my brother started calling our cat “doobie brother” which he then lengthened to “dubious brother” and has since morphed into “brother dubious” like he’s some sort of fucked up little monk
escapist media in general is an ongoing fascination for me. media written with escapism as a main priority typically requires very little thought from the reader - the whole point is to kick back and live vicariously through a fun story, after all. they’re narratives written to prioritize reader comfort.
but because they are written to be as unchallenging as possible, they often come with a set of underlying assumptions that can be just fucking fascinating to unpick. like yeah, why IS it assumed to be escapist and indulgent to enjoy colonial wealth without thinking about it in regency fiction. why IS the self inserty female protagonist, who is assumed to be as universally relatable as possible, written to be sweetly naive and sexually inexperienced. why does this “queernorm” contemporary world replicate patriarchial structures exactly but just with Gay People Allowed. why are these ideas assumed to be easy and comforting? can the writers not imagine anything better than the status quo but except maybe with more gay people and poc if you’re lucky?
the fact of the matter is that “unchallenging” fiction tends to just simply replicate dominant cultural narratives as a point of comfort. we won’t challenge the reader, so we won’t think about the way we write certain things. everything we think of as comforting and safe are, of course, universal, and could not be founded on any harmful ideological assumptions. there is nobody who could be alienated by this.
and that’s the sticking point to me, in terms of escapist fiction: it’s always necessary to ask whose comfort is being prioritized. you’ve got to interrogate who gets to escape and the mechanisms by which that escape happens. escapism can be good and necessary to survive the current world, but it does not exist in a vacuum separate from the real world, even if it pretends it does!
The United Auto Workers are also negotiating new contracts with the big three US car manufacturers and have announced that they’re prepared to strike if they can’t get a fair deal.
We are all, all of us, in a series of caves. Some of the inhabitants of the caves have dug little holes or access routes to the surface, where strange things like blue tweeting birds dwell. Some of us have fled here from a site the alien rules, and a few of us are splitting our time between their weirdly bright and shining domes and our comfy moss-covered holes.
From within your cave, you can dig tunnels. Some people choose to dig tunnels up to the top of other peoples’ caves just to observe. Occasionally they might sneak down and steal a choice morsel to drag back to their own hoard, sometimes they just observe. Some tunnels don’t lead to the caves owned by other individuals, but instead to dumping grounds where people shove copies of things that they think are related to a single topic. There’s no actual rules to that, per-se, it’s just a sortve rule by collective consensus about what kinds of things should go in that cave. Sometimes things get shoved in there which don’t really belong, but that’s fine too.
Some people cultivate their caves to reflect their own specific sets of interest - maybe their hoard has a theme, a motif, a genre. Some people just grab whatever looks shiny and show it off to whoever comes by to look.
When you find something that’s interesting, you can - and should - grab it and run back to your cave and put it on display. As everyone knows, piracy isn’t stealing, since it makes a copy, so the original is left untouched. That’s how things spread down here. There’s no real pacing to it, so sometimes someone will make a thing, show it off, and no one will notice that it’s there until later, at which point it might take off running through the caves as everyone grabs a copy. Sometimes it does that in fits and starts. Sometimes it hits a particularly nutrient rich patch of the caves and grows way out of control, far beyond its original creator’s intentions. Like a slime mold that hit a big ol batch of protozoa. The slime mold thing is probably more accurate than it should be.
The point isn’t the spread, though. Tumblr works opposite of how most other big content sites like Facebook and Reddit and Twitter work. In all of those, the point is to yell at the top of your lungs and get as many people to hear you. If you can’t get enough people to hear you, you might spend billions to buy the platform and try to buy more of an audience that way, because the audience is the point.
On Tumblr, instead, the audience is irrelevant. The treasures you can bring back to your cave are the point. The point is to hoard and collect and grow your shinies. It’s nice to show them off (because who doesn’t like it when their hoard is admired?) but it’s the having and the getting, not the giving.
it’s more work than reddit or facebook or twitter, because no one is out here trying to tell you what should go in your hoard. Everyone everywhere else has strong feelings on what kind of kitsch and treasures and knickknacks you should have. Here, you have to dig. You’ll find a lot of trash in the process, but you have the choice of where your tunnels lead, and which garbage pi… other people’s hoards you’re sifting through, so it’s a friendly sort of grubbing in the dirt that feels comfy once you’re used to the muck.
The Night Watch quote I’ve been carrying in my heart this year is Lilac was common in the city. It was vigorous and hard to kill and had to be. Every time this fucking country starts wearing me down. I am vigorous and hard to kill and have to be. I am the memory of all my loved ones who are no longer part of this fight and I am the promise that this will not be forgotten. I am the knowledge that we may not have truth yet, or justice, or freedom, but we can probably have reasonably priced love and the trust and camaraderie of those around us, and we can damn well have breakfast. How do we rise up?
Every time I see companies selling “”“punk”“” jewellery or clothing I become apoplectic with rage. Just saw a £65 padlock necklace advertised to me bitch Fuck you go to your nearest weird little shop that sells everything in the world including fake Rolexes and bongs the size of a toddler. Buy a thing of chain and a padlock. Borrow some bolt cutters someone you know will probably own some and if not get some cheap ones or borrow from a local tool library. Slap em together. Maximum cost £30 and that’s MAXIMUM that’s assuming you bought over a metre of expensive heavy chain AND bought the bolt cutters. You can do it for under a fiver with a wallet chain and pliers. I still wear a necklace I made when I was 15 out of a wallet chain and pliers and a padlock I got in a set of 3 from poundland. If the issue is dexterity or otherwise disability related then find a friend and swap a favour with them it’ll still be cheaper than these scamming poser companies and will help you build community and share resources. Something which is actually punk. Fuckin. Capitalist posers
Important to keep in mind there’s a distinction here between ‘someone who paints and sells patches in their own small business’ (cool, craftsmanship, usually very fairly priced for materials and labour while still affordable for punks who don’t have that skillset to buy, honestly not a category far removed from 'if you buy me lunch I can paint your jacket’ exchanges) and big companies who charge extortionate prices for something that’s supposed to be counterculture, paying staff minimum wage and making huge profits the workers will never see a penny of (cunts)
It’s so annoying to see overpriced punk fashion stuff! Like ,punk was made to go against capitalism and all that shit! It was a rebellious daring fashion style !
Punk people used to repair,thrift,alternate their clothing with whatever they thought it was cool!!!!
Like there’s nothing wrong with buying a thing that Ya really like,I get it,sometimes a pair of boots just looks too irresistible! but like I would love to see people getting a little quirky with it too since that’s part of the style too! I wanna see all the things people can up with!
