ANYTHING and wait to sit down until I’m invited to do so
• Getting yelled at for “not playing correctly” (??)
• “Who’s your celebrity crush” uhhh idk I only watch this one movie from 20 years ago so I don’t know any current celebrities
• Motion sickness. All the time.
• No one else follows the RulesTM correctly! I hate group projects!
• Having constant stomachaches and headaches from overstimulation, but the doctor says you don’t have a physical problem so obviously you’re faking to get out of school
• How does everyone else just know how to do that?
• Practicing “normal” conversation before going out in public
• Touching all the soft fabrics in the store until you find that one Bad Texture and now it’s burned into your skin and you are going to die
• I made a joke and everybody looked at me strangely and now I can’t figure out what I did wrong but I think they thought I was serious?
• On the opposite side: I said something totally sincere and now everyone is laughing so I guess I join in?
• Wearing the same shirt over and over and over and over