the kicker is he was being asked if his work was coming from the approach of man vs. nature aka “THE ENVIRONMENT STRIKES BACK” but no. his literal words were along the lines of “sharks are not very scary if you are never in the water so i had to make them scarier, and now they have legs.”
Junji Ito has the best fucking take on horror, which is ‘wouldn’t that be weird’ and then he draws it into the most terrifying thing possible.
One of his strangest stories is about a cursed type of honey that, when ingested, is guaranteed to be the best thing you’ve ever tasted. But, if you consume it, you have a 25% of being flattened like a pancake by a giant tree demon. Characters eat it, get addicted, and that addiction forces them to risk it over and over again until they eventually get turned into a gory puddle by this ghost tree thing.
It’s a weird story, but the funny part is that Ito wrote it because he thought it would suck to be a mosquito.
remembering that time I explained on Twitter that Jews are 0.2% of the world’s population and control like 1.2% of its wealth
while Christians are 30-something percent of the world’s population and control 55% of its wealth
so, like, there IS a minority of the world’s population controlling the majority of its wealth
Christians.
and of course a bunch of utter walnuts were like “SEE??? this proves that Jews ARE disproportionately wealthy!!!”
which, like, sure
sure
we have $1.20 to Christians’ $55
but sure, individually we average out to having a bit more pocket change than the world’s average
a couple of things, though:
-those are AVERAGES—it doesn’t mean that every Jew you meet is wealthy, especially because…
-we are such a small population that the existence of *one Jewish billionaire* would skew the average, learn what an average is ffs, if there are 10 of us and 1 is a billionaire and the rest of us have $0 dollars, on average we each have $100,000,000 but in reality 9 of us still have $0 dollars
-y’all killed off a LOT of our poor people less than a century ago which also tends to skew the average
The minority group (in the sense of being less than half the population; they’re still the largest religion) controlling the majority of the world’s wealth is Christians. Sorry about your favorite conspiracy theory.
y’all killed off a LOT of our poor people less than a century ago which also tends to skew the average
i want to print that out and staple it to ppl’s foreheads. a lot of the jews who fled extreme violence, genocide, and ethnic cleansing were only able to do so because they had the funds. those who couldn’t afford to leave were killed. and those who were barely able to scrape by enough to escape usually were forced into assimilation wherever they immigrated because poverty doesn’t give you much of a choice.
not dying of preventable diseases is actually one of my favorite hobbies
Because smallpox used to kill about 30% of everyone who caught it. The successful vaccine program run by the world’s medical community means that no one will ever die of smallpox ever again.
Because rabies is 100% fatal without a vaccine. No one needs to die of rabies ever again. It is entirely preventable.
Because 1-2 in 1000 who get measles, die. Vaccines let us contain outbreaks or fully wipe them out. There is no specific treatment for the disease once you have it. Your immune system either wins or you die.
We like vaccines because vaccines save lives and raise our standard of living.
My mother, now in her 70s, talks about how her mother wept for joy when her children received the polio vaccine. Because she didn’t have to be afraid of polio anymore.
My activity page did a thing XD. I agree with both tho - it’s lovely when people are kind to each other! It’s fucking hellish that you can’t just plug in to a printer and fucking use it.
This all happened a long time ago, and my memory is imperfect, but here’s my memory: The cock monologue certainly hurt my feelings! But when people are trying to force someone out of a virtual space, they sometimes resort to behavior that is similar to bullying except it’s not completely identical to bullying because the person they’re making fun of has a lot of power. (As someone who got bullied a lot in school, the feeling was similar in 2014 but it wasn’t identical–because I was aware of the fact that I was okay, that what was in danger was certain aspects of my identity/self-value that I treasured but not my entire personhood itself.)
Anyway, it hurt my feelings, and still hurts my feelings when I see it shared (it feels to me like a joke about my sexuality, although I understand other people don’t see it that way; but yeah, you don’t know much about my sexuality and I don’t really want you to but it feels like a joke about that to me, which just bums me out).
But all of that stuff is a side effect of my job and having been successful at it, and I like my job. It is a great job. All jobs have aspects that suck. My job has fewer such aspects than other jobs I’ve had.
So yeah, I did not quit tumblr because of the cock monologue. (I also did not ask tumblr to make reblogs un-editable.) .
I quit tumblr because a few people started to make extremely specific threats. One might, for instance, send me an ask that featured a google streetview screenshot of my home alongside a plan for breaking into it.
I was super scared of these people (or possible person pretending to be a few people?) because they seemed to have a lot of knowledge about me and my family. We lived in a normal middle-class neighborhood in Indianapolis and I felt very exposed and nervous all the time in my real life, and eventually the freaked-out feeling just got too big and that’s why I quit tumblr.
(Edited to add: I am aware that prominent people sometimes use death threats against them to portray themselves as victims and protect themselves against justified criticism for their bigotry or abusive behavior or whatever. I don’t want to do that; it’s important to note that I have a lot of resources and power and so was able to, for instance, move to decrease the threat, which a lot of people can’t do. But I also feel like not talking about the experience honestly has not really helped me or anyone.)
I SHOULD’VE quit tumblr much earlier–I needed to realize that people weren’t comfortable with me in their virtual spaces and that to them I came across as cringey or even creepy, but at the time, I wasn’t nearly self-aware enough to leave for any of those reasons, and plus there was a lot of pressure from movie studios etc to stay on the social Internet so I could continue to promote my books and the stuff around them. So I didn’t quit when I should’ve, and as a result had and caused quite a few negative experiences for people. I’m sorry about the role I had in causing those negative experiences. I should’ve had a better understanding of not just how I experienced myself but also how other people might experience me. That’s something i’ve worked on over the years but still come up short on sometimes.
At any rate, I might delete this later because it makes me feel a bit like all my nerves are exposed to the air but I did just want to clarify that the, like, Tumblr Legend of this whole thing is at minimum a bit over simplified.
1) John, thank you for this information. I think a lot of us who were there at the time recognized that it wasn’t really “the cock monologue drove John Green off tumblr”, but a combination of a lot of things, of which the cock monologue was the easiest to copypaste/explain, and as new ppl have joined the site, the details have gotten lost.
but 2) I was there, too. I remember seeing just a glimpse of the drama and it was full of people making horrible accusations with absolutely zero basis, making threats, all kinds of really truly horrible stuff. I am absolutely 0% surprised that there was a stalker sending very directed threats, because that was the energy about the whole thing, and it was terrifying to watch. John, I hope you saw less than I did of the dregs of that dramabeast, though I fear you probably saw far more.
and finally 3) the cock monologue was, no matter who it was done to or their reaction to it, sexual harassment. Full stop. Even if John’s not feeling harassed by that specific thing, it’s still sexual harassment, and making sexual harassment a joke or a meme or a copypasta? That’s fucked up. Let’s not.
somehow instead of saying “as a treat”, I’ve started using the phrase “for morale”, as if my body is a ship and its crew, and I (the captain) have to keep us in high spirits, lest we suffer a mutiny in the coming days.
and so I will eat this small block of fancy cheese, for morale. I will take a break and drink some tea, for morale. I will pick up that weird bug, for morale.
I’m not sure if it helps, but it does entertain me
