The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
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User ID: 174
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
18hr ago
Google NYC, but they took some pains to keep them segregated from the (symbolically) unwashed mostly-male SWEs.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
22hr ago
It's in It's a Wonderful Life (but note George is no neophyte; he actually has done things) and probably some but not all of the Superman origin stories, but Peter Parker refusing to stop a robber who later kills Uncle Ben is Spider Man's defining moment, and is definitely not about him being already wonderful.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
22hr ago
Yes, the Alien queen is most definitely female. Not sure about the facehuggers and chestbursters. I'm sure there's a description of the Xenomorph's lifecycle somewhere on the web....
Ah, here. Doesn't look like sex would apply to the facehugger, it's basically disposable. It doesn't appear there are any males in the genetic sense, canonically.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
22hr ago
2010s feminists didn't want tech companies to staff their teams with skinny blondes either.
Oddly enough, skinny blondes were fairly common among the female tech employees in the office I was in. Mostly data scientists from Eastern Europe.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
22hr ago
We don't know what happens after Cinderella marries the Prince, but you actually could make a Karate Kid type story out of that, with her stepmother and stepsisters unwittingly playing the role of Mr. Miyagi in making her competent through adversity. But of course, that's not IN the story.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
22hr ago
No. Most superhero fiction is about men who are ridiculously competent and powerful... but alas have enemies to match. And in the origin stories, they tend to have to become wonderful people. Peter Parker has to make a moral error which kills his Uncle Ben in order to learn. Superman has had more origin stories than I can count, but in many of them as a boy he uses his powers selfishly and has to be corrected. Batman's origin story is creating himself from nothing but money and his butler after the death of his parents.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
22hr ago
And to be honest, I always thought Asimov just sucked at characterization in general. His characters are mostly hooks to hang a plot on.
Asimov was known for a very spare, plot driven writing style which literary types absolutely hate. But as many have pointed out, he did characterization just fine...,as long as you count robots as characters. His most character driven story is probably the novelette "The Bicentennial Man", but even the short stories had memorable characters like Nestor-10.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
1d ago
As has been said before, “If freedom entails responsibility, most people don’t want to have anything to do with it.” They’ll argue for their privileges more than they ever will their rights, but there are no rights without duties and there are no duties without rights.
99 times out of 100, someone making this argument is looking to saddle someone with duties without rights. Perhaps the duties come now and the rights come in some forbidden future, or perhaps the duties by nature circumscribe the rights to near-nothing. It's an anti-freedom argument.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
1d ago
"Toxic masculinity" is (IMO) intentional equivocation. The phrase "toxic masculinity" can either refer to a particular subclass of masculinity, or it can be describing all masculinity as "toxic", in the way of a poetic epithet. Academics pretend to mean the former, but it is clear that the phrase is intended to assert the latter.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
2d ago
Jessica Fletcher? OK, maybe it's only me who'd want to punch her at least three times an episode.
Black Widow from the Avengers. Any number of "La Femme Nikita" type characters would work. They all do tend to be portrayed more sympathetically than House, though House is an extreme among male characters. So it probably can be done, but it's harder to do.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
2d ago
Right, it takes much greater writing chops to do things like make a good horror movie where the characters don't make the stupid horror movie mistakes.
The Cabin in the Woods works, but it cheats as it's a pastiche.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
2d ago
Well, also, it's a _rom_com. If you make the character ugly, that's going to spoil that part. If you make them unpleasant, it's a different genre (e.g. The Taming of The Shrew). You need the flaw to be something the male character will find endearing or at least tolerable. The clumsiness also makes it easy to set up the meet-cute.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
2d ago
So are boobies.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
2d ago
Characters in novels do sometimes make reference to going to the bathroom, but the scene isn't typically described. And characters mentioning shitting their pants after some terrifying event happens too. The Orc thing you mention would be comic relief, so might fit in somewhere.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
2d ago
Gregory House is obviously a bag of flaws. We start out seeing that he's an asshole. He's also crippled, but that's the least of his flaws. We quickly learn he's also a drug addict. Ethics rules aren't so much guidelines as a checklist of things to violate. He deliberately pretends to be a racist to get one of his subordinate's goat, and deliberately pretends to be more sexist than he is to do the same to his boss, a subordinate, patients, relatives, etc. He's lazy about seeing 'boring' patients (who he insults all the time) and doing his paperwork. He's utterly reckless -- it's typical of him to nearly kill a patient in the process of diagnosing them. How does he keep his job? He's the best in the world... and, as he obnoxiously asserts constantly and is eventually proven right, his boss is attracted to him.
Little of this, however, is actually the cost of his skills. Except maybe the recklessness and ethics violations. You could have a show about a less-flawed House, but it wouldn't be as good.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
2d ago
I think Jiro has the right of it here, and further, the academics often specifically pick terms that would obviously be "misinterpreted" in the pejorative way ("toxic masculinity" perhaps being the worst offender, or "symbolic racism").
Further, I don't find the "male gaze" of the camera to be all that interesting, because when the directors or cinematographers specified that the camera moved up from the walking woman's legs, lingered on her ass, and only then continued slowly up to her face as she turned (revealing her prominent breasts)... they always knew damned well what they were doing. And so did most of the audience. The feminist critic just put a name on the practice so it could be denigrated (and equivocated upon).
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
2d ago
When feminists brought up these concepts, I never interpreted them as meaning that a book that fails the Bechdel test is automatically bad, nor that a book in which a female character exists only to get murdered to motivate the male protagonist is automatically bad.
You should. They will claim otherwise, but that's in-between paragraphs applying those tests in exactly that way (and often enough, wrongly).
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
3d ago
Of Star Trek protagonists, Kirk perhaps pays the least, but he does pay over and over again. (Despite his reputation, he hardly every gets the girl, and he loses them all the time)
Holmes is canonically kind of a miserable guy who, when he doesn't have crimes or writing of monographs to keep him occupied, gets strung out on cocaine. He's asexual by nature and appears to enjoy none of the other pleasures of life except smoking. Watson is actually quite successful, married (though eventually widowed, and without issue), and often happy, but he's the chronicler, not the protagonist.
Rex Stout's Nero Wolfe is another Holmesian character; he has one pleasure besides solving mysteries, which is eating himself to obesity. His Watsonian sidekick is Archie Goodwin, who gets beat up and arrested a lot. Unlike Watson, Goodwin never marries.
Mike Hammer is the archetype of the noir detective; if you think they don't pay, you don't know the genre (not GETTING paid, now, that happens on the regular)
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
4d ago
I'd vote for Cujo over Vivek. Even if Cujo was eating my face at the time.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
4d ago
but going back as far as Kinsey we know that the number of men who have had sex with another man is higher than the number of men who self-identify as gay or bi. There is a reason why early AIDS researchers used the term "men who have sex with men" and not "gay or bi men".
How much of this is just among ethnic groups who refuse to admit to being gay, though?
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
4d ago
Not just the medical process but the psychological process -- that is, getting the kids to believe they are trans and want all this stuff in the first place in the first place. And the social process (new name, pronouns, dress, makeup, etc)
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
4d ago
If Kamala manages to get the nomination, it'll be a second Tim Walz type. She can't stand anyone who could obviously upstage her.
I don't think the Democrats are dumb enough to give her the nod, considering every Republican possibly in play except Vivek could beat her with their eyes closed (OK, Nikki Haley might need to keep one eye open), but if she does, it'll be another Democratic disaster.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
4d ago
LVT has a lot of problems, but the most basic one is property tax is generally supposed to pay for municipal expenses. And (Strongtown's claims notwithstanding) municipal expenses scale almost not at all with land value, and a bit more with property value (not so much among classes of property, but between them, because what they scale best with is population.)
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
4d ago
If property prices go up uniformly in a taxing district then your property taxes do not go up. This is true basically everywhere.
Except California, which is where a lot of the discourse centers. And it seems a lot of people -- even non-CA property owners -- don't realize that California is weird in that respect, and was before proposition 13 (among other things there's a constitutionally provided 1% property tax). And you'll note the people who insist that prop 13 must be repealed NEVER talk about going to a conventional property tax system at the same time.
Some people have freedom sans responsibility, others responsibilities and very limited freedom; this is a part of anarcho-tyranny.
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