Can we maybe start calling “feminine hygiene products” just “period products” instead? Cuz like, gendering anatomy is 1) transphobic and 2) dysphoria inducing for lots of trans peeps, and also the whole point of calling it that to begin with is catering to the crusty patriarchy’s period phobia. So lets just… not do that anymore. “Period products” who’s with me
okay but in all seriousness i bet it’s a real hazard to cry or even sit on your bed looking unhappy at Avengers Tower because Steve “Mom At The Ready” Rogers WILL appear in your doorway wearing something soft and saying “Hey.” in a gentle, compassionate voice
“Knock knock,” Steve Rogers probably says aloud, tapping the doorjamb softly with his knuckles and gazing at you with warm maternal tenderness. How will you explain to him that you are sad because of a tumblr post about a dog who delivers the mail
Three main reasons why I don’t support white people using aave and why I never explain black slang to white people:
You’re almost always going to use it wrong. And even if you’re one of the down (that’s aave) white people who manages to use it mostly right, you are inadvertently giving other white people permission to use it, and they will get it wrong, and y’all literally never correct them, mostly because you don’t actually understand how it’s wrong.
We literally can’t have anything. The second a black person uses a word y’all don’t know in a vine or a song, y’all go through the same stages. First you say we’re destroying the english language, then you turn us into memes to mock us, then you start using the word like you came up with it when, as above, you don’t know what it means. Y’all are literally the “You made this? I made this.” comic.
Y’all make bank (that’s aave) off of our shit. The same shit that we get called ignorant and illiterate for creating, y’all get put on the Ellen show for repeating. You put it on pastel t-shirts and riot grrrl patches and suddenly it’s cute. And we never ever get credit unless it is to disparage us.
Honestly, I’ve given up on fighting this for the most part. Cause I know how y’all are and I know you’re never gonna change and it’s honestly not worth it for me to point out every time y’all do this. I would literally never have time to do anything else.
But trust me. I notice.
White people should reblog this
this reminds me of a few weeks in High school, i had said to a white teacher that “white kids will copy us no matter what we do” and he didnt believe us, so after class , me the teacher and another friend of mine who was black, made up a word right then and there, and the two of us started saying it ALL THE TIME, in the halls , at lunch, etc.
the word was “funkadoink”. it was a replacement for “fucked”.
by the end of the week, white kids in our school were misusing it , and overusing it so much that our english teacher spilled the beans on a loudspeaker proclaiming “ i wish we never even came up with this!”.
it was incredibly terrible because the white kids, an NBPOC just USED it. they didnt ask us what it meant, why we said it. they would just hear us say it, talk shit about how stupid black people sounded and then OVER use it on the next school day.other black people would always point out that they never heard it before, it sounded weird, and ask us what it really meant.
but WE got in trouble when white kids started scratching it into glass of course.
and then at the end of it all, the white kids all claimed “funkadoink” was actually theirs, actually california “beach slang” and they had been saying it all along. it wasnt until a white middle aged man stood in front of them red faces and said “WE MADE IT UP, OMG we really ARE LEMMINGS!” that they felt stupid.
but it was literally like watching appropriation incubate!
If a cat or dog is eating vegan meals, they’re doing it out of their own free will, just saying. Give a dog a piece of Tofu turkey and they eat it, i didn’t force them to eat it, so.
Give a dog anti freeze and they’ll eat it. Feed a dog rat poison and they’ll eat it. Give a dog grapes, nuts, chocolate, beer, etc. They’ll eat it. They don’t know that it’s dangerous for them. As their caretaker you are responsible for knowing better, not them. If you deprive your cats or dogs of meat, especially cats, you are actively killing your companion in the slowest way.
I once adopted a kitten who was being systematically starved by his previous human who insisted in feeding him vegan food. He was so excited when he got meat-based cat food from us that he gorged himself until he puked. He was left with digestive tract issues for years because of his previous human’s neglect. Do not do this. I don’t care what you believe in personally - cats are carnivores (not omnivores), depriving them from meat is cruel and animal abuse.
What I couldn’t say in public is a series of images exploring anonymous confessions and secrets from all ages of people. The confessions and secrets are posted and left in public places for people to view.
Jon Faulconer | 2015
Interviewer: How would you explain DNA to an 8 year old?
Me: I would tell them that DNA is like Legos. Like four different colored legos. Individually, they can't do much, but when you build them in a certain order, you can make different things, like a house or a tree or little lego people. It's the same in your body. Four different DNA molecules fit together to create the unique you.
Interviewer: *brief pause* That's a really good answer.
Me: Thank you. I like Legos and science.
I got a call from a friend in Washington who knows more about political polling than anyone in America. He was almost breathless with excitement.
“It’s gonna be a landslide,” he said.
“In which direction?” I joked.
“Hillary’s going to win in places we haven’t won in years – Georgia, Nevada, Arizona. She’ll take the entire West, the whole East Coast. Trump is sinking like a stone.”
“So do we get the Senate back?”
“You bet.”
“Sixty votes?”
“No, but a nice majority.”
“And the House?”
“We won’t win it back, but Democrats will get 14 of the 30 they need. So still a Republican majority, but far weakened.”
“And what about the states?”
He paused. “The states?”
“Will we take back the states?”
“No. The GOP will remain in control in most states.”
“So the only part of government that will change hands is the U.S. Senate, and not even by enough to overcome a filibuster?”
“Yes,” he said, as if I had taken the air out of his balloon.
“And what about all the people who’ll be voting for Trump?”
“What about them?” he asked, cautiously.
“After Trump loses, they’ll still be out there, right?”
“Of course.”
“And they’ll be madder than hell, poisoned with Trump’s venom. They’ll be a ready-made constituency for the next demagogue.”
“Bob?” he asked.
“What?”
“Remind me never to phone you again.”
“Sorry,” I said.
This is why complacency is not an option, and why we must continue fighting *even harder than we are now* after Trump is defeated. It’s going to take at least one more election cycle – the mid-terms, when Democrats just historically don’t turn out – to get the House back and get past 60 votes in the Senate, and it’ll take even longer to get the states back.
This isn’t something that will be over in a single election. It’s really, really important to remember that, so we stay engaged and keep fighting, because you can bet your life that the neo-nazis who are the GOP base now will be fighting just as hard, convinced that they and their ideas would have won if they’d had a better candidate.
If your idea of feminism doesn’t include the “sluts” who take selfies in the underwear, who work in the porn industry, and who have multiple sexual partners because you think you’re better than them then please get out of my face because you’re just as sexist as the people who think that women belong in the kitchen.
OK, I'll be honest, I never watched the movie as a kid. But I read the book. Oh, lord, did I read the book. Recently, I decided to reread it. It's amazing. Absolutely amazing. It's the kind of book you give a kid because then you're basically giving them two books, one to read when they're a kid, and one to read when they're an adult. So now my nephews have a copy.
The Neverending Story was a classic children’s fantasy of the 1980s, right up there with The Dark Crystal, Labyrinth, Legend, and The Last Unicorn in creating a latticework of terrifying puppets, questionable animation, and traumatizing storylines. It had an added allure for this small, library-loving nerd: it was about a book that never ended. Most fantasies just give you a perfunctory review of some scrolls or an ancient dusty text before galloping back into an action scene, but The Neverending Story is literally about a kid sitting in an attic and reading all day—making it both fantasy and Carverian realism as far as I was concerned.
Looking back at it as an adult (more or less), I was surprised by how well it holds up. True, you have to look past some extremely…emphatic acting, and Falkor is slightly creepy now that I’m older (although compared to David Bowie’s tights and Molly Grue’s lamentation for her virginity lost youth, he’s really not that bad), but most importantly, watching it now gave me a completely different experience, not just an exercise in nostalgia.
Here are 9 reasons you should revisit it, too:
1. Nostalgia
Let’s just get this one out of the way. Being a kid sucks most of the time. You have very little agency, you’re bound by rules you don’t always understand, you often have to eat things that you hate, and there’s usually at least some amount of homework. If you were anything like me, the best days of your childhood were most likely spent huddled under a blanket, reading something—The Hobbit, Earthsea, Harry Potter, Ender’s Game—that took you somewhere else, somewhere where you were definitely not a kid, or at least you had some compensatory magical ability. The Neverending Story takes this memory and cranks the dial all the way up, adding a forgotten math test, a spooky attic, and a vicious thunderstorm to create the best possible environment for escapism.
2. The effects are fantastic!
I mean, they’re not always good, and they don’t quite stand up to The Dark Crystal or other Henson work of that era, but they have a particular homemade flavor. Morla the Ancient One and the Rock Biter are expressive characters who come to life with only a few moments of screen time, and the council of advisors who summon Atreyu are all unique, rather than succumbing to the discount Mos Eisley Cantina feeling. The Neverending Story isn’t lifting imagery or ideas from Star Wars, E.T., Henson, or even something like Excalibur. Fantasia feels like a fully-realized, self-supporting world, and the movie is telling a story that, while drawing on archetypes and classic mythological themes, still gives you something new.
3. The Auryn
The Auryn is still the coolest piece of fantasy jewelry ever. It doesn’t need to be cast into a volcano, it won’t screw up any time streams, and it doesn’t require a piece of your soul. It simply functions as an elegant symbol of eternal return and interconnectedness, and occasionally mystically guides you to the Childlike Empress. No big deal.
4. Artax
When you were a kid, Artax’s death was shattering. His death is real, and tragic. Yes, Artax does come back, but only because Bastian—who is just as devastated as the audience—wishes it. I don’t know about the rest of you, but I spent waaay too much time wondering if the Artax at the end was really the same Artax, if the newly-wished-into-existence horse would have the same memories as the original. And does he remember his death? (Like I said, maybe too much time spent on this…)
Watching The Neverending Story again as an adult is beneficial in a very specific way: You watch the horse die, it still hurts, and you remember that you’re not the hollowed-out shell of grown-up responsibility you sometimes fear you have become.
See? Helpful.
5. The Magic Mirror Gate is far more resonant now
To put it a better way, it probably didn’t make any sense at all when you were a kid, but now it will. As a kid, Engywook’s words of caution—“kind people find out that they are cruel. Brave men discover that they are really cowards! Confronted by their true selves, most men run away screaming!”—didn’t sound terribly scary, because they refer to a very adult type of self-doubt. Bastian and Atreyu are both confused by the Mirror—like the kids watching the film, they can’t understand why seeing your true self is so frightening. But what adult would be willing to look into it, and see that their self-image is false?
6. META-PALOOZA. META-GANZA. META-POCALYPSE!
Now we throw the term “meta” around as carelessly as “hipster,” but The Neverending Story uses its nested story structure to illustrate a larger point. Atreyu is living his adventure as the hero, but he’s given hints that his life isn’t what he thinks it is. He sees Bastian in the Mirror Gate, hears Bastian scream when Morla first appears, sees his own story depicted in a series of narrative murals, and eventually is directly told by the Empress that Bastian has shared his adventure. Despite this, he never questions his quest. He carries on being a hero, even to the point of challenging Gmork to an unnecessary fight (more on that later) and dies in the Tower without ever realizing that he’s a fictional creation. He has a job to do, and anything beyond that job is irrelevant.
Bastian, meanwhile, also receives clues that he is more involved in the life of Fantasia than he realizes. He hears the Empress tell Atreyu that “others” are sharing Bastian’s adventures: “They were with him in the bookstore, they were with him when he took the book.” Bastian replies with a Hamill-worthy “But that’s impossible!!!” and carries on in his role of nerdy boy reading in an attic. He only truly flips his shit when the Empress addresses him directly to demand a new name. (More on that name in a second.) The movie deftly skips over that bit, and never returns to it, but think about it: those “others” are us, right? As in, the kids sitting on the floor in front of the TV watching the movie? If we’re watching Bastian, and he’s watching Atreyu, then who the hell is watching us?
Now, before we spin off into dorm room musings, I wanted to pull back and say that I don’t think the film was trying to convince us that we’re all in some reality TV show without our knowledge. But I do think they were trying to sneak in a comment about the way we construct our lives. How do we see ourselves? How do we choose our actions? If our lives were books or movies or six-issue mini-trades, what would we want them to look like? I would submit that you could do worse than this:
7. “If we’re about to die anyway, I’d rather die fighting”
On the one hand the fight with Gmork is Atreyu acting like a heroic automaton. But then there’s that other hand, and that other hand has an amazing moment in it. Think about it—it would be so much easier for Atreyu to give up. The Nothing is coming anyway, right? Gmork doesn’t recognize him, he’s done everything in his power to reach the Human Child—at this point no one could blame him for sitting back with the Rock Biter and waiting for the Nothing to take him.
Instead, he risks a painful death-by-combat with a giant wolf. That’s a hell of a way to rage against the dying of the light.
8. Bastian recreates the world from a grain of sand
Blakean imagery aside, there’s a great lesson here—a lesson that’s far better for adults than kids. When you’re a kid it’s pretty easy to bounce back from failure and disappointment, because—unless you’re a Peanuts character—you just assume that the next time will go better, and you try again. But once you’re older, and you have a longer list of break-ups, dropped classes, books you haven’t finished reading, books you haven’t finished writing, plus maybe a layoff or two, it gets harder and harder to work up enthusiasm for new projects. Here we have a story where the world really ends, and all the characters we love die—Atreyu and Bastian have both failed. How often do you see a kid fail in a children’s movie? But that failure doesn’t mean that Bastian gets to fall apart and hide in the attic forever—he has to go back to work, and, ironically enough, do exactly what his father told him to do at the film’s beginning. Fantasia is his responsibility now, and he has to rebuild it and take care of it.
9. Follow Your Urge to Research!
As an adult watching this you can hear the name Moon Child and think, “what the hell? Did Bastian’s grandparents conceive during a Dead show?” Alternatively, you can look up the name Moon Child, and go off on a fabulous Wiki-wormhole leading to Aleister Crowley and the history of 20th Century Magick, which is just fun. But even better, you could dive into the work of The Neverending Story’s author, Michael Ende. Ende was one of most beloved children’s authors in Germany, and while not all of his books have been translated, it’s worth the effort to find them. The Neverending Story in particular is a fascinating deconstruction of fairy tales, much darker than the film, and one of the most rewarding books I’ve ever read.
You have all followed me on the adventure of revisiting this film. Now, in true Childlike Empress style, I am turning to you. I don’t need a new name, but I would like to now: did you love this movie when you were a kid, or were you more into…I don’t know…Inkheart? What are your go-to movies for adult-ennui-relief? I can always use a few more.
This article was originally published in August 2013, and appeared again in August 2016.
Leah Schnelbach has never quite managed to keep her feet on the ground, no matter how hard she tries.
So now not only is Leslie Jones being slutshamed on the World Wide Web for having nude photos in her possession, but her body is being treated as though it was never something to celebrate. What’s wrong with it? Too much melanin for your eyes to handle? She too dark to be desirable? When Jennifer Lawrence’s nudes got leaked, y'all threw a party! Y'all praised the iCloud gods y'all were blessed to see such a thing while simultaneously running to her defense and preaching about how it’s not right to judge or shame her for having naked photos of herself because “she’s a gorgeous, famous actress, why wouldn’t she?”
But when Leslie Jones is hacked and her nude photos are leaked, you question why she would ever want to keep photographic evidence of her body, like its some kind of dirty thing the world should never have to come across or you say if she never took the photos in the first place, she wouldn’t have this problem. Funny how Jennifer Lawrence and the tons of other White female celebs who had their nudes leaked weren’t met with the same unforgiving rhetoric and logic. If she bleached her skin* or tracked a mile of Brazilian hair to her scalp, would you suddenly defend her? Because she chose to look nothing like White consumer America, suddenly she asked for it. Looks like Black women always ask for it in this country, even when we never got to open our mouths. Even when we are begging to be left in one piece somehow we are still asking to be ostracized in front of the general public just by existing.
Leslie Jones has NOTHING to apologize for.
Leslie Jones has NOTHING to be ashamed of.
Leslie Jones is BEAUTIFUL.
Leslie Jones is unapologetically BLACK and America hates her for it.
White Feminism has made it well known that if you are not making yourself palatable for White consumption, or disowning your Blackness altogether, they will not fight for you, they will not say your name with the same urgency as their own or another White one, or at all.
She is so sharp and so funny that her tweets convinced NBC to let her commentate at the Olympics!
She worked to get where she is, she failed a few times before she succeeded. And she related this sentiment on SNL & told people, “You can achieve your dreams at any age.” Which may not seem like a lot, but in a world full of 20 somethings being super successful it means a lot!
She is honest! She speaks her mind & doesn’t take bullshit!
Did I mention she’s fucking hysterical?
She continually blows away people’s expectations…
And does not deserve all the haters who hack her personal website, who compare her to apes on the internet, and who tear her down for no other reason than existing. NO ONE DOES!
