unsuspecting innocent bystander: so what is this show about, anyway?
me: hold on, lemme get out my flow chart
PUT YOUR BEARD IN MY MOUTH

Origami Around
NASA
Mike Driver
he wasn't even looking at me and he found me
2025 on Tumblr: Trends That Defined the Year
Not today Justin
Game of Thrones Daily
art blog(derogatory)
Lint Roller? I Barely Know Her

Love Begins

izzy's playlists!
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if i look back, i am lost
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★

祝日 / Permanent Vacation
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@aquastranger
unsuspecting innocent bystander: so what is this show about, anyway?
me: hold on, lemme get out my flow chart
i DO believe that a good writer can make mischaracterization work. oh there's a character who doesn't normally cry? figure it out!! disect the character. make the situation cryable for them. make that character cry ugly tears even if it goes against their very nature. YOU CAN MAKE IT WORK!!!
A great piece of advice I've seen is "Don't fixate about what the character would never do. Think about the circumstances that would drive them to do this, even if they wouldn't normally."
Best advice ever!
*smirking* you couldn't waterboard that out of me, but even if torture was an effective method of information extraction and not a futile display of state-sanctioned sadism, the high percentage of false confessions it produces would mean that even if you could waterboard it out of me, could you even trust the veracity of my statement?
amazing things happening in late series columbo episodes
I’ve been wanting to make this post for a while; I’ve been seeing enough recently about history being primarily “storytelling,” or even simply dismissed as propaganda and or pithily reduced to “written by the victors” that as a historian I really want to push back.
This is a take that on its face sounds subversive and meaningful, but taken to its logical conclusion enables a lot of the same issues as history that was baldly written as propaganda. Reducing all history telling, especially modern, academic history to “stories written by the victors” is in my opinion both anti-intellectual and anti-academic. And this is not meant as a callout post or reprimand to anyone who’s used the phrase because in a lot of ways it sounds right, and it is important to think about who is writing history and what their agenda is, but it’s often used as a dismissal and conversation ender by people trying to sound progressive who I don’t think are considering the wider implications of that dismissal.
My credentials to discuss this are that as historian, my research and teaching focus has been on ideas memory, memorialization, and historical forgetting. I have conducted graduate level classes on this topic. For a bold and thought-provoking intro to these studies, I recommend the excellent essay: Why Every Single Statue Should Come Down, by Gary Younge.
We all of course know the common examples of “history written by the victors” erasing bad actions and atrocities. This is how history has been used as a propaganda tool, and why newly uncovered evidence and research like critical investigations into the atrocities of early US presidents who were slaveowners and books like Imperial Reckoning by Caroline Elkins, which uses primary sources to destroy the myth of the “peaceful” British exit from Kenya, are so important. But those revisions and deconstructions are not only also history, they are a far better example of what history is as a discipline now. It’s why the rising fascist governments find modern history and historians so dangerous and are cutting their funding: because relying on research, facts, and evidence, while not changing the fact that history is written as a narrative with a perspective, make unpleasant pasts harder to refute.
A large current example of this fascist rejection of history is the Trump administration ordering the National Park Service to take down signs at the presidents house in Philadelphia. Those signs detailed the reality of George Washington’s life as a slaver, and focused on the courage and full lives of individuals who escaped from enslavement while he was president, such as Oney Judge. Even though the administration was court ordered to return the signs in February they have not done so.
The Trump administration’s argument about these panels is that they present a “distorted” history “written by the victors” that is exaggerated and trying to make America look bad. The idea that the North distorted and exaggerated the horrors of the American South in their histories because they won and it made them look better is not new, and is the reason for the “lost cause” myth and the fact that today many Southern US schools do not teach accurate history about slavery.
Another large example of how the idea of “history being written by the victors” can be used to aid historical forgetting of atrocities is Holocaust denial. This is actually a common tactic with denial of many genocides but Holocaust denial is the clearest example because we can point to a legal trial around it. In 1993, historian Deborah Lipstadt wrote a book called “Denying the Holocaust,” which critically engaged with the distortions of evidence used by Holocaust deniers. One of those deniers, David Irving, sued Lipstadt for libel, essentially trying to argue in a court of law this his narrative of the Holocaust was as valid as hers and not “denial”. The court ruled in Lipstadt’s favor, crucially finding that Irving’s distortion of evidence did invalidate his history and make it illegitimate, and that it was not libel for Lipstadt to refute his bad research and call it denial. This trial is a huge statement on what modern, academic history is. Citations and documentation are a fundamental part of history as a discipline, as much as if not more so than crafting narrative out of what those documents show us.
(As an aside, the way more fun drama that happens in history now is when someone gets caught drawing terrible and incorrect conclusions from the primary documents they did cite, such as when Naomi Wolf’s entire dissertation and book premise was debunked as a completely avoidable lack of understanding of what “death recorded” meant in UK legal terminology in the 19th century. She has since, unsurprisingly, become a right-wing grifter who can’t stop posting on X).
History is a relatively new discipline, historically speaking (pun intended) and one that relies on storytelling to engage and craft narrative. But it also, crucially and increasingly, equally relies on evidence and primary sources. Looking at what evidence someone is using to craft their narrative is far more important than “were they the victor” or even sometimes “what is their agenda?” If we buy into the idea that all history is propaganda storytelling because a pithy line makes us feel enlightened about what lies have been told in the name of Nationalist history narratives, we run the risk of enabling people who would like us to forget history altogether.
In light of recent events, I have begun submitting bug reports when I see mature content labels applied inappropriately to posts, especially if an appeal has been rejected.
Extremely good idea - how are you doing it? Through the contact us option?
Yeah it’s one of the options on the Contact Support form:
for what it's worth: after a few months of submitting help tickets as 'feedback' when i saw a post inappropriately flagged as mature, i tried following this suggestion instead. today i got my first-ever response from tumblr support on this issue, letting me know that a post i'd submitted a ticket before has had its mature content flag removed.
Hey it worked! Maybe if enough of us make a stink they’ll fix the fucking system.
This is legitimately brilliant. Bug burndown reports (the rate at which your software team can close bugs) is a major metric for most software houses.
It takes an extra step in our part, but this is part of what makes it effective. It's not one click, one reblog activism and it hits them where they care: their damn KPIs.
so hard to find these guys
Love how their method of locomotion on land is trundling while also oozing over the terrain
I love that I can say "watch out! They can sting you" about this thingy
once again. i love you, zac oyama.
Shane & his parents // Ilya & his parents Heated Rivalry, S01E01
Can we talk about how both David and Grigori are on the right side of the frame, Yuna is to the left of Shane- but to the left of Ilya is just a sharp drop.
Personally I do think that sometimes non-hockey fans can end up mischaracterizing Shane and Ilya because they don't know enough about hockey/hockey playstyles
The Ilya we see in Heated rivalry would not be throwing the first punch, he's not an enforcer. Ilya is a star center and a Pest. He wouldn't be doing his job correctly if he was punching players every other game, it would end up with not enough ice time to let him be the playmaker he's paid to be.
But being a pest can be playmaking! Find a player to bait, emotionally push them just enough that they try to fight you, and then get the fuck out of there before the ref gives you both penalties. This gets your team the power play. There is probably someone on Ilya's line dedicated to helping him get out of the fights he starts, and finishing them for him!
I also think this is also something that Shane would respect. Ilya is good at it and it's a good strategy for his team. I don't think Shane would see it as some dirty tactic, because Shane probably thinks everyone with a brain can see it for what it is! He probably thinks everyone should be able to see that being an asshole is a tactic for Ilya, that it's something to ignore and not fall for, that it's a strategy and not personal beef.
I think Shane's more disappointed when a Metro falls for it. Shane sees it as Ilya set up a Looney Toons ass obvious trap and one of his teammates ran into it. Why be mad at Bugs Bunny when you can be mad at your defenceman for falling for a fucking Bugs Bunny trap.
Clippy just wanted to help...
i fucking hated your shoelaces this entire time
for the uninitiated
Happy Pride!
Every pride, you must reblog this. No exceptions
bonus/proof:
we tipped her well dw. best waitress ever 🍒