Emotive since the womb. Lam. An Artist. A Dreamer. More Intersectionalist by the day. Kinda gay, getting gayer. I associate with a lot of things, and they all give me feels
I like the movie explanation for why there’re so many Spider-people across the multiverse much better than the comic explanation.
The explanation in the comics is that the Spider-people are the totems of an ancient Spider-god called the weaver who weaves a web of destiny through the multiverse and inserts a Spider-hero where one is necessary.
Not only is that explanation complicated and esoteric, but it also strips the agency of the heroes from them. Peter, Miles, and Gwen didn’t choose to become a hero. They were chosen by some god to fulfill a heroic purpose.
The movie explanation is much more thematic and fitting. It ties back to something Stan Lee said in the 60s. That because Spider-Man is covered from head to toe and you can’t see his face, he could really be anyone under the suit. It just so happens that Peter Parker is the one who took the mantle upon himself.
And the movie goes further by saying that if Spider-Man could’ve been anyone, what if more than one person actually became Spider-Man?
Batman is the identity of Bruce Wayne. And if anybody else became Batman, it wouldn’t be Batman. But anyone could be Spider-Man. And every Spider-person is equally as Spider-Man as Peter is.
And that’s what the movie makers went with and built the entire film around. If anyone can become Spider-Man, then even a neurotic, self-conscious kid with a bit of a badboy side like Miles can become Spider-Man.
yall on here: kljfhlskdjghslkjg us gays are useless! lol we cant do anything right ugdigxixhlcohc cant cook, cant drive, cant read, CANT count. we just out here being big gay disasters! asdfghjgfdkjfk we’re all just a bunch of big clueless dumbasses :) <3
Humans are packbondy creatures. I mean, there’s just no arguing it. They packbond readily, and quickly, and unbelievably strongly. Once a human has packbonded with a thing, they will do anything to help and protect that thing.
There’s a downside to that, not often mentioned. It uses up a lot of their time and energy to build those packbonds, maintain those packbonds, and most especially to do the work of helping and protecting those with whom they have packbonded. It doesn’t leave them a lot of time and energy for helping other beings.
If you want a human to help you – if you want to reliably get their best effort – you have to packbond with them first.
“Yeah? So?” So you’re probably going to be working with humans for most, if not all, of your career. No matter how good or bad you are at your job, there will come a time when you need someone else in your workspace to help you with something, whether that’s manning the fry station for 2 minutes while you pee, sending over those numbers from marketing, or dropping everything to teach you how to do a thing that your boss told you to do or else you’d be fired.
Not to mention the big things. They don’t give promotions to just their friends – at least not so much any more. Promotions go to the people who’ve completed big, visible, important projects. It seems fair until you consider,,,, who gets the big, important, visible projects assigned to them in the first place?
Humans give boosts to the people they’ve packbonded with. They mention packbondee’s accomplishments to the boss (or the boss’ boss). They cover for the mistakes of people they’ve packbonded with.
“That’s not right! It shouldn’t be a popularity contest! It should be about who does the best –” Listen to me. Listen.
You may be right. You may be the most correct creature to have ever spoken since the beginning of galactic civilization.
It does not matter
Humans packbond. It’s what they do. I can’t stop it. You can’t stop it. No power in the ‘verse can stop it. This is how the human do.
All you can do is work with it.
If you want a human to help you – if you want to reliably get their best effort – you have to packbond with them first.
“Look, I’m introverted and scared of people and I have social anxiety so I really don’t know how to –” Hey, my pal, I feel you. I, too, am introverted. And I have social anxiety. And I have PTSD that actually – and I recognize that this is bizarre – has ‘business networking’ as a trigger.
For you, I have good news: Humans will packbond with anything.
Like, you don’t really actually have to do anything. You kinda just have to… exist. In their presence. They kinda do the rest.
If you can talk with them, that speeds things up. But it doesn’t have to be, like, good conversation. Like, it can totally go
You: boy, sure is hot out! Human: Man oh man, can you believe it? You: Wow, yeah Human: Totally You: …. Human: ….
This conversation – as awkward and uncomfortable as it felt to you, has caused this human to packbond with you a little more. If you repeat it weekly, you will get good results.
THE TAKEAWAYS
You need to packbond with the humans you come in contact with
Taking time to do that is not only justifiable, it is an important part of your job, and should be treated as such
That is to say that, as much as you hate it (and believe me, I understand), you have to take time away from actual work and dedicate it to packbonding with your fellow workers
Tips
Plan out your packbonding time. It’s easier if you can initiate than if a human springs packbonding-time on you all unexpected. In an office job I like to use Friday afternoon, but adjust according to what makes sense to you and your situation.
Keep some packbonding-time questions handy. My go-to list is:
(If it’s Monday or Tuesday) How was your weekend?
(If it’s Wednesday) How’s your week been so far?
(If it’s Thursday or Friday) Any big plans for the weekend?
How’s your day been?
You don’t have to care about the answers to these questions. All you have to do is remember that if the human is answering questions, they are not asking you any questions. Therefore questions are your friend. If you ask follow-up questions, you may be able to get through the entire packbonding time without having to do any of the talking
Learn to disengage from packbonding. You can use basically the same sentence (or variants on it), but you’ll want to practice it so that you can make it sound natural. I use “Awesome! Well, I gotta get going. Have a good one!”
I know it feels overwhelming, but a few minutes of packbonding, once a week, is all you need. Once you build it into your habits it can be no more annoying than doing dishes or showering.
So we’re just not gonna talk about how OP is an alien anthropologist investigating the human species before infiltrating huh
“That is to say that, as much as you hate it (and believe me, I understand), you have to take time away from actual work and dedicate it to packbonding with your fellow workers”
In many of my shittiest jobs I wasn’t allowed to talk to the other employees because the bosses say we couldn’t do our jobs if we were socializing. Now that it has been phrased this way it makes me realize how not only just how life-sucking that is but also how dehumanizing.
They won’t even let us packbond.
Pretty sure that’s by design. They know you won’t talk to the bosses, much less packbond with them, but if you bond with your coworkers? Well. That’s perilously close to unionizing, but arguably more dangerous. Now you actually care about them, like with your real *heart*.
I love that this concept has gone full circle from “let’s talk about how humans interact to aliens” to “let’s look at humans through an alien lens” to “let’s use our observations about humans to now interact with other humans.” It’s exactly what scifi is supposed to make you do: challenge your assumptions about how you view the world so that maybe you can approach your world from a new POV. Just perfect.
So this is just a PSA, y'all should never sign a contract until you read it. I’m talking in rl right now. I just got through reading my employee handbook/service contract and my bosses slipped in a lot of bullshit like telling me I can’t complain about my job on social media, demanding I work off the clock in the name of good service, expects me to show up on time during inclimate weather, and considered disability or religious accommodation a direct threat to the company.
These are all things I took issue with and brought to my employer for further discussion before signing the contract. Most of my coworkers signed without reading, treating it like an internet terms of service contract.
Tl;dr real life is serious shit, lawyers write contracts to protect your employer FROM YOU, read contracts before you sign them - fucking ARGUE about contracts before you sign them
Also important to note, and something my bf has repeated to me many times: a contract is a negotiation until it is signed, and YOU ARE ALLOWED TO AMEND IT. Tech companies often put some bs in there about “we own everything you make while you work for us” which broadly applied also means anything done on your own time. He always ALWAYS does write-in amendments with initial and date to state that they only own things done FOR the company, on company time, because there have been companies that enforced that bullshit when somebody had a personal side project the company decided they wanted to steal. There’s only one company that threw a fit at his attempts to amend it and he considered that a huge red flag and refused to sign, turned down the job.
Never. EVER. Sign shit without reading it. Also: if your prospective employer won’t let you take the thing home to read before you sign it and says you need to sign it then and there THAT IS A RED FLAG. The job I had that turned out to be abusive as shit was like that. Every other job I’ve been able to bring the contract home to my parents to have a more experienced set of eyes on it. It’s also common practice in some fields to have one’s attorney look over it before signing. So never let them tell you that you can’t look over it with someone else. That’s a fat load of shit. For “lower level” jobs they may not accept amendments to the contract but if they won’t even give you the proper time to read it over, they’re trying to pull some bullshit on you and you’re going to regret it if you sign. Even if there’s nothing bad in what you signed it’s an example of how they are going to treat you while you’re there. Take it to heart and run like fucking hell.
Please also tell your coworkers. Inform others. Tell everyone. Please, for the lovee of everything TELL PEOPLE THEY ARE ALLOWED TO DO THESE THINGS.
Companies BANK on the fact you’re not going to read it. Then they slip in shit like ‘you can’t talk about your wages’ because they want you to keep quiet, so thy can pay that guy six bucks, and pay the guy over there fifteen and pay you eight. They want you to accept it all blindly. PLEASE DON’T STAY BLIND.
Yes, I’ve lost out on jobs because I wanted to read it and they didn’t want me to. Or they wanted m to resign and I said no to to the things they added that I pointed out were unfair and borderline illegal.
Read shit. Tell everyone else to read shit. BE INFORMED.
Absolutely 100% good advice ☝🏼☝🏼☝🏼
Never ever ever sign shit without reading and re-reading it! Take it home, show it to someone more experienced, if you can, show it to a lawyer. A contract is supposed to work for both sides. A company in Toronto tried to make me sign a contract with clause that in event of me leaving the job I will not work in a similar position anywhere in Ontario. Yeah, right, not enforceable in court, dudes, you can’t prevent me from making a living. Read the shit and don’t let them intimidate you.
im extremely nosy but i dont have loose lips and thats the best combination tbh im not here to spread rumors or hurt anyone im only in it for the knowledge of everyone’s business i wont tell anybody but i NEED to possess ALL of the secrets
me hearing all the different sides of the story because everyone involved has told me directly what their take on the situation is but not saying anything and just watching it unfold like a intensely dramatically ironic shakespearean play with an audience of one (1) which is ME
Coco and Moana both teach kids the rare-but-important lesson that sometimes parents who love you, but who have been through traumatic things in the past, can make bad decisions for you out of fear.
This is an important distinction from the usual varieties of parents where either they are evil and do bad things to their children, or are good and it turns out that their actions were right all along, even if the child didn’t understand at the time.
Loving parents, families who genuinely care about their kids, can still end up stifling them in an effort to keep them safe. It’s hard to shoulder the responsibility of protecting and guiding another human, and so it’s easy to mess it up from time to time, even when you don’t mean to. Chief Tui didn’t want Moana to drown in the ocean. Mama Imelda didn’t want Miguel to abandon everything else in pursuit of music.
Their fears came from understandable places. From genuine trauma, and bad things that had happened to them.
But they were also both wrong. If Moana hadn’t sailed off to find Maui and restore things, she would have died on the ‘safe’ island along with everyone else. If Miguel had been forced to give up his music, he would have only continued to resent his family, and would have lost the closeness they had through another, different kind of tragedy.
It was important that they learn where their loved ones were coming from. But in the end, they were right to change things, too.
This is actually a huge emerging theme in children’s media. It’s so exciting that media is beginning to acknowledge that kids are born into a population of traumatized and hurt people, and that they don’t escape that hurt. The shows and movies and books are no longer having parents try to protect their kids’ innocence only to have kids become alienated as they come-of-age. Instead, in movies like the above or on shows like Avatar the Last Airbender, Steven Universe, and Adventure Time or in books like the Harry Potter series and Percy Jackson, the kids are acknowledging (or can’t help from acknowledging) the responsibility and hurt they’ve inherited. Then they’re attempting to find innovative ways to heal and reconnect across generations and across divided cultures. What a time to be alive <3 (And consider how this theme in children’s media parallels adult interest in/respect for children’s media and new approaches to social/emotional support for kids and adults. I’m just sayin)
Emily: I knew you had a secret. But when you were little you were so carefree. But these last few years more and more it’s almost like I can feel you holding your breath. I wanted to ask you about it, but I didn’t want to pry. Maybe I made a mistake.
Simon: No. No mom, you didn’t make a mistake.
Emily: Being gay is your thing. There are parts of it you have to go through alone. I hate that. As soon as you came out you said, “Mom, I’m still me.” I need you to hear this: You are still you, Simon. You are still the same son who I love to tease and who your father depends on for just about everything. And your the same brother who always compliments his sister on her food, even when it sucks. You get to exhale now, Simon. You get to be more you than you have been in, in a very long time. You deserve everything you want.
There’s this amazing graphic novel coming out called Bloom by Kevin Panetta and Savanna Ganucheau. It has baking. It has gays. It has gays baking and falling in love. And did I mention it’s a beautiful graphic novel? Can you all pre-order the shit out of this book? AmazonBarnes and NobleBooks-a-Million Your local comic bookstore can order it for you too!
It comes out January 29th and we need to all scream about this from the roof tops so we get more good gay content in 2019 and beyond. It’s also being released in Hardcover and Paperback! SO YOU CAN HAVE BOTH. Do it for the gays. Or the cupcakes. I don’t care which.
LOOK AT THIS GAY PANEL. THEY WORKED A FAIR TOGETHER 😭😭😭
I was going through useless facts and trivia to fill my brain with shit and I learned in feudal Japan the term for a bisexual man was something along ”wields swords in both hands”
