@stvksn on ig
I hope your god has asked for your mercy. I hope youve refused to forgive him.
i love this more and more every time i see it.
I have so much love for this person. The amount of empathy it takes to have these considerations about a person you will never meet, the eloquence and conviction with which they speak, the contempt for landlords. Sometimes I see something someone writes or creates and I wish with everything in me that I could meet and talk to that person for hours about what caused them to be this kind of light in the universe. This is one of those times.
VERY IMPORTANT a dam in the Netherlands, the weerdsluis lock, is directly on a migratory path for spawning fish. They have a worker stationed there to open the door for the fish, but they can take a while to open it. So to keep the fish from getting preyed on by birds they installed a doorbell. Only, the fish don't have hands to ring the doorbell. If you go to their website, they have a LIVE CAMERA AND A DOORBELL that YOU RING FOR THE FISH when they're waiting, and then the dam worker opens the door for them! I can't express how obsessed I am with this. look at this shit. oh my god.
I just looked, and there are 170 other people on there, also checking to see if there are fish waiting.
Please remember, if ever you are tempted to make a sweeping statement about human nature, that on this night in March, 2024, while war rages, there are 171 of us looking to see if a fish needs us to ring a doorbell.
Plenty else is going on, but also that.
(PS, the site says that the busiest times for fish are sunrise and sunset, which for now are at about 6:30, AM and PM, local time. Local time in Utrecht is 1 hour ahead of GMT, 5 hours ahead of EST, if that helps. I'm going to try to remember to check back again around 2 AM my time, when it will be morning for the fish!)
it drives me bonkers the way people don't know how to read classic books in context anymore. i just read a review of the picture of dorian gray that said "it pains me that the homosexual subtext is just that, a subtext, rather than a fully explored part of the narrative." and now i fully want to put my head through a table. first of all, we are so lucky in the 21st century to have an entire category of books that are able to loudly and lovingly declare their queerness that we've become blind to the idea that queerness can exist in a different language than our contemporary mode of communication. second it IS a fully explored part of the narrative! dorian gray IS a textually queer story, even removed from the context of its writing. it's the story of toxic queer relationships and attraction and dangerous scandals and the intertwining of late 19th century "uranianism" and misogyny. second of all, i'm sorry that oscar wilde didn't include 15k words of graphic gay sex with ao3-style tags in his 1890 novel that was literally used to convict him of indecent behaviour. get well soon, i guess...
I saw a review of The Tenant of Wildfell Hall that said 'I can't believe people think this was a feminist book'.
Like, do you know how swooningly, outrage-causingly shocking it was that the main character slammed her bedroom door in her abusive husband's face? Do you have any idea how unthinkable it was that she denied him access to her space and her person? She was supposed to submissively look away while he turned their son into an alcoholic for his own amusement and seduced innocent young women! It was revolutionary in 1848; when Bronte (Anne) wrote it, she had to do so under a male psuedonym because publishers wouldn't accept works by women unless they were harmless pap, which was all that was thought suitable for women to read lest their mild and gentle minds be corrupted.
The reason these groundbreaking books of history seem to tame and understated now is because they worked. They raised the bar, pushed the agenda forwards, cleared the path for the next writer. They did exactly what they were supposed to. Time is linear. History moves forward. We make progress.
When you are old, if things happen as they ought, a future generation of teenagers will read The Hate U Give and Simon and the Homo Sapiens' Agenda and Speak and think to themselves 'why did anybody ever think this was contraversial? Why did they ban them? These are just things we talk about, these are things we deal with like normal people. What was the past like, and how do we stop from backsliding into a place where these things are considered shocking again?"
I really hope that's how it goes.
First rule of literary analysis: the analyst cannot judge a past work by modern standards or ethics. Doing so leads to faulty comprehension, straw man fallacies, and lazy logic and analysis. We must always consider the work within the broader frameworks of the history, culture, and events that shaped it.
A really obnoxious meme to post those guys from Buzzfeed Unsolved going, "It's easy to condemn someone from another time by modern standards... and condemn away we shall!"
When I see that, what I see is, "I'm actively refusing to be media literate because it makes me feel good to call things from the past bad without thinking."
This makes you incredibly easy to manipulate when someone wants to engage in historical revisionism, call for book bans of books with 'offensive' content, make baseless callout posts, and otherwise lie to you, because you've trained yourself not to look at the context in which a statement was made and not think about anything but what's explicitly stated directly in front of you.
I don't know how to break it to you all but a bad parent will parent badly with books and a good parent will parent well with an iPad.
Ipads don't make the "ipad kid". What upsets you is a child who is being given something distracting and potentially obnoxious to those around them so that the parent doesn't have to deal with engaging with their child. And it's not new.
I grew up before the invention of the ipad and the complaints were the same. It was "tv kids" and "Gameboy kids". And it was book kids too, though people rarely complained about those kids because it didn't make noise and bother them personally so they no longer cared. Because the "it's for the good of the child!" argument dried up real fast as soon as it was something that didn't affect them.
A good parent who is engaging with their child's interests can do so with an iPad or television. A bad parent can say "take this and leave me alone" with a book or a toy. The problem is that some kids were raised by objects. By whatever kept them busy and entertained and away from their parents. Sure, there are parents who need to realize that's what they're doing and would benefit from changing their parenting style by limiting electronics use, but "if you give your kid an electronic toy, it means you're a bad parent" is not the same thing and largely misses the actual source of the problem.
Your arbitrary standards of what "good children" doing "good child activities" is as restricting.
To illustrate this post by @mayahawkse I would like to visualize to you the difference:
A post in 2023:
A post in 2014:
A zoom out of the same post:
This is what a community looks like.
See how in 2023 almost all of the reblogs come from the OP, from their few hours/days in the tag search. Meanwhile in 2014 the % of reblogs from OP is insignificant, because most of the reblogs come from the reblogs within the fandom, within the micro-communities formed there. You didn't need to rely on tags, or search, or being featured. Because the community took care of you, made sure to pass the work between themselves and onto their blog and exposed their followers to it. It kept works alive for years.
It's not JUST the reblog/like ratio that causing this issue, it's the type of interaction people have. They're content with scrolling and liking the search engine, instead of actually having a reblogging relationship with other blogs in their community.
Anyways, if you want to see more content you like, the only true way to make it happen is to reblog it. Likes do not forward content in no way but making OP feel nice. Reblogs on the other hand make content eternal. They make it relevant, they make it exist outside of a fickle tumblr search that hardly works on the best of days.
If you want more of something, reblog it.
this whole plagiarism discussion makes me feel genuinely insane. do these people not enjoy research? not enjoy developing arguments ? no. money and clout is the only thing real for them. hollow people
gita jackson is - as per usual - on the fucking money too. these people are so scared of their mediocre commentary and/or analysis that they never risk anything to develop it and thus continue to stick themselves in the same awful cycle by just stealing other peoples works. write!! by doing so you're miles and miles ahead of anyone who ever plagiarises without thought.
shampoo bottles are like "proven 3x more luscious hair" and you're like...how have they invented the quantitative measure of lusciousness...
what farming items in mmorpgs has taught me: i used to think using ice trays to make ice cubes was free but after thinking about it i have to pay the electric bill to power the freezer so every moment that i’m not freezing new trays of ice cubes is a moment that i’m underutilizing the freezer and increasing the cost of ice cubes. i have to constantly swap out ice trays for new ice cubes on an hourly rotation on a 24 hour basis or else i won’t produce the maximum amount of ice cubes possible and will underutilize the full potential of my electric bill. i need to stop using all other appliances and utilities in my home to make more ice cubes
One fallacy, I think, of anti piracy arguments is that a lot of them seem to assume that if I'm unable to pirate something I'm going to pay for it instead rather than going "oh! that's a terrible shame" and then quickly forgetting about it
"If you were not pirating [media] you'd be paying for it and therefore piracy is evil 😡" actually if I were not pirating that media I would be thinking about something else. I have made the decision to not spend any money on this and even god himself could not shake it
the research on this was already done decades ago and then quickly squashed because the record labels did not like the finding that people who pirated music were spending way more money on actually buying music legally than people who did not pirate music. it turns out people who care enough to pirate media are generally big fans of that media and willing to spend money on it if they have the money to spend
article is from 2009 so we have known this for a LONG time.
The Norwegian study looked at almost 2,000 online music users, all over the age of 15. Researchers found that those who downloaded "free" music – whether from lawful or seedy sources – were also 10 times more likely to pay for music. This would make music pirates the industry's largest audience for digital sales.
Wisely, the study did not rely on music pirates' honesty. Researchers asked music buyers to prove that they had proof of purchase.