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Cake day: July 13th, 2023

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  • I didn’t have anything specific in mind, but a lot of this matches up based on the one episode I watched. There weren’t any sex scenes though.

    The Air Nomad genocide happens within the first ten minutes, while Aang is on a walk or something. It’s billed as this super metal moment that shows you this isn’t for kids. However it looks so fucking cheap and is written so badly. I just sat there rolling my eyes.

    To be fair, the online discourse part also didn’t match up. The show got good but not great reviews. Avatar is a lot more popular that most adaptations, especially among millennial bloggers who do these reviews. While there were the usual 9/10s, there were also a ton of reviews written by people who grew up watching the show that were just like “yeah this is disappointing in every way. I guess it’s okay if you didn’t watch the original show, idk you do you 5/10”. Because of the diversity of the original IP, there was no culture war BS either.



  • So I’ve noticed that there are a lot of streaming movies and TV shows that match a lot of these patterns:

    • IP is announced. Adaptation of extremely popular series with existing fanbase
    • IP is billed as “adult” with “mature themes”
    • Producer/Director goes on a podcast and compares IP to “Game of Thrones” a few weeks before release. Said comparison treats GoT as an ideal to aspire to instead of a cautionary tale.
    • Producer/Director also insults existing fanbase for some reason
    • IP is previewed to critics, gets amazing reviews
    • IP comes out, and gets high streaming numbers day one
    • Writing ends up being terrible
    • Plot ends up being surface level, with all the subtly of the original adaptation cut out. This somehow is true now matter how basic the source material may seem
    • Acting is terrible. There is at least one race swapped character, who they also butcher from a writing perspective
    • VFX is terrible, and expensive scenes are cut out
    • Costumes are terrible to the point where everything looks like shitty cosplay
    • There’s a few violent scenes that are extremely gratuitous. VFX and writing are so bad that it’s comical instead of jarring
    • There are a few random sex scenes thrown in. The sex scenes detract from the pacing of the story, and are blatantly thrown in so producers can brag about them
    • Sex scenes tend to focus on the female form. If men are involved, they all are hairless and look like boy band members
    • If it is a gay sex scene, it blatantly written by women and for women with an extremely limited knowledge of men as a whole
    • In a few days, the Internet erupts with needlessly vitriolic discourse about said IP.
    • A year post release, the show is essentially forgotten.

    In that context it’s no surprise younger people don’t like sex scenes. It’s basically a canary for a low quality show and extreme toxicity.





  • I want to offer another perspective.

    I knew someone who got married at 16. The groom was 18, they both came from religious families, and they ended up divorcing at like 22, which was basically a few months after they moved to a liberal area on the west coast.

    I don’t think any sane person would call this grooming. At no point was I given the impression that the husband in this situation was abusive. However the situation was fundamentally fucked in a way that was unfair for both parties. My friend felt pressured to be a homemaker while still in high school, while her ex felt even more pressure to be a provider despite having no real emotional or financial capacity for doing so. They also both tried to make it work much longer than they should have, which inflicted a further set of scars.

    We live in a world fundamentally more complex than what the average person had to experience 100 years ago. We don’t let teenagers do things like buy alcohol or smoke cigarettes. It is almost expected that 18 - 21 year olds in the US will be on some major level dependent on their parents.

    Even in cases where there isn’t abuse, we shouldn’t be letting minors get married. It is just an unfair position to put both parties in.





  • I actually have more respect for Pelosi after this.

    She willingly stepped down in 2022. Her first reaction was to refuse to comment, and not exert pressure. She seemed to genuinely want either Joe Biden to come to the conclusion that he can’t run on his own and/or Hakeem Jefferies to lead the charge to have him step down.

    It was only after Jefferies proved himself pretty much useless that she inserted herself back into the primary role. She proceeded to prove that, despite everything ,she’s incredibly capable in a way that no other democrat can match.

    Regardless of how the election turns out, I think we can all agree that Biden was a massive liability for Democrats. While I have personal issues in regards to the Harris/Walz ticket, most Americans seem infinitely more amicable to it than Biden/Harris. None of that would have been possible without Pelosi.






  • I feel like it should be noted that the western pressure campaign to get rid of Netanyahu forced him to rely even more on people like Ben Gvir and other Hadreem, which allowed them to extract concessions in regards to expanding the settlements.

    Like just from a place of pure competency it was an awful strategy. If Schumer has said something like “Israel has a right to defend itself, but the US refuses to help the IDF so long as they violate court orders and refuse to draft Hadreem” Bibi would have been gone.

    I just don’t get the sense that the US State Department has a fundamental understanding of Israeli Politics, or the internal politics of most middle eastern nations. Without that knowledge projecting soft power becomes so much harder.


  • So one reason that everyone is glossing over is that republicans had a legit primary.

    Trump is an extremely well known quantity. Republicans had a large variety of options to replace him. These were real candidates; There were multiple senators and governors who would be considered real candidates in a more traditional election. The entire political spectrum that makes up the republican party was represented.

    Given all those options, republicans still chose Trump. They 100 percent knew what they were getting into.

    On the other hand the Democratic establishment collectively chose to not challenge Biden. There were exactly three choices: Biden, a no name house member, and a woman most famous for trying to stop a hurricane with spirit energy. The extent of Joe Biden’s mental and physical decline was also hidden from the public to the point where bringing it up would largely get you attacked for being a MAGA republican.

    The end result is that a lot of voters feel blindsided and gaslit when it comes to Biden, while Trump is exactly the asshole he portrays himself as.

    I watched the debate with friends. We’re all liberals. We were all extremely upset over Biden’s performance. However during one of his more lucid moments, he brought up how Trump cheated on his pregnant wife with a pornstar. As he was talking, Trump grinned and shrugged. Even though what he did was objectively awful, the entire room burst out laughing. I feel like the election kind of has that energy.