seashellronan:

the thing that gets me about about barbie is that barbie land wasn’t even purposefully a matriarchy, barbie land came about because of the way little girls were playing with their barbies, it wasn’t created by mattel it was created by the people using the toys, so the fact that the barbies ignored the ken’s and had girls night every night wasn’t because they had some bias against him, it was just an accurate depiction of how kids play with barbies. I had some ken dolls as a child and they were essential to the plot in the sense that of course my barbie has a boyfriend because that represented the world i saw around me, but also he didn’t have any purpose in my dream world because i was only interested in what the girls were doing because they represented me and how i wanted to be, I wanted girls night every night I wanted the girls to be president and austronauts and not because of some inherent feminist idea but because I was a girl and I wasn’t thinking about boys, ken was an accessory. this movie wasn’t made to change the world but it showed a different perspective than what we usually see which I thought was fun. Men don’t have to be the centre of all our stories and its not even because we hate them, sometimes we’re just not thinking about them

sarahsmiller:

ryan gosling this. ryan gosling that. margot robbie made barbie what it is. she OWNED it. put respect on her name

monsterhospital:

manjunii:

shared warmth

funky-dealer:

icant even explain why i feel this way about it but this meme, this specific version, just makes me so emotional i love it so so much. its very heartwarming. peace n love on planet earth

emily-e-draws:

clingy 💙

reasonsforhope:

It’s natural to be scared and sad about this stuff. We live in a world that gives us more information about more people than we were ever designed to handle. And a lot of that information is about really upsetting, tragic, or horrific things.

What I try to do whenever I start to feel like I’m falling into despair, I try to remember to take a long view of history.

Change isn’t often visible in the short term because change is so chaotic. But in physics - and I would argue therefore for organisms and humanity as well - chaos at the micro level creates stability at the macro level.

The fact is, statistically, this IS the best time to be alive. It really doesn’t feel like it a lot of the time, but it is.

But a lot of things still suck, and sometimes it feels like all the reasons in the world are slipping through your fingers. It can be very easy, sometimes, to give into the despair in the face of all the things humanity has done, to ourselves and to each other.

Here’s the one fact I hold on to with all my strength, when all else fails. The one thing that is too powerful to slip through my fingers:

For almost all of human history, until the past roughly 200 years, the child mortality rate was about 50%.

Sure, it varied based on location and century and the hygiene practices of the dominant culture. But overall, it was about 50%, with child morality defined as any infant or child who dies before their 15th birthday.

That means that half of all people born died before their 15th birthday.

Most of human history, as famous journalist and nonfiction author Bill Bryson puts it, was “overwhelmingly a place of tiny coffins.”

Imagine how fucking awful that would be to live with. Imagine all the extra grief and pain and suffering flooding the world.

That fact alone basically guarantees that ever single person who ever lived, until very, very recently, was traumatized, or died before they could be. And that’s leaving out the rampant trauma of famine, nonfatal disease, exposure, violence, and everything else that can come from a lack of resources or just the brutal vagaries of nature.

But we don’t live in that world anymore. We live in a world where we have reduced child mortality from 40% to 3.7% in just two hundred years.

And those rates are going to keep falling as developing nations with higher child mortality rates get access to better infrastructure, medical care, and resource distribution.

So this is what I cling to, when I can cling to nothing else: no matter how bad things are, no matter how much technology fucks things up, technology and progress have freed us from the hell of half of all our children dying.

We have already done so, so much to free ourselves from one of - if not the - absolute worst curses of human existence

The world has improved so, so much more that most people can even imagine - more than our ancestors could have ever expected - just from that one fact. In just a couple of centuries.

What isn’t that worth? Very, very, very little, I’d argue.

The challenges we’re facing are formidable. Just a few years ago, they looked insurmountable. From child mortality to climate change, we still have so much more to do.

But if we can save ourselves and our children from a mortality rate that was, for almost all of human history, an inevitable part of the human condition…

Then what can’t we do? What won’t we be able to achieve, in the end?

Again, I’d argue: very, very, very little.

godshideouscreation:

(via rockpapertheodore)

depizan:

I see posts go by periodically about how modern audiences are impatient or unwilling to trust the creator. And I agree that that’s true. What the posts almost never mention, though, is that this didn’t happen in a vacuum. Audiences have had their patience and trust beaten out of them by the popular media of the past few decades.

J J Abrams is famous for making stories that raise questions he never figures out how to answer. He’s also the guy with some weird story about a present he never opened and how that’s better than presents you open–failing to see that there’s a difference between choosing not to open a present and being forbidden from opening one.

You’ve got lengthy media franchises where installments undo character development or satisfying resolutions from previous installments. Worse, there are media franchises with “trilogies” that are weird slap fights between the makers of each installment.

You’ve got wildly popular TV shows that end so poorly and unsatisfyingly that no one speaks of them again.

On top of that, a lot of the media actively punishes people for engaging thoughtfully with it. Creators panic and change their stories if the audience properly reacts to foreshadowing. Emotional parts of storytelling are trampled by jokes. Shocking the audience has become the go to, rather than providing a solid story.

Of course audiences have gotten cynical and untrusting! Of course they’re unwilling to form their own expectations of what’s coming! Of course they make the worst assumptions based on what’s in front of them! The media they’ve been consuming has trained them well.

(via ejacutastic)

demonshauntingcomputers:

stevencinematicuniverse:

stevencinematicuniverse:

disney punk edits has nolimits look they even edited old man giuseppe

his name is geppetto

god he’s hot

(via despazito)