Triweekly Tuesday Tributes: Take Three

I've set this up in such a way that I'll get to post two of these during pride month >:3c Anywho, I'm currently in a phase of working a ton while also applying for jobs constantly to no avail due to a spike in crime at my current place of work and the economic crisis our society is barrelling into at full speed. So I'm not working on this site as much as I'd like :(

Books

I may or may not have exclusively read Terry Pratchett's Discworld series. Anyway here's a tier list of the five books I read.

Guards! Guards!: I read this one first and holy shit, this book slaps. It's very British, but hilarious in a way that made it so my American ass didn't mind having to google certain foods and slang terms every so often. I'm very picky about hetero romance subplots but I really liked the one in this book, mainly because it took its sweet time and the characters had very good chemistry.
Going Postal: The character of this book's main character is fantastic. Pratchett did a great job with making sure Moist was clearly not a good person from the get-go, without taking it to the point where the reader won't have trouble believing he's actually changed somewhat for the better by the end of the relatively short novel. Mr. Pump is a sweet baby boy and I love him.
Equal Rites: This one was still pretty damn good quality-wise, but wasn't my favorite. I had a hard time figuring out how I felt about Granny Weatherwax, mainly because her particular brand of internalized misogyny mixed with that weird little pseudo-misandry is very realistic to some of the women I've known personally. I was also irritated to no end by her love interest. It was also very cliche, and felt like it should've been a kids' book(one I would have adored as a kid, for the record). That being said, it was a pretty well-written plot and it had interesting characters. Just not my cup of tea.
The Color of Magic: I'm not gonna rag on this one too much, as it was the first book in the series. It's a very cookie-cutter fantasy novel. The prose and humor is still pretty good, but it's just okay.
Mort: Not gonna lie, I straight up disliked this one. I read this one last, and Death worked much better as a character for me before he was expanded on. The plot felt kinda stupid to me, and the characters felt like standard tropes in a non-satirical way.

Meme(transcript in alt text)

A reddit screen shot of a comment by the user Serrisen that reads as follows: There was one time I was on a trip, from the Continental 48 US states up to Alaska. We were on a bus tour, and the driver pointed out the little orange spheres they had hanging on the power lines. He said 'those are for hunters. You shoot one with a shotgun and all the resources you need for a day tumble out. Good if you're lost' (or something like that) /

The guide very quickly turns her mic back on and says the real explanation (they're visibility markers so low flying planes don't hit them) /

The bus driver says sorry, he didn't know this was a reputable trip. Force of habit /

I think about that sometimes

Articles

'It's like a trans-Barbie world!' the Indian festival where transgender women can celebrate without fear: A cool look into how trans joy and survival looks in a culture very different to my own(white American). Fascinating read.
The Award-Winning Novelist Who’s Under Fire for Simply Depicting an Israeli: Oh my god guys, we have lost the fucking plot. An example of why we as humans need to examine our knee-jerk emotional reactions BEFORE acting on them.
The Woman on the Line: An interview with a volunteer for the harm reduction and overdose prevention organization Never Use Alone. I live somewhere that is being hit hard by the opiod crisis, and this is a really good article about what we can do about it. Also, look into whether you could acquire and carry narcan in your day-to-day life- I've seen it take someone from fully unresponsive on the bathroom floor to up and walking around just fine in minutes.
Happy Mother’s Day, from Prison: A personal account about family and the prison system. Very interesting.
The Savannah Bananas Bring Back a Negro Leagues Team: A great look into both the historical context of banana ball and its place in the present. I grew up around baseball(although I didn't ever play it myself) and I'd never heard of this, but now I really want to see one of these games lol.
Wikipedia page, Winfried Fluck: Another guy who just has a fun name.
When a Son Abuses a Daughter, Parents Find Themselves in a Moral Crevasse: The content of this article is exactly what the title implies, you have been warned. Multiple brutally raw accounts of one of the hardest situations for a parent to help their children through.
What to Say When Someone Has a Miscarriage—And What to Avoid: I've never really been around a pregnant loved one or a loved one trying to bring a child to term for more than a few days, so this was really helpful advice for the future.

Youtube videos, TV and movies

Office Place (PILOT): Really fun start to a new twist on the basic office sitcom! Also the versatility of the art style slaps.
How Grumpy Cat Built a Media Empire | Fallen Titans: As someone who had a massive grumpy cat phase in middle school(I had half the merch in this video and was obsessed with the movie) and who has watched Quinton Reviews since the Fallen Titan series was last updating, this video was everything I could've hoped for. It's a long watch, so it'll probably take a few days, but it's worth it if you're into this sort of thing.
Demi Adejuyigbe Is Going to Do One (1) Backflip: Really funny comedy special. It's on dropout.tv, I believe it's behind a paywall, but they've posted their comedy sketches for free on youtube before so idk.
Who Are Trigger Warnings Helping? I'm gonna briefly discuss depression and self harm for a second. I won't go into detail but I'm going to be blunt about it. The article will be done after that so stop reading now if you need to. This video put feelings I've been having about trigger warnings for a very long time into words. As someone who's gone from being at risk of relapse into a self-harm addiction simply from seeing a title of a book at Barnes and Noble to being completely unphased by explicit depictions of exactly what I used to do, I've found that the only way out is through. There's a world of difference between letting people in vulnerable mental states stumble into triggering content completely unwarned and shielding ourselves from any content that might make us even a little uncomfortable. The best approach to this I've seen is actually in fanfiction author's notes, specifically the ones on AO3 where there's a vauge description at the top of the chapter, with a link you can click to go to the longer notes at the bottom of the chapter to get a more detailed warning along with where in the chapter the content is and if it's skippable. This is what I've found the most helpful personally. I get a brief rundown of what categories the potential trigger falls into, and if it's not a problem for me in this moment, I can keep reading completely spoiler free. If it is a potential problem for me, I can go read the more detailed version, and make the call on if I can read it now, if I need to come back and read it later or just skip that bit, or if I should just not read the work entirely in my current mental state. Another thing Weekes points out in this video is how we often hold female artists to a higher standard than male artists when it comes to trigger warnings. I think misogynist biases tend to make us think women are less able to tackle nuanced subjects. Overall, fantastic video.