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amaralesbian:

Good news, Missouri has terminated its ban on gender affirming care for adults due to the fact that they did not feel confident they could defend it in court. I think that’s a pretty good sign.

The youth ban is still in effect, but as Erin Reed says in this tweet now attorneys don’t have to split their resources and just tackle the youth ban.

assassinregrets:

headspace-hotel:

ghostingrose:

jaspertheshark:

iain-pm:

My Argentinean housemate just got a book on proper American accents and I’ve never felt more attacked

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like why’s it gotta be so accurate

What’s fascinating to me is realizing that we simply ignore the glottal stop in every word that begins with a vowel when we speak quickly. Like unless you’re enunciating or speaking slowly you simply tell that glottal stop “fuck you” and hook the vowel to the previous consonant sound. Amazing. Glottal stops more like waste of time amirite

SUPER SALAD

Wtf we actually talk like this don’t we

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hopeymchope:

No hardcore fandom has ever died so quickly and so completely as Veronica Mars. This is the story of its murder.

They should study Veronica Mars in Hollywood. I’m serious.

It’s an incredible story of how to go from “loud, passionate fanbase with its own fandom name that campaigns and advocates constantly for it” to “absolutely zero fucking interest” damn near OVERNIGHT with just ONE epically terri-bad decision.

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If you weren’t there, you don’t understand: From 2007 to 2014, the fandom — the “Marshmallows,” as they called themselves — were everywhere in the Internet’s geek spaces, my friends. They routinely beat the drum about the series’ three seasons and its excellence, lamented its cancellation, pushed others to give the show a try, and always - ALWAYS - proudly and loudly called for the series to be revived.

FULL DISCLOSURE/CONFESSION: I’ve not even watched that much Veronica Mars, frankly… ? Yeah, I’m sorry! it does seem pretty good from like the four-or-five hours I’ve experienced firsthand. I just never took the time to sit down with it. Regardless, I find fandoms and their dynamics — both how they operate internally and how they display to others externally — deeply fascinating. And I honestly find them easier to study from the outside than the inside. Like, if I’m IN a fandom, I’m more likely to stay in my corner and ignore places that seem negative. But being on the outside lets me just… absorb what’s out there, looking into every forum without judgment. It’s like studying pop-culture sociology or something? And it helps that I’m very close to some serious(-ly burnt) Marshmallows. It makes it so much easier to find and absorb the gamut of the fandom.

Besides: There is NO fandom story I’ve ever seen that’s anything like what happened to Veronica Mars and the Marshmallows.

(Time to insert a brief explainer for the uninitiated: Veronica Mars was a TV series that aired from 2004-2007 on the now-deceased UPN network wherein Kristen Bell played the titular character, a high school girl whose single dad was a private detective in the fictional community of Neptune, California. She grew up working “unofficially” as his assistant, which meant that she herself was effectively a teenage private detective.

The three core elements of the series were: 1) Veronica investigating each week’s big mystery with plenty of quips and snark, 2) Watching Veronica’s various relationships develop and shift, with most of the focus given to a) her relationship to her father and b) Her romantic pursuits (which began as the Veronica/Duncan/Logan triangle before eventually becoming focused on the slow-burn, off-on Veronica/Logan love story), and 3) The gradual development of that season’s “mytharc” — the overarching BIG MYSTERY that doesn’t get resolved or wrapped until the season finale. So it went over the course of two seasons that took place in high school and the third, shorter season that was at the start of Veronica’s collegiate career.)

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Just how big and how passionate were the Marshmallows? WELL! When series creator Rob Thomas (not the Matchbox 20 guy) and star Kristen Bell announced the Kickstarter campaign for the Veronica Mars movie in March 2013, it achieved its heretofore-unprecedented goal of TWO MILLION GODDAMN DOLLARS within less than 12 hours. At that time, it was the biggest Kickstarter goal to ever succeed — and certainly the fastest to reach that kind of height. Fans fell OVER themselves to pay out for it. Hell, my own significant other was DEEP in the tank for VM at the time and invested enough to get multiple t-shirts as backer rewards as well as a disk copy of the movie when it eventually came home.

And AFTER the movie hit in 2014? It was thankfully beloved and embraced! The once-teenage characters were adults who were actually out living on their own and working for a living, but the fandom had grown up with them, so it wasn’t like they were begging for them to stay young students. They embraced Adult Veronica and her new adventure. The fandom rejoiced loudly and continued to be all over the geek side of the Internet… where they, of course, still wanted more. Sure, there were new novels in the aftermath (which were written by the creator of the series), but most of the Marshmallows were calling for more movies or a streaming revival.

And then, at long last… season four was actually announced. And there was much (premature) rejoicing yet again.

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Yes, Veronica Mars returned for a fourth season on Hulu in 2019. It was just eight episodes, and it was heavily centered on one season-long mystery instead of sprinkling that amongst a bunch of smaller ones, but it would still feature the same ol’ Veronica. They promised a new, more “adult” mystery/investigation plus a strong focus on Veronica and Logan’s love story.

New Hulu purchased the rights to the first three seasons and hyped up its presence on the platform while marketing the return for the new run. The marketing team played up the most popular quips from the show’s history plus put out TONS of stuff centered on the Logan/Veronica ship to pump up the fans.

The season was dropped all at once using the classic Netflix “binge” model in July 2019. And then… afterwards?

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There was a brief explosion of LOUD RAGE from the Marshmallows at what series creator Rob Thomas had to done to burn and spite the fandom and ruin his own goodwill.

SPOILERS FOR SEASON 4: See, at the end of the movie, Veronica and Logan finally entered into a long-term relationship. In season four, they’ve been dating for years, and Logan proposes marriage. But of course there has to be drama/obstacles: In this case, Veronica isn’t sure she’s ready to marry… or capable of being in a marriage. Ah, but of course she eventually realizes how much Logan means to her. The two are married, and, in the season finale… Logan is killed by a car bomb in the penultimate scene. The final scene is a flashfoward to a year later, where Veronica leaves Neptune alone.

For most fandoms, that’d be a memorable point of pain. A big ol’ speed bump that ultimately throws some people off the bus, leaving only the die-hards. But the fact that fans had been invested in this relationship for literally 15 years and that Hulu (and creator Rob Thomas) had heavily marketed the new season as being a big romantic event for the ship… it was too much. Unlike the aftermath of the Star Wars sequels, there was no lingering group of die-hard fans who were open to whatever was next — at least no significant one. I did some Googling and could only find TWO people who still wanted another season.

Funnily enough? Critics LOVED this. Vanity Fair infamously penned an editorial about how Veronica Mars had “finally grown up” with the finale. (The same editorial also featured the author openly hating on Veronica ever being in a relationship because it causes “arrested development” and declaring that the movie – which was acclaimed by both critics AND fans alike, I remind you – was a lame dud. So. The writer must be a reeeaaaal fun person.)

But a series doesn’t live based on critical acclaim, as it turns out. The fandom was murdered overnight. “Marshmallows” stopped appearing in geek spaces online entirely. No one expressed interest in seeing the next season or the next movie. The constant flow of fan AMVs on YouTube and fanfics on AO3 dried up to nothing.

Since 2019 ? Nothing. Chirping crickets. An intensely dedicated fandom of 12 years was just… vaporized.

I’ve never seen anything like it before OR since.

That’s why it’s so fucking fascinating.

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So what went wrong?

Creator Rob Thomas was adamant about two things: ONE, the series was intended to be a noir show, which meant there couldn’t be any happiness for its protagonist. And TWO, the death of Logan was necessary to evolve and grow the series.

Thomas thought that having Veronica in a relationship would be holding her back, and that a marriage would absolutely kill the series and leave her stagnant. It never even occurred to him that marriage isn’t the end of a character’s life and growth. It never occurred to him that plenty of drama can be had AFTER someone is married, or that development/growth could be that the characters mature enough to be capable of maintaining a committed relationship. Thomas’ view of his own universe was so myopic that he couldn’t conceive of any possible way that Veronica could still be a private detective involved in life-threatening investigations AND be married at the same time. Futhermore, he felt that fans just wanted Veronica to become a pregnant housewife, which is about as far from what Marshmallows were after as you can get without straight-up killing Veronica and/or Logan. He managed to do the only thing wronger than what he wrongly thought was their insistence.

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On top of the above, Rob Thomas only viewed “noir” as a vehicle for total fatalism… despite the fact that many of the most famous noir stories are cynical and full of moral ambiguity, but they still feature a positive outcome. The Big Sleep still has the protagonist get the girl. The Set-Up arguably ends with the happiest possible ending in spite of the beating the hero receives.

Perhaps most importantly? Despite Thomas own insistence that Veronica Mars was always “noir,” the majority of both TV critics and fans did not think that designation ever truly applied. I suspect that’s the reason why Thomas decided to go as dark and fatalistic as possible: He wanted to be noir, and he was being told that he wasn’t. So he went so far into noir that he killed his own most popular property.

He was adamant that it was the only way for the series to grow. But as it turns out, it was instead the only way for the series to permanently end. Without that season four finale, a passionate group of fans would still be begging for more. With it? It’s over. Nobody fucking cares now.

That’s kind of amazing.

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rebeccabinch:

okay new one tag with the funniest red flag you see in the person you rbed it from

elbiotipo:

Me: Did you know that medieval cathedrals weren’t actually supposed to be dark and rundown places with only stained glass as color? They were bright places full of light… the reason they look like that now is because of the centuries of accumulated grime and dust, here look at this restoration of the Cathedral of Chartres in France:

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It’s based on actual paint from the times, and when you think about it, it makes a lot more sense, after all a church is supposed to be a bright place of hope. Yet when we think about the middle ages we think about grimy and dark cathedrals. I wonder how much of our conception of history is shaped by our current visions of historical buildings.

My Goth GF: listen, I don’t think this thing between us is working,

dreg-heap:

dreg-heap:

Can’t let British people have air conditioning because first they’d call it something twee like “the climate fixer” and then in 20 years they’ll call it “the climb” or “the climmy”

French kids would call it “le climot”, frustrating language officials who would prefer they call it “machine pour le contrôle du climat froide à l'interieure de l'édifice”

bodhimcbodeface:

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I meant milk names for a Chinese baby but thanks google that’s helpful

Anyway I think this baby is going to be called 臭臭 (stinky) but don’t brand your milk that way. Maybe your cheese.

moderatetobelowaverage:

imsobadatnicknames2:

imsobadatnicknames2:

imsobadatnicknames2:

The fact that there’s an actually functional website for the library of Babel is one of those things that fucks me up more and more the more I think about the implications.

So, if anyone hasn’t encountered the concept of the library of Babel, the idea comes from a story of the same name by Jorge Luis Borges, which is set inside a seemingly infinite library which contains every possible combination of letters, periods, commas and spaces that fits within 410 pages.

So like… It isn’t THAT out there that someone was able to make a digital version of it. Making an algorithm that randomly generates every possible combination of those 29 characters within that space and making a website that lets you explore those combinations are things that are pretty squarely within the scope of things you’d expect someone to be able to make a computer do.

But it begins to get pretty out there when you start thinking about all the things that are technically contained there (and that someone randomly browsing it could THEORETICALLY stumble upon) just by virtue of being one of those possible combinations of letters, spaces, commas, and periods.

Somewhere in that website there IS a book that specifically mentions me by full name before giving an accurate, excruciatingly detailed, 410-page long physical description of me. There’ also many more books that SEEM to be that but are actually factually inaccurate. There’s also versions of all of those containing every possible combination of every possible typo, spelling mistake, and grammatical error.

Somewhere in that website there IS a book that’s a perfectly accurate prediction of how and when I will die narrated in third person over the course of 410 pages. There’s also a book that contains the exact same events narrated in first person. Not only for me, but for every person in the world. There are many more that claim to be that but are actually inaccurate.

Somewhere in that website there IS a book that’s completely blank except for the world’s funniest dick joke written right at the end of the very last page.

But chances are no one browsing that website is EVER going to see any of that because for every book we would consider useful, interesting, or even intelligible there are millions upon millions upon millions more that are just completely full of gibberish from cover to cover.

Every single thing I will ever write (barring punctuation marks that arent periods or commas and the letter ñ) is already contained somewhere on that website.

OP, you forgot to mention one of best parts, that being that you can search the website, and find exactly what book and page i can find, for example, the book containing the text of this tumblr post word for word.

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heres the code if you would like to read it yourself:

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