i’m excited for the barbie movie as much as the next person but it is weird to see people hype up and praise the film’s marketing. like gagging over brand tie-ins and collabs. and also doing free marketing for Oppenheimer?! like am i missing smth?
some of you are misunderstanding me (my fault for not being clear enough) so let me expand on my point: it’s strange to me that so many people are all of a sudden uncritical of the barbie brand; That no one finds it weird that mattel is (very successfully) reinstating Barbie’s “you go girl!” neolib feminism for a nostalgia poisoned adult millennial and gen Z audience without any pushback? I get that it’s fun to see the barbie doll aesthetic reimagined for grownups and admittedly it’s cool to see the barbie movie pr team is pulling out all the stops BUT why are we so happily playing into pink consumerism? why am i seeing viral tweets praising a barbiecore malibu mansion listed on airbnb, why are people praising the branded packaging of shoe and makeup brands doing tie-ins with barbie?? why are so many people doing free marketing for a movie that is essentially a commercial for a doll brand? I loved playing with barbie dolls and watching the animated movies and playing the games like i am not a barbie hater. even my art is inspired by barbie, this isn’t me being a contrarian and hating on something popular. I believe you can enjoy something and still be critical of it. I think it’s fine to wear all pink and be excited for a fun summer movie. BUT It’s not fun and cute to praise a multibillion dollar brand for how well it’s doing capitalism; it’s not fun and cute to act like there’s no deep implications for this behaviour and what it means for a society obsessed with commodities. I find that disturbing.
Costco’s pivot to checking the photo on membership cards is wild. I went in with a friend yesterday who is a member and I never, ever want to go back.
Treating paying customers like criminals because the big bad corporation is missing a few dollars from people sharing cards ain’t it.
They checked her card twice while we were in the store *and we didn’t even buy anything* because one item had to be bundled and we weren’t aware and they were out of the other.
Like I don’t like the Waltons, that’s for sure, but Sam’s doesn’t treat it’s customers like that and I’ve never left there without the stuff I went in for.
There was a news story about an employee harassing a woman whose photo “didn’t match her person” as-if the photos on the back of Costco cards are decent quality anyways jfc. When she asked them to check her ID against it, they refused and continued to humiliate and harass her.
Like damn dude, that ain’t it. Costco can get bent.
Years ago, my mother had surgery to remove her eye.
She needed groceries. I offered to go to Kroger, and she said no, go to Costco. I took her card, since I didn’t have one.
I got her groceries, got to the front….they looked at the photo, which at the time they absolutely never did. Lady said she couldn’t sell to me. I said “I’m sorry, it’s my mom’s card. She’s at home recovering from surgery and asked me for groceries.”
Lady said she’d call the manager to see if he could make an exception. Manager chewed me out in front of a long line of people, basically calling me a thief and saying he didn’t care about my mother’s surgery, she could come herself for groceries. I ended up crying and even someone else in the line told him to stop being an asshole.
I went back to my mother with no groceries, crying and apologizing. Keep in mind this woman had an eyeball-sized hole in her head. She had just had a vital organ removed. There was a wad of gauze on her eye socket the size of a golf ball, held in place with medical tape and an eyepatch. She was in incredible amounts of physical and emotional pain. But she demanded to go back to Costco with me. We got in, she demanded to speak to the manager who’d spoken to me. He walked out of his office and went pale when he saw her. You have to imagine a tiny verging-on-elderly woman who’s visibly frail, this gigantic medical patch on her face, and that awful pinched drawn look people get when their pain is off the charts. I guarantee he wasn’t frightened of her, exactly, he’d just realized what a giant fucking PR disaster he’d made for himself. He was looking at a very sick, very incapacitated woman with one eye and a cane, and he’d called me a liar for saying she was sick and incapacitated, and he knew it.
She walked up to him, handed him her Costco card, and said “you can take this. Since my daughter can’t shop for me six hours after I had surgery. Nina, let’s go.”
He basically forced me to take the card back, stammering apologies. I just let him see on my face exactly what I thought of him, and walked out.
I later got an apology from someone way up the food chain in management. Basically their consensus was “yeah, you shouldn’t be using your mom’s card as a regular thing, but the moment you said she’d just had major surgery they should’ve been like ‘yeah, no, understood, let’s get you checked out,’ and even if it was a more regular circumstance the language he used was just unacceptable.”
If they’re being that aggressive about checking cards, take it up the food chain. See what’s going on. We might need to get pissed at Costco or it could be local management being dicks.
hello! do you perhaps know where marcille reading a shoujo manga panel is from? it's the one with the long dark-haired elf and her saying she relates to him. i hope this makes sense.
Listen, you should never film strangers in public without their consent, but I swear there need to be fines or something for people who do that shit in some spaces. For example: I had to go to the ER last night, and some jerk filmed a woman who just came in and was clearly having an asthma attack. She immediately got to go back, and he was unhappy about that. Believe me, I get that it sucks having to wait when you’re in pain, but you don’t get to pick who deserves care when. The medical system in the US is a nightmare, and the ER could be the worst moment of someone’s life. No one deserves to be recorded because some jack ass believes someone doesn’t look like they need care.
This is fine to reblog. People who film strangers should be shamed if nothing else.
I know a lot of EFR instructors (Emergency first response, the people who teach CPR classes) who used to be ambivalent about this and now are firmly in the “fuck you fuck your phone category.
Maybe its demographics, EFR instructors do tend to be older and less online, but there’s been a shift from voyeur filming being seen as irritating and tasteless to actively harmful.
I met one lady who had an entire section of her lecture based on how to divide labor in emergency and one of those steps was crowd control. If you are taking charge of an emergency situation, you delegate tasks. Point at one person and tell them to call 911, Point at another person tell them to warn traffic, Point at another person tell them to get the first aid kit if you know where it is. You assign small tasks to individuals instead of asking a crowd that way the task actually happens, and you’re not sitting around 20 minutes later wondering why the ambulance is taking so long to show up and it turns out that everyone assumed someone else called.
Now there is another step. Pick a big dude and tell him to stop people from filming. Which is actually the tamest version of what she said, because this lady went on and on about how phones are fragile, light, small, pieces of computer equipment that can be easily punted into oblivion.
And yeah, she’s probably the most vocal proponent of property destruction in the face of voyeur filming I’ve heard lately but she’s far from the only person in emergency services who’s frustrated with the eternal quest for viral videos of strangers pain.
And to be clear there is a huge difference between the paramedic who doesn’t want you filming and the cop who doesn’t want you filming.
The paramedic who doesn’t want you filming is trying to protect someone who is hurt and vulnerable and maybe going through the worst day of their life. That is worthy of respect and if you film someone in medical distress you are a pustulent asshole of a human being.
A cop who doesn’t want you filming is probably trying to violate someone’s civil rights and you should absolutely record away.
I really want people to focus on the “hours later” component. Conservatives and non-voters have been harping about Biden being a do-nothing president, but this is absolutely not the case.
Do not fall for the apathy, do not engage in purism, and do not surrender to despair.
Twitter: what level of enshittification are you on? Tumblr: I dunno, 4, maybe 5? We took away the ability to easily go directly to an individual post off the dashboard and we’re still trying to Pivot to Streaming Twitter: you are like little baby. watch this Twitter: [BANS READING POSTS]
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