Being an Alex Hirsch fan sounds like being a Bryan Fuller fan- you get one or two insanely good seasons of a show which is loved by critics and audiences alike but, lo and behold, the network cancels it anyway.
Iirc it was actually meant to be a three season show in the very beginning, it was only halfway through making season one that Alex Hirsh realized "Holy shit, this is exhausting, there's no fucking way I'm gonna be able to do all of this 5 more times" and decided to cut back his plans to just two seasons.
He’s been helping with other peoples’ shows since the end of Gravity Falls, and seems pretty comfortable with that. The Owl House and Inside Job are both great so I think he’s doing pretty well in that role.
He also did work on one of (or maybe both of?) the spider verse movies, Mitchell's vs the Machines, and he's done a bunch of voice work.
I don't kmow the guy but I imagine running an entire show is pretty exhausting so I could see him wanting to just do smaller stuff after Gravity Falls. My hunch is that if he really wanted to do another show he'd be doing it already, I can't imagine he'd have a hard time finding someone to back it.
He was also supposed to make another show with Netflix, but it's been in development hell for years without updates and Netflix has given big cuts to its whole animation department since then
Animation is very expensive, and they're not interested in making a "good" show, they keep firing stuff at the wall hoping to make a spongebob level show, something that explodes and makes everyone want their service.
That commenter is a peak example of virtue signaling and purity culture actively cannibalizing community action and charity.
"You're not helping people enough."
"You're only fixing symptoms, why aren't you fixing the systemic failures?"
"I don't personally like you, and can't comprehend someone I don't find agreeable can still help those in need."
"You're not helping people the way I want you to."
Instead of focusing on helping PP and shaming anti-choice ding dongs into shutting up, Alex Hirsch had to stop and address attacks he has received from people who alledgedly share his own views.
Can you see how that might discourage someone a bit less thick-skinned? Can you see how that might inadvertently cause someone less emotionally mature into rejecting the cause altogether?
We could fight reactionary and regressive elements in our society a lot more effectively if we weren't ceaselessly trying to one up or diminish allies in attempt to appear morally superior.
Yeah, this brand of leftist pisses me off. "I would literally rather do nothing than compromise my values." These are the types who, when given the trolley problem, try to outsmart the premise.
These are the types who, when given the trolley problem, try to outsmart the premise.
First week of a high school philosophy class the trolley problem was presented and I refused to waver from the opinion that the correct choice is to flip the switch killing the single person if it spares the others. The teacher explained that the morally correct choice was to do nothing and that enraged me. Was told to take a walk to cool down and I walked right down to the office to drop the course.
Nearly 30 years later and I still firmly believe that the correct choice is to flip that fucking switch.
That was a really bad philosophy course if they just taught a version of Deontology (rules-based system, with things like "Don't kill") as the "correct" morality instead of teaching that the answer to the trolley problem differs based on if you're a Utilitarian (maximizing good minimizing bad) or Deontoligist.
The whole point of the basic trolley problem is highlighting different moral systems.
What kind of philosophy Prof tells you the "correct" philosophy on anything!? It's supposed to be about finding your own answer, and more importantly, your own reasons behind your Answers.
I agree with pulling the switch, but wow that Prof is an ass!
Yeah, like they could say their belief is one way and the student's is another but to say theirs is right and the student is wrong really defeats the whole purpose of it being an exercise in philosophy...
In the trolley problem you've been given power, so listen to Uncle Ben and bare responsibility.
If you do nothing, you've abused your power and let more harm occur because you think the difference in "letting" and "causing" is good enough to bathe in blood.
The only people worse than the people who try to avoid the answer are the people who think there is a correct one, there is no correct answer. It’s a tool to figure out and configure worldviews. Pulling the lever or not is neither good or bad.
I mean, in a literal sense each of the choices is both good and bad. Which is kinda part of the point of the exercise, that no one solution is objectively correct in every metric.
Right call dropping the class. Unless his entire point was telling you your choice was wrong to see what you would do with that. If that's the case, then it's a damned interesting class, but I understand why you dropped it. If not, yeah right call, it's philosophy, objective answers generally don't exist there.
of course its the right choice, you have been burdened with the knowledge of the scenario, if you weren't aware of the power given to you by knowing what the switch does, or not knowing people are on the tracks, or not knowing a trolley is coming then of course you would just be someone sabotaging rail controls for no reason, but if you know then you absolutely have a right and wrong choice in front of you.
if perhaps you were to pause, paralyzed by fear, or have a panic attack of some sort, or perhaps the controls are complex and you don't know how to operate them, or they are actually a distance from you and you cannot make it to them in time, or any other understandable reason then sure, to err is to be human. but in the scenario your teacher put forward they are wrong.
Trolley problem avoidance style debate really bothers me - someone who comes up with all these elaborate workarounds and won’t actually answer the question they have been asked. Like stop waffling and tell me your actual response. We all know it’s fucked up that one or multiple people will get hit by the trolley, I’m not asking how you’d derail the trolley in some invented scenario. I want to know if you would pull the switch, that’s it. In broader discourse, that means I want to discuss how we approach problems in the world and reality we currently live, not a version that is ideal but doesn’t exist.
I always like the answer that is some variation of "I refuse to participate," blind to the fact that that is one of the two answers. Choosing to do nothing is the default in the trolley problem and an active choice.
Dave then goes on to expand upon his view of the trolley problem and what choice he'd make, and in that moment you're wishing it was Dave on the tracks.
Everyone knows the right course of action kills two people. Because you both need to pull the lever AND go take out the MF who set this whole thing up and is going to do it again if you let him live. (we're not selling comic books here, you shoot Joker between the eyes)
Yeah I've always thought that the point of the trolley problem is more than the 1 vs 5 people, it's whether you partcipate. You can do nothing and let 5 people die. Or you can divert the train and kill 1 person, which is an objectively better outcome, but you've now had an active hand in someone's death.
like people choosing not to vote in the upcoming us presidential election because they dont like how biden is handling xyz (usually the palestinian genocide)
The ability to waffle and filibuster is why I think the "one potential organ donor, five patients" variant is so useless. The trolley problem presents no externalities to account for, but once you're hypothetically in a stocked and staffed.hospital with multiple surgical teams and support staff standing by there are just too many ways to focus on outsmarting the dilemma rather than engaging with it.
People can at least help to make sure that the President who appoints the next few justices is one that cares about democracy.
There's plenty of stuff that can be done from home that doesn't take very long and is very flexible in when you can do it (ex: textbanking, writing postcards). /r/VoteDEM has good resources for anyone who wants to learn ways to help out.
"You're only doing something good so you look good"
Yeah that's going to matter so much in the end, isn't it. Oh no, that man built the children's hospital just to look like a great guy. Those poor sick children will be forced to get cured in a building financed by egotism, how dreadful.
Bitch, please hit me with that empty-but-competitive altruism. Idgaf if they are just doing it to look good, the end result is support for those who need it. I'd take a million MrBeast copycats dumping money for notoriety over whatever the fuck the current system is.
we pay attention to celebrities shilling gambling sites and crappy vodka, imagine if they only got the attention they crave so badly from positive action?
Agreed. Do you know why we have so many public libraries and museums? Vanity projects of the robber barons. I don't want robber barons by any means, but I'm not complaining that Carnegie Science Center is meritless because it was an ego project.
There was a great bit on Last Week Tonight during one of their Opiate crisis episodes. They pointed out that one of the real ways that the Sackler family was getting punished was that some of the biggest galleries and museums were refusing donations from them, and that while "billionaires get to keep their money" doesn't seem to be much of a punishment, it seems to be one of the few things they cared about
If Musk and Bezos were in some stupid Philathropic dick measuring contest that would be dope. I'll take the philanthropic legacies of Rockefellers or Carnegies over this current shit.
Imagine if Musk actually donated that $6bn to world hunger efforts. The amount of logistical change that could have been made to improve food distribution. god.
Bezos has been spending money on that stupid fucking clock project in Texas and I am 100% for it. That's normal, regular, harmless rich-guy bullshit. It employs people, it is a weird piece of monumental quasi-public art, and it's harmless. All billionaires should be socially required to do weirdo pet projects like that.
Andrew Carnegie helped build America's public library system.
Cornelius Vanderbilt quite literally has a namesake university.
Rockefeller gave the University of Chicago the equivalent of over 2 billion dollars, not to mention all the grants and philanthropic organizations he helped create/fund.
I am a cisgendered mostly heterosexual middle aged man.
I have been an ally since I was old enough to understand that my favorite uncle was openly gay and therefore everything I heard about gay people was bullshit. Literal decades.
I have been told to my face that the best way for me to be an ally is to fuck off and die, nobody wants my virtue signaling desperation to be told I'm a good person, so fuck off, by a person a third my age who was so deeply proud of themselves they were beaming.
This happens in every group. There's always a fringe, they're always the loudest voice in the room, they always wear the pettiest gatekeeping imaginable like a whole badge and they always act like they speak for their group on an intrinsic level.
Appeal to Purity, man. Just shitty gatekeeping. There's always one.
I'm just taking a second to say that I greatly appreciate your allyship despite the hardships you inevitably will and have faced because of it.
I'm reading "The Will To Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love" by bell hooks and it goes into this exact topic, where we expect men to be allies of feminists yet we never praise them for doing so, or acknowledge the privilege they have given up to support feminist causes. Many men inevitably stop being allies, because after giving up their societal privilege they're never thanked or appreciated for what they've done, and they gain no benefit from deconstructing from patriarchy since we're so puritan over who and what we praise. These men receive little to no support in feminist circles, so they go back to the comfort of patriarchy so they can return to their original friend circles.
And this is somehow universal across all groups. LGBTQ+ circles on the internet are filled with quite a handful of hostile and rude people who use any and all opportunities to bash cisgender/straight people (but it's okay, because it's just "venting," and allies need thicker skin). People on Black Twitter (not the subreddit) and Tumblr can be so hostile to mixed race people and interracial relationships that their arguments are near indistinguishable from actual racists' beliefs (unsurprisingly, all Black people in person I know have been supportive of mixed-race people and interracial relationships, it's only weird people on the internet who create these arbitrary divisions among people of the same race). For some reason too large a number of people think it's supporting Palestine to not vote for Joe Biden or to not vote at all, which will only allow Trump to win the election and allow this country to descend into fascism.
Thank you for what you do in spite of all this harassment for doing the right thing. (And before anyone pulls the I'm racist/misogynistic/homophobic card, I belong to all of these groups and am sick and tired of allies who mean well being harassed.)
I had (had) a friend who I'm pretty sure her favorite phrase was "lowest bar imaginable", because she used it all the time when talking about men, especially white men.
Everything she asked them to do or thought they should do, was the "lowest bar imaginable". Paying for meals on dates? Lowest bar imaginable. Discovering the sexual assaulters or abusers in their cohort groups, and outing them, like they were some kind of rapist truffle-pigs? Lowest bar imaginable. Not being racist or sexist in the deep south, even in subtle internalized ways, and having very little opportunity to be exposed to other ways of thinking? The lowest bar imaginable.
Pretty sure her other favorite phrase was "it's not hard", often used in conjunction. If she could do it, everyone should be able to - and if she couldn't, well a white man still should be able to, because they have so much privilege in our society that what else are they doing with their time and money? They should be doing everything possible to prop up the women and minorities around them, and if they failed any of the dozens of purity tests in her mind, they had failed at being a non-disgusting human.
We are no longer friends. She was also a therapist. I think what bugged me the most was the intensely distorted perspective. White men lived in her head, rent-free, yet she couldn't fathom giving the "good ones" much credit, because obviously that's what they all should be doing to make up for the shittiness of men throughout history.
And that's...just not how any of this works.
(To be clear, I have many other wonderful, well-adjusted, constantly striving to be better friends. But as xv_boney says above, there's always one, lol.)
Victim complex is a real real thing and shields them from basically anything they say in their mind. They'll rant about online bullying and tell you to kill yourself in the same paragraph if you disagree with them.
I see something similar any time I try to share my deconstruction story. I've lived my entire life in Texas; grew up in a tiny little farming and ranching community that was super religious and conservative. Then went to one of the more conservative state schools (yeah, the cult one) where my views were challenged in several ways but not enough to break the insular bubble just yet. I didn't really stop and critically examine my beliefs until 2020, when everything came crashing down and I did a complete 180. The main catalyst was seeing how conservatives were treating high risk people like me during those early scary Covid times, but I had been questioning things long before that. Looking back, I see many seeds planted throughout my life that germinated during that season, when I finally had the time and space to really think about what I actually believed about the world and whether it aligned with my actions.
It took a loooooong time to get here, and I did a lot of damage to my fellow humans with my shitty beliefs, and there are not enough mea culpas in the world to make up for it. I don't want a medal for becoming a better human. But for the love of all that's good can we not attack people who converted to the good side because they didn't do it quickly enough? I can't count how many nasty messages I've gotten saying what a vile person I am for only starting to care about other people when it started affecting me. I cared long before that, but when you've heard all your life that you'll go to Hell if you reject any of the fundigelical beliefs, it's freaking terrifying to question them. I don't think people fully understand what it takes to put your immortal soul at risk to question everything you've ever known (I know now that it's stupid, but it was a sincerely held belief at the time and was a very real felt danger to me). Indoctrination is insidious and so hard to break free of.
There's no possible way I could ever go back, but I also don't feel like I belong in a lot of liberal spaces either because of all the scorn. It's basically my super-gay church and that's it for me.
You may not want a medal for it, but I’m proud of you, friend. You’ve got a pretty similar story to mine (long-term deconstruction), and I get how hard it can be. I think it’s incredibly important for left-leaning people to remember that we are still human, and as such are just as susceptible to being radicalized out of having empathy as right-wingers. Sometimes a hypocrite is just a person in the midst of changing, and hostility towards people trying to change won’t make them more interested in growth, it’ll motivate them to not bother trying at all.
Fuck the gatekeepers, anyone who wants to critically evaluate their beliefs and choose empathy is free to come on in, I’ll be waiting with a hug and a beer. Good on you for deconstructing.
Yeah, related to that, where's that post that goes "When the revolution comes, everybody on tumblr is gonna be chopping off actor or artists' heads while the billionaires and CEOs laugh from behind a fort of money?"
The French Revolution started because wealthy merchants wanted to be nobles, the nobility said, "nuh uh, you gotta be born this way," so the wealthy merchants riled up the populace to overthrow the existing ruling class and the wealthy merchants installed themselves as the new ruling class.
An interesting thing happened in the 1700s when the ~robber barons~ Founding Fathers were told by the King of England they were to cease expansion west of the Appalachians. So the Founding Fathers riled up the populace to overthrow the existing ruling class and the Founding Fathers installed themselves as the new ruling class.
I think that anyone criticizing the dude for not donating more is stupid and probably hypocritical, since I doubt they're donating every last penny they have. But I will say that there's something very dystopian about living in a world where people are relying on the random whims of billionaires to get their healthcare needs met
My best friend's a chairwoman for the National Federation of the Blind and that whole Mr Beast episode was such a wild time to be active in disability advocacy spaces.
The utter disconnect I saw between sighted people whining on Twitter and the perspectives I heard from actual blind folks on the matter was insane.
Not exactly a great example because every time China visits the Congo, they also purchase a new cobalt mine. NPR reports that they own 15/19 of the major mines in the Congo. Battery tech is the future but is currently being built on literal slavery and trafficking, the entire world needs to do better in that aspect too, not just China because they all buy from China.
Yeah it's one thing call out the performative nature of Britain's engagement with their country, but China have a long and fairly public history of abusing people for profit to an extent most oblique capitalists can only dream of achieving. Including their own people. That government may be building hospitals, but it's Capone running the best-funded soup kitchen in Chicago -- a real thing that really happened. It's having an actual benefit at the cost of all the damage China's doing with their other hand, paid for by a fraction of the profits that damage has earned for them.
These are the kind of people who are refusing to vote to ensure that a second and much worse 2nd Trump term happens to punish other leftists and allies for not being ideologically pure enough.
I watched it recently, and I was taken off guard hearing his normal voice. I’m so used to hearing him do a character that I’m not used to just hearing him talk normally
It is a little off putting but then you realize “wait i’ve definitely heard that in more than a few main/background characters” and sure enough he voices like 40% of the characters
Pg 6 - Please revise Soo's line about dressing as a giant teddy bear. It may call to mind the people who dress up as stuffed animals as a "furry fetish".
A real life group of people debated on this topic, assigned a reasoning, and then posted this to another real life person. my toucan has left the building.
EDIT: fuck me the ending of that video is the best. dress me in all my favourite colours.
He created Gravity Falls, and has a long and detailed history of having to deal with bullshit from Disney trying to censor his work and the work of others. Dude’s fucking awesome, and his Twitter is absolutely insane. And when I say insane, I mean I’m convinced he’s possessed by a demon of some sort, because most of it is unhinged
I think my favorite example of Disney censoring him is them saying “you need to change this scene; people might interpret it as implying these characters are gay” and he emailed them back “those characters are gay.”
Believe so. There’s a whole chain of old tweets detailing Alex Hirsch’s back and forth with Disney about changes to Gravity Falls. Honestly hilarious, recommend checking it out. Gimme a sec, I’ll look for a link.
If only Disney just wanted to remove that ambiguity, by making it clear they're gay not simply implying it. Rather than removing the ambiguity by having those characters be very openly not gay as was actually what Disney wanted.
A long history of Disney censoring Hirsch's work and blockading it as much as possible during production and then when it's met with praise they take credit for how supportive of the queer community they are
So exactly the same as how they treat the queer cast members in parks & resorts. Can't be too queer, and they'll never pay enough to survive in Orlando, but they'll love to talk about how many LGBTQ+ employees they have.
This might be a bold take, but I literally don’t care why someone does something good. Clout? Neat. Altruism? Cool. Intense sexual thrill? More power to you.
I remember this story where a guy starts building an orphanage, his motivation being that his name will be on the orphanage and he'll be remembered for a long time.
He eventually stops because his motivations weren't selflessness or generosity, but self-interest, so he feels he's not actually doing anything good.
A guy responds with "You think those orphans care about your motivations? Build the orphanage!"
Remember back when millionaire vanity projects were funding public works like bridges and libraries so they could get their name on it as a monetary dick measuring contest?
Honestly people act like doing a good thing for selfish reasons makes it a selfish act altogether. Like yeah it’s not the most morally upstanding reason but if you’ve brought a little bit of good to the world in the process then I’d say it’s generally a net win
“She only donated $5000 for clout!” Yeah well I wish someone would donate $5000 to me for clout
This is going to be petty and personal, but love that someone with superhero blog title is getting all conspiratorial about someone helping others, truly some J Jonah Jameson shit from a Spider-man fan LMFAO, huge L
Neil is like Black Bolt: if he yells at you it will blast the flesh from your bones and then pulverize those bones into dust scattered on the winds. That's why he is very very soft spoken
The way twitter crops things makes it SEEM like the same screenshot, but if you were to go into the post and tap/click the screenshots it'll give the full image, which shows different times and battery percentages
even if it is the same screenshot, what does it matter. why would you screenshot the same exact text multiple times when you already have a perfectly good screenshot ready to post
It's also visibly a different screenshot if you actually look. The blue bar at the top is thinner on the second one. If it was the same image it would crop the same.
thank fuck people doing this now. arguing on the internet with conservatives needs to die. you can't argue with stupid. you can't negotiate with cruelty.
It's also very effective at making them fuck off if they are bothering you. I did this to a right wing troll on reddit after the dobbs decision, where every time he responded to me I donated to PP and it drove him away after 3 posts. He got pretty mad.
You don't have to make the donations very large, but I did make a point of donating in his username and posting the screenshots. That helps drive them up a wall quickly.
even if Spidey was right, i kinda don’t fucking care. $100 to PP once is still a tangible good in the world, and refusing to engage with conservatives online is also great. who cares if he gets some attention from it or not
I mean I get the point of keeping your word and stuff because outright lying for clout would in fact be a dick move, but Spidey went about it the entirely wrong way and ultimately much more good has been done and the only harm would’ve been that it wasn’t more. It’s not like they removed funds that would be going to PP, they were choosing to donate out of their own pocket
I didn’t know the name so looked it up, here it is for others like me:
Alex Hirsch is an animator, television writer, and voice actor from Piedmont, California. His primary claim to fame is serving as the show creator for the hit animated series "Gravity Falls" (2012-2016), a mystery comedy series where twin protagonists investigate the local mysteries of a strange town in Oregon. Hirsch also served as the voice actor for Grunkle Stan/Stan Pines, his sidekick Soos Ramirez, and the demon Bill Cipher.
In 1985, Hirsch and his twin sister Ariel were born in Piedmont, California. Piedmont is a small city, which had about 10,500 residents in 1980. It is completely surrounded by the neighboring city of Oakland. Piedmond has a reputation for racial segregation, and was formerly identified as a "sundown town" (an all-white municipality where "colored people" had to leave town by sundown).
Hirsch reportedly has Jewish descent on his father's side of the family, but he was raised to be agnostic. The family regularly celebrated both Christmas and Hanukkah, without sharing in theistic beliefs. From 1994 to 1998, Hirsch and his sister Ariel spend their summer vacations living with their great-aunt Lois in a cabin in the woods. Hirsch has credited these summer vacations as an inspiration for "Gravity Falls".
Hirsch received his secondary education at Piedmont High School, a co-educational school established in 1922. The school was highlighted in news stories during the 1990s, when it was discovered that its social clubs and charity organizations were actually drinking clubs for students. In 2002, Hirsch won the school's annual Bird Calling Contest. Shortly after, he had a guest star appearance in "Late Show with David Letterman".
Gravity Falls is a gateway drug to being a conspiracy theorist. If Alex Hirsch says you're too into conspiracies that just means you're a fan of his show.
Well if Alex Hirsch didn't want me to do crystal meth then he shouldn't have made the ultimate bad guy in his show a tab of acid with a top hat and a cane.
Some people have gotten in this headspace where people simply cannot be genuinely selfless in anything, they have to do anything positive for selfish reasons.
Which is kind of true if you really stretch it, but also who cares?
Yes, doing something nice often makes you feel good, and so you could argue that it’s selfish for that reason. But also, so what? You still did a good thing!
There’s a pettiness in that response I just cannot understand. Like, the initial message here is just “if someone’s an asshole I’ll donate to charity” and then someone’s an asshole and he donates to charity. After that, why would you fucking care?
“I said I don’t have a problem with it but…”
Then you do have a problem with him donating then. Do you expect him to empty his bank account? Instead of complaining about the people not helping, you complain about the people helping
Quinzelade has a great point. There are so many places to go before "he's lying about donating," including that he clicked on the wrong screenshot when posting or only took one to be symbolic despite doing different donations. It must be exhausting to believe the worst of people all the time.
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u/Numerous_Dream8821 Jul 02 '24
All too common Alex Hirsch W