It's so weird when men complain about female characters existing in movies. Like, do you really think of life as just a series of interactions with other men? Don't you regularly interact with women out in the world (at work, at the store, at social events)? Isn't it fucking *weird* to tell only stories about exclusively men?

Do these dudes just not notice ALL OF THE FREAKING WOMEN IN THE WORLD?

At the hospital at 6am for 🐢's ankle surgery. They're repairing the damage from the poor job they did a couple years ago on his broken ankle (seriously, when the surgeon looks at the MRI and says "I don't know why they did it this way. No wonder you're in so much pain," that's not fun to hear).

Surgery in about an hour, should last a couple hours and then there's recovery a bit before going home, but we should be out of here before mid-afternoon, I think. Oof. This is stressful.

I kind of miss being able to pray about stuff, but also... praying is not always all that different from worrying, so maybe it's for the best.

She's so beautiful.

#CatsOfMastodon

I think I need a better understanding of how people form and change their opinions.

I am clearly an outlier in terms of how informed I try to be & how much analysis of things I try to engage with. But since I hang out with people like me, this feels "normal".

It's clearly not though...why do some of us compulsively engage in the effort to understand, interpret, and react to current events in the larger world? And why don't other people?

Why do I feel the need to have a multi-year game-plan for resisting fascism and other people shrug and go "shit is always bad"? Why do I think it's an obvious necessity to get into all the messy details and try to find opportunities for change?

What is going on here? What drives other people on a daily basis? What keeps them so "in the now" that they don't have time or interest in the bigger picture? Why don't they want to know? And am I fucking broken for *needing* to know & *needing* to act?

@FlashMobOfOne
It can be worth interacting with media like that at least to have an awareness of how other groups of people are receiving and processing information.

I have been finding the difference between the level of knowledge and discourse shared on Fedi and the level of knowledge even among my fairly well-educated friends "IRL" really jarring lately. It's not even "an echo chamber"—it's just confusing that others get their info and form their opinions in such different ways.

@FlashMobOfOne
Maher's anti-Muslim sentiments are what first made him unbearable to me, and that was back when I was still taking tiny baby steps on recognizing xenophobia...like, I was still very conservative, and even then I found Maher's bigotry offensive.

I have a hard time giving him the time of day because of that.

I think I just need copies of Cronos and Nightmare Alley and then I will have a complete collection of Guillermo del Toro feature films to date.

#ThisIsAGuillermoDelToroFanAccount

Can I just say it?

The quote "Ginger Rogers did everything Fred Astaire did but backwards and in high heels" annoys the fuck out of me, because it isn't true.

It may sound very feminist to say, but...no, Ginger was not the same type of performer as Astaire was and she did not even WANT to be at his level (he was impossibly perfectionistic and rehearsed obsessively, and Ginger was not into that). She was a wonderful dancer, but she did not do everything he did. It's just factually inaccurate.

My piano teacher always told me to pause before playing a piece, just for a moment, and hear it—*feel* it—before I played the first note.

In that moment, I felt suspended in time, as though nothing existed but me and the music I was about to bring into the world. It didn't matter if there was a judge there or an audience or whatever. For a moment I was alone.

That's magic.

"China has access to your data" is a way less scary threat to people that you have been trying to lull into a stupor so they won't object to privacy violations.

Most people I know (outside of Fedi) have utterly given up on privacy entirely. They just say "don't bother. They have everything anyway."

You think all of a sudden they are going to get worked up about the type of privacy violations you tell them are harmless and inevitable?

"But it's a foreign government..."

As a citizen of the US which do you think is more likely to use my data and lack of privacy to harm me? The Chinese government or my own?

I think most people know it's a lot more likely that the US government is going to directly fuck with them and their life.

Is Hellboy 2 now one of my favorite movies? Yeah, I think it is. It's just gorgeous.

#GuillermoDelToro #GdT #Hellboy2 #Hellboy2TheGoldenArmy #ThisIsAGuillermoDelToroFanAccount

So turns out Pete Hegseth is in the same cult I grew up in. 🤦♀️

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/jan/24/trump-pete-hegseth-extremism

On the plus side, it was cool to see an old friend quoted at length in this article.

This revelation may turn out to be something that literally keeps me up at night. Knowing the type of men who are going to have direct access to the Secretary of Defense because of his church affiliation makes my stomach churn.

One of my first radicalizing experiences was not with government at all, but with church "authority". I learned about how abuse and domestic violence were tolerated, swept under the rug, and sometimes even encouraged by church "leadership", and I learned that calling attention to it only got one attacked and discredited.

It kind of broke me for a while, realizing that the people I'd been told were protectors were either predators themselves or friends with predators (frequently both).

If you're cis but, like me, sometimes perform your gender in non-conforming ways, now might be a great time to ratchet that up to 11 (if you're willing and able to catch flak for potentially being perceived as trans).

I feel like this too is a matter of "do not comply in advance". Don't make it easy for people to single out trans people. Don't match people's expectations of gender. Fight the enforcement of gender roles.

@FlashMobOfOne
Now that I live across the street from a school I keep the shades closed always...I am in varying states of undress too often in my home to have school children looking inside.

Up until living here, my general rule of thumb has been to close shades if I have lights on and it is dark outside, if I am going to be in a state of undress. I don't want to upset my neighbors or anything, but mostly I think if people are looking into your windows, what they see is their problem.