(no subject)

A linguistic quirk I liked that seems to have gone extinct: using “outside of” to mean “other than.” Groucho Marx: “Outside of a dog, a book is a man’s best friend. Inside of a dog, it’s too dark to read.”

(no subject)

I want a they/them character who’s enormous and bearded and loves barbecue and motorcycles. They tried masculinity. They did their best to be the most mannish of men. There were things they loved about that, and they didn’t give up everything, but overall, they are done with manliness.

(no subject)

The more I think about it, the more frustrated I am with that person who told me I didn’t understand systematic racism and gave me a list of books to read. I know what systemic racism is! I don’t know what you think is an appropriate response to systemic racism, and you got mad at me for not following your chain of thought! I wasn’t looking for a book about the general subject matter, I was looking for what you, an individual who presumably doesn’t think in lockstep with the book, thought about the specific situation you were talking about!

(no subject)

It’s not just Dungeon Meshi that bothers me. As one example, Darwin Carmichael Is Going to Hell ends with Darwin in heaven, but a character I liked just as much as him went to hell and will never stop suffering there for all eternity. There’s no hint the heaven and hell system could possibly end, and this is just something I’m supposed to accept along the way to the happy ending. Or that gay romance about the god of trash collectors. The main character is a proto-Utilitarian in a setting where Utilitarians are ontologically impossible, because your happiness is determined by unchangeable fate, and the only way to make your life better is to steal someone else’s fate and make them miserable. The main character never gives up trying to make the world better, but it’s unclear in the end what a better world could possibly look like, and I’m supposed to accept that because he got a BF and that’s a happy ending.