‘staring into the camera like you’re on the office’ is such an interesting cultural phenomenon because it points to one of my very favorite things in pop culture, which is the use of commonly known fictional situations to indicate an emotion or context that is extremely specific and can’t necessarily be communicated with language alone.
why do characters on the office look into the camera? on the office, the characters are being filmed as part of a documentary; they understand they are being filmed and can acknowledge that fourth wall and those theoretical future viewers. but because the office is a comedy, that fourth wall acknowledgement is not about explaining motivations or gaining approval for an action, but about sharing an agreement with a group of people who are not actually there.
characters on the office look into the camera when something ridiculous is happening that no one in the room thinks is ridiculous but the person looking at the camera, were they to say ‘this is so ridiculous’ to the people in the room, their comrades in fiction, they would get serious pushback or anger; to those characters the situation is serious. the character looking into the camera is a more objective viewer, like the audience, and by looking at us they’re putting themselves on our objective team. and in the future when this ‘documentary’ would air, they would be vindicated as the person who understood that the situation was ridiculous.
so in real life, when we talk about ‘looking into the camera like we’re on the office’, this very specific emotion is what we’re referring to: that we’re in a situation that any objective viewer would find inherently ridiculous, and are seeking acknowledgement from an invisible but much larger group that would agree with us, even though nobody in the situation would do so. we’re putting ourselves in an outsider position, a less emotional position, and inherently a more powerful position, because we’re not vulnerable to being laughed at like all the ridiculous people we’re among. we’re among them, but we’re not with them, and the millions of people watching us on theoretical tv would be on our team, not theirs. that’s such a specific idea and concept, and one that’s really hard to communicate in pure language. but we can say ‘looking into the camera like we’re on the office’ and it’s much easier to communicate what we mean.
for me that’s what pop culture is for, and why it’s so important that it’s pop culture. maybe it feels more special if it’s only you and a grape who know that something exists, but the more people consume something, the more its situations and reactions become common knowledge, a sort of communal well from which we can draw to articulate real life problems. and ultimately, the easier it is for us to communicate and understand each other.
Presenting the new editions of all five Mangoverse books, a fluffy fantasy series focusing on LGBTQA+ Jewish characters getting happy endings and “found family.” The first four books are full-length, standalone novels; Tales from Perach is all seven in-universe short stories bundled together. I’ve added Hebrew+Yiddish glossaries at the end this time.
The Second Mango – origin story, in which Smol Lesbian Queen and hetero demi warrior woman become besties Climbing the Date Palm – Queen helps the bi prince from next door rescue his activist boyfriend from Certain Doom A Harvest of Ripe Figs – Queen solving mysteries in her capital city, chiefly the theft of a priceless violin, while raising a baby with her bi partner The Olive Conspiracy – Queen saves her country from a plot to sabotage her country’s agriculture Tales from Perach – includes f/f, m/m, and m/f trans romance and also Purim. If you’re familiar with the series but haven’t read Olive yet, and are wondering who the new couple on the cover is, they’re Hadar and Halleli.
I’ve had some problems getting paid, so I got my rights back from my publisher and reposted the entire series myself (with the help of the amazing Jane Dominguez, who turned art commissions from @theloserfish, @erikahammerschmidt, and Caroline C. into covers.)
From this point going forward, if you want to buy one of these books, please buy the editions that have the above art–if you don’t see it in your preferred format (ePub, paperback, etc.) never fear, because those are coming as fast as I can get to them. Paperback proofs have already been submitted to CreateSpace (and all the paperbacks except Mango and Tales have art on the back, too. I’ll share that once the paperback links go live.)
One bonus of this is that most of the books are now cheaper, and unless I’m reading something wrong the paperbacks will be cheaper as well.
Shira is absolutely lovely and I’m a HUGE fan of her writing!
I highly recommend her Mangoverse as a sweet fantasy series that’s full of wonderful queer Jewish characters, a fantasy setting that is (as far as I remember) kind of like an Alternate version of a certain central Florida city that isn’t Orlando, and okay there are DRAGONS!!
I read the first three books and I’ve never been this satisfied with a book series. She’s a great writer and I aspire to be like her one day
Oh my god y’all are like the balloons lifting me up after so many heartwrenching decisions about the not-being-paid thing ❤ ❤ ❤ Thank youuuuuuuuuuuuuuuu, thank you both of you!
(& @stitchmediamix: Perach is mostly the Broward/Palm Beach/Miami-Dade area where I grew up. I live in Gainesville now and while I love it here for many other reasons I get homesick for coconut palms & sea grapes a lot.)
Seriously y’all Shira’s books are the most fluffy and pure happy-ending fantasy, without being brain candy. Everyone deals with real issues and all but the nice thing is that everything ends happy. So happy.
Especially for my queer ladies I cannot think of a happier more satisfying series of books to read. THE QUEER LADIES DONT DIE. they live. Happily. It’s amazing.
these are great, great books, not only are the stories amazing but also the characters are such great examples of healthy relationships, both romantic and platonic, they communicate with each other and treat each other with kindness and respect, its so important
Hoooooy shit!!! I read the first I HAD NO IDEA THERE WERE MORE GIVE THEM TO ME! I am so happy right now
I did not know this was a thing. THANK YOU!!!
these books are adorable, so YAY for them bein available again and Shira actually getting paid 🙂
A few weeks ago I received an email from an editor I’m working with that had “Urgent” written in the subject line. Always a great way to give a grad student her daily heart attack. This actually wasn’t a big issue though, just a legitimate question she was relaying from the copy editor: Why in the world did you write “powerful!Harry” at the end of your essay? Is this some sort of typo?
It definitely looks like one doesn’t it? By the rules of conventional English (whatever the hell that means) chucking an exclamation point between two words so you can string them together pretty much isn’t a thing. Fan language though? Loaded with meaning. The exclamation point—otherwise known as a bang—is used as a way of emphasizing a trait that a character possesses (Fanlore). Harry isn’t just powerful in this fic, he’s powerful!Harry, in that his power is a defining aspect of his identity and a driving element of the story. Writing “barista Harry” is distinctly different from “barista!Harry” as the former is merely a descriptor of his occupation while the latter highlights that occupation as something formative to Harry and our experiences of the fic. As the beautiful, wonderful, fantastically detailed Fanlore also points out (you’ll notice throughout this post that there is pretty much a grand total of One Source and they’re it. Welcome to the limited records of fandom history), the bang can be used to denote fic genres as well—or fic tropes if you prefer. Differentiating the two in fandom is messy to say the least.
@carry-on-my-wayward-wesley – I think I’ll do that sometime! There’s definitely a lot to be said about how television shows in particular (X-Files, Star Trek, Beauty and the Beast, Starsky and Hutch, etc.) emphasized certain genres, narrative structures, and dynamics between duos that really resonated with fans and helped to define a lot of the pre and early Internet fandom.
(And then there’s Harry Potter in a class all its own. Freaking international cultural phenomenon lol)
hey do any of your fucking HATE when sites call you out for adblock? are you on pc? if yes to both go to your site settings for that website (on chrome you do that by going up to “secure”on the left hand side of the search bar and going down to settings on it), go down until you see “allow javascript” and “allow flash” and put both on BLOCK, and now the site can’t mess with your experience enjoy
a step by step visual for chrome users since im also a visual learner and i have time…
at the top is going to be the site info, whether or not its secure or whether it just states the site name doesn’t matter, just click on it
you’ll see this
just go down to site settings and you’ll see a page like this:
the default for most permissions is going to be “ask”, but a lot of the time Right when you click on the site it takes your clicking and entering the site as giving permission, so if a site is sketchy or you just dont want to fucks with it, disable everything you wouldnt want it having access to, like your microphone, camera, and especially your usb and midi and even plugin access
but really we’re here to block javascript and flash, you can skip the above if you so desire/dont want to bother, the script is the real problem here – making popups and detecting adblock, but i like to disable flash since i dont really want to interact with sites as is or click something i dont mean to so thats technically optional too
once youve blocked javascript and flash youre going to exit out of the window it redirected you to when you pressed on site settings and go back to the site you were originally at, and it’ll have a little popup at the top that looks like this:
youre going to want to reload, wait a klik, and there ya go
uninhibited access to sites you might revisit but dont want to go through the hassle of turning adblock off for, enjoy
listen i also hate those dumbass political cartoons about kids and their phones but at the same time you’re a fool if you flat out deny there are negative aspects to the way we communicate in the social media age
facebook and instagram strategically time your notifications after you post something to make you waste time scrolling. those two platforms also come to mind as being particularly performative (“look at this beautiful picture-ready thing i’m doing today”) although any social media encourages that. snapchat’s streak feature, as well as those stupid emojis next to people’s names, exist solely to suck you into using the app every day. twitter and instagram display your follower count, and facebook displays how many friends you have. tumblr cultivates a culture of oversharing, and although you can have one-on-one conversations on here, most “communication” takes the form of shouting from a soapbox. all of these things are related to the problem of privacy online, which many of us simply assume doesn’t exist and should therefore be tossed aside so that we can dissect and manufacture every detail of our selves and desires online. you can’t honestly tell me these things are of no concern for the way we understand ourselves and others, and our relationships to the world.
I love this post. Also note that social media (the Internet truly), in a way that TV hasn’t been able to achieve, allows advertisers to be more intimate and targeted than they’ve ever been before. Through platforms like Instagram and Facebook, we basically declare to them the things we desire, interact with most often, the places we go, etc…
All that information is scraped from us and used for all sorts of stuff. To get us to buy things, to get us to watch things, to sway our opinions on so many things.
Plot Designing 