Jack Saint

Patreon Mess-ups and Next Week's Content

Added 2018-08-05 18:55:50 +0000 UTC

Howdy, Party People. Just a couple of notices on this fine Sunday.

First thing is a bit overdue, but basically just a prompt to check and make sure everything is fine with your payment options - apparently some technical hiccup last week meant a bunch of people falsely got their cards declined, so give it a check as otherwise your pledges won't go through.

Finally, a tease of next week's content. So I was chatting with our good comrade Peter Coffin and he talked with me a little about normative images of reality (also reminding me I still need to read Society of the Spectacle!), which got me thinking about some odd media discourse I've been seeing lately. Namely I've noticed that a lot of people seem to be finding it an 'inconsistency' that the character of Eddie Brock in the new Venom movie, "despite being an educated journalist", has a strong regional Brooklyn accent. I've even seen people pose the question of if the film-makers know Brock isn't some "dock worker" or "street thug". This is something both my partner (a Mississippi girl) and I (an Essex boy) have dealt with a lot with our own accents - feeling obligated to subdue our 'natural' voices in the name of some amorphous "standard" dialect, to remove certain notions people might have about the kind of people we are.

There is an image of education and sophistication that rejects 'regional' voices which, in my mind, primarily serves to normalize the notion of being 'above' the street-level, to be 'worldly' - in other words, to be of a higher class. And of course it's for the most part, absurd and completely arbitrary - but it's still there, and it's something I think I want to unpack a bit. So, unless something suddenly happens that I absolutely need to discuss, that'll probably be next week's content. Hope you all enjoy! And of course, a final note thanking you all again for your support - it genuinely means the world to me. Talk soon!