"you Need To Take Responsibility For Your Illness. You Need To Find Something To Make It Easier For Me

I still foolishly dabble in Twitter to see what some of my fellow animation enthusiasts are saying, and one particular SpongeBob tweet annoyed me so much that I’m not even gonna talk about it on that app. It was quoting a segment of the Season 12 episode Shell Games, a fairly standard and innocuous episode, and saying that the plot is an insult to Stephen Hillenburg’s legacy. That was the final straw for me. I can no longer trust the people who aren’t diehard SpongeBob geniuses with Stephen Hillenburg’s name. Especially when they’re blue checkmarks who can benefit from the clout SpongeBob fans will give them.

What was so insulting about Shell Games? Them revealing Patrick’s rock was actually a turtle shell, for one episode, out of nearly 600. I swear, you have less of a reason to be upset over The Principal and the Pauper, and even that’s been an overreaction. I’m not gonna say Shell Games is one of my all time favourites, but I think it’s got enough character with the turtles to make it memorable.

But the gall of that user to transparently have no idea what the show is like now, and still feel the need to stuff the late creator’s name into their opinion to feel better about it. It isn’t 2019 anymore, when Kamp Koral had just been announced and no one had the concrete information on Stephen’s awareness of it. Even back then, my stance on post-Hillenburg SpongeBob stuff has always been “I may not like a lot of it, but I salute the people who he knew continuing to work on it.” How is that such a hard stance to take? Can’t these blue checkmark people have empathy for working class animation teams?

I miss 2015-2018 when the SpongeBob community was more stable. When a Post-Sequel episode aired that the fandom didn’t like, we didn’t jump to “Stephen didn’t want this! Legacy tarnished!”, we discussed what we didn’t like about it and hoped the next episode would be better. A lot of fans still do that, but certainly not the normal people who haven’t even watched the show since they were kids. Fair enough, but if that’s the case, don’t act like an expert out of nowhere. If you were a big fan of Sherlock Holmes, and every single thing made for the past 94 years has had people going “Arthur Conan Doyle didn’t want this! Legacy tarnished!”, you’d understand my antipathy.

Never mind the irony of all this - Stephen Hillenburg was alive when Shell Games was produced. It was the 4th-to-last episode to enter production before he stopped coming in to the studio. Community notes sorted that out quickly. And let me say, you don’t have to like every episode he personally contributed to or oversaw. But come on, why am I expecting nuanced thinking from someone giving Elon Musk their money?

Twitter’s never been a great website, but now, it feels like all the worst people have cracked the code. Only the loudest and angriest voices get the attention, which gets more dangerous the more sensitive the topic is. And then, even if you agree with the sentiment, you will despise the personalities of the very people you’re agreeing with. It’s a platform that encourages all the worst human behaviours. Whenever I so much as make a joke on there, I feel like I’m walking on eggshells. It’ll hurt to see less from accounts I really respect, but I’ll offload it for a little while, because it’s not been good for my mood.

And I’m really sorry that this is yet another long angsty blogpost so soon. It’s been those times for me, and I hope you got some sort of useful lesson from what I’ve typed out.

Love Palestine more than you hate Israel. Love trans people more than you hate transphobia. Love the poor more than you hate the rich.

Always love who you fight for more than you hate those who you fight against. Otherwise when the Uniting Enemy is gone, you might start to hate as well.

Anger is part of revolution, but love is too.

from river to the sea

pro-abortion. pro-divorce. i believe we have the god-given right to give up

lets all just start posting about diary of a wimpy kid

No matter who she pays or who pays her JK Rowling will be remembered by us as a rat shit terf who has nothing to offer the planet except hate and crap racist writing.

I just got described as an "ad hating commie" by someone because I said a minute of youtube ads is unpleasant. fully spent 5 minutes arguing and defending youtube ads. insane stuff

I have seen an uptick in posts from tumblr users in the vein of 'You shouldn't believe any accusations against transwomen!' since the Lily video was released, and on one hand I agree that , especially with transwomen, you should handle it with a grain of salt, but the black and white ideology of it going around has me thinking of victims like you, so I have to ask, as an outspoken victim of an abusive transwoman, what do you feel when you see posts like that? Do you feel unheard or erased when those posts go around?

I understand this is a tricky situation, especially with transwomen, but it genuinely feels like another situation of tumblr throwing away nuance in abusive situations on that basis of an abusers identity.

Tbh this is something that's been an issue the whole time in regards to Lily and a couple of other examples.

On the one hand, I get it. Innocent trans women get a ton of undeserved shit and wild accusations just because of who they are on a regular basis. I understand where the knee-jerk defensiveness and anger comes from.

On the other, when it gets to the point where you're not even willing to look at evidence presented by numerous people making similar allegations of abuse, manipulation, ect, that's a problem. Regardless of what demographic a person falls in, burying your head in the sand and refusing to get the other side of the story, or even worse completely dismissing evidence when you see it, is not protecting the community. On the contrary, it's doing even more harm. Not only does that behavior allow actual predators and abusive people continue to get away with their behavior and victimize more people within the community, to outsiders, they see "the rest" of the community willingly protecting dangerous individuals. Which in turn gives actual bigots ammo to point to and confirm their biases.

Yes, it's true that trans women get falsely accused of things a lot. That's a massive problem. But that doesn't mean all accusations are automatically false. Nobody is immune to being abusive and causing harm.

animation being treated like a genre instead of a medium is something that actually makes me go insane. beauty and the beast is a romance. the emperor's new groove is a buddy comedy. big hero 6 is a superhero movie. moana is an adventure film. the lion king is a drama. treasure planet is sci-fi. if i was talking to someone who hadn't seen these movies before, and they weren't specifically interested in animation as a medium, then i wouldn't necessarily assume they'd enjoy all of these. and that's just disney movies! try telling an anime fan that fruits basket and fullmetal alchemist are the same genre and see how they react!

So, my iPod does this fucking genius factory thing where it forgets which artwork goes with which album and it makes guesses. Because it’s pretty sure I won’t notice.

Needless to say, I noticed.