Sade Olutola
art blog(derogatory)
izzy's playlists!
Today's Document
AnasAbdin
$LAYYYTER
Cosmic Funnies
#extradirty
Andulka
❣ Chile in a Photography ❣
Product Placement
I'd rather be in outer space 🛸
shark vs the universe
Lint Roller? I Barely Know Her
Love Begins
taylor price
No title available
i don't do bad sauce passes
roma★
blake kathryn
seen from Türkiye
seen from United States
seen from United Kingdom
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seen from Malaysia
seen from Spain
seen from Taiwan
seen from United States
seen from France
seen from Türkiye
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@aurielledawn
Big Brain Idea: bots and constructs pushing into each others feed space and sharing inputs and stuff like that is a form of socialization for machine intelligences, like when animals groom each other. Murderbot, while having difficulty socializing physically with humans is actually very social in a different way.
ART in chapter 9 of Network Effect
Why is it referred to as coming out of the closet?
It could be coming out of anything. What wasted potential.
Coming out of my cage and I’ve been doing just guys
#if you want the pedantic answer bc I’ve actually researched this for my thesis#there doesn’t seem to be a for sure agreed upon origin of the phrase BUUUUUT#it seems to be a combo of two earlier phrases ‘coming out’ and ‘skeletons in the closet’#coming out started to be used by gay men in 1920s new york bc a “coming out” was the 1st time a debutante would debut into the dating scene#so gay men would have their “coming out” when they first went onto the gay dating scene#a skeleton in your closet is a shameful/dirty secret that would often only be revealed once a person died#for a lot of queer people their queerness was something they literally took to the grave#so being ‘in the closet’ meant you were the skeleton in your closet#I couldn’t find an exact confirmation of when the phrases began to be combined but it seems to be around early 1970s gay liberation movemen#at the time a popular protest chant was ‘out of the closet and into the streets’#which I think also helped to popularize the term#I’m putting all this in the tags bc I realize this is a silly post that is meant as a joke and I didn’t wanna ruin the punchline#but I also wanted to provide an answer for those who were curious
ALSO ARTISTS LOOK AT THIS SO YALL CAN STOP DRAWING UR “PALE” BLACK CHARACTERS WHITE
100% Disagree
It’s an underdog story about classism in which the folk hero (Johnny) is confronted by a powerful man (the Devil) who tries to exploit the hero’s perceived ignorance and inferiority by offering a great reward with impossible odds. Although Johnny warns him that looks can be deceiving, and that he’s going to regret the dare because Johnny is the “best there’s ever been”, the devil is blinded by his greed and arrogance.
The devil creates an awful cacophony of technically excellent fiddle playing that would be impossible for Johnny to replicate. It’s a trick.
But Johnny just grins at him and starts to play “simple” classic country fiddling songs - Fire On The Mountain, House Of The Rising Sun, and Daddy Cut Her Bill Off. He doesn’t rise to beat the Devil - he simply creates his own music from his home, in the style that he knows, and his love of it and the familiarity of the music make his “backwoods” fiddling more perfect than the Devil could ever achieve.
It is thus the devil’s pride, not Johnny’s, that allows Johnny to Bugs Bunny his way into a golden fiddle.
(In that sense, I do agree that it is the most American song: in a land of prejudice and inequities, great power lies - dormant but ever-present - in those we underestimate and attempt to exploit.)
It’s so easy to underestimate the significance of the fact that all of Johnny’s songs are classic folk-americana tunes, honestly! Like, of course thematically what matters is meeting “technically challenging but obnoxious” with “genuinely skilled and beautiful, you just didn’t expect him to be good because he’s poor,” but the music choices are significant for another reason.
Bluntly: Standards.
Sure, the Devil’s portion of the song is extremely technically challenging to replicate....but that’s only relevant to us, retelling the story and trying to replicate it. He didn’t have that standard to be judged against. He just did a bunch of complicated lightning-fast screeching, and tried to set Johnny up to match him, and lost when the kid refused to play that game. The bargain, after all, wasn’t “anything you can do I can do better”. It was just “I’m a better musician than you” and Johnny is the one who actually understands what that means.
But also: all of those name-dropped tunes are incredibly iconic. They’re at least as extremely technically demanding, but more importantly, if Johnny had fucked up even one note it would have been immediately obvious. Every musician in that area knows those tunes. He had to play them perfectly, blend them seamlessly together, and put his own spin on them in order to meet the challenge, and there were no imperfections for the Devil to claim victory over.
All the Devil had to do was make noise. Nobody could tell him that he did it “wrong” because the obvious retort is “no, that’s exactly what I was trying to do, if you think I did it wrong then let’s see you do it better” and that, right there, is the trap.
Johnny had more heart, of course--that’s the point, that lightning-fast fretting work is nice and all but if you don’t understand and respect the history and culture and the interplay of music you’ll always be lesser than those who do. But he also gave himself the better demonstration of skill, because he did the harder thing, and held himself to a pre-existing standard.
(Also he didn’t summon an entire goddamn backup band to do the heavy lifting for him, but like. Of course this is the American folklore Devil, the trickster-spirit archetype figure who is really more akin to the Fae and not the actual Christian concept of Satan, but “the Devil cheated” still isn’t exactly an instant disqualification. That’s kind of a given. He is, after all, the Devil.)
I would like to note my mother got to see Charlie Daniels play this live, and there’s one more reason the Devil lost:
Care.
See, apparently Charlie Daniels actually kept extra fiddles on the stage for this song, because playing the Devil’s part WILL snap the fiddle strings. Yes, both Johnny and the Devil have longer solos in the live version because this song is really just Charlie Daniels showing off (earned, though, lbr), but my mom said his fiddle strings were literally SMOKING long before he got into the extended part. And so by necessity, when one set of strings snapped he’d drop the fiddle and pick up another.
The Devil is using his fiddle the same way he uses people: he’s abusing it, treating it as something worth nothing but disdain. I want to pause here briefly and note that when this song was originally written, the best violins in the world were considered to be the Stradivarius violins; there are now modern violins that match or beat their sound, but that’s an EXTREMELY new innovation. This means the Devil is likely playing on a violin worth tens of thousands of dollars; even if he’s conjured an infernal violin for himself, the contempt he shows for Johnny’s (implied) poverty and simplicity says it doesn’t look like just any old violin. And yet, he treats it like garbage—and that’s exactly what comes out of it.
(If you’re wondering where the violin comes into this, a fiddle is a violin played differently, and this is one great way to show the difference between “high” and “low” art is spelled B-U-L-L-S-H-I-T.)
Meanwhile, Johnny is some backwoods hick who’s probably never even heard the word Stradivarius, wouldn’t know what to do with one if he had one, and likely plays an absolute shitkicker that looks like hell and cost him fifteen bucks at the pawnshop.
But Johnny VALUES his fiddle. He doesn’t so much play it as make love to it. What we hear is beautiful because he understands he’s not the only one with a soul; instruments have souls, too. He’ll take that solid gold fiddle because he can use the money, but he’ll go right on playing his cheap beat-up old thing until the day he dies. He loves it like he loves his home and his music, and that love makes magic.
The Devil loses because he doesn’t understand the concept that love will beat out greed every time. Johnny wins because he values and respects what he has.
[Image description: screen shot of a social media post from Brendan Frasier Crane (@bf_crane): "The Devil Went Down to Georgia" is the most American of songs, because it's set up like a cautionary tale about pride leading to a fall but it turns out the fiddler actually is the best and his vanity is justified. 9:23 PM. 05 Jul 23. 137K Views. Description ends.]
Also, the Devil values his fiddle because it's made of gold. But and actual golden fiddle would sound terrible -- not like a handcrafted instrument carved from wood. Like other Capitalists, the only value the Devil can understand is monetary value.
BTW, for those interested, here are the fiddle tunes referenced in Charlie Daniel's song:
Fire on the Mountain, run, Boy, run. Devil's in the House of the Rising Sun. Chicken's in the bread pan, pickin' out dough. Granny, Will Your Dog Bite? No, child, no.
Fire on the mountain (some eye contact):
House of the Rising Sun (some eye contact):
Chicken in the bread tray (pan):
Granny, will your dog bite?
@changelingfangs
I love how it's assumed in this thread you've heard this song, but I'm just gonna drop it. It's not only worth a listen, but look, there he is, fiddling away. There is no second fiddle. He done play the devil too.
actually i'm curious what the general consensus is (though i think i can guess which way this will lean)
what's your favourite murderbot book?
All Systems Red
Artificial Condition
Rogue Protocol
Exit Strategy
Network Effect
Fugitive Telemetry
System Collapse
Conversations with murderbot are always a bit of a minefield because occasionally it will drop the most devastating piece of info totally casually and then move on while its human friends are left reeling.
Like one day they're having a watch party or something, and ratthi will look over, stare at murderbot for a second, then say in a surprised voice, "oh, i didn't know that secunits' organic parts age the way humans do!"
Murderbot is quiet for a few seconds as it studies itself from one of its drone cameras, sees the fine wrinkles starting to line the skin of its face. Then it says in a wondering voice, "I didn't know that either. We usually don't live long enough to experience significant changes to our appearance."
And then an explosion happens on the display and murderbot goes back to paying attention to its show while all the humans around it stare at each other in abject horror. Arada's on the verge of tears and wants to hug murderbot so badly. Instead, she just hides her face in Overse's shoulder.
Mensah has to leave the room.
opening tumblr in march and it's just like "huh. knife weather we're having."
Murderbot on its own personhood, by book:
All Systems Red
...Mensah had offered to let me hang out in the hub with the humans like I was an actual person or something.
Artificial Condition
Even when I was still in armor, once my PreservationAux clients had seen my human face, they had wanted to treat me like a person.
I told myself I still looked like a SecUnit without armor, hopelessly exposed, but the truth was I did look more human. And now I knew why I hadn’t wanted to do this.
It would make it harder for me to pretend not to be a person.
Since I wasn’t a person and I didn’t have an employment voucher, I would have to hack my way into one of the supply shuttles …
Rogue Protocol:
You would think the person they knew as a security consultant slamming in and disarming one of them would cause everyone to stop and reassess their priorities in this situation, but oh, you would be wrong.
Exit Strategy
“It’s the first one I saw. When I hacked my governor module and picked up the entertainment feed. It made me feel like a person.”
[...]
A roving drone cam showed me she was frowning. “You are a person.”
Oh, that we can’t talk about. “Not legally.”
Fugitive Telemetry
But I wasn’t a citizen and also technically not actually a person, which made it more difficult.
Network Effect
(I know, it’s a logo, but I hate it when humans and augmented humans ruin things for no reason. Maybe because I was a thing before I was a person and if I’m not careful I could be a thing again.)
Y’all Colter Shaw is so much like Murderbot. He’s tall, has a traumatic backstory and zero sense of self preservation, is emotionless in dangerous situations, likes breaking into shit, would rather die than talk about his feelings, and once he’s identified you as a client he’ll get pieces of his body blown off keeping you safe. So anyway y’all should watch Tracker.
Does Matt continue to be deeply unlikeable? I struggle to watch him. Send help.
they get it
if you don't love me at my BBC you don't deserve me at my granada ok?
How long have you been using AO3? Version 2.
Less than 10 years.
10 years.
11 years.
12 years.
13 years.
14 years.
15 years.
16 years.
17 years.
NOT AN OPTION BECAUSE AO3 WAS CREATED IN 2008 SO 17 YEARS IS THE MAX.
Feel free to reblog to have more people to vote. Feel free to explain why you voted the way you did. DO NOT SENT ANON HATE FOR HOW PEOPLE VOTED.
REBLOG IF YOU USED TUMBLR IN 2011 - 2013
If so, you knew how turnt Tumblr use to be
“Raw milk is better for you as long as you boil it” so true bestie now imagine if we could like. Super boil it. To really get all the bacteria out. And if we could do that quickly and efficiently. Imagine that.
