This is true, this is real, this is Straight Edge

There are already people on Tumblr who want to fuck Ultron.

Get me a young priest and an old priest. We have to exorcise Tumblr.

THE POWER OF CHRIST COMPELS YOU.

Johnny Gargano has found slash fic of himself and Chuck Taylor.

For the record, if any pro wrestlers ever happen across this lj and read erotic slash fanfic of themselves as written by moi, I am not responsible for any hurt feelings because my fic is always about your character, not you as a person. That being said, if my erotic slash fanfic inspires you to have sex with the co-worker I paired you with, please send me pics. That would be cool. Sincerely, moi.

Today was the first day of Comic Con, which is also my only day of Comic Con, so I was determined to fit in as much as possible into the one day that I had. I attended two panels with theladyscribe: one was about writing diverse characters, and the other was librarians talking about censorship. The first panel was okay, but was more about general "how to start writing", rather than really focusing on writing characters very different from yourself. Four of the panelists went on and on about Google Earth, to the point where I was like, "Is Google paying them to get name-dropped at this thing?" I was expecting the librarian panel to be boring, but it was actually quite interesting. The librarians had their shit together -- they had notes in front of them, they had their points they wanted to make, they had citations -- I like that level of dedication.

I prowled about the vendors and Artists Alley to see all the treasures for sale and take pics of cosplayers, and y'all I MET PETER S. BEAGLE and bought a DVD of The Last Unicorn which he autographed for me in three separate places.

My last NYCC event was the panel for James O'Barr's The Crow, which turned out to be exactly the kind of panel I like: no bullshit, no slides, just James O'Barr hanging out with a few dozen fans and answering questions. He talked about the Crow movie that's in development, and he seems cautiously optimistic; apparently, it's an adaptation of the comic, not a remake of the 1994 movie. They're looking to film in Detroit ("It's a ready-made apocalyptic wasteland") and Tom Waits is interested in appearing as the shopkeeper, Gideon. A fan asked if he'd spoken to Brandon Lee's family about the new movie; O'Barr said that he had spoken to Shannon Lee and that she was understanding. He told us about how Hollywood dicked over Alex Proyas, the director of the 1994 movie, and that most of the songs from the first movie's soundtrack were done as a favor by bands that O'Barr was friendly with (the exception being The Cure). He also declared, "I don't give a damn about Kitty Pryde" when a fan asked him if he read mainstream comics.

Back with cosplay pics later!

Your daily dose of Tumblr Stupid: "What kind of nasty able-bodied gaze is necessary to probe that deep into a character’s medical care?"

A) Bucky is A FICTIONAL FUCKING CHARACTER. He is not a real person! You cannot violate the privacy of someone who doesn't exist!

B) You can’t say a mobility/access device breaks someone’s bodily integrity, not even in the context of a failing in medicine to inform the patient. You don’t get to decide what is or isn’t integral or belonging to the body. Oh, fuck you. Why is it the people who scream "ABELISM!" the loudest are always the most abelist cuntfaces imaginable? Bucky was not a 'patient' of HYDRA. He was a prisoner of war and a guinea pig. They did not give him 'medicine'. They grafted a metal arm onto his body to turn him into a killing machine against his will!

C) Disabled people have a right to refuse assistive devices. Bucky was not given a chance to exercise that right. If he went to Tony Stark or T'Challa or whoever and said, "Get this thing off me, remove as much of it as possible," that would be his right. It's also goddamn abelist to presume that a disabled person would of course be happier with an assistive device than without one, even against his will!

D) Can we stop cowering to these people? "Thank you for calling me out! Thank you for not letting me slide!" Grow some balls/ovaries. Anyone who 'calls you out' is not necessarily in the right. Sometimes they are motherfuckers like otterplotter (who is, by the way, according to his own Tumblr, "non-visably disabled." So it's not like he knows anything about having A FUCKING KILLER CYBORG ARM FORCED ON HIM.) These motherfuckers want to see us grovel, see us apologize. They want to suck the joy out of everything, even speculating and writing meta. Filthyyuckystevebucky is so groveling that I half expect him/her to lick otterplotter's taint in gratefulness for being "called out". Have some self respect, jesus fuck.

Just got back from seeing Guardians of the Galaxy again.

( SPOILERS )

I just discovered there's a video for Mickey Avalon's song "I'm Hot", and more importantly, I discovered that the video is Mickey dancing on stage in a strip club and giving a woman a lap dance while she stuffs money in his jeans.


GIFSoup

Giffed for your enjoyment.

The video dates from two years ago, so it may or may not predate Magic Mike, which is the only thing I can think of with male strippers. It's surprising how something so simple can still be a little shocking. There's sexy girls dancing with him on stage, but Mickey is the stripper; he's the one grinding for money, he's the one giving the camera come-hither looks, he's the one getting felt up.

One day I want to write an essay about the male response to Mickey Avalon based entirely on Youtube comments. My boyfriend is the one who introduced me to Mickey, and he told me, "On Youtube, every other comment is from a dude saying 'He's a fag, he's a fag, he's a fag!'". There is something about Mickey that freaks them the fuck out. I seriously think it's because Mickey is so open about whoring himself but also being into girls, and in music videos he presents himself as a sex object, so even though a lot of his lyrics put him squarely into the "take ya home and fuck ya twice guy" braggadocio category, guys still find him threatening. Between raps about sexing up ladies, Mickey will casually mention "truckers get my number off the stalls at rest stops" and his male porn star buddies. The audience is never able to let their guard down entirely (and yet they still seek out his videos. Hmm.)

On a comm, there was a request for people to record themselves speaking in their second language. So here's my contribution, a snippet of a poem in French Creole by Pierre Dalcour.


Record and upload voice >>

Found this cool video of Ronda Rousey (Olympic medalist; current UFC Women's champ; also an actress) practicing some moves with Gilbert Melendez (former two-time Lightweight champ in the UFC). Great demonstration of skill. Don't make my mistake and read the Youtube comments, as they will give your eyeballs herpes.



While I'm at it, standing ovation for this excellent bit of Kree world-building fridge horror meta. Puts a whole new spin on Ronan's hateboner for Xandar.

I've been reading about Aleister Crowley and his cult, Thelema, and his harem of followers, all very intriguing stuff even if you don't buy a word of his occult beliefs. So intriguing that by Edwardian standards, Crowley was "The Wickedest Man in the World" -- in an era that's seen Jonestown, David Koresh, and the Manson Family, it's almost quaint to think of some oversexed crowing rooster like Crowley as being the wickedest anything, ever.

While we're on the subject, my man-creature introduced me to Raymond Pettibon's "The Book of Manson", all of which is on Youtube. Pettibon is an artist and the brother of Greg Ginn of the punk rock band Black Flag; "The Book of Manson" is a movie he made with some of his punk rock friends playing the part of the Manson Family. It's very much in the Mel Brooks tradition of getting revenge by making your enemies ridiculous. Pettibon portrays the Manson Family as the dirty unwashed pack of psycho-hippies they were, allowing us to laugh at them and thus strip them of their power to terrify us. The scene where the male acolytes of the Manson Family dowse for the dead body of one of their victims in what is clearly some random person's backyard is hilarious -- they keep stumbling around the same 10 foot by 10 foot area the entire time in a zombified drug-haze, complaining that they "work harder than the Marines."

But my favorite is the scene where the Manson girls ask Charles Manson (played by weedy-looking punk rocker Robert Hecker of the band Redd Kross) for a miracle to cure their crabs. He goes into a deranged rant about how he never had a father because he's Jesus Christ, at which point some actress with the best comedic timing ever indignantly pipes up with, "Fuck Charlie, I'll just keep on scratchin'." Genius!

I have of late become obsessed with the movie Lords of Dogtown, and also the documentary on which it was based, Dogtown and Z-Boys, which tells the story of the rebirth of skateboarding in 70's coastal California and the rise of the three most iconic members of the famous Zephyr skateboarding team: Tony Alva, Stacy Peralta, and Jay Adams. In case you're interested, you can watch Lords of Dogtown for free for the next couple of days on Crackle, and Dogtown and Z-Boys is available on Youtube for free with French subtitles.

So imagine my surprise when I discovered a chapter about this movie and the documentary in Kyle Kusz's book, Revolt of the White Athlete. Kusz treats us to some first-class, missing the fucking point, navel-gazing meta.

It is quite conspicuous and peculiar that this in-depth profile of Adams, a convicted felon, begins with shots of a wide-eyed, smiling, and happy go lucky Adams as a boy. Such images rely on conventional and mutually-reinforcing notions of whiteness and childhood as pure, innocent, and essentially good to activate the affective sympathies of white viewers for Adams. -- pg 127.

Jay Adams was thirteen years old during the beginning of the time period depicted in Lords of Dogtown/Dogtown and Z-Boys. Are the filmmakers supposed to portray him as having been evil from birth? His downfall is made quite clear in both the movie and the documentary. While Alva and Peralta become world champions, ran their own companies, and made millions of dollars, Adams chose the path of violence and drugs, and it eventually drove him into an early grave. This cautionary tale would have no impact on any viewer -- white, black, brown, or green -- if we are not first introduced to a young boy with a lot of talent who squanders it.

... this strategy of constituting white men in a variety of ways as innocent boys who are not quite fully men (think about the films Big, Billy Madison, Forest Gump, About A Boy, or even Fight Club) was yet another popular strategy used to distance and disaffiliate individual white males from white male privilege, as well as, disadvowing its institutional existence. -- pg 128.

All those movies are about fictional characters. Jay Adams was a real human being who really lived and really died. You cannot act like his existence was comparable to that of a fictional person from an Adam Sandler comedy.

At this point, we should recall that Alva's racial/ethnic identity is both suitably ambiguous and unremarked upon throughout the film.... Alva could reasonably be read as Latino, white, black, or bi-racial. -- pg. 129.

Only a fucking idiot could fail to realize that Tony Alva is a Mexican.

The illustration of Alva as a cool and "different" white Z-Boy... Add these black discursive encodings of Alva's white masculinity with heavy emphasis given to his "style" in showcasing Alva's exceptionality. -- pg. 130.

Oh, I forgot, this book is written by a fucking idiot. The Mexican heritage of both Alva and Peralta is brought up several times in both LOD/D&Z. Kusz can't have that, though, so he tries to argue that both of them are 'coded' as white (because only white people are ambitious? Only white people succeed in skateboarding? Only white people own companies and win film-making awards?) and bizarrely tries to make a point that "style" is the exclusive domain of black men and that Alva is leveraging the white privilege he apparently has as a dreadlock-wearing Mexican from the slums of coastal California to steal "style" from black dudes.

By constituting Peralta as the center of the film's [Lords of Dogtown] narrative, the Z-Boys' white masculinity, first and foremost, gets portrayed to the mainstream as: hard-working, desiring upward socio-economic mobility, virtuous, innocent, respectful of women and commercially successful, values better aligned with those of the American middle class. -- pg. 135.

As mentioned before, Peralta is also Mexican! (or rather Mexican-American) And holy shit, what a concept, portraying a Hispanic teenage boy as being hard-working and successful and nice to girls. Only white, middle class Americans want to see protagonists like this.

Also, by arguing that both Peralta and Alva are symbolically white guys, isn't Kyle Kusz committing the very sin he accuses these filmmakers of: erasing their Mexican heritage and portraying them as white heroes for a white audience because they're not authentically "Mexican enough" for Kusz? What would make them "Mexican enough" -- if they wore sombreros and rode on donkeys? This guy is so fucking racist and he can't even see it. Kusz pushes Peralta and Alva to the side in order to focus on the one legit white guy in LOD/D&Z: Jay Adams.

Whereas Alva and Peralta are portrayed in both the movie and the documentary as flawed but exceptional heroes, and Adams as a tragic figure who fell from grace, that doesn't work with the agenda Kyle Kusz is pushing here. He has to downplay Alva and Peralta's Mexican heritage and their achievements in order to promote his agenda. And along the way Kusz throws out some troubling racist stuff without seeming to notice or contemplate on it -- like why is "style" exclusive to black men? Is Kusz saying that black men don't care about substance, only superficiality? Why does Kusz think that teenage boys being portrayed as hard-working, successful, ambitious, and good-hearted is something calculated to appeal to white America? Does he assume that Latinos, blacks, and Asians don't like to see young men portrayed in such a way?

We now have a Bobbi Morse/Mockingbird for Agents of SHIELD: Adrianne Palicki, who also played Lady Jaye in one of the G.I. Joe movies, and Wonder Woman from the failed TV pilot from a few years ago.

Ant-Man is shaping up to have the oddest cast of a big Marvel blockbuster movie: aside from Douglas, Rudd, and Lilly, it's also got Michael Pena, Wood Harris from The Wire, the rapper T.I., Bobby Cannavale, and John Slattery returning as older Howard Stark. Evangeline Lilly's haircut looks super-cute, but why give her a Janet Van Dyne-do when she's not playing Janet?!

In other news, the lizard king Benedict Cumberbatch has been cast as Richard III in the mega production of The Hollow Crown: The Wars of the Roses, which I hope means he's now out of the running for Dr. Strange. Of the other rumored candidates, I'm hoping Edgar Ramirez gets it. I also think Jared Leto could give us a decent Strange.