Yes! I think the first Harry Potter film had a strong aesthetic and sense of how Wizards and their world looked and felt. The fashion we saw in Diagon Alley and at the first sorting was good weird shit but by the end of the series everyone basically wore jeans and a pullover at all times. Even Luna looked like she shopped at American Eagle. Where were the weird robes? Their pointy hats? The absolutely wild hair accessories and jewelry and charms people would have, especially twelve year old girls. Adult wizard fashion disasters? The weird stuff that would immediately separate kids raised by muggles because the wizarding world dresses so old fashioned and strange. I think the movies really just lost any strong aesthetic. The first movie feels so magical and strange in such a good way and the rest just dont.
So the essence of grimdark is that everyone’s inherently sort of a bad person and does bad things, and that’s awful and disheartening and cynical. It’s looking at human nature and going, “The glass is half empty.”
Hopepunk says, “No, I don’t accept that. Go fuck yourself: The glass is half-full.” YEAH, we’re all a messy mix of good and bad, flaws and virtues. We’ve all been mean and petty and cruel, but (and here’s the important part) we’ve also been soft and forgiving and KIND. Hopepunk says that kindness and softness doesn’t equal weakness, and that in this world of brutal cynicism and nihilism, being kind is a political act. An act of rebellion.
Hopepunk says that genuinely and sincerely caring about something, anything, requires bravery and strength. Hopepunk isn’t ever about submission or acceptance: It’s about standing up and fighting for what you believe in. It’s about standing up for other people. It’s about DEMANDING a better, kinder world, and truly believing that we can get there if we care about each other as hard as we possibly can, with every drop of power in our little hearts.
Going to political protests is hopepunk. Calling your senators is hopepunk. But crying is also hopepunk, because crying means you still have feelings, and feelings are how you know you’re alive. The 1% doesn’t want you to have feelings, they just want you to feel resigned. Feeling resigned is not hopepunk.
Examples! THE HANDMAID’S TALE is arguably hopepunk. It’s scary and dark, and at first glance it looks like grimdark because it’s a dystopia… but goddammit she keeps fighting. That’s the key, right there. She fights every single day, because she won’t let them take away meaning from her life. She survives stubbornly in the hope that one day she can live again. “Don’t let the bastards grind you down,” is one of the core tenets of hopepunk, along with, “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice.”
Jesus and Gandhi and Martin Luther King and Robin Hood and John Lennon were hopepunk. (Remember: Hopepunk isn’t about moral perfection. It’s not about being as pure and innocent as the new-fallen snow. You get grubby when you fight. You make mistakes. You’re sometimes a little bit of an asshole. Maybe you’re as much as 50% an asshole. But the glass is half full, not half empty. You get up, and you keep fighting, and caring, and trying to make the world a little better for the people around you. You get to make mistakes. It’s a process. You get to ask for and earn forgiveness. And you love, and love, and love.)
And THIS, this is hopepunk:
Here I am with more addendums to this post: Seems like a lot of people are saying the word “noblebright” at me, and I just want to be really clear about this: Noblebright is not hopepunk. Noblebright does not espouse the same ideals that hopepunk does. They are two distinct, separate, coexisting things.
Noblebright is Arthurian legends. The world is a good place, people are essentially good. The codes of chivalry are in full effect. People in positions of authority are there because they are wise, prudent, caring leaders. They rule because they deserve to rule. They protect the weak, they uphold their ideals, there’s people practicing chaste courtly love in every bower and garden. Things are fine, and people have adventures in which they triumph because (see: all of the above).
Hopepunk is (as many wonderful people in the comments have pointed out) Discworld: The world is the world. It’s really good sometimes and it’s really bad sometimes, and it’s sort of humdrum a lot of the time. People are petty and mean and, y’know, PEOPLE. There are things that need to be fixed, and battles to be fought, and people to be protected, and we’ve gotta do all those things ourselves because we can’t sit around waiting for some knight in shining armor to ride past and deal with it for us. We’re just ordinary people trying to do our best because we give a shit about the world. Why? Because we’re some of the assholes that live there.
Examples of hopepunk media include:
Guardians of the Galaxy: “Why do I want to save the galaxy? Because I’m one of the idiots who lives there?”
Thor Ragnarok: “Asgard is not a place… It is a people.”
Leverage: “Right now, you’re suffering under an enormous weight. We provide… leverage.”
The Librarians: (“I have seen you all die so many times when it didn’t matter, I can’t let it happen now that it does.” “What do you need us to do?”)
Scorpion.: (”If you try to tell me about the greater good one more time, I will hit you.”)
Star Wars: (”There is good in him still.”)
Star Trek (the original universe): (honestly, there’s no one single quote, but like, the entire damn thing is solid hopepunk.)
Wonder Woman: (”It is not about deserve, it is about what you believe.” also “Who will sing for us, Charlie?”)
Also, Mad Max: Fury Road. Angharad is a hopepunk queen, and Furiosa and Max get pushed and pulled on to that path by the end of the movie through their connection to each other and the people they fight with.
More HopePunk quotes, cause I think we all need them:
It’s difficult in times like these: ideals, dreams, and cherished hopes
rise within us, only to be crushed by grim reality. It’s a wonder I
haven’t abandoned my ideals; they seem so absurd and impractical. Yet I cling to them because I still believe, in spite of everything, that people are truly good at heart.— The Diary of Anne Frank
If a hiker gets lost in the mountains, people will coordinate a search.
If a train crashes, people will line up to give blood. If an earthquake
levels a city, people all over the world will send emergency supplies.
This is so fundamentally human that it’s found in every culture without
exception. Yes, there are assholes who just don’t care, but they’re
massively outnumbered by the people who do. And because of that, I had
billions of people on my side. Pretty cool, eh?— Andy Weir, The Martian
No one is born hating another person because of the colour of his skin,
or his background, or his religion. People must learn to hate, and if
they can learn to hate, they can be taught to love, for love comes more naturally to the human heart than its opposite.— Nelson Mandela, Long Walk to Freedom
When I was a boy and I would see scary things in the news, my mother
would say to me, “Look for the helpers. You will always find people who
are helping.”— Fred Rogers
I believe in my fellow citizens. Our headlines are splashed with crime
yet for every criminal there are ten thousand honest, decent, kindly
men. If it were not so, no child would live to grow up. Business could
not go on from day to day. Decency is not news. It is buried in the
obituaries, but it is a force stronger than crime. I believe in the
patient gallantry of nurses and the tedious sacrifices of teachers. I
believe in the unseen and unending fight against desperate odds that
goes on quietly in almost every home in the land.— Robert A. Heinlein
Sure, humans kill each other. We kill for passion, madness, rage, love,
war, and lord knows other things. And yet, we’ve got six billion people
running around the planet. Almost as if people who kill other people are
the exception rather than the rule.— Linkara, Atop the Fourth Wall Marville #4 review
“But we were born of risen apes, not fallen angels, and the apes were armed killers besides. And so what shall we wonder at? Our murders and massacres and missiles, and our irreconcilable regiments? Or our treaties whatever they may be worth; our symphonies however seldom they may be played; our peaceful acres, however frequently they may be converted into battlefields; our dreams however rarely they may be accomplished. The miracle of man is not how far he has sunk but how magnificently he has risen. We are known among the stars by our poems, not our corpses.” – Robert Ardrey
some people’s blogs are being incorrectly flagged as being explicit so if you would like to check your status, you can look it up on postlimit.com.
if you have been incorrectly marked as nsfw, you can appeal before tumblr permanently filters you as such and your blog is set back to default settings prior to december 18th here.
I emailed staff yesterday and they fixed it, which is likely why. Never got a response from them, I just know my blog went from being muted to suddenly visible again after I did.
Honestly I can’t believe that I’m watching this right now. This is This is the sweetest most gentle and loving and pure thing I’ve ever beheld and I feel so blessed to have seen this
“Sshh don’t cry, my baby.”
MY FUCKING HEART 😭
“My baby is big and soft and doesn’t look like me but he is my son and I love him.”
so you’ll see me getting rid of stuff in my queue and drafts as I prepare to back up my tumblr. Probably to pillowfort. I’ll post a link as soon as I’ve got it. I’ve got some family stuff to deal with this afternoon so the plan is to leave the computer on to do the import while I do that stuff and then come back, check over it’s all good, and log out by 9pm.
EDIT: Looks like pillowfort has closed registrations, so wordpress it is.
My wordpress is jahloveangelcom(.)home(.)blog
I’m also on twitter under the same handle.
I run weddingonice and jla-is-with-her, those will also be backed up to wordpress under similar if not identical handles.
Since the wordpress import is still not showing progress (geeze 78k posts wonder why) I’m also using that python script to make a copy of my tumblr on my compute. Sorry, I don’t go poof that easily.
I have a culinary degree, and have worked as a professional cook, and have been a restaurateur. The “gastronomer” in my url is quite serious. I have Opinions about how people use the word chef (”chef” is a job title, it’s a French word that means “boss” and is a cognate of chief; only someone who actually runs a quality kitchen should be called a chef – you can’t be a “home chef”), about how “spaghetti bolognese” is used (it’s not just any spaghetti with meat sauce, Bolognese is a specific style that includes beef, pork and pancetta), about what a proper key lime pie is like (don’t even get me started).
Because of this, people expect me to be a food snob. I am NOT. You like what you like, and you should eat what you like, and anybody who looks down their nose at you for it isn’t a “foodie”, they’re a fucking asshole. You like Li’l Smokies in your box mac’n’cheese? Right on! You like Taco Bell? So do I! Let’s go get a crunchwrap and a gordita! You buy cheap pink box wine? Sure, I’ll have a glass with you, if you’re offering.
I have food I don’t like, and food I will offer what I find more enjoyable alternatives to (oil packed canned tuna has a very fine taste, while water pack tends to wash out the richer flavors), but hey, if you like the stuff I don’t, you eat that all you want!
I want to make fresh, delicious, high quality ingredients available to everyone, but don’t you dare take away my $1.99 “chocolate” covered waxy-tasting mini donuts! I will fight you!
Foodie-ism has stopped being about just enjoying food for yourself, and has, far too often, started being about sneering at the food other people like. It’s food hipsterism. And it’s bullshit. It’s often classicist and racist and ableist/healthist as well.
Don’t pull that shit around me. I will take you the fuck apart.
Okay, but what IS a proper key lime pie? And what isn’t? I presume it’s not just a lemon pie but with lime-flavored or lime-based filling instead of lemon?
Now you’ve got me curious.
You got me started.
OK, first of all, a key lime pie is NOT made with “regular” (Persian) limes. It is made with key limes, aka Mexican limes. They are smaller than Persian limes, about the size of a ping pong ball. They’re also not a deep green, but more of a yellow-green, and the juice is yellowish. They are considerably tarter than Persian limes, and have a distinctive flavor. They’re also kind of a pain to juice if they’re not fresh-picked, so personally I always buy bottled up here in Seattle. (I’m from Florida, where part of the year you can get good ones from groves or even off your own backyard tree.) Nellie and Joe’s Key West Lime Juice is the only brand I know and trust, and if your grocery store doesn’t have it, Amazon does.
A key lime pie is a custard pie made from key lime juice, egg yolks, and typically sweetened condensed milk, in a graham cracker crust (none of your bullshit butter cookie crusts, save that for some other, appropriate, kind of pie). Traditionally, you *can* put meringue on top, but only to use up the egg whites you separate from the yolks. It’s not fucking lemon meringue pie, there should not be a huge mound. Personally I don’t like wet French meringues (made with granulated sugar, as opposed to Italian meringues, which are made with syrup), I think they feel like sweetened snot in my mouth. You can also add a small amount of sweetened whipped cream when you plate it, but only a dollop.
A key lime pie should never, EVER be green. If it is, the baker doesn’t know what the fuck they’re doing, and you should skip it. Even a custard pie made with Persian limes shouldn’t be green, ffs.
A key lime pie SHOULD be both very sweet and very tart, as well and very smooth and creamy. My personal standard for the flavor is that when you take a bite, the first thing you taste should be the creamy and the sweet, and then the tart should hit you, but your mouth shouldn’t pucker until you take a sip of water and wash the sugar away.
A key lime pie filling should not contain flour, starch, gelatin, or other stabilizers. It should be as simple as possible. Key lime pie, historically, is poor people food from the Florida Keys, using the basic ingredients they had lying around: limes from the backyard, eggs from the chickens (they still run around loose on Key West), a can of sweetened condensed milk, some graham crackers, sugar and butter for the crust. You’d stir it up, pour it into the pie shell, pop it in the over with dinner, pull it out and stick it in the icebox (with literal ice) to cool, eat it the next night. (Unless you used a no-bake version, where the key lime juice itself denatured and “chemically cooked” the egg yolks. But it’s too easy to get salmonella that way these days, in the US.) They’re meant to be simple, dammit.
Key lime pie was the kind of thing they made in shotgun shacks. (Which frequently look a little different in the Keys than they do in those pics. The hallways often have rooms built off both sides of the hallway, and the roof’s peak sometimes runs perpendicular to the hallway, and then additional sections might get added to the back as the family grew, leading to rooflines like ^^^^.) Just a bit of history.
So then. Key Lime Pie Recipe Time! This is the recipe my family has always used, it’s the recipe I used in my restaurant, it always gets rave reviews, and it is thoroughly authentic. Because I hate meringue, it does not include meringue.
You will need:
Hardware:
one mixing bowl
one wooden spoon, stirring spatula, or spoonula
one liquid measuring cup
one small bowl for separating eggs into
one graham cracker pie crust, recipe to follow, or use a store-bought one, I don’t care
Ingredients: 1 – 12oz can sweetened condensed milk 3 egg yolks ½ cup key lime juice
Preheat the oven to 350F.
Mix those things together until smooth. Don’t beat them hard, you’ll incorporate air into the mix, that will mess up your texture and give you bubbles. When it is completely smooth, your oven should be hot, stick your filling in the fridge for a little while. Pre-bake your crust for 15 minutes, trust me, it is so much better if you do this. Do this even if it’s a store bought crust. If you don’t, your crust can get soggy. Pull it out, let it cool 10 minutes. Pour in the filling, bake 15 minutes. Pull it out. Let it cool for 30 minutes of a countertop, then stick it in the fridge for at least four hours, preferably overnight. Share and enjoy. (Or eat it all yourself.)
Graham cracker crust recipe:
You will need:
Hardware:
one mixing bowl one glass bowl to melt butter in one gallon ziplock OR a food processor a wooden spoon
Ingredients:
1/3 of a box of graham crackers 1 stick butter 1/2c sugar one 9″ pie plate one heavy glass with a smooth flat bottom
Dump the graham crackers into the gallon ziplock or work bowl of your food processor. If using a bag, crush them up real good, until you have a lot of fine meal and some small pieces. If you’re using the food processor, break them up roughly, then pulse until you get the same thing.
Put them in the mixing bowl. Add the sugar, and stir to combine. Melt your butter. Mix that in. It should reach the consistency of wet sand, like you’re making a sandcastle. If you pick some up in your hand and squeeze it in your fist, it should hold its shape until you poke it.
Press this firmly into the bottom and up the sides of your pie plate. Then use the bottom of your glass to press it in even more firmly. Really compact it. Then bake it as above.
Great all-purpose graham cracker crust recipe, good for cheesecake too.
If you lose track of this recipe, look on the bottle of Nellie and Joe’s, that’s where we got it!
If you want to get really ridiculous and over the top, make a triple batch of filling and put it in the same crust. That’s what we did at the restaurant. But you might want to find someone to share the slice with!
There. I told you, don’t get me started. It’s a whole fucking thing with me. In the restaurant, if somebody asked in the key lime pie was authentic, the servers would go, “Oh, the owner’s from Florida, she has a thing about key lime pie. I can go get her if you like, she’s got a whole rant. It’s really funny.” And they would go get me out of the office and I would do a whole little standup bit about key lime pie. Much shorter than this was. I just wrote like 1200 words on this. I could write more. I won’t. I’m done.Thank you for coming to my Ted Talk?
I have never liked key lime pie.
Apparently I’ve been eating bad key lime pie and need to home make some asap.
Thank you, random chef on the internet. You may have saved key lime pie in this household yet.
I would also like to say thank you to random internet chef for:
1. Defending the right of people to like what they fucking please, and smacking down classist bullshit.
2. Giving me a fantastic key lime recipe. My dad used to make it properly. He died some years ago, and I could never find a recipe for it. But this looks very, *very* similar to the spread I used to see in his kitchen when he was making it. I’m going to try it, and if it’s even remotely similar to his, I will sit there happily sobbing into my key lime pie. Thank you.
The new tumblr shakeup caught us on the cusp of
announcing our calendar for 2019 and some of the new procedures we are
implementing this coming year. Even though a bunch of stuff is still in
flux, we want to get this basic information out there as quickly as
possible, while most people are still on tumblr to see it.
****Please reblog far and wide.**** We don’t know when we’ll have another chance to reach a lot of people again quickly.
1) Who are you guys, again?
We
are a handful of fans who came together, in the wake of the 2016
election, to throw together an auction to support some of the
organizations that would fight against the Trump administration. By
another accounting, we are the hundreds of fans who have participated in
the last two auctions to raise over $50,000 for organizations like
Planned Parenthood, the ACLU, ProPublica and the Trevor Project. You can read more about us on the About Us page linked at the top of our blog.
We are still finalizing our list of supported organizations for the year, but we will post that list shortly. 2) Where will the auction be hosted? How can I find you?
Like everyone else, we’re not totally sure where we are going to land. We have
our own freestanding site in production, but it won’t be ready for this
coming year (in part because we hadn’t thought we would need it yet!)
Our plan for now is to host this year’s auction at dreamwidth.
You can find us at dreamwidth under the name fandomtrumpshate.
That
being said, we are still taking suggestions: if you know of a platform
that is particularly well-suited to running an auction, please leave a
comment on this post.
Even if we end up running the auction from a different site, we will
make sure that you can always use the DW page to find us quickly and
easily.
We have also started a twitter account for auction announcements. Our handle is – you guessed it – FandomTrumpsHate.
3) When is the 2019 auction taking place?
We will post further information about auction logistics in a couple of days, but here is the basic calendar.
Sunday, January 6th:
creator signups open. As in years past, we are inviting people to
contribute one (or more!) of five kinds of fanwork: fic, art, vids,
podfics, or fan labor.
Friday, February 1st: creator signups close.
Monday, February 18th: Browsing
week begins. This is a new addition to our calendar! We’ve learned that many participants from the past two years, creators and bidders both, feel that a week is too long for
an auction. So instead, we’re giving potential bidders a full week to
look over all the offerings and decide what interests them, and then
shortening the bidding period itself.
Tuesday, February 25th, 8pm EST: Bidding opens
Friday, March 1st, 8pm EST: Bidding closes
Friday, March 8th, 8pm EST: proof of donation due from winning bidders
4) Why are we still doing this FTH thing? Blue wave, amirite? It’s
true that American voters turned out in record numbers this November to
vote for democrats (or against republicans.) But the 45
administration’s attacks against immigrants, refugees, women, people of
color, non-Christians, members of the press, and the operations of
democracy itself are only getting fiercer – and the organizations that
are fighting back need our support as badly as ever. Since our last
auction at the beginning of 2018 (and we wish we could link you to
sources here, but all of these stories are easily googled):
* ICE
has created inhumane detention camps for asylum speakers, separated
infants and toddlers from their parents, seized and imprisoned American
citizens of color on the suspicion of being undocumented, and beaten to
death a trans woman in their custody. And if that weren’t enough, US
troops at the border have committed war crimes by firing tear gas
across an international border in order to deter a caravan of
asylum-seekers, including young children.
FTH stands
with refugees, asylum-speakers, and undocumented immigrants, supporting
organizations like RAICES and the Young Center.
*
Hate crimes of many kinds have risen across the country, including the
Pittsburgh synagogue massacre and individual attacks against Muslims,
Sikhs, and LGBTQ+ people.
FTH continues to stand in
solidarity with the vulnerable people threatened by the Trump
administration, and to provide support to the organizations that offer
support and fight for their rights.
* Democrats’ electoral victories fell far short of the actual level of support they received from the electorate. Significant gerrymandering meant
that, in many states, Republicans maintained control of state and
federal offices in spite of being significantly outvoted across the
state as a whole. Furthermore, active voter suppression campaigns in
Georgia, North Carolina, and Florida (among others) prevented hundreds
of thousands of poor and minority voters from making their voices heard. In states where the Republican party was unable to retain legislative or gubernatorial control, outgoing
lawmakers are passing laws and signing executive orders to strip power
away from their successors, and hastily approving vast numbers of
judicial appointments to lock in conservative judges.
This
year, FTH joins the fight for every voice by supporting organizations
that fight voter suppression and gerrymandering and seek to reinstate
the Voting Rights Act.
So yes, we’re still
doing this. We hope you’ll keep doing it, too. This is a long fight,
and it’s far from over. it’s going to take all of us.
Oops, quick correction… our twitter handle is FansTrumpHate. find us (and follow us) there!
“The choice in the Democratic primary ultimately is about only one thing: who is best prepared to beat Trump at a time when Trump owns the culture? Someone who actually understands culture would be a start.”
JahLoveAngel 