GraniteM

Not that I really expect Disney to ever do the right thing as such, but I can dream about Disney lawyers going all...

...in court for ICE fucking around with their "WOW" customer service ethos and therefore their bottom line.

If you're doing bendy sex positions and your partner farts and you can't both have a laugh about it and continue with the bendy sex then your relationship needs an upgrade.

Tetsuo: Twin ceramic rotor drives on each wheel... And these are... Computer controlled anti-lock brakes... 200 horsepower at 12,000 rpm...

Kaneda: That bike's been customized just for me. It's too wild. You couldn't handle it!

The cookie in question:

Me in College: I identify as a Democrat, but I don't think anyone has all the answers, and while I disagree with people on the right on a lot of things, I have to assume that I've got some blind spots, and surely if we all work together in good faith we can find a series of compromises that will make the world a better place over time!

Me Now: THE ONLY WAR THAT MATTERS IS CLASS WAR.

Yeah, that's a bit like asking someone who is vegan for ethical reasons to give you permission to sometimes eat hamburgers. Core concept. Wrong conversation to try to have.

I was in that storm!

I was working in Durham at the time, living in Raleigh. What was usually a ~45 minute commute became a 4 hour saga. It was mostly made up of idiots sliding backwards down frozen hills with their fucking wheels spinning at max rev. I was driving a basic ass Yaris and didn't actually have any problems myself, it was just a matter of going around all the intersections clogged with other cars.

Erotic Lincoln-Samurai Fax Fiction

The works of the roots of the vines, of the trees, must be destroyed to keep up the price, and this is the saddest, bitterest thing of all. Carloads of oranges dumped on the ground. The people came for miles to take the fruit, but this could not be. How would they buy oranges at twenty cents a dozen if they could drive out and pick them up? And men with hoses squirt kerosene on the oranges, and they are angry at the crime, angry at the people who have come to take the fruit. A million people hungry, needing the fruit- and kerosene sprayed over the golden mountains. And the smell of rot fills the country. Burn coffee for fuel in the ships. Burn corn to keep warm, it makes a hot fire. Dump potatoes in the rivers and place guards along the banks to keep the hungry people from fishing them out. Slaughter the pigs and bury them, and let the putrescence drip down into the earth.

There is a crime here that goes beyond denunciation. There is a sorrow here that weeping cannot symbolize. There is a failure here that topples all our success. The fertile earth, the straight tree rows, the sturdy trunks, and the ripe fruit. And children dying of pellagra must die because a profit cannot be taken from an orange. And coroners must fill in the certificate- died of malnutrition- because the food must rot, must be forced to rot. The people come with nets to fish for potatoes in the river, and the guards hold them back; they come in rattling cars to get the dumped oranges, but the kerosene is sprayed. And they stand still and watch the potatoes float by, listen to the screaming pigs being killed in a ditch and covered with quick-lime, watch the mountains of oranges slop down to a putrefying ooze; and in the eyes of the people there is the failure; and in the eyes of the hungry there is a growing wrath. In the souls of the people the grapes of wrath are filling and growing heavy, growing heavy for the vintage.

--John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath

I've counted myself lucky that most of the things that I like either haven't been dramatically revealed as created by monsters, or if there are monsters involved they weren't as charismatic and central to the creation of the work, or the monsters are long-dead and no longer capable of profiting from their work. When JKR revealed her true colors, it was easy for me to walk away from a fairly casual Harry Potter interest. I could easily pass on the new movies; they're mostly terrible. I could easily pass on Hogwarts Legacy, because I really only play about one game per year, so that one just never made the cut. The biggest pang I ever felt was that some of the Harry Potter Lego sets look rad as hell, but... whatever, they're expensive and I can cultivate other interests no problem.

I have real sympathy for people who got into HP early in life, who had their personalities shaped by it, who felt like they had derived real moral and ethical lessons (even if JKR herself rebuked those lessons later on), who felt like they had developed a personal bond with the material. The parts of those people that were shaped by HP are theirs, and they don't owe those parts of their identities to JKR, but I can easily imagine that it would hurt like hell to try to let go of those feelings.

I don't have a great solution. I think it's right to back away from HP, I think it's right to avoid ever giving JKR another dime. I don't pretend that I could easily give up everything Star Trek, for example, ever put into me, if I were ever put in the same position. I try to have patience and grace for people who do feel that tension, so long as they acknowledge the realities on the ground for what JKR is and what she is trying to do, right now, with the wealth that HP has generated for her.

I love that a show about a hat-wearing pig looking at plants is long enough to have an intermission.