It’s really astonishing to think about all the years I’ve spent not painting?

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"I'm Dorothy Gale from Kansas"
he wasn't even looking at me and he found me

#extradirty
I'd rather be in outer space 🛸

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izzy's playlists!
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@adamwb
It’s really astonishing to think about all the years I’ve spent not painting?
A friend asked me “what course is this for?”
Working from the top down, unfortunately the way pop humanities books are written sometimes makes me very mad.
Anyway, has anyone got a good handle on how this new bullshit is supposed to work? As far as I can tell, the "Other reblogs" pane now only displays reblogs which have accrued to the current reblog and its descendants, but the "Reblogs with comments" and "Reblogs with comments and tags" panes still display a combined view of all qualifying reblogs from all branches of the reblog tree. I'm not sure whether this the intended user experience and the newspost was just incredibly shitty at explaining it, or whether I've somehow only picked up half the changes.
Whoops, it just changed for me – now the "Reblogs with comments" and "Reblogs with comments and tags" panes only show comments and tags directly associated with the specific reblog you're currently looking at. I guess that answers that!
I think discoverability of interactions is actually worse than Twitter quote-rewteet chains as it stands, which is kind of impressive.
at the bottom of the stupid menu that the reblog button opens now, there's an option that says "show all reblogs" which is where all of the others are hiding. which is unintuitive, stupid, and took me dicking around for a while to even notice that the option was there because I had to scroll on the menu.
if they were going to introduce a limited reblog view like this, they did it exactly backwards. the limited view should be unintuitive and limited to the new organization and the actual reblog list as it was should be the default. the whole thing could very easily have been avoided by them *not* doing a full overhaul of how the base user mechanics are organized with no warning
As far as I can tell there is no such button on desktop, though that might also be a symptom of the fact that the changes seem to be rolling out piecemeal. Can anybody else see the button @emrysthirteen is describing on desktop?
I see it, but I'm baffled as to why the fuck it's there of all places.
No, that's the button that shows you the reblogs directly associated with the current iteration of the post (i.e., the one you're physically looking at). That's not what @emrysthirteen is describing.
an hour ago i thought to myself “well, lets see the implementation” and, uh, i wish i hadn't
For the first time in my adult life I now own a television, really incredible whet they are doing with those these days. Anyway I’m a movie guy now here is my letterboxd
adam uses Letterboxd to share film reviews and lists. 294 films watched.
Been thinking a lot about how guys like Spica in The cook, the thief, his wife, and her lover are the reason why for instance a quiet but beautifully shot film like Past lives has all of its dark scenes totally crushed to shit by horrible visible compression artifacts if you try to stream it from amazon.
Been writing on here off and on there’s a couple good pieces I think.
Dream Kitsch (Traumkitsch) is an essay by Walter Benjamin published in 1927; translated by Edward Viesel
Dreams no longer provide a view on blue horizons. Dreams have become grey. A grey layer of dust on things is dreams’ highest faculty today. Dreams now lead straight into banality. Technology is in the process of cancelling the exterior appearance of things—never to be seen again—in the same way as banknotes, scheduled for invalidation, are cancelled. In a final farewell, our hand grasps the exterior appearance of things in dreaming and runs its fingers over their familiar shape. It touches the things where they are most worn. This is not always the best place to touch things, however: children do not clasp a glass, they grasp it by putting their fingers in it. And which side does a thing present to dreams? What is this most worn place? It is the side that has been worn thin by habit and is garnished with cheap maxims. The side that things present to dreams is “kitsch”.
y'all need to relearn the word erratic and stop using schizophrenic/bipolar/psychotic as a replacement
y'all need to relearn the word particular and stop using ocd as a replacement
People need to relearn the word "egocentric" and stop using narcissist/narc as a replacement.
People need to relearn the word "impulse" and stop using "intrusive thought" as a replacement
“Technically, all males are ‘performative males’. Haven’t you read Judith Butler?”
J.L. Austin has entered the chat
bad news everyone: i have a take
the loneliness epidemic/gen z dead-eyed stare/poor socialization of younger generations and increasing rudeness of older ones is kinda an internet thing and kinda a pandemic thing but it is also the well-meaning chickens of the Stranger Danger movement coming home to roost
something something everybody thinks violent crime is at a high when it’s at a 30 year low, something something training your children to see everyone outside of their family as a threat until you yourself believe it, something something. again this was well-intentioned, people want their kids to be safe, but when you’ve heard “dont talk to strangers” all your life it’s hard to kill that instinct as an adult
but yeah if you’re an early 20-something person, it might be helpful to be directly told this: talk to strangers. that rule only applied when you were a child. you not only should but must talk to strangers
some more things to consider
calling stranger danger rhetoric well-intentioned is giving it way too much credit. it was an expansion of parents' property claims over children with the added bonus of maintaining separation based on race and class. it wasn't an individual idea that parents independently came up with, it was a massive coordinated narrative pushed through popular media
kids can and should talk to strangers. stranger danger is not a good safety rule at all. isolating kids in their families puts them in more danger of abuse, not less.
increasing wealth disparities & the changing nature of work & the expansion of policing made in person socializing much more difficult (expensive & risky) than it used to be. this is especially true for children
people have been complaining about this generation's kids being ruder than before for like... many hundreds of years.
ultimately though, you're right about stranger danger being a big shift in cultural attitudes towards children that had huge ripple effects!
sex and gender are different in that gender is an elaborate series of superstitions that arises around the reproductive process in the context of class society, while sex is a form of pop science that arose to legitimise those superstitions
What tropes in fiction annoy you the most for completely subjective reasons?
there's nothing in fiction that can annoy me as much as the irl desire to discuss art as nothing but a series of boiled down tropes
abolish the family: a manifesto for care and liberation - sophie lewis
Reblogging more Sophie Lewis as a timeline cleanse bc tumblr keeps suggesting terrible baby terf takes “based on your likes”. Someone was really on here saying marginalized ppl should support the credit card companies banning sex to get on the right side of things. Where are they coming from. Full on h-p fan art. It’s bad.
Internet surveillance has killed eroticism. We need privacy to reclaim it.
I choose these examples from my personal life because they express sentiments that were once the kind of stuff I encountered only in the messy battlegrounds of Twitter, amid discussions about whether Sabrina Carpenter is being oversexualized, whether kinks are akin to a sexual orientation, whether a woman can truly consent in an age-gap relationship, and whether exposure to sex scenes in movies violates viewer consent. It is quite easy to dismiss these “discourse wars” as a “puritanism” afflicting the young, a reactionary current to be solved with a different, corrective discourse of pro-sex liberation, distributed via those same channels. If only it were so! To me, the reality goes deeper and is bleaker. The fact is that our most intimate interactions with others are now governed by the expectation of surveillance and punishment from an online public. One can never be sure that this public or someone who could potentially expose us to it isn’t there, always secretly filming, posting, taking notes, ready to pounce the second one does something cringe or problematic (as defined by whom?). To claim that these matters are merely discursive in nature is to ignore the problem. Because love and sex are so intimate and vulnerable, the stakes of punishment are higher, and the fear of it penetrates deeper into the psyche and is harder to rationalize away than, say, fear of pushback from tweeting a divisive political opinion.
enemy feminisms: terfs, policewomen + girlbosses against liberation - sophie lewis
Picked this up from the library today after reading Lewis’ recent essay on dworkin’s zionism.
The work of the director David Cronenberg proposes that transformation can attend disgust and that our desires might be elevated only when w
Most people would give anything to be turned into anything else, because most sex is mediocre, and the measure of its mediocrity is that it leaves us unaffected. No one falls ill; no one transforms into a fly or a cockroach; nothing changes. As the narrator of Norman Rush’s novel “Mating” sagely observes, “Sex can be various things, but in my experience the usual thing it is is considerate work on the part of both parties,” accompanied by the exchange of careful courtesies: “after you, no, after you, mais non.” No one has transformative sex all the time, and there is nothing wrong with sex that is merely pleasant. Indeed, a polite volley of pleasantries is probably the best thing that unecstatic sex can be.
Of course, many mediocre sexual encounters are rote in a more pernicious way. Heterosexual sex that follows the standard scripts, with its spankings and its schoolgirls, is not always devastating or traumatic, but its tiresomeness is nonetheless not innocuous. Women are the most obvious losers when the scenarios faithfully reënacted in the bedroom so consistently favor male predilections, but men who inherit their desires from the prevailing sexual culture—or, worse, men who feel they must satisfy a virile masculine ideal whether it appeals or not—lack the opportunity or the means to develop sexual agency. For both parties, the resultant comedy of errors is not satisfying. What nefariously underwhelming sex has in common with respectfully underwhelming sex is that neither brand is especially surprising or especially erotic.
To have sex erotically—and ethically—is to have it with someone else, and a person demonstrates her difference from the self by being impossible to predict, domesticate, or assimilate to preëxistent fantasy. It is not erotic to impose a ready-made desire onto someone pliant, or to slot her into a fetish that has little to do with her. Eroticism occurs only when someone rewrites us so completely that she rewrites even the quality and content of our appetites, and only when this radical rewriting is reciprocal.
Eroticism does not arise every time there is sexual activity, no matter how plodding, but it is also not the exclusive concomitant of love, marriage, or conventional commitment. Most sexual pairings are no more dishevelling than a game of tennis, but it is constitutive of sex that it has the potential to thrust us into metamorphosis that may be sweet, may be sinister, and may be both concurrently. When at last we grow wings, who can say exactly where we will want to fly?
Can a person consent to dying? Can she consent to a complete renewal, which amounts to the same thing?
Surely she cannot consent in the normal way. To consent in the normal way is not merely to grant permission but to grant permission on a particular basis—perhaps a reasonable expectation of pleasure, security, or safety. In any case, there is some positive inner state to which the outward utterance of license is supposed to correspond. A woman, almost always the presumed consenter in a heterosexual exchange, is exhorted to have sex with someone only when she has good reason to believe that she will have a generally happy time with him. Over and over, she is told: you don’t have to do anything you don’t want to do; you don’t have to do anything that makes you uncomfortable. Because she is assumed to know exactly what makes her comfortable, and because comfort is assumed to be a necessary condition of good sex, the procedure the consenter is instructed to follow is not unlike the operation favored by decision theorists. First, she is to imagine what sex with the partner under consideration will be like; second, she is to assign a value to the experience that she has conjured; third, she is to assign a probability of accuracy to her prediction. Having done all this, she finds herself in a position to make a rational decision, consenting if and only if she foresees that an exchange will turn out to be unimpeachably agreeable. Should she prove wrong in her predictions, should she ever feel the slightest scintilla of unease, she should withdraw her consent and beat a hasty retreat.
Three faulty assumptions are baked into this model. The first is that people in general, thus women in particular, can predict, if roughly, what a prospective partner will be like during sex; the second is that people in general, thus women in particular, can predict what they will be like during sex with a prospective partner; the third is that sex can and should be comfortable.
In fact, we are not impermeable packages of preformed desires, importing our likes and dislikes around with us from one encounter to the next like papers in a briefcase. An erotic craving is inextricable from the ferment that foams up when oneself is sluiced into another. Not only is it impossible for us to know whether an encounter will be deflating or transformative but we cannot know what sort of metamorphosis will ensue if the sex is as jarring as we can only hope it will be. We can have no more success when it comes to divining how we will change our partners than we can have when it comes to divining how they will change us—or, following Cummings, how their changes will change us, and how our changes will change them, iteratively and indefinitely. Maybe we will grow the wings of cherubs, but maybe we will find ourselves meshed with the coarse bristles of gigantic flies. All we can say with certainty is that sometimes, when it is working, sex carves out new bodies for our bodies, and these bodies can be both better and more brutal than the ones we could invent alone.
From Cronenberg’s fever dreams, we can surmise that there is a further reason to reject the decision-theoretic model of consent: not only is it impossible for us to know what we will become if an erotic encounter is transformative but we should not want to. To determine in advance what a transformative experience will churn into existence is to sap its power, for the very essence of transformative experience is that we cannot predict how it will transform us. To be sure, it is uncomfortable to stand on the precipice of metamorphosis, but unless we are willing to assume genuine risk we cannot be undone and remade.
"aesthetic sensibility...is the one sub form of sensory sensitivity that predicts positive mental health outcomes!" <- really curious about this if you have any links/further thoughts! tbh personally I feel like I've always had a high level (?) of this (not in the sense that I have Extra Good Taste, more like being really opinionated in a way that's kinda visceral and hard to explain) and I suspect that it made my basic perception of gendered aesthetics weird(er)
Here's the link to the study finding that highly sensory-sensitive people who are high in aesthetic sensibility actually enjoy a lot of positive mental health outcomes from that -- because they can experience immense pleasure from aesthetic joy, despite the sensitivities and difficulties that can also come with that kind of wiring:
Aron and Aron (1997) developed the Highly Sensitive Person Scale (HSPS) to measure individual differences in sensory-processing sensitivity
It has long been my belief that people who are not accustomed to complaining about small details should cultivate a practice of it. It’s good for you.
Winter salon, January 2024. Photos by Tyler Sherard.
something that talking about media on this site always ends up reminding me is that theres apparently thousands of people out there who only complain about things when theyre like steaming uncontrollably furious and assume everyone else is also like that