Apollo 17 vs Artemis II
Despite everything, it's still you.
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Apollo 17 vs Artemis II
Despite everything, it's still you.
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Also prev tags:
That's really cool actually
The boulder pushing punishment is iconic. But I think more people should know the reason Sisyphus was punished to begin with, which was for cheating death, twice.
The first time he cheated death, Sisyphus had just angered Zeus by revealing the location of the Asopid Aegina whom Zeus abducted. Which is super valid, fuck Zeus.
Sisyphus knew that Zeus would send the god of death Thanatos after him, so he prepared a trap and trapped Thanatos in the chains meant for him.
After that, nothing on Earth was able to die so long as Thanatos was in chains. Which meant no animals could be sacrificed to the gods. This angered the gods, who made Sisyphus' life so miserable with pain and illness that he would beg for death. And so he released Thanatos.
But then came the second time Sisyphus cheated death. As he was dying, he asked his wife to dump his naked corpse in the middle of the public square. Denied a proper burial, his soul ended up on the far side of the river Styx, unable to cross.
He complained to Hades and Persephone about how his wife disrespected him, and begged them to let him return briefly to the world of the living to scold her and make her bury him properly. They agreed, and Sisyphus returned to life. He then embraced his wife, and refused to return to the Underworld.
It's only when he finally died of old age that he was sent to Tartarus and punished with the boulder.
I don't remember where I've seen it, but I like the interpretation that Sisyphus doesn't have to push the boulder. He can choose to stay in Tartarus and rest. But he was promised that if he managed to push the boulder to the top of the mountain, he'll ascend to Elysium.
And Sisyphus, in his stubbornness and cleverness, refuses to give up on a challenge.
One must indeed imagine Sisyphus happy, planning and scheming about how he'll cheat the gods next.
@heydocverdant Don't hide this gem in the tags.
maybe i was made for loving things. maybe that's what life is all about.
don't care + running + jumping + skipping + hopping + having fun + playing
While I understand the desire to make Big Art entirely and viscerally I think it's worth considering that small art often leaves an outsized impact on its audience. Short stories, teensy indie games, short films, sketches on scrap paper, carved or sculpted figures that would fit in the palm of your hand, etc. etc. are all things that, when they hit your psyche at just the right angle, can stay lodged in there forever specifically because they are small. It is not necessary for a thing to be sprawling for it to have impact.
some gorgeous fan art :))
I just found some stunning mlc fanart with beautiful backdrops!
not mine! credit goes to å¼č±č§ č on weibo! she makes gorgeous fanart/wallpaper of various c-dramas, go check it out!
ugh I can't get over how BEAUTIFUL they are! note: there are SO many more, though some where low res so I didn't include them :)
to bite. Fondly.
love is stored in the throat offered willingly AND in the teeth sinking in. Or something
I think fandom analysis on the whole would be a lot more fun and interesting if it took the sort of attitude a great many of my lit professors did, and the idea was to look at the text, see what you think it's saying, or even COULD be saying, and let's fuck around with that idea. I got four years of hearing insane takes on stuff and I was extremely fortunate to go a school with small enough class sizes and a dedicated enough faculty that in many respects, wild theorizing was encouraged.
One of my professors was straight up like "I don't want you reading papers about this book until we finish it!" and we had writing things for the first 20 minutes of every class because he wanted to know what WE thought, not what we had become convinced was THE thing to think.
When I was in my second year of college, I spiraled out into this whole "Jane Eyre is a lesbian!" thing, and my professor (not the same guy as above but delightfully insane in her own right) was like, "Wow, I've never heard this from anyone," and instead of being like, "um this is not what has been agreed upon by everyone else" went "Tell me more." Now, as a forty year old woman who has never stopped engaging with stories on both an enjoyment and academic level, the paper I would write with age and distance would be more "Homosociality, desire, and the domesticated male in Jane Eyre" or something like that, nineteen year old me was a little reductive and simple, but same vibes.
But my professor did not think I was right, she thought I was being INTERESTING, and so she encouraged me and championed me to write that paper and I actually presented it at the student division of a conference! The cool thing about that was, that when I was defending it, I was having to think about it, but it was in the spirit of collaboration, it felt like. No one was trying to 'win' the conversation.
Doc, what the fuck are you--I saw a really interesting thing this morning, someone talking about Shrek, of all things, and how they thought it was about how you cannot turn an ogre into a man, but he can make you become an ogre. And I immediately went, "Wow! Okay, interesting, not how I read that at all, TELL ME MORE." It was really jarring for me, then, to see pretty much every comment be like, 'uh you are wrong and also stupid." Sure, maybe that's not the intention of the work, but I don't for one goddamn motherfucking second think Charlie Bronte was sitting down going "I am going to write a woman so gay..." nor do I think the read of her as same sex-attracted is the end all be all of interpretations. It's mine, for sure! But like...talking about stories is supposed to be fun and it's supposed to be about possibility.
That one post got me thinking about how we are, in fandom often all looking at this same text, and there's immense pressure to have a 'right' interpretation--I was at the nexus of so many Sailor Moon fandom wars, and while I got into a few tussles, I was also stupid to do that. This characters are not real, and I was shutting down POSSIBILITY. And even after I was like, 'Wow, I don't think this is actually a very fun way to do stuff" it turns out you can't magically give everyone the same revelation you have simultaneously. Which is upsetting. And I see these same patterns repeat over and over and over again.
In my old age, I'm less interested in he "He would not say that" and more interested in "Cool, tell me why he would say that?"
Don't misunderstand me, there are points of view and ideas on different texts where I'm like, "Hm. I don't care to engage with that." Remember that the window we're looking out of is as important as what we're looking at, and will DOUBTLESS change the appearance. But the whole reason we have each other is to try and find other windows! It's not actually to find someone who is the next pane of glass in your same window. I miss that environment, where you could trust that everyone coming to the table was engaging with the same ground rules and that there was an expectation of, detachment doesn't quite get to the heart of what I'm talking about, but we were expected not to take the text or the analysis of it personally, even when it was hard. And sometimes it was. But I think it led to me having--for example it's crazy to me to have one 'right read' on any given text. I had a SUPER FUCKING ANIMATED conversation with a fellow lit nerd about whether or not GdT's Frankenstein was emotionally faithful to the text (which is not the same as being literally faithful nor the same as being good)and it was so fun, EVEN THOUGH we were coming at it completely opposed. But it was so fucking fun.
I wish I could do that with anime and cartoons, but you can't. People take Shrek personally. So I'll never have that same fun.
ANYWAY SORRY I AM DRINKING COFFEE AND MY DAUGHTER ISN'T HERE I HAVE TOO MUCH FREE TIME.
please do not forget how politically convenient it is for you to earnestly believe sexuality and desire is an inherently dangerous thing that can only be gentled or tamed and can never be a healing or positive thing in of itself
If anyone is wondering where we are on a scale of 1 to fucked, Weird Al Yankovic just did a full cover of Rage Against the Machine - Killing In the Name
In this man's 46 year long career, through everything, he has NEVER spoken about politics. He has NEVER spoken harshly to anyone. He has NEVER performed songs with heavy swearing or forceful lyrics. This man guest starred on My Little Pony as "Cheese Sandwich," the only other party pony as fun as Pinkie Pie!
When THIS man stops laughing, we are in trouble.
Seeing Weird Al screaming "FUCK YOU I WON'T DO WHAT YOU TELL ME" with his whole chest, zero comedy, really is like seeing the nicest person you know finally snap because everything around him is so fucked up and horrible. I've always respected Weird Al as an artist and as a person, and this has only upped my respect for him.
^This exactly!^
quick wave studies.
i'm going to say something insane. i think the overall pronounced fandom cultural slide away from complex plotty violent work and towards kidfic and coffee shops AUs and cozy domestic romcoms is a symptom of fascism.
okay actually this is a great phrase for it
Reblogging this for the term "neopastoralism", because I think that's fantastic.
Coffee shop AUs are, like... fine. They're not my thing, but they're hardly going to end the world. We don't need to have a moral panic about people enjoying coffee shop AUs. I'm also not about to come for anyone seeking escapism in the current hellscape.
However, I do think it's interesting to examine the tendency within these AUs to project a sort of idyll onto the coffee shop: here is a whimsical place where you can spend time with your friends and potentially meet your true love; here is a world where the greatest dilemma you may face is choosing the right coffee syrup for a new beverage or sneaking your number onto that to-go cup without being obvious.
The fantasy of the coffee shop AU is divorced almost entirely from the reality of an actual coffee shop. There are no abusive, creepy customers or bosses; there is no mention of the barista's wages; we don't see the dishwasher sweating at their station, the cashiers' aching feet; the person whose job it is to clean the (customer-only?) toilets. These topics are Political and Depressing and Must Be Avoided, because Political and Depressing things are antithetical to this kind of escapism.
The coffee shop AU exists, not in a world without capitalism (because this is a setting where commerce is actively happening) but in a world where capitalism has no teeth: a world where capitalism somehow works. In order to be convinced and soothed by this fantasy, you must suspend your disbelief and avert your eyes. You must filter the coffee shop through a neopastoralist lens.
To me, there's something very uncanny about it.
I've made this observation before, but there's a distinct and strong correlation between "wanting simplistic, saccharine, and morally binary media" and "authoritarianism". It's not a 1 to 1, which is where a lot of people seem to misunderstand things; it's not "If you like fluff, you're a jackbooted authoritarian." Very much not. This is a pattern that grows up out of thousands--hundreds of thousands--of individual interactions, out of culture, out of a shift of perspectives on what is seen as the norm and what is seen as outrageous.
Individual people liking cutesy fluff? Not a problem. Thousands of people insisting that fluff is the only acceptable option and if you dare make them think and consider, you're the problem?
That's a Problem.
It's the shifting of norms in culture, and fandom is not an isolated bubble--it's a representative of larger trends. And the trend right now in our larger culture, especially in America, is authoritarianism. Authoritarianism that has gone past "creeping" and is now "prancing", "dancing", "galloping", or dare I say goosestepping. Of course that's going to have an impact on the cultural scenes, including fandom!
And there's a correlation in societies that want saccharine fluff and their own authoritarianism. I can point to numerous examples--Victorian England with the censored stories for children. The USSR with an entire kitschy style of stories and art. The USA before the rise of Trump with Thomas Kinkaid's art. And that's just scratching the surface.
The main point in bringing this up is to be aware of the trend, not to take it as a personal attack for enjoying fluffy stories.
And I think the way to keep this from pendulum-swinging into āfluffy stories badā (because we know this does happen with any observation of problematic trendsāsee: feminist critiques of objectification turning into puritanical sex-negativity, critiques of appropriation turning into enforcing cultural āpurityā, etc) is to shift the focus from the presence of this kind of fiction to the proportional absence of the alternative.
Obviously, the presence is easier to spotāyou can actually see something that is present, but you canāt directly see something thatās absentāso it makes sense that this is the first piece of evidence in building this critique, but the critical thing that makes this an issue is the absence of engagement with challenging works, not actually the engagement with unchallenging ones.
Positive emotions and things that make us feel safe and cared for are as important a part of the human experience as for the negative. And safety-seeking can be as much a response to the rise of fascism to get away from it as an indication of people falling into it. We just canāt only have the safe, unchallenging stuff. Because it is that censorship and cutting out of fundamental parts of human experience that feeds into the social conservatism & puritanism of authoritarianism.
you've heard of death of the author, now get ready for death of the audience: where instead of basing your reaction on a thousand uninformed opinions online, you actually read the text and engage with it
girl help there's people on this post who can't actually read my text
#the way that this is literally how death of the author works lmao
OKAY i'm fucking sick of people who can't read leaving these comments so here we go, we're gonna read Barthes together. hold my hand
Barthes' 1967 essay The Death of the Author (La mort de l'auteur) loosely takes the form of a literary history: he relates the changing attitudes of criticism towards the text and of literature towards criticism down to his day. He is interested in what writing is, and thus, what a book is: "a tissue of signs," which the critic claims to be able to interpret. But Barthes argues that once the necessity of connecting the author to the book is removed, the critic has no work to do: "Once the Author is gone, the claim to 'decipher' a text becomes quite useless." This is a rejection of both the supremacy of the critic and the intentions of the author.
When Barthes says "critic," he doesn't mean "anyone who has encountered the text," however. He differentiates the critic from the "reader":
the reader is the very space in which are inscribed, without any being lost, all the citations a writing consists of; the unity of a text is not in its origin, it is in its destination.
For Barthes, the reader's understanding of the text is supreme because it weaves together the "tissue of signs" into a coherent whole, producing a singular interpretation. He concludes by advocating for the overthrow of the critical establishment in favor of individual interpretation: "to restore to writing its future, we must reverse its myth: the birth of the reader must be ransomed by the death of the Author." In other words, in order for us to allow readers their own experiences, we must stop prioritizing the critic -- not the reader, but the critic -- and instead allow the reader to engage the text.
We're gonna un-Barthes Barthes now, okay? Stay with me. Here's the context:
Barthes was responding to a stifling and rigid environment in which criticism was the sole province of the academic expert. As part of the deconstructionist wave, he wanted to upend the traditional hierarchy that dictated how a text should be understood and what it was for, instead prioritizing language and reaction.
He got his wish. We live in a world of reaction.
Gone is the tyranny of the formal critic; gone even is the formal literary education of the reader. Our "tissue of signs" is no longer the text, but an infinite mirrored hall of reactions to reactions to reactions in which the text diminishes into a vanishing point, as the Author once did on Barthes' literary stage.
We do not need to resist the tyranny of the academy. The academy has been destroyed. Adjunctification, the widespread corporatization of universities, the resulting devaluation of college degrees, the devastation of humanities departments in widespread shutdowns, and now the revocation of billions of dollars of government funding have left the academy on its knees. Public trust in academic expertise has declined so sharply that people on this very hellsite will tell you that if someone has an advanced degree in a specific field, that actually makes them less trustworthy.
And in Ozymandias' place, we have the reader.
The reader consumes a variety of "content" and regurgitates its reactions in a variety of "posts." It transmutes text into more text which further readers wriggle eagerly through, refining what might have had meaning into a rarefied fertilizer of emotion and echo. What it leaves behind becomes the literary history for new strata of reactions, nostalgia, and imitation.
This is the audience: an ouroboros of interpretation, a rat king of readership. It has no end but itself. Ultimately, it needs no text to function. In this world, the truly radical act is to disentangle yourself from the other worms and rebuild the edifice of meaning. This may require you to do such tasks as "read the actual book," but because we no longer have the support -- however oppressive -- of literary criticism to inform our reading, we must also learn how to read, explore the historical context on our own, and recover both the facts and the symbols from which the text is woven.
That is what death of the audience means: not a rejection of the critic in favor of language, but a rejection of endless language and infinite readers in favor of fact, history, and skill.
It's a pun, by the way: "La mort de l'auteur," spoken aloud, recalls Le Morte d'Arthur, a 15th-century collection of Arthurian legend which marked the turn away from the Middle Ages and into a nostalgic Early Modern period which valorized them. The Author becomes the mythic King; as myth, he can be severed from fact and dismissed.
Fact has now itself become the myth.
Fucking read.
don't care + running + jumping + skipping + hopping + having fun + playing
Whatās the Real Lesson?
Hereās something that happens to ADHD children a lot: Ā Getting pushed beyond their limits by accident. Hereās how it works and why itās so bad.
Child says, āI canāt do this.ā
Adult (teacher or parent) does not believe it, because Adult has seen Child do things that Adult considers more difficult, and Child is too young to properly articulate why the task is difficult.
Adult decides that the problem is something other than true inability, like laziness, lack of self-confidence, stubbornness, or lack of motivation.
Adult applies motivation in the form of harsher and harsher scoldings and punishments. Child becomes horribly distressed by these punishments. Finally, the negative emotions produce a wave of adrenaline that temporarily repairs the neurotransmitter deficits caused by ADHD, and Child manages to do the task, nearly dropping from relief when itās finally done.
The lesson Adult takes away is that Child was able to do it all along, the task was quite reasonable, and Child just wasnāt trying hard enough. Now, surely Child has mastered the task and learned the value of simply following instructions the first time.
The lessons Child takes away? Well, it varies, but it might be:
-How to do the task while in a state of extreme panic, which does NOT easily translate into doing the task when calm.
-Using emergency fight-or-flight overdrive to deal with normal daily problems is reasonable and even expected.
-Itās not acceptable to refuse tasks, no matter how difficult or potentially harmful.
-Asking for help does not result in getting useful help.
Iām now in my 30ās, trying to overcome chronic depression, and one major barrier is that, thanks to the constant unreasonable demands placed on me as a child, I never had the chance to develop actual healthy techniques for getting stuff done. At 19, I finally learned to write without panic, but I still need to rely on my adrenaline addiction for simple things like making phone calls, tidying the house, and paying bills. Sometimes, I do mean things to myself to generate the adrenaline rush, because thereās no one else around to punish me.
But hey, at least I didnāt get those terrible drugs, right? That might have had nasty side effects.
#I wonder if this might potentially apply to people with autism as well?#because I havenāt been diagnosed with adhd but MAN do I fee this#and like I had the situation a lot of people went through#breezed through elementary and high school and in gifted and talented#but then college happened and I was LOST
Thereās a lot of overlap between ADHD traits and autism traits.Ā Whether you meet the diagnostic criteria for ADHD, too, I have no idea (because Iām a random person on the Internet), but you might find ADHD resources helpful in figuring out your life challenges. A lot of āhelpā for executive function skills comes from neurotypicals who are naturally good at it and lack insight into people who arenāt, which makes it spectacularly useless to the people who actually need it.
Well shit this explains so much about me
Yes, I am autistic without ADHD, and this isā¦how a lot of things happened to me.Ā Iām an adrenaline addict, too, and this is why.
And Iām not going to say that that mode of operation doesnāt have its uses.Ā But it is a really, really counterproductive way to teach kids how to take the time and focus to learn to do something well and sustainably.
It can also make kids look lazy who arenāt, because you start to learn that youāre only good at things if you can do them PERFECTLY, IMMEDIATELY, RIGHT NOW and you donāt learn how to work through your anxiety and processing difficulties to actually practice and understand something.
Also, child never learns how to articulate why the task is difficult.
They learn that theyāre not allowed to.
^ This is it. The child IS taught that theyāre not allowed to talk about the task being difficult. Whether theyāre ignored, disbelieved, punished, or given āhelpā that actually makes things worse, the message is the same: Donāt.
Oh my God. I never realized why I was like this. I can do incredible things in a panic mode, like write an advanced 12 page neuroscience research paper and edit it in less than 24 hours. But sit down and skim my class notes in my free time? Nope. I even had a therapist tell me once that I needed to learn how to study when Iām not running on adrenaline because it doesnāt work (sadly it DOES for me so that advice didnāt help.) This explains so much
(last rb-d post about kink / bdsm / domsub) actually theres sth about the examples used that rly don't resonate with me despite the emotional space things being super duper interesting š®āšØš®āšØš®āšØ every time i look into kink / bdsm i rly feel this way lmaooo Like why do the ideas sound so good in theory but in application they are jsut so boring or do absolutely nothing for me....?