Who the fuck named the Sahara Desert anyway
Sahara is just the Arabic word for “deserts”
You fucking named it the Desert Desert
way to fucking go
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- Me: *makes a small irrelevant mistake*
- My Brain, banging pots and pans together: YOU FUCKED UP YOU FUCKED UP YOU FUCKED UP YOU FUCKED UP YOU FUCKED UP YOU FUCKED UP YOU FUCKED UP YOU FUCKED UP YOU FUCKED UP YOU FUCKED UP YOU FUCKED UP YOU FUCKED UP YOU FUCKED UP YOU FUCKED UP YOU FUCKED UP YOU FUCKED UP YOU FUCKED UP YOU FUCKED UP YOU FUCKED UP YOU FUCKED UP YOU FUCKED UP YOU FUCKED UP YOU FUCKED UP YOU FUCKED UP YOU FUCKED UP YOU FUCKED UP YOU FUCKED UP YOU FUCKED UP YOU FUCKED UP YOU FUCKED UP YOU FUC
- Me: *makes huge mistake that will directly affect my future horribly*
- My Brain, lounging on a lawn chair with shades on: ....acknowledged
chai tea
I’ll take “European Imperialists Who Never Bothered To Translate The Local Languages” for Alex.
"Soviet" means "union"
The Union Union
We’re good at this.
the world is full of nothing but moon moons we are all moon moon all of us
Mark it down: 2014 was the year my friends texted, one after the other, to say goddamn, you were right about Taylor Swift.
What they meant was: can you EVEN BELIEVE Blank Space?
Blank Space is genius. Blank Space is a catchy pop song whose message is nothing more complicated than fuck you, fuck you, and fuck you. It’s a gleeful paean to making messes; if it reminds me of anything, it’s Azalea Banks grinning and wearing a Mickey Mouse sweatshirt and two long little-girl braids, mouthing I’mma ruin you, cunt, over and over again, right into the camera.
When she was a lot younger, Taylor Swift wrote to a different ex: go ahead and tell your friends I’m obsessive and crazy / that’s fine / I’ll tell mine you’re gay. Now she says: got a long list of ex-lovers / they’ll tell you I’m insane / but I’ve got a blank space baby / and I’ll write your name. She’s ditched the (doubly) offensive posture in favor of a much more powerful stance. What she’s saying is that she might actually be crazy, but it doesn’t matter, because you will love her anyway.
To be fair, history pretty much seems to be bearing her out on this one.
This is Taylor’s story about 1989: that she was tired of the way her relationships with men dominated the media coverage of her and her music. When Red came out in 2012, Vulture immediately did a detailed analysis of who each of the hidden messages in her liner notes referred to. Amy Poehler and Tiny Fey joked about her boy-craziness on stage at the Golden Globes in 2013. (Taylor fired back with a remark about women who don’t support other women burning in hell. I love her, but she is the very definition of the #problematicfave.)
Anyway, for 1989 she was done with all of that. She hadn’t dated anyone since a breakup with another insanely famous pop star, which ended a few months after Red’s release. So that was old news, and with the advent of 1989 she could—and did—direct the conversation back to herself and her work.
“I feel like watching my dating life has become a bit of a national pastime,” she told Rolling Stone. “And I’m just not comfortable providing that kind of entertainment anymore.” It’s a particularly savvy and telling thing to say: she understands that, at this point, her personal life is watched like a soap opera, more often than not with scornful glee, and there’s nothing she can do about that except living with it—or taking the show off the air entirely.
So instead of men, she’s focused attention on her newly-claimed feminism and her close friendships with other women. And it’s worked! It has totally worked.
Well, it’s worked to the extent that now instead of slideshows analyzing her taste in boyfriends, we get longreads about her Instagram and her “girlfriend collection.” She’s shifted the story, sure, but the scrutiny is just as intense as it ever was.
That’s the real story of 1989, though, as far as I’m concerned: this is the album where Taylor Swift figured out how to be famous on her own terms. The fame machine is a ruthless apparatus and it eats girls and women, particularly, alive.
“I just struggle to find a woman in music who hasn’t been completely picked apart by the media, or scrutinized and criticized for aging, or criticized for fighting aging—it just seems to be much more difficult to be a woman in music and to grow older,” she told Time. Obviously this instantly became: Taylor Swift Says She Doesn’t Have Any Female Role Models in Music. (Not stated, but always implied: Because Taylor Swift is a Bitch.)
That’s not what she’s saying, though. She’s saying no one has walked the impossible line of being a female performer and celebrity in the way she wants to walk it. (This should surprise no one, because Taylor Swift is a truly obsessive perfectionist.) And she’s figured that out for herself, at least for now, in a really fascinating way.
By all accounts she runs her very own Tumblr, where she Taylurks and reblogs her fans. She sent Christmas gifts to some of them, this past December. In the run up to 1989’s release she invited several hundred of them to her houses in various cities for The Secret Sessions, where they listened to a preview of the album and ate cookies with her.
Taylor Swift has made herself a very accessible celebrity.
Or, more accurately, Taylor Swift has made a call on what she can and cannot afford to give to the public. She’s also obsessed with privacy and security; elsewhere in that Rolling Stone interview, she talks about her fear of wiretaps, of someone photographing her naked, of being kidnapped. (She cops to outrageous paranoia, but each of these fears is justified in its way. 1989 did leak; her Twitter and Instagram were hacked a few weeks ago; men have showed up at her parents’ house repeatedly, looking for her.)
“I realize the only privacy I’m really entitled to is when I’m in my own apartment or my own home, ‘cause everything else is kind of — I’m looked at as sort of public property. And there’s nothing I can do about that perception except control my mental perspective on it, which is, I need to treat people well. I need to be grateful. I need to take pictures with people when they ask for one. So if I’m not in the mood to do that, I don’t leave my house,” she told NPR in an interview.
Taylor Swift has made herself accessible only when she knows she can afford to be nice. You can call it an anti-feminist priority, but it’s hers, and she’s chosen it explicitly. In a culture that reduces everyone to a headline, Taylor’s chosen Niceness as hers.
It’s interesting that she talks about it. She’s said the same in other interviews, too, making it clear that it’s not that she’s always gracious and camera ready. It’s that when she isn’t, she doesn’t get near camera, which is to say, leave her house. A lot of the invisible labor of pop stardom, especially for women, comes in constructing those off-stage performances. Taylor has drawn a line around them, and said: you can have this. That’s fine. But you’ll get it on my schedule, on my terms, because I know what game we’re playing now, and I’ve gotten pretty good at it.
There is also the fact that niceness is, past a point, boring. Performing it shores up her fanbase and at the same time makes it more interesting to talk about her music—that is to say her work—instead.
So Blank Space. Back to Blank Space.
I Knew You Were Trouble, Red’s first single, garnered a lot of praise from people who felt like Taylor needed to take responsibility for her role in her breakups: she knew this dude was going to hurt her the minute she saw him, and she went ahead and did it anyway. Boy did everyone love it, when a girl finally took responsibility and said shame on me!
Blank Space is the flip side of that narrative: it reminds us that at this point, everyone in the world knows that Bro, She’ll Write a Song About You, and these boys just keep singing on the dotted line anyway. Everyone knows she’s trouble; why do they keep letting her get away with it, if they don’t love it just a little bit?
Taylor has talked about the idea that it’s written from the perspective of the caricature the media made of her, a black widow or Venus fly trap, but what makes the song amazing—what has made it the song that brings women into the Taylor Swift fold—is that she somehow manages to make fun of herself as the hysterical, impossibly needy nightmare on the surface, and at the same time give a scathing indictment of the narrative that she’s in any way actually damaged goods.
Because that’s the story from 2012: Taylor’s love songs were selling millions and getting enormous airplay and winning her all kinds of awards, giving her unprecedented power as an artist and celebrity. But at the same time, they were being used against her, to insist that she was only famous because she was so over-emotional, so desperately needy, and so bizarrely open about it. Which is to say: such a girl.
Taylor uses the (sorry) blank space of creating a character to allow herself to say the thing that Taylor Swift could never say, to remind us that she does have a long list of ex-lovers—and the language is deliberate, lovers, not boyfriends, or just exes, but lovers—and it hasn’t diminished her power in the least. As a matter of fact, it’s part and parcel of its source.
Plus, you know, boys only want love when its torture. Men love it when they get to call women crazy: it absolves them of responsibility for anything they might actually have done to hurt her feelings. I love the players / but you love the game: because if she wants to be in the public eye, there’s no choice to play by the rules that have been set out for her— but she doesn’t forget for a second that it’s men who make them, and reinforce them every day.
And Taylor has finally figured out how to tell him (all of them): fuck you, fuck you, and fuck you. She does it in a dress, with a smile. A pop song with a pen click sound effect. A video that distracts you with dresses! And horses! And a baby deer! So that you get the song stuck in your head for so long that eventually you can’t help but hear the lyrics: go ahead and imagine she’s just a blank space, and that you’ve diminished her enough that she isn’t a threat to you or anyone. She’ll go ahead and sell a million plus records, calling you by name.
Imagine McGonagall giving Hagrid another chance after the war
Imagine his eyes welling up with tears when he gets to exchange his umbrella for a wand.
IMAGINE HIM SITTING EAGERLY AMONG A CLASS OF SCARED FIRST YEARS
And he gets his letter from an owl.
And Harry takes him shopping for school in Diagon alley, to return the favor.
NOPE FUCKING CRYING
Regardless of whether you watch Scandal or not, everyone needs to watch this and see Lisa Kudrow fucking nail her scene exploiting misogyny and sexism.
I’m pretty sure that just changed my life.
fucking annihilated
Don’t interrupt me when I’m speaking.
- abby: *kills her own husband*
- abby: *tells clarke it was her best friend*
- abby: *sends clarke down to the ground*
- abby: *tries to tell clarke she doesnt know what shes doing*
- abby: *yells at clarke for something she cant control*
- abby: i really dont understand why my daughter hates me???
My kid cousin, all of 11 years old, called me up sobbing today. I had about 50 horrifying reasons popping up in my head when he stopped crying enough to ask one question
“Cap’s not Hydra, right?”
A bit of background on why this made sense to me: My cousin was 3 when me and my brother bought him a cute Captain America hoodie. He was 5 when he first caught sight of his dad’s comic collection. He was 8 when he insisted on dressing up as Captain America for a contest at school. He was 9 when he first got bullied and his mom used Captain America as a symbol to tell him to always be kind in strength, to know that he was a better person. He got his Marvel encyclopedia last year for his birthday and every time we meet, me and him have hours long discussions on the characters. His favorite Avenger is Iron Man but he has always been and will always be a Cap’s boy. Steve Rogers has helped him appreciate his own strengths, has helped him understand that being a good person is much more important than being perfect. He got strength from Cap’s stand against bullying, inspiration from Steve’s ability to be kind and caring about the world even in the worst of situations, and most of all motivation to appreciate his own goodness. To him, he was just like Steve Rogers and I’ve seen that kid be so proud of that.
And today he calls me up, shattered and heartbroken, because his ideals, his dreams and convictions of years have been ripped apart. He felt betrayed and lost, because if Cap, his Cap, could be Hydra, a Nazi organization, then did it mean that he was drawing strength from evil all these years?
An eleven year old is questioning his life choices. Nick, still think you’re funny?
My six year old godson is crying in his bedroom right now - his Marvel plastered, Captain America bedsheets and poster covered bedroom - because his hero is a bad-guy and apparently has been all along.
Nick Spencer is such a bad writer that the only way he could think of make his mark on a character like Steve Rogers is to steal the hero from thousands of children.
And if I thought I could find them without having to break out a microscope, I’d gladly do the jail time for punching him in the balls.
Tell kids everyone that Nick Spencer is Hydra and he’s trying to convince them to lose faith in Cap. This is what I told my nephew and he accepted that and decided he was going to keep wearing his Cap shirt because otherwise he was letting Hydra win.
This is a good plan. And excellent plan. Everyone do this!
nick spencer is definitely hydra.
honestly i would never have the balls to pick up a Death Note to destroy my enemies
….
i would, however, snatch up a Yeast Infection Note or a UTI Note up real quick-like
I asked my mother what superpowers she’d want if she could have one and she said: “I want to karmicly inconvenience people.”
Someone howling hate speech? Oh No! Sudden and inexplicable chronic laryngitis!
Driving like an asshole? Uh-oh, Car trouble!
Keep saying nasty shit to people online? No router in your proximity will ever work.
After a moment she added “or convenience them, that’s important too. Like people who return lost dogs or volunteer time. They need extra cash and to never have hayfever again, something like that.”
when you wake up angry in the morning and somebody says “you must have got up out of the wrong side of the bed”
excuse me
my bed is up against the wall it isn’t my fault that i can only get out one side you motherfucker
It’s kind of tricky when you’re a over-thinker and you are aware of it. At this point I’m so unsure about the conclusions I come up with. I mean, is it true? Or did I make it up because I have been overthinking too much? Am I right or has my overthinking fooled me?
I just realized I hit the next level; I’m overthinking about overthinking