The Autistic Urge To Study Other People And Society…

I need waffle

I'm sorry Sony but you gotta drink some liquid uranium

As great as Ego's speech is at the end of Ratatouille, he's wrong. That whole thing about, "Now I know that when Gusteau said, 'Anyone can cook', he didn't mean anyone can be a great artist, but that a great artist can come from anywhere."

Like, that's true, but it's not really the point he's making. Gusteau's not saying anyone can be a great artist. But he is saying, "Anyone can cook." It says nothing about greatness. It's encouragement to beginners, saying that you don't need to be anyone special or have any special level of talent. You--yes, you--can follow these instructions and in the end, you will have cooked something, and that's a good thing to do.

It's still a great metaphor for the creativity, and cooking is a particularly fitting illustration. Not everyone will be a great chef, but everyone needs food, and you deserve to know how to cook at least something for yourself. In the same lines, not everyone will be a great artist, but everyone can draw some kind of picture. Not everyone is a great musician, but everyone should sing. The fact that you're not the next Shakespeare shouldn't bar you from the joy of writing poetry. You're not going to win any literary awards, but you should still write stories. The act of creation is something that anyone can do, and it's something everyone should do, because it feeds you. Greatness doesn't need to enter into it at all.

I want some nice cereal

During the most poor and homeless period of my life, I had a lot of people get angry with me because I spent $25 on Bath and Body Works candles during a sale. They couldn’t comprehend why the hell I would do that when I had been fighting for months to try and get us on our feet, afford food, and have an apartment to live in.

Those candles were placed beside wherever I slept that night. In the morning, I would move them and set them wherever I’d have to hang out. At one point I carried one around in my purse - one of those big honking 3-wick candles. I never lit them, but I’d open them and smell them a lot.

I credit that purchase with a lot of my drive that got me to where I am today. I had been working tirelessly, 15+ hour days with barely any reward, constantly on the phone or trying to deal with organizations and associations to “get help at”. It’d gone on for almost a year by the end of it, and I was so burnt out, to the point that I would shake 24/7. But I could get a bit of relief from my 3-wick “upper middle class lifestyle” candles. They represented my future goals, my home I wanted to decorate, and how I would one day not be in this mess anymore.

When we moved into the apartment, and our financial status improved, I burned those candles every single day. When they were empty, I cleaned them out, stuck labels on them, and they became the starting point of my really cute organization system I had ALWAYS planned to have.

So whenever I hear about someone very poor getting themselves a treat - maybe it’s Starbucks, maybe it’s a home deco item, maybe it’s a video game… I don’t judge them. I get it. I get that you can’t go without anything for that long without it making you go crazy. You need to pull some joy, inspiration, and motivation from somewhere.

if you really loved me you would give me a job that pays a 6 figure salary for part time hours that is simple and easy for neurotic women

Why is she literally me

thinking about the japanese racehorse who was such a failgirl she became a folk hero for losers

Well, the ants decided to have a colony inside my mech keyboard.

So like I had a big family party a few days ago and we made mac n cheese cause I like mac n cheese a lot, but we made too much mac n cheese and had like 2 and a half trays of it left after the party

I didn't really mind cause I like mac n cheese a lot and so for the past few days I've just been eating mac n cheese for every meal and I've been loving it

But today my mom goes "we better put it in the freezer before it spoils" and I'm kinda sad about it cause what will I eat now, y'know?

So I go to take a nap and I have this like CRAZY distressing dream where I'm in this white blank void and in front of me is a glowing and floating tray of mac n cheese and I try to reach out for it but my hand just passes through it and then slowly the mac n cheese starts fading away and like I fall down to the ground straight up CRYING because I'm so sad about the mac n cheese leaving me, and I wake up with tears in my eyes and I have that like melancholic feeling of having forever lost something or someone very close to you

The meme above is an artists rendition

I think the Hunger Games series sits in a similar literary position to The Lord of the Rings, as a piece of literature (by a Catholic author) that sparked a whole new subgenre and then gets blamed for flaws that exist in the copycat books and aren’t actually part of the original.

Like, despite what parodies might say, Katniss is nowhere near the stereotypical “unqualified teenager chosen to lead a rebellion for no good reason”.  The entire point is that she’s not leading the rebellion. She’s a traumatized teenager who has emotional reactions to the horrors in her society, and is constantly being reined in by more experienced adults who have to tell her, “No, this is not how you fight the government, you are going to get people killed.” She’s not the upstart teenager showing the brainless adults what to do–she’s a teenager being manipulated by smarter and more experienced adults. She has no power in the rebellion except as a useful piece of propaganda, and the entire trilogy is her straining against that role. It’s much more realistic and far more nuanced than anyone who dismisses it as “stereotypical YA dystopian” gives it credit for.

And the misconceptions don’t end there. The Hunger Games has no “stereotypical YA love triangle”–yes, there are two potential love interests, but the romance is so not the point. There’s a war going on! Katniss has more important things to worry about than boys! The romance was never about her choosing between two hot boys–it’s about choosing between two diametrically opposed worldviews. Will she choose anger and war, or compassion and peace? Of course a trilogy filled with the horrors of war ends with her marriage to the peace-loving Peeta. Unlike some of the YA dystopian copycats, the romance here is part of the message, not just something to pacify readers who expect “hot love triangles” in their YA. 

The worldbuilding in the Hunger Games trilogy is simplistic and not realistic, but unlike some of her imitators, Collins does this because she has something to say, not because she’s cobbling together a grim and gritty dystopia that’s “similar to the Hunger Games”. The worldbuilding has an allegorical function, kept simple so we can see beyond it to what Collins is really saying–and it’s nothing so comforting as “we need to fight the evil people who are ruining society”. The Capitol’s not just the powerful, greedy bad guys–the Capitol is us, First World America, living in luxury while we ignore the problems of the rest of the world, and thinking of other nations largely in terms of what resources we can get from them. This simplistic world is a sparsely set stage that lets us explore the larger themes about exploitation and war and the horrors people will commit for the sake of their bread and circuses, meant to make us think deeper about what separates a hero from a villain.

There’s a reason these books became a literary phenomenon. There’s a reason that dozens upon dozens of authors attempted to imitate them. But these imitators can’t capture that same genius, largely because they’re trying to imitate the trappings of another book, and failing to capture the larger and more meaningful message underneath. Make a copy of a copy of a copy, and you’ll wind up with something far removed from the original masterpiece. But we shouldn’t make the mistake of blaming those flaws on the original work.

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