“Alas! Why does the pungency of thou breath inflict such a villainous blow of which is offensive to thine nostrils (Shakespeare)” - me @ Roxi whenever she’s within 2 meters of me

EDIT: we had our annual vet visit last week. No dental issues and she’s healthy, though she’s now on a wet only diet cuz she’s on a diet which has made her breath WORSE, which i didn’t think was possible

Ok ok ok so I know that folks here aren't the biggest Dr. Mike fans (and I TOTALLY get that), but SUPRIYA GANESH IS ON THE SHOW!! (I'm currently watching and she just admitted that she hasn't watched any of season 2 before filming this which makes me even sadder about what happened to her cuz it reaffirms that she was completely blindsided)

She brings in her med student background and everything. I love how articulate she is while talking about the show and her role in it.

I so love her. When she was talking about the panic attack scene (sooo good) this quote just made me fall in love more:

>Don't get me started on like pathologizing mental illness. I can like go on forever and like maybe get myself canceled. So, let's just keep going.

Anyway I think this episode is worth watching because she's so great, but also it'll probably make you more upset lolsob

I was just really happy to come across this (peer reviewed published article - don't worry it's easy to understand) about why we should take TV seriously. From the article (that also cites it's sources MUAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA)

>Studying TV shows means paying attention to popular culture as moral resource. It is not a matter of drawing from a reservoir of past examples but rather of inverting hierarchies of what matters. Reconsidering the “popular” leads to rethinking the connection between culture and democracy, in order to organize both of them pragmatically around actual, shared practices and forms of life. Popular culture (movies and TV shows, videogames, music, Internet videos, and so on) plays a crucial role in re-formulating ethics and in the political and social constitution of democracy. Dewey defines the public as emerging from a problematic situation: individuals experience a problem that they initially see as arising from private life, and a solution is arrived at through the interactions between those who decide to give public expression to this problem. This leads to rethinking the connections between culture and democracy.
...
TV series accompany us (or used to accompany us – today their life span seems shorter) over the years as the plot unfolds and evolves, as we unfold and evolve. The importance of TV series is further reinforced by audiences’ attachment to characters: viewers truly care about/for TV series protagonists. TV series provide communities with words for conversations and a common language to approach the world, empower individuals with moral judgment, and present varieties and differences in moral points of view.

>These shows are increasingly important to the way we deliberate in the public sphere. They appear regularly in policy debates and impact both public perceptions and policymakers. They are repeatedly present in conversations, surveys, debates; they constitute an “interface” between the private and public spheres. They make possible a new way of “educating” the viewer’ and “creating” a public through the expression and transmission of values and problems. By virtue of their aesthetic format, TV series entail viewers’ initiation into forms of life that are not made explicit and are initially opaque and sometimes disturbing.

>All the contributions to this issue, in their various topics and styles, take TV series seriously. They demonstrate the intelligence a show brings to its own production – the importance of the function of the screenwriter, the work of actors, the choices made by showrunners, and so on. Actors’ modes of expression and embodiment of characters (moral texture, gait, style of speaking and behaving) in TV series are central to the moral education made possible by such works. All the studies here highlight the collective and individual moral choices, negotiations, conflicts, and agreements that are at the basis of this education; trajectories of characters or ensembles; narrative turns and arcs; plot twists; and so on. Series are linguistic, ethical, epistemological, and cultural references that structure understandings of the world. (emphasis mine)

I found this while creating a wiki for us! (with SO MANY links b/c I am a researcher and I cannot do anything without bringing a powerpoint presentation to it). This and many other articles and resources are linked in the wiki, but I love this one because it's a very

HA!

moment at all the people saying "it's not that deep" and "idk what parasocial means how dare you care about fictional characters" (like do these people not know that tons of studies have been done that show that in general the more books you read growing up the more empathetic you are b/c you spent your childhood putting yourself in other people's shoes and caring about them.).

Story brain (Mike Dimartino, co-creator of the last airbender)

>Stories are the way we learn about the world, and as some of the research suggests, reading helps us “hone our real-life social skills.” It’s a safe place for us to encounter fear, love, heartbreak, betrayal, and excitement — all without the real-life social and physical dangers.

I'm just so annoyed because the whole reason we tell stories is to connect, to understand what we don't understand, to work through our fears and our anxieties, to share our joys and our sorrows, to inspire, to dream of things that are not yet possible but may be some day, to entertain, and to try to make sense of this world that often makes no sense. (Seriously I could go on for DAYS about how we use horror, especially, to examine and work through our fears - you can tell what a society is grappling with by their horror movies.) Discworld is one of the most popular book series IN THE WORLD for the past FORTY YEARS and that world runs entirely on Narrativium, not Quantum like us poor sods. (I did make a couple of posts about it in the intro thread cuz someone asked & if you couldn't tell by my username I am a Discworld fan - we're a quiet fandom, but we're really dedicated). We CRAVE stories

>Stories have been told as long as language has existed, and without stories the human race would have perished, just as it would have perished without water. - Karen Blixen

Isaac Yuen breaks down the 1.5 hour video Why we tell stories: The Science of Narrative into 5 basic points in his post here, which basically break down to:

• stories have the power to change us
• they help us understand others better by being able to see through their eyes
• they help us find meaning in this mess of an existence
• they help us bond with one another (i mean look at this sub & my Discworld word vomit lol)
• they allow us to test out different social situations without risk - they are simulations

Idek where I was going with this. I was just going to announce the wiki & the resources, but I just get SO MAD when people try to minimize or dismiss the fact that humans are WIRED to create and consume fiction. It is one of the truly great tools that humanity possesses (the greatest being empathy, ofc, but as stated above stories can teach us empathy). I truly do not believe anyone in any of these forums who dismisses people for caring about the show and the characters has never cared about fictional characters. In fact, why the fuck are they talking about the show if they don't care? Whatever. Not my circus.

In case you couldn't tell I LOVE stories and the power of fiction. I can open a book and hallucinate a completely different world all from scraps of paper! That's AMAZING. Stories and books are how I survived a childhood growing up in an abusive household. My body may have been stuck there, but my mind traveled across universes. Hell I created my own little universes with my own (found) families. And here I am sometimes a bit too overly empathetic (better then not & I'm not a doormat). Never once did I think that they were real, even as an 8 year old, but they were there (seriously I would have written a MASSIVE AMOUNT of ao3/wattpad fiction cuz I have complete worlds in there (there are folks to write OC stuff not inspired by anything else, right? I assume yes)

I guess on one of my favourite days of the year I wanted to talk about one of my favourite parts of being human and I'm so glad that you all here understand this and that we have this little slice of reddit to discuss this story.

Oh yeah on to the mod announcement thing - here's what you can find on the wiki:

Some of the stuff I expanded on and linked to in the wiki (most of these y'all know, but feel free to pass them on - sort of a shared resource section for anyone who wishes to come and participate here)

• Expanded rules (& illustrative links! & quotes!)
• Resources (LINK CITY!)
• Intersectionality 101
• more to come????

I made this for C2E2. If I’m going to carry a gun (and this was my first cosplay with a realistic gun, only my second with a gun - I’m not a gun person) I’m gonna make it the most badass gun. So I made Ashford’s gun! (First time 3D printing too).

I also made the boot attachments so that you could tell my mag boots were always on lol (I’ll get to the backpack - i was also doing Death Stranding so i was going very basic with my belter cosplay).