i finished my bachelor’s thesis earlier this week using nothing but caffeine and vyvanse, so at least one of us still exists :)

scoliosis :3

… Nicole? Nicole? Nicole?

my condolences

this raises a question: is your pfp an illustration of you, or is it of “jessica” (that mysterious person who you totally aren’t)

this is horrific, i love it so much and want to build one myself now

the dark circles under my eyes might be caused by lack of sleep, or by landing on my face after my mid-morning tumble down the stairs. or both! i’ll never tell :3

scrolling through this batch of posts on mobile, i now understand how it must feel for tiktok/reels/shorts users when they open netflix and watch movies in portrait mode

tbh i’ve never used any form of OCR (outside of the one time i tried out live translation in google translate) and the idea of using it didn’t even cross my mind

bear in mind that no matter how progressive the filmmakers are, the Spider-Verse movies are still mass-market movies, and the corporate studio overlords would never greenlight anything which they deem “controversial” and could hurt the film’s reception. in the West, gayness is sufficiently widely accepted that the entire MCU was able to get away with a single canonically gay character who says one throwaway line (which is totally inconsequential and can be easily dubbed over for less progressive markets). on the other hand, even in the “progressive” West, the mere existence of a trans person is enough for some people outside of the alt-right to raise a huge fuss - there’s no way any major studio would allow an open discussion of a character’s transness in one of the most hyped franchises of the past few years, let alone one of the main characters¹. veiled hints and nods are the best you’re going to get.

that said, while i sorta understand your skepticism, i think there’s enough times throughout the movies where it’s just aggressively in-your-face without explicitly saying it that i have no doubt that the writers intended her to be trans. off the top of my head:

• she has a trans pride flag in her room. this could just mean she’s a cis ally, but there are almost certainly fewer cis people flying the trans flag than trans people
• her entire color scheme is white, pink, and blue. could be coincidental, but considering how intentional so even the most minor visual details are throughout the series, i refuse to believe that they didn’t consider the potential implications of that choice when deciding on the color palette for one of the main characters (and her entire universe)
• her dad has a trans pride flag on his police uniform. again, he is a cop. with very few exceptions, cops simply are not trans allies, and certainly not to the point that they’d show it off on the job - unless, perhaps, maybe one of their family members is trans…
• having your hair turn into the trans pride flag while having a heartfelt speech about having to hide half of yourself from the people you love is about as subtle as a brick

again, considering these movies have so much thought put into the most minute graphical elements, i simply cannot imagine a way that they could’ve managed to accidentally surround a character whose entire story is a clear trans allegory with so much blatantly obvious trans imagery. of course there’s no way it could ever be said out loud, but what they’ve done with Spider-Gwen goes very far beyond the usual “transcoding” or “queercoding” of characters in media.

¹ unless the character being trans is portrayed as a joke in and of itself, in which case it’s apparently totally fine!

i figured it was such a small amount of text that it’d take less time to do manually than it would to track down the original source of the meme (if any exists - it could’ve just been someone messing around with browser devtools or the wikipedia editor preview), but i severely underestimated how hard it is to quickly transcribe text when every second word has been horribly mangled

considering she literally has a trans pride flag hanging above the door in her bedroom, i’m gonna say it’s a little bit more than just allegory

i considered posting this in !egg_irl@lemmy.blahaj.zone, but decided against it on the basis that not all trans people have been eaten by snakes prior to their transition so it might not be relatable

bepis

omg cakejumper mentioned!!1!1!!!1!

come play GregTech: New Horizons, you’ll never be done >:D

oh no, maria got her hands on so many noodles that she’s gone mad with power!

enjoy your big box of noodles, may it give you many yummies :)

teach me your ways sensei