I Just Sat Bolt Upright In Bed After Realizing It’s The Last Supper. THE DINNER PARTY FOR THE FIFTH

Mama Mia it’s-a Wednesday

Calvin's parents decide to take a Hawai'ian vacation. They're not sure how much of it their son will tolerate but they would like to do at least a few things that involve sandy beaches and scenic cycling routes. They are therefore pleased when Calvin seems to make friends with a local girl about his own age and the two of them run off to play

Now, from Calvin's point of view what has happened is that he spotted actual aliens, and starts trying to bring this to the attention if the adults. But the tourists are like, "that's nice, go shoot 'em with your water gun, have a good time," and the locals are like, "yeah, they're an older couple who decided to retire here. Happens all the time." Eventually, it becomes clear that Spaceman Spiff is going to have to handle it himself.

From Lilo's point of view, Jumba and Pleakley are her gay uncles, do you mind? Calvin does mind, and so the two of them spend the rest of the afternoon terrorizing Kaua'i in the effort to destroy one another while the aliens alternate between bailing them out of trouble and attempting to escape.

Hobbes and Stitch, meanwhile, are calmly playing checkers and drinking non-alcoholic margaritas.

“Medieval peasants couldn’t handle my Spotify playlist” but could YOU handle a medieval bard relaying the epic of Beowulf over the course of an hour? Humble yourself.

do you all see my vision here

I get so excited when I hear someone naturally say "squoze" as the past tense for "squeeze".

i'm sorry but language-wise we gotta start moving things along. English has been around for 15 centuries and still barely scrapes a couple hundred irregular verbs. for starters i propose the past form of "slice" should be "sloce"

broooooo ahaha that's so epic. do you mind if i grow fond of you

I’m not naming names because I’m not trying to start anything but I’m seeing several mutuals claiming they always knew Gaiman was a bad egg and it was so obvious, as though they didn’t make me stand in line with them to get his signature and kept their signed copies of his books on a special shelf akin to a shrine.

And like, listen, you don’t need to pretend.

This isn’t the devil’s sacrament. You’re not tainted by association. You’re not morally bad for not immediately knowing when someone is being charming and persuasive to hide something they don’t want you to know.

Abusers don’t just groom their victims. They groom their witnesses too. You were never supposed to know something was wrong because it was intentionally hidden. It’s okay you didn’t know. You don’t need to act like you never liked him or his work. You don’t need to pretend. But you do need to stop being shitty to other people who also didn’t know because it reeks of victim blaming.

“Well I knew, so how come others didn’t?”

His victims were fans. Are you blaming them for not knowing?

Christ alive, I hope not.

I want to step away from the art-vs-artist side of the Gaiman issue for a bit, and talk about, well, the rest of it. Because those emotions you're feeling would be the same without the art; the art just adds another layer.

Source: I worked with a guy who turned out to be heavily involved in an international, multi-state sex-slavery/trafficking ring.

He was really nice.

Yeah.

It hits like a dumptruck of shit. You don't feel stable in your world anymore. How could someone you interacted with, liked, also be a truly horrible person? How could your judgement be that bad? How can real people, not stylized cartoon bogeymen, be actually doing this shit?

You have to sit with the fact that you couldn't, or probably couldn't, have known. You should have no guilt as part of this horror — but guilt is almost certainly part of that mess you're feeling, because our brains do this associative thing, and somehow "I liked [the version of] the guy [that I knew]", or his creations, becomes "I made a horrible mistake and should feel guilty."

You didn't, loves, you didn't.

We're human, and we can only go by the information we have. And the information we have is only the smallest glimpse into someone else's life.

I didn't work closely with the guy I knew at work, but we chatted. He wasn't just nice; he was one of the only people outside my tiny department who seemed genuinely nice in a workplace that was rapidly becoming incredibly toxic. He loaned me a bike trainer. Occasionally he'd see me at the bus stop and give me a lift home.

Yup. I was a young woman in my twenties and rode in this guy's car. More than once.

When I tell this story that part usually makes people gasp. "You must feel so scared about what could have happened to you!" "You're so lucky nothing happened!"

No, that's not how it worked. I was never in danger. This guy targeted Korean women with little-to-no English who were coerced and powerless. A white, fluent, US citizen coworker wasn't a potential victim. I got to be a person, not prey.

Y'know that little warning bell that goes off, when you're around someone who might be a danger to you? That animal sense that says "Something is off here, watch out"?

Yeah, that doesn't ping if the preferred prey isn't around.

That's what rattled me the most about this. I liked to think of myself as willing to stand up for people with less power than me. I worked with Japanese exchange students in college and put myself bodily between them and creeps, and I sure as hell got that little alarm when some asian-schoolgirl fetishist schmoozed on them. But we were all there.

I had to learn that the alarm won't go off when the hunter isn't hunting. That it's not the solid indicator I might've thought it was. That sometimes this is what the privilege of not being prey does; it completely masks your ability to detect the horrors that are going on.

A lot of people point out that 'people like that' have amazing charisma and ability to lie and manipulate, and that's true. Anyone who's gotten away with this shit for decades is going to be way smoother than the pathetic little hangers-on I dealt with in university. But it's not just that. I seriously, deeply believe that he saw me as a person, and he did not extend personhood to his victims. We didn't have a fake coworker relationship. We had a real one. And just like I don't know the ins-and-outs of most of my coworkers lives, I had no idea that what he did on his down time was perpetrate horrors.

I know this is getting off the topic, but it's so very important. Especially as a message to cis guys: please understand that you won't recognize a creep the way you might think you will. If you're not the preferred prey, the hind-brain alarm won't go off. You have to listen to victims, not your gut feeling that the person seems perfectly nice and normal. It doesn't mean there's never a false accusation, but face the fact that it's usually real, and you don't have enough information to say otherwise.

So, yeah. It fucking sucks. Writing about this twists my insides into tense knots, and it was almost a decade ago. I was never in danger. No one I knew was hurt!

Just countless, powerless women, horrifically abused by someone who was nice to me.

You don't trust your own judgement quite the same way, after. And as utterly shitty as it is, as twisted up and unstead-in-the-world as I felt the day I found out — I don't actually think that's a bad thing.

I think we all need to question our own judgement. It makes us better people.

I don't see villains around every corner just because I knew one, once. But I do own the fact that I can't know, really know, about anyone except those closest to me. They have their own full lives. They'll go from the pinnacles of kindness to the depths of depravity — and I won't know.

It's not a failing. It's just being human. Something to remember before you slap labels on people, before you condemn them or idolize them. Think about how much you can't know, and how flawed our judgement always is.

Grieve for victims, and the feeling of betrayal. But maybe let yourself off the hook, and be a bit slower to skewer others on it.

my watery friend... are you too brushed with the pattern of the dappled light...?