AmarulaGold

Just the worst drink ever, but I'll grow on ya! Profile pic credit to Sungwon @ www.behance.net/sungwon

[truestoriesaboutme]

I can't quite explain it, but Clue (1985), The Princess Bride (1987), Galaxy Quest (1999), and Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves (2023) are all the same genre

[truestoriesaboutme]

Yes! You get it!

[normal-horoscopes]

To summarize literally 2000 years of occult philosophy in a tumblr post:

Reality is fundamentally flexible, it is fluid, pooling in some places and running thin in others. You may be familiar with the idea of a "thin" or liminal space, and their rarely-cited opposite, the proximal space.

All things exist on a spectrum of "real" to "not real" but they can never actually be 100% real or 100% unreal.

For example: prove to me right now that you're real.

Basically, it's impossible, we have to trust that our eyes and ears and tongues aren't lying to us when they tell us "yes we are experiencing the world right now" but they could be lying to us! This could all be a vivid dream and tomorrow we could wake up as a frog. That isn't likely, but the world is full of unlikely things.

So, if you can't prove that something is real, there is no capital-T Truth to reality, but (and here's where the woo-y occult philosophy bits come in) that means that there's also no capital-U Untruth to reality either.

Hence, all things exist on a spectrum between truth and untruth, all built on the flexible and (and manipulatable) nature of human perception.

[normal-horoscopes]

Here's a fun question:

Which is more Real? The Simpsons house from The Simpsons? Or the Banks house from the Fresh Prince of Bel Air?

[deactivatedcatofshadow]

oh this reminds me of when I was younger, can I try?

if we’re going with truth in the sense of “can be experienced with the senses” then the Banks house wins because it existed as a physical space (a set) and therefore could theoretically be experienced with sight and sound but also touch, smell and taste, while the Simpson house has only ever existed as a drawing

if we’re going with truth in the sense of “shared reality” then the Simpson has been going on for longer and has been syndacated everywhere = part of a shared experience for more people and therefore more true.

but also! of note, the real physical existence of the Banks house was limited to the approximation of a set. The actors on said set would have looked at the live studio audience (IIRC), the lights, the cameras. As noted by Will Smith himself, they got no roof. The physical experience wouldn’t have been that of a house but of a tv set built in the image of an ideal “Banks house” that never existed.

in contrast, within the universe of the Simpson their house is completely real. They have a roof and four walls. The stairs go to a second floor. The house in the Simpson is not a copy of a thing but the thing itself, a cartoon house for cartoon people. If we were sucked into tv reality somehow, the Banks house would be fundamentally different from what we experienced on the show, while the Simpson house would be the same.

Also, we establish truth based on what serves us. If I am, say, a scholar writing a thesis on famous sitcoms and signifiers of wealth, then it pays off to act as if the Banks house real - I say “we see stairs so we can assume the house has two floors,” even if i know full well that the “real” stairs went nowhere. Instead, if I am a director for a Fresh Prince episode, I have necessarily to think of the house in terms of a set, in order to correctly cohordinate the actors and crew.

dammit this is so long already but I’m not even like five minutes in, I remember thinking about this a lot

[normal-horoscopes]

FINALLY A DECENT RESPONSE

IF I COULD GIVE YOU A GOD STAR STICKER I WOULD

[scottbaiowulf-deactivated201805]

Male writers writing female characters:

“Cassandra woke up to the rays of the sun streaming through the slats on her blinds, cascading over her naked chest. She stretched, her breasts lifting with her arms as she greeted the sun. She rolled out of bed and put on a shirt, her nipples prominently showing through the thin fabric. She breasted boobily to the stairs, and titted downwards.”

[m1ssc0mmun1cat10n]

‘ She breasted boobily to the stairs, and titted downwards’ is the greatest fucking sentence I have ever read.

[silly-activites]

THE ORIGINAL??

[dduane]

(smh) Never thought I’d see it in the wild. Yet here it is. :)

[browniejeane]

always gotta reblog the ‘breasted boobily’ post

[huffy-the-bicycle-slayer]

Absolutely bonkers that I'm now one of those weirdos you hear about on Twitter

[huffy-the-bicycle-slayer]

I committed to the bit so hard that I also committed misdemeanor impersonation of a government official

[great-and-small]

Actually I do not feel snug as a bug in a rug I feel uptight as a mite in a fight

[viralfrog]

[dragongirlbunny]

[pusong-mangga]

[animals-with-fan-art]

This counts as fan art

[salmonpiffy]

PHM spaceships gijinka

[cephalopod-celabrator]

I think it's really funny that reading the discworld witch books (at least the ones that are Weatherwax+Ogg+Magrat), Granny immediately seems like the scariest one by far. She seems like a terrifying force of nature accompanied by a jovial old grandma and an insecure young woman. But as the series progress, the times when Granny holds back and Nanny and Magrat jovially engage in brutal physical violence add up. Now I'm not saying you *shouldn't* be scared of Granny, I'm just saying that she has a rather strong conscience in her way, whereas Magrat and Nanny will both sucker punch you, kick you between the legs and happily step over your groaning body. Granny is to be feared, but Nanny doesn't fight fair and Magrat will kill a motherfucker. Terry Pratchett really knew how to write female characters.

[oma-goodness]

Too right to stay in the tags

[krakenartificer]

image transcription

#Granny fears what she might do too much to ever do it #the other two have no such limiter #because Magrat believes she’s a good person #and Nanny doesn’t care

[sleepy-bebby]

Top left clockwise: Keith groover, Jordan Simons, Bret Crow, Harry Hansen

[thriceandonce]

WHAT holy shit that’s wildly cool

[miscellaneous-marios]

[bloop-doop-woople-deactivated20]

Repairing with gold, kintsugi

[ltwilliammowett]

The Danish training ship “Georg Stage” (1934) dresses in rainbow colour, 2021 

[dragon-in-a-fez]

not the kind of gay ship I’m used to seeing on tumblr but cool

[dubiousculturalartifact]

ship georg is an outlier but SHOULD be counted

[queer-joy-detector]

Queer joy detected!

[sahonithereadwolf]

George Strait not detected

[fforsythiaaa]

Once when I was in undergrad, someone described something as “problematic” in class and our professor was like, “That’s cool, but ‘problematic’ doesn’t really mean anything. It means that the thing you’re describing has a problem, and in and of itself that’s not bad. Art, especially, should always have problems, or else it’s not interesting and not art, either. It sounds like you’re trying to say that this is bad, but you don’t want to say ‘bad.’ Is that right?”

So from then on whenever one of us called something problematic, he would make us talk it out until we could name the “bad” thing we were hinting at. In this particular class, 7/10 it was some type of oppression, and the remainder was like, “I’m uncomfortable because this is very new/confusing/pushing boundaries that made me feel safe.”

Once we stopped calling things “problematic” and stopping at that, class got way more interesting and... we all had to say, like, “that’s racist” or “that’s misogynistic” or “ew capitalism gross” out loud, which a lot of us had never done in a classroom before. Or we had to be like, “Uhhh... I’m not sure what’s so bad?” and confront our own beliefs and that was maybe even more useful.

Anyway. Whenever I see the word problematic, I can’t help but think of this professor being like, “Good starting point, now let’s get specific.” I think when we have to commit to saying “that’s ___” it requires a lot more careful thought about the truth and impact and complexities of whatever we’re claiming. Sometimes there really is some bullshit afoot, and also sometimes it’s art, and it should be full of problems, because that’s what art is.

[hypokeimena]

#'this is present in the text' is often a good first step #but those second and third ones (naming it; describing its function) are vital (via @elucubrare)

[thesituation]

my 100% failproof way to handle reactionaries asking why i don’t shave at all is going “because i don’t want to” it works because what they really want is an argument about the merits of feminism, and they’ll draw it out and try to convince you it’s a cult or whatever, but you can avoid it all by sticking to “i just don’t wanna. don’t feel like it” and if they argue with you about it you can use your ultimate ability, which is “i’m sorry i thought it was a free country?” which, believe me, they cannot come back from. they’ll either drop it or start harping on something you didn’t say, and it’s important you don’t take the bait at that point. when they can’t argue with what you say, they assume your beliefs and attack those. and you crucially must be visibly baffled at their change of direction because it will make them seem and possibly feel crazy (which they are). “i don’t want to shave” is a perfect response because truly it all comes down to autonomy and the ability to do what you want. they’ll try to say “feminism makes you think you have to do that” and it’s important to not take that bait. to reiterate that you don’t know what they mean and you just don’t like shaving and that it’s really weird to look into it that deep. this works i promise

[amarula-gold]

This works with most stuff actually

[manuciruja]

awww the like button turns into a rainbow when you press it! that's so cute...hey staff what's with all the trans women you keep nuking?

[manuciruja]

i think we should be ridiculing them more for this. you don't get to try and go all "queer website" when your staff likes to go on nuking sprees targeting the trans fem users

[creatingblackcharacters]

I can't remember where I read it last week, but the person discussed how when we think of chattel slavery in the US, we tend to think of massive plantations of cotton or tobacco, with one very rich white master or mistress with lots of land and lots of enslaved people. But we very rarely think of the many families that had just one or two slaves, in smaller homes.

Because it's not like you had to pay them, so once your family owned someone, they owned them and their descendants indefinitely. Could you pay and eventually free em- sure! You could also send them anywhere you want for any labor you want, could have an enslaved woman bred for more children, or maybe save up and buy new slaves and sell the old. Like cattle (thus, chattel slavery).

So it's interesting that many people go "oh well it's not like my family owned slaves!" Because like, one, how do you know that? Have you ever actually asked your grandmas about their grandmas? How many of your family members grew up with mammies? Have you ever asked? I wonder how many people have actually done the digging for the truth (or was it easier to just benefit). Because I've talked to my grandma, who picked cotton in the sea islands. She had to have been doing that for someone in the 1930s and 40s!

And two, it's easy to think that because your family (or someone else's) didn't own sprawling stolen land and generational blood money like a plantation owner, that it wasn't as important. But... It was. That was still someone's entire life. That was a person, whose labor benefitted and saved a family money that could be used in other ventures. How often do we think of them?

[only-cat-memes]