please if you do anything useful in your life, don’t scroll past this
watch it
PLEASE
tchaikovsky is proud
In case anyone is baffled by this, there’s a Tchaikovsky piece in which there’s supposed to be a loud sound but he never specified what you should use to make that sound. People have done all kinds of weird shit depending on how they think the sound should, well, sound. Hitting a large piece of wood with a sledgehammer is a relatively conventional one.
I thought some folks who won’t be listening to the interview might appreciate an outline, so here is an overview and highlights. Please note that there are some descriptions of racism and violence, and other potentially disturbing situations for some folks.
Highlights:
The show is something Rebecca thinks of as “reverse escapism.”
Beach City is based on a blend of Dewey Beach and Rehoboth Beach, with an east-coast beach feel.
The Gems are explicitly described as nonbinary and as not thinking of themselves as “women” whatsoever, but do not mind that humans interpret them as such.
Rebecca Sugar is a nonbinary woman herself, and likes that she can express being so through these characters.
She considers her show a “gender expansive” show that is in part a reaction to the unnecessary gendering of shows during her childhood, which was alienating for her.
Doing this show and bumping up against expectations laid by other successful shows has made Rebecca determined to bring many important and historically ignored messages to kids.
Being compassionate is heroic.
The theory behind Fusions on the show was a desire to show how a healthy relationship can also be something cool and exciting.
Rebecca loves having an opportunity to have her characters express really intense, complex emotions that are so challenging to draw and so unusual to see on a cartoon character.
In response to mocking and sneering comments about how the show advocates “feminizing men,” Rebecca says it’s deeply sad that someone would feel that femininity is negative or that being able to communicate about emotions is weak. She wants kids to learn that it’s good to be honest about feelings, and that many of the symbols we associate with power or weakness are arbitrary.
Garnet represents Rebecca’s relationship with Ian Jones-Quartey, how they ran the show together like a pillar of strength even though separately they’re more like Ruby and Sapphire. They wanted her to have natural hair, and to represent their own interracial relationship.
Rebecca and Ian were once physically attacked by racists who disapproved of their interracial relationship. That incident was influential in her desire to normalize the kind of interracial, gender-expansive relationship that’s part of her own everyday life. “Stronger Than You” is about surviving those kinds of awful incidents.
In a way, making Garnet’s relationship so cool is one thing Rebecca is doing for people who might otherwise grow up to think like those men. If she provides an opportunity to make relationships like hers seem cool and beautiful, maybe fewer adults will be motivated to attack them in disgust without even thinking about it.
Rebecca Sugar identifies as bisexual and learned to be more confident in talking about it openly through her work on the show and meeting people through it.
Rebecca worried that she couldn’t talk about being bi because she’d be thought less trustworthy or as looking for attention. These are worries she thinks she picked up through media.
In response to a question about whether the show really is for everyone even though some identifying as conservative are put off by it, Rebecca claims that her show is honest and that’s for everyone; that said, you can’t make someone listen if they refuse to hear.
Rebecca mentions growing up on Disney weddings and wanting to show that a relationship like Garnet’s could be just as wonderful.
We as a society focus too much on what victims of bullying should do and not enough on how to process feelings associated with hurting someone else. Bullies can be created out of people who make mistakes and don’t know how to handle anger or poor decisions.
“Here Comes a Thought” is sort of a sequel to “Stronger Than You”–not just an affirmation of strength, but a peek into how Garnet became and stays strong.
Rebecca originally wanted “Mindful Education” to just be Steven giving kids a mindfulness meditation exercise because it’s so vital to have these tools. She and her writers figured out how to instead show a resolution that used the tool.
See, what the race-to-the-bottom people forget is one simple fact:
The average cost to replace a minimum-wage retail employee, according to a study by the Center for American Progress, is $3,328. And that’s a lowball. Basically, any time somebody quits or is fired, it costs the company money. A lot of money. New employees are also less productive (because it takes people longer to do things they are less familiar with). Employee churn is very expensive.
The Wal-Mart (and Amazon) model is to consider employees as expendable robots. They completely dismiss the costs of hiring, onboarding, training, reduced productivity during the training period, etc, because “these people are cheap.”
Costco treats employees as “appreciating assets” – that is to say, employees become more valuable over time. Therefore, it is better and more productive to only replace employees who aren’t doing their jobs.
Let’s take a warehouse worker in a large facility. A new worker will waste time remembering which aisle it is, may take a longer route there, etc. Somebody who has been there a year has it down cold. They’ll pick the item far quicker than the new person. This improves productivity, which improves profits.
But for some reason a lot of companies don’t seem to grasp this.
All they see is the paycheck, when the actual figure they should be looking at is the profit a worker produces. That is to say, the difference between productivity and pay. Raising pay causes people to stick around and become more productive, which actually increases the profit in the long term.
We need to stop thinking so short term.
Oh my god. Costco employees get paid better than starting teachers in my school district.
(Which is not to say they should be paid less. We should be paid more.)
A REAL LIST OF ACTUAL NAMES AND THEIR (approximate) PRONUNCIATIONS: Siobhan — “sheh-VAWN” Aoife – “EE-fa” Aislin – “ASH-linn”
Bláithín – “BLAW-heen”
Caoimhe – “KEE-va”
Eoghan – Owen (sometimes with a slight “y” at the beginning)
Gráinne – “GRAW-nya”
Iarfhlaith – “EER-lah” Méabh – “MAYV” Naomh or Niamh – “NEEV” Oisín – OSH-een or USH-een Órfhlaith – OR-la Odhrán – O-rawn Sinéad – shi-NAYD Tadhg – TIEG (like you’re saying “tie” or “Thai” with a G and the end)
I work with an Aoife and I have been pronouncing it SO WRONG
As someone who is trying and failing to learn Gaelic, I feel like is an accurate portrayal of my pain.
This is the Anglicized spelling of a people who really fucking hate the English.
No, no, this is the orthographic equivalent of installing Windows on Mac.
The Latin alphabet was barely adequate for Latin by the time it got to the British Isles, but it’s what people were writing with, so somebody tried to hack it to make it work for Irish. Except, major problem: Irish has two sets of consonants, “broad” and “slender” (labialized and palatalized) and there’s a non-trivial difference between the two of them. But there weren’t enough letters in the Latin alphabet to assign separate characters to the broad and slender version of similar sounds.
Instead, someone though, let’s just use the surrounding vowels to disambiguate–but there weren’t enough vowel characters to indicate all the vowel sounds they needed to write, so that required some doubling up, and then adding in some silent vowels just to serve as markers of broad vs. slender made eveything worse.
They also had to double up some consonants, because, for example, <v> wasn’t actually a letter at the time–just a variation on <u>–so for the /v/ sound they <bh>. AND THEN ALSO Irish has this weird-ass system where the initial consonant sound in a word changes as a grammatical marker, called “mutation,” so they had to account somehow for mutated sounds vs. non-mutated sounds, which sometimes meant leaving a lot of other silent letters in a word to remind you what word you were looking at.
And then a thousand years of sound change rubbed its dirty little hands all over a system that was kind of pasted together in the first place.
My point is, there is a METHOD to the orthography of Irish besides “fuck the English.” The “fuck the English” part is just a delightful side-effect.
there aren’t enough posts going around about the swedish cryptid known as the skvader which is a rabbit with pheasant wings and also a very good boy.
like this one dude just made a fake taxidermy and spread it around as a hoax for a good ass while and it lead to this really cool fantasy creature and i am genuinely dissapointed that it never gets used in anything
THE BOY
Rabbirds, by the amazing @tkingfisher/Ursula Vernon (source).
I stanned him so hard back on project runway! Great to see this
Same, I’ve been on the Siriano train since Project Runway.
SAME!!!!!
He treats clients as people & his gowns make me sigh like cupid just hit me with the SCUD missile. Let me tell you the day I found his stilettos in a payless in my size but I couldn’t wear heels anymore? I wept.
i thought i’d written this up on here before, but i can’t find it. so let me tell you my favourite story about my time in oxford.
my college library is a converted church (with graveyard still attached). and it closed at about 1am every night, but they let people keep working in the vestry – where there were… i think six desks? – overnight. i was not very good at doing my work at anything other than the absolute last minute, and would fairly often end up in the vestry the night before an essay was due.
it was grim. honestly i do not miss it.
the highlight of those nights was when i allowed myself a break to go out to buy a burger from the kebab van that was on the other side of the high street. the nearest kebab van was ahmed’s. kebab vans in oxford are serious business (there are few kebab shops, and they’re mostly not near the colleges, where the first and third-year students often live in). i just looked ahmed’s up to check i was spelling his name right and found this amazing painting of the van!!
anyway. so one night in – i guess it was probably april? i think it was in my final year, and not too long to go before exams – i walked out to the kebab van. it was 2am, or maybe 3am. a weeknight – maybe a tuesday – and there was nobody around. too late for other people taking study breaks, and maybe the people who were out clubbing weren’t coming back yet. i felt like i and ahmed and the other guy who worked in his van were the only people alive.
and then an entire band of men turned up in full 16th century regalia.
i think maybe one or two of them had musical instruments with them, but not all of them. they stood there. they didn’t seem to think that they were doing anything unusual. i guess for them, it wasn’t. nobody else came by. nobody said anything except to order some food.
i thought: am i hallucinating??? what is happening???
i always ordered a cheeseburger at ahmed’s, and as it wasn’t a busy night they didn’t already have any cooking, so i stood by the van for a good five minutes while it cooked, just watching these men, who seemed like time-travellers, solemnly order their kebabs. none of them had phones out or anything. nothing broke the illusion except the situation we were in. it honestly felt like time was collapsing. like we had all been pulled out of the timestream and were just chilling here together. it wasn’t april whatever, 3am, 2011. it was no time, no place. The Kebab Van At The End of Time.
they just seemed like people from the past who wanted to get something to eat. an eternal constant. and the guys in the van were as nonchalant about it as the men themselves were. yeah, we get sixteenth century people through here all the time.
i'll apple your turnover 