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@autisticlinx
This is a reminder for those who handmake Christmas presents that now is not too early to start. It may in fact be a good time to start if you have a lot to make/your craft takes a long time. You should maybe start it now, whether that's brainstorming or actually doing the crafts!
Translating this into tumblr's preferred public service announcement format for this kind of alert:
You’re completely correct. Out of my way, able-bodied losers. Fuck you.
This was posted on a ‘second hand finds’ Facebook page…
…only to be followed by this amazing message.
The roller coaster ride started.
With a happy ending…
…and a sweet poem to finish.
when two musicians sing into the same microphone and lean in very close to each other… like omg are you guys gonna kiss now to relieve the homoerotic tension?😳
THIS IS NOT ABOUT ONE DIRECTION I DON’T KNOW WHO THIS “HARRY” PERSON IS GO WATCH BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN AND CLARENCE CLEMONS KISS ON STAGE RIGHT NOW
op is the only valid person i’ve ever met. everyone else needs to come to the light
Okay, but this is really important: Bruce Springsteen occupied this really weird place in music history. His songs were all from this pessimistic, nihilistic view of an America that had let him down:
Just like the anti-Vietnam War protest songs that we associate with the 1960s, or the early nihilism that spawned punk music in the 1970s. But he didn’t *sound* like a punk anarchist; he sounded like a country rock singer. When he released Born in the U.S.A. people completely misinterpreted (or possibly ignored) the lyrics in favor of the tone of the music.
Politicians used his music to promote their ‘Murica Yes! brand, and he had to literally explain that that was not what he was about. He’s over here asking when we’re going to have jobs and heathcare, not stanning the politicians who weren’t helping the people.
It was also kind of a big deal that he had an integrated band, because even as late as the 1980s music was still kind of segregated and MTV was straight up racist. They refused to play and promote black artists and then claimed that were no black artists in the first place. Michael Jackson’s record company had to threaten a boycott of their white artists to get MTV to play his Thriller video.
Plus, the first black/white interracial kiss on TV was in 1968 (OG Star Trek). Also it took us until the 70s to get sympathetic gay characters on screen, and the 90s to get gay characters to kiss onscreen. And all of those firsts were met with outrage.
So keep that in mind when you see Bruce Springsteen not just playing with an interracial band, but engaging in an interracial, gay kiss on stage repeatedly.
Passages from American Popular Music by Larry Starr and Christopher Waterman
I used to think that Bruce and Clarence kissing onstage was exuberance, showmanship, and telling racist homophobes to fuck off. Like, they picked up a certain kind of audience and went “Racist homophobes? Not in our house!” And started the kissing then but then I actually looked it up and
https://www.gq.com/story/this-fucked-me-up-bruce-springsteen-singing-about-clarence-clemons
It was a story where… we remade the city. We remade the city, shaping it into the kind of place where our friendship and our love for one another wouldn’t have been such an exceptional thing. - Bruce Springsteen
It wasn’t about showmanship or rejecting bigots or anything it was just. Damn right that was one of the loves of his life and damn right he was going to kiss him onstage
It gets me a little that Bruce has had a divorce, that he’s been married twice, but he loved Clarence for the rest of Clarence’s life and will presumably love him the rest of his own
Clemons said in one interview. “Bruce and I looked at each other and didn’t say anything, we just knew. We knew we were the missing links in each other’s lives. He was what I’d been searching for.” In another version of the story, Clemons says “He looked at me, and I looked at him, and we fell in love.”
I’m having some emotions about it!
“He was elemental in my life,“ Springsteen adds, “and losing him was like losing the rain.”
Not just! I love you pure and deep and true but! I am going to love you like that in front of the whole damn world!
We have fewer narratives about taking risks and making statements for platonic love rather than romantic and supposedly it would be easier to downplay this onstage than romance and! They refused! They fucking refused! In front of hundreds of thousands of people, over the course of years! In the spotlight, in word and deed, I love you!
God I’m not okay about it
Now I’m mad that this is not among any of the things I was ever told about this artist.
I knew about this in general (& via all those fabulous photos), but this just adds even more beautiful context <3
Just to add to the pile: this was the cover of Springsteen’s break-through album Born to Run, in 1975:
I mean, will you LOOK at this:
This was the pic chosen for the album cover from an extensive photoshoot, too. A few others:
There’s a lot more online if you search. They’re all pretty amazing. But the photographer is right, the one chosen for the album cover just pops.
so I got into grad school today with my shitty 2.8 gpa and the moral of the story is reblog those good luck posts for the love of god
okay so i just got my dream job??? a week after applying to it?? and now i’m thinking….maybe this is the good luck post
…..not even six hours later i got an offer of a well paying full time long-term job with free room and board in queens in nyc, allowing me independence and a way to escape an abusive situation and an unhealthy environment
likes charge reblogs cast, folks, this is the good luck post
i need all the help i can get for finals
Hey so
the last time I reblogged this post right before I got a great job, in a permanent work-from-home position, with benefits, retirement, and a salary literally 3x what I was making before, doing something I really like.
So you know.
This might be the real one, y’all.
I could use some luck
Sand writing
"Huh, I wonder what sand writing i-- ARE YOU KIDDING ME?"
You ever see something that makes you think "wow I didn't even know that could be a talent or skill but that's amazing"
There b some specific ass forms of calligraphy in this world
reminder to worldbuilders: don't get caught up in things that aren't important to the story you're writing, like plot and characters! instead, try to focus on what readers actually care about: detailed plate tectonics
@dragonpyre any chance you could elaborate on this
I grew up learning about land formations. Seeing fictional maps that don’t follow the logic and science of them makes me upset
What are the most common sins you’ve seen relating to this? I wanna know
Mordor.
Why is the mountain range square. How did the mountain range form. Why is there one singular volcano in the center. Why does it act like a composite volcano but have magma that acts like it’s from a shield. If it’s hotspot based volcanic activity why is there only one volcano.
And then the misty mountains!!!! Why isn’t there a rain shadow!! And why is there a FOREST where the rain shadow should be!!!!!!!!
So what is a rain shadow?
Wind blows clouds in from the sea, but mountains are so tall the clouds can't get past 'em, so you get deserts on the windward side of mountain ranges because clouds can't get there to water the land, or do so only very rarely.
this is because, as clouds are forced upwards by rising land, they cool and dump their rain. so the side of the mountain facing the ocean (or an inland sea, or a great lake) gets all the rain as the clouds are squeezed out, and the opposite side gets nothing.
my favorite thing is the american great lake snowbelts! so, the 'flow' of weather across north america, in very general terms, blows from the northwest on down south and east to the gulf of mexico.
so the wind is blowing from west to east, and in the winter it's a dryer wind than in the summer because it's colder. but after blowing across a great lake for a hundred miles, the wind is wet again. and that wet turns into snow. so for all of these lakes, the big cities are on the west side, not the east sides, because the east sides absolutely suck to live on.
the sole exception is buffalo, NY, which literally has to be there because, unfortunately, that's where all the important canal stuff between lake ontario and lake erie is happening.
also this always strikes me as cool, check out where cleveland is:
it's right at the edge of that snowbelt. and you see way more cities west of it than east, too.
#but again. mordor looks like that becaue sauron made it#and he's an ass
On a Watsonian level, sure.
On a Doylistic level, Mordor looks like that because plate tectonics was a fringe, ludicrous, laughable theory that nobody outside serious geology nerds had ever heard of until scientists proved seafloor spreading in the early 1960s. The first edition of the LotR trilogy was published in 54-55. We literally did not know that plate tectonics was real until almost a decade after the book was published, so obviously, it was not something Tolkien could have been considering as he made his maps.
I don't know enough meteorological history to know when white people figured out about rain shadows and added it to geology classes, or what would have been taught about volcanoes and such. But any education Tolkien got on the subject would have been in childhood/adolescence; his college education focused on the liberal arts, not the sciences, and his professional study was linguistics and the middle ages. So anything Medieval and earlier European authors wrote about he had a pretty good chance of knowing about. But not much exposure to modern science. So his science knowledge was probably limited to "what English schools taught at the turn of the 20th Century."
I mean, it's true he didn't know about plate tectonics, but he did know what mountains look like, and that it's not normally That. And it wasn't his style to break that kind of norm without cause.
LotR has recurring themes of the reckless imposition of one's will on the natural world creating ugliness, an order you thought was inherently an improvement that in fact is inferior to what you have displaced. (Typified by reckless tree-felling; a reflection of the despoiling of the English countryside and the world by Progress.)
Mordor is a rectangle because Sauron is an asshole.
#the rain shadow thing otoh was undoubtedly total ignorance#but those mountains were made as the fortress of a demigod#too steeped in evil to understand beauty#it's *supposed* to look like something that Shouldn't Exist#like quite often this is something that happens in worldbuilding yes#things are arranged Wrong because a person doesn't grasp the underlying logic#but mordor is a bad example for the same reason it's an obvious one#it's So Very Wrong because it was designed to be wrong#to give you a bad feeling with how much it shouldn't look like that#if he just wanted it unapproachable on all sides it could've been in a caldera formation it didn't *need* corners#the corners were a choice#tolkien's job involved lots of looking at maps and things okay#meanwhile people whose lives revolved around the weather generally knew where the rain happened#long before it was formalized into 'rain shadow effect'#people not having The Science doesn't mean they don't have eyes and brains
I wrote an entire paper in college analyzing the geology of the Misty Mountains and to a lesser extent the White Mountains (the Misty Mountains are easier because we get a cross-section via Moria). One thing I discovered that still knocks me for a loop when I think about it is:
Moria is the only place in Middle-Earth where mithril is found, right? That's kind of a big deal. So, why? What makes that location so special? Is it just random?
I found a paper that had just been published *that year*, 2011 or 2012 as I was writing it, that studied the locations of precious-metals mines in the Pyrenees, the similarly long skinny mountain chain that divides Spain and France. This paper discovered that where there was a bend in the mountain chain, from one of the continental plates having an awkward corner in it that got subducted under the other plate, that had dug deeper into the mantle and caused precious-metal-bearing ores to flow up to the surface in ways they didn't do anywhere else in the Pyrenees.
There's a conversation in The Fellowship of the Ring where one of the hobbits -- I don't have my copy handy or I'd get the direct quote -- asks why they can see the Misty Mountains ahead of them at one point if they're still heading south from Rivendell, and it's explained that south of Caradhras (which you may recall is the surface mountain under which Moria runs) the mountain chain bends and runs southwest instead of due south for a while.
Tolkien had absolutely no way to know *why* this particular feature of a mountain range was associated with intrusions of rare and unique metal ores, but he had gone backpacking in mountains enough to know How Things Should Look.
(And as prev excellently points out, when Jirt made screwed-up geology it was very much on purpose. Mordor shouldn't be square! Mount Doom shouldn't be doing any of the things it does! A composite volcano shouldn't even have especially hot lava! Even the Gulf of Udun, the circular feature at the upper left corner of the square, shouldn't be like that -- perfectly round features should be impact craters or calderas, not The Mountains Just Do This In A Suspiciously Convenient Way. These are all the way they are because Sauron forced them to be, in defiance of the laws of nature. Remember, he's akin to Balrogs and was a Maia of Aulë -- he's a volcano spirit in many ways.)
Amazing work by the LoTR fandom, as always.
This also serves as an excellent example of why worldbuilding needs - more than realism - to be cohesive and work with the themes of your story.
Sometimes I can still hear their voice
Breaking: TikTok is better bc it’s more hostile towards humanity
The lack of video content is what kept us here... I thought we all agree that the best feature of this hellhole was and always will be anonymity.
Tumblr's not asking for my phone number. It's not going through my contacts to try and connect me with my fucking colleagues. I can come here and talk about whatever I want without anyone ever seeing my face or hearing my voice. I don't have to censor myself and hide my interests or enthusiasm out of fear of consequences it might have in my real life.
I think the biggest misunderstanding they have of Tumblr is that they think of it as a social media platform when in actuality it's a blogging platform with social features.
I like the use of Metroman here because if there's one thing Tumblr users collectively agree on it's that we want everyone to think we're dead
wish we were still on Tumblr instead of the void
Oh yeah there's a part 2 of the horse desensitizing that I love.
🐎: Hey what's with that tiny predator, the one you're hold- WOAH WHAT THE FUCK WHY IS IT UP SO HIGH
Never in my life have I seen all cat so clearly thrilled to be swung about like a ferret
why is this post completely broken in every way imaginable
Broken notes… deactivated account… removed image….
Finally, we have them all.
In addition: OP’s name is just… gone. No “[insert username]-deactivated[insert a bunch of numbers]” as is the standard for deactivated blogs.
Just the world “deactivated.” Look upon their post, ye mighty, and despair.
It’ll be almost impossible to find this post unless it wanders across your dash.
Reblog this triple-dead post for something good to happen to you this week.
"Can we please stop falling for shitty rage bait foot fetish cooking videos" should not be a sentence that ever needs to be said, but alas.
Falling for the who and the what now
I wish age gap discourse hadn't spiraled the way it has because I want there to be a safe space to say "Men in their 40s who date 25 year olds aren't predators, they're just fucking losers"
... honey you just described a predator LOL
No, I said what I said. But thank you for providing an example of how this topic has become insufferable on the internet.
i am honestly burningly curious about how a 40 year old man who fucks around with college grads is not a predator
"College grad" is not a developmental stage, nor is it what I would describe a 25 year old as. I was 4 years out of college at 25. My mother had two children at 25. You can be a fucking congressman at 25.
There's a difference between a man who is immature and buys into misogynistic views of beauty and aging and one who is a predator. Also, many actual predators? Not losers and able to move through society pretty freely being seen as cool and the ideal, so conflating the two isn't helpful.
This is going to be my final response to any attempt at discourse. You're welcome to continue amongst yourselves.
also sometimes a 40 year old and a 25 year old just weirdly find each and it's a perfectly normal relationship - like all human relationships are complex and situational, it's so rarely an either/or thing let alone just one thing only
if a 40 year old dude only dates 25 year olds, DiCaprio style or something adjacent to it, then yeah he's a loser
if a 40 year old dude meets a 25 year old through social event or friends or whatever and they happen to hit it off and make a go of it, and this isn't some sort of reoccurring pattern for the guy, that's just a relationship with an age difference
being predatory means something specific, and man I agree w/ OP and really wish people just stopped ascribing it to any and all relationship dynamics they personally might not like
predator and groomer - two words that need to go up on the "can't use till you learn their meaning" shelf
Something I find really stressful is this seemingly endless creep of infantilisation and removal of autonomy from young people. Like, not to be all “in my dayyyy” about it, but… at 16, my friends and I were expected to be broadly responsible for our presence in the world. Most of us had jobs, we navigated public transport, looked after younger siblings. We were expected to make informed decisions about our future careers and our sexual partners. We were allowed to leave education and work full time (this was not necessarily good thing - I think increasing the school leaving age to 18 was broadly for the best). Most of us were smoking, or drinking, or both - again, not good things, but just facts - and many of us were sexually active. Many of the AFAB people I knew were on the pill. Legally, we could live independently, or get married with adult consent.
Legally (I live in the UK) we were not minors, although we inhabited an odd legal limbo until we turned 18, and we were certainly not “children”. Intellectually, socially, though, we were considered (young) adults, or at the most “older teenagers.” We were expected to read mostly adult books (rather than middle grade or YA), watch the news/read papers, watch mostly adult television.
And I do think we a bit under-protected, under-supported, and in some cases - neglected and financially exploited - and I’m not necessarily advocating that. But it did make us feel, I think, in charge of our own lives, capable and competent to make decisions.
At 16-17 my parents knew they could leave me alone overnight/for a couple of nights, and I wouldn’t starve or burn the house down. I felt comfortable getting cross country trains on my own, or booking and staying at a hotel (yes, with my boyfriend.)
Then there was this… creeping of sentiments that we were all Too Young to trouble our heads about certain things. A lot of it was good - more stringent licensing laws, raising the school leaving age, raising the minimum smoking age(!) - but some of the broader cultural stuff was… a bit patronising? Eg, the introduction of “New Adult” as a category of books aimed at 18-25 year olds, the way cartoons and books written for the 9-12 age group were being marketed as for the 12-15 age group, referring to late teens as “children,” etc etc.
Then, in 2008, there was the big financial crash and suddenly my generation were (broadly) robbed of all the usual markers of adulthood and success, meaning that we got ‘stuck’ in the lifestyles and modes our late teens/early 20s. And suddenly, all the emphasis shifted from social and legal protections for late teens/ younger adults, to legal restrictions on their freedoms/rights, and strange philosophical protections on the emotional states.
So, OF COURSE a 23 year old can’t buy a beer without carrying an ID card, and a 17 year old can’t have a crush on a 16 year old, but also, because you’re *children* you don’t need to live like adults. So the UK government got to save money by saying “18 isn’t a proper adult,” then “20 isn’t a proper adult,” and “25 isn’t a proper adult” because it meant they could refuse to give single occupancy housing benefit rates to people of those ages (I think they’ve raised it over 30 now.) Or by refusing to clamp down on exploitative temporary/zero hours contracts - because they’re just “temp jobs for young people!”, or by raising the retirement age because “60 is far too young to retire. You’re not a real adult until 35.”
And it means the discursive environment is such that you can claim that a 21 year old trans person is too young to make their own medical decisions, or a 15 year old is too young to consent to the contraceptive pill.
Meanwhile, they are not offering additional *protections* to these newly infantilised adults. 18 year olds are still encouraged to saddle themselves with enormous educational debt, or allowed to have credit cards, or expected to pay rent, or no longer receive child benefits. You still have to *work*. In fact, in the States, they’re looking to removed child employment restrictions - but that’s fine, because 20 year olds are being protected from making their own medical decisions, and adults get to say which books their teen kids are reading in school, and kids aren’t allowed to change their name or what they wear without parental consent.
We can see what these people are doing to the rights of children - so why are we being so complacent in expanding the definition of ‘child’?
Regardless - 25 is VERY CLEARLY an adult. At 25 I was married, had two kids, an overdraft, rent to pay, and experience of living in the world for 6 years. I had more in common with someone of 40 than I did with someone of 15. Hell, at*20* I had more in common with someone of 40 than someone of 15. Any sexual or relationship decisions you make at 25 are your own to make.
Of course there are likely to be power imbalances in a 15 year age gap - which is why most 25 year olds don’t date 40somethings - but not actually necessarily. And yeah, a 40 year old who only dates 20somethings is a skeeze - just like a 30 year old who routinely ingratiates themselves with rich 80 year olds is a skeeze.
But if any young people are reading this (doubt it)… your rights are much, much more important than your protections.
Yes, young people should be protected, but if someone claims they’re protecting you while denying you access to personal autonomy, financial stability, intellectual curiosity, or sexual self-determination because you’re “too young” to need, or understand those things… be very suspicious of their motives.
And if you’re legally an adult, ask yourself why you don’t feel comfortable defining yourself in those terms.
This thread is from 2023, and now with the Cass report we have seen the real, tangible danger that comes from infantilizing adults in their 20s.
the long reply above mentiones this, but I want to emphasize this: many western societies have lost their "rituals of maturity". Young adults don't get to buy a house, starting a family is a lot of stress if all adults in the household have to work fulltime, and it's almost impossible to find a job above minimum wage that offers career options. All of which are things which previous generations enjoyed more broadly, and which were seen as steps into adulthood.
Only a few decades ago, 90% of the people in the region where I live owned their own houses. Granted, they were often shitty ones, but they were their own. Today, not even 50% own the place they live in.
We've removed the milestones of adulthood, it's no wonder we increasingly infantilize adults. And the worst is, this does nothing to prevent real predators from preying on under-protected people! With the removal of the milestones of adulthood, we also removed a lot of the safety net previous generations could rely on.
All of these additions are absolutely spot on, but there's one more thing I want to add, and that is to point out how the "a 40yo dating a 25yo is inherently predatory" type of age gap discourse increasingly treats predation, not as a conscious, specific behaviour, but as an ambient effect of being in proximity to someone younger. Because if, as it's so frequently argued, it's impossible for people of different ages to have anything meaningful in common, such that there's no legitimate grounds even for friendship between (say) a 25yo and a 40yo, let alone something romantic or sexual, then what's being implied is that either that everyone is at all times only a single interaction away from natively turning predator, or that predation is somehow natural, automatic, reflexive - neither of which is true. But believing that it is is incredibly fucking dangerous. Because if there's no good or safe or reasonable way for someone older to interact with someone younger outside of a strict workplace or familial relationship (and sometimes not even then), then what we're doing is saying that it's inherently unsafe or wrong for younger people to learn from older people, or for older people to mentor them, or for (say) twentysomethings and fiftysomethings to exist in the same spaces as equal adults. We're saying that an eighteen-year-old should feel bad and weird about hanging out with a two-years-younger friend they've known since infancy because it's inappropriate for minors and legal adults to be friends. (I truly wish this was a hypothetical example, but no, it's not: I have legitimately seen multiple accounts of teenagers getting stressed out about exactly this type of thing because of this discourse.) And by acting as if the age gap power imbalance can only ever go one way, we're also completely ignoring the reality of things like elder abuse or older people being scammed or exploited by younger people.
But beyond all this, if you assume all older people are inherently dangerous to younger people, you're leaving yourself horrifically vulnerable, not only because you're not putting any effort into learning what actual predatory behaviour looks like, but because age gaps are not the only fucking vector for predation or abuse. If you can't distinguish between a safe adult/older person and a suspicious adult/older person or between trustworthy behaviour and manipulative behaviour because you've trained yourself to screen categories rather than actions, not only will you miss out on many cool friendships, but you'll be vulnerable to exploitation if and when someone, be they older or not, eventually sneaks past your guard, because you won't know to recognise what they're doing. Yes, there are absolutely times when an age gap is, in and of itself, a massive red flag, but if you can't distinguish between "45yo man marrying 18yo girl he's known since she was 12 the very moment she's legal" and, say, "35yo divorcee marrying 50yo widower she met at an art show," or "19yo dating a 17yo from the next school over after meeting at a mutual friend's party," or even "22yo has an extremely fun consensual one night stand with the 38yo they met at the bar," then you're going to be very poorly placed to recognise any abusive dynamics that don't perfectly align with the optics you've internalised as being indistinguishable from abuse, because the optics and the abuse are two different things. The one might indicate the presence of the other, but it doesn't guarantee it, and you can certainly have the abuse without the optics. And particularly in the context of conservatives increasingly insisting that just existing as a queer or trans person around children is an inherently predatory act, it makes me feel absolutely insane, how quickly so many people have conceded to the exact same type of logic (that an older person just existing around a younger person for non-familial, non-work reasons is inherently suspicious), argued for the exact same reasons (think of the children!) without stopping to question it at all.
Also, for the 25-40 age Gap specifically, it is VERY plausible for both of them to have their first/only child be three years old at that time, without being an absurdly young or absurdly old parent, and to get close to the only other Single among their kid's classmates' parents.
To jump back several reblogs, one thing I find interesting is how class ties in to who gets to be a 25 year old child. A "college grad" at 25 is not being considered mature yet, but from experience a 25 year old who has to go straight into the workforce is usually just an adult.
Is this about how ppl born in the late 20th century have a unique and fluid experience of navigating barriers to information access and its our responsibility to teach the younger folks how to tinker with technology to avoid being spoonfed everything we experience in order to have critical skills that keep us informed, autonomous, and able to hold power despite looming threats of authoritarianism or..........???
i love love lOVE the additional element of “the only information that’s free is the ‘how we’re going to hell’” BS. Chef’s kiss.
I wasn’t expecting that
