Show & Tell
occasionally subtle
Kaledo Art
he wasn't even looking at me and he found me
NASA
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ojovivo
sheepfilms
Alisa U Zemlji Chuda
ellievsbear
Stranger Things
❣ Chile in a Photography ❣
blake kathryn
TVSTRANGERTHINGS
todays bird
Monterey Bay Aquarium
trying on a metaphor
Cosmic Funnies
@theartofmadeline
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@bethebluepenguin
I have a simultaneously amazing and appalling memory which means that I’ll remember that months ago you quickly mentioned you collect bookmarks once and then you never brought it up again so for your birthday I’ll buy you a mermaid related bookmark because you brought up you like mermaids once but you won’t end up getting it on your birthday because I forgot when it is
I’m in this picture and I don’t like it
in 7 years its going to be the 20s again so we can bring back swing music and the aesthetics of that era but keep modern values who’s with me
you can’t repeat the past
can’t repeat the past? why, of course you can! of course you can.
date of origin: 19th of may, 2013.
this is my post. do you know how it feels to have this be your post? do you understand the guilt i have to live with knowing this is my post? the weight on my soul as the decade popped into prominence with spanish flu … 2 !
do you know how it feels, heritageposts? are any of these heritage posts your own or are you just a curator of human misery? do you know how it feels to live knowing that of anything i’ve ever made, anything i’ve ever said, this has been seen by most people, and this will probably remain the case until i die? for this to be my legacy? can you relate? can you empathize?
but do you want to know the worst part? the absolute worst part of all of this?
we haven’t even brought back art deco into mainstream prominence. sickening
So let's talk about the Lost Generation.
This is the generation that came of age during WWI and the 1918 flu pandemic. They witnessed their world collapse in the first war that spread around the globe, and they -- in retrospect, optimistically -- called it the "war to end all wars". And that war was a quagmire. The trenches on the Western Front were notoriously awful, unsanitary and cold and wet and teeming with sickness, and bloody battles were fought to gain or lose a few feet of territory, and all because a series of alliances caused one assassination in one unstable area to spiral into a brutal large-scale war fought on the ground by people who mostly had no personal stake in the outcomes and gained nothing from winning.
On some of the worst-hit battlefields, the land is still too toxic for plant growth.
And on the heels of this horrific war, a pandemic struck. It's often referred to as "the Spanish flu" because Spain was neutral in the war, and so was the first country to admit that their people were dropping like flies. By the time the warring countries were willing to face the disease, it was far too late to contain it.
Anywhere from 50 to 100 million people worldwide would die from it. 675,000 were in the US.
But once it was finally contained -- anywhere from a year to a year and a half later -- the 20s had begun, and they began roaring.
Hedonism abounded. Alcohol flowed like water in spite of Prohibition. Music and dance and art fluorished. It was the age of Dadaism, an artistic movement of surrealism, absurdism, and abstraction. Women's skirts rose and haircuts shortened in a flamboyant rejection of the social norms of the previous decades. It was a time of glitter and glamour and jazz and flash, and (save for the art that was made) it was mostly skin deep.
Everyone stumbled out of the war and pandemic desperate to forget the horrific things they'd seen and done and all that they'd lost, and lost for nothing.
Reality seemed so pointless. It's not a coincidence that the two codifiers of the fantasy genre -- J.R.R. Tolkein and C.S. Lewis -- both fought in WWI. In fact, they were school friends before the war, and were the only two of their group to return home. Tolkein wanted to rewrite the history of Europe, while Lewis wanted to rebuild faith in the escape from the world.
(There's a reason Frodo goes into the West: physically, he returned to the Shire, but mentally, he never came back from Mordor, and he couldn't live his whole life there. There's a reason three of the Pevensies can never let go of Narnia: in Narnia, unlike reality, the things they did and fought for and believed in actually mattered, were actually worth the price they paid.)
It's also no coincidence that many of the famous artists of the time either killed themselves outright or let their vices do them in. The 20s roared both in spite of and because of the despair of the Lost Generation.
It was also the era of the Harlem Renaissance, which came to the feelings of alienation and disillusionment from a different direction: there was a large migration of Black people from the South, many of whom moved to the Harlem neighborhood of New York City. Obviously, the sense of alienation wasn't new to Black people in America, but the cultural shift allowed for them to publicly express it in the arts and literature in ways that hadn't been open to them before.
There was also horrific -- and state-sanctioned -- violence perpetrated against Black communities in this time, furthering the anger and despair and sense that society had not only failed them but had never even given them a chance. The term at the time was shell-shock, but now we know it as PTSD, and the vast majority of the people who came of age between 1910 and 1920 suffered from it, from one source or another.
It was an entire generation of trauma, and then the stock market crashed in 1929. Helpless, angry, impotent in the face of all that had seemingly destroyed the world for them, on the verge of utter despair, it was also a generation vulnerable to despotism. In the wake of all this chaos -- god, please, someone just take control of all this mess and set it right.
Sometimes the person who took over was decent and played by the rules and at least attempted to do the right thing. Other times, they were self-serving and hateful and committed to subjugating anyone who didn't fit their mold.
There are a lot of parallels to now, but we have something they didn't, and that's the fact that they did it first.
We know what their mistakes and sins were. We have the gift of history to see the whole picture and what worked and what failed. We as a species have walked this road before, and we weren't any happier or stronger or smarter about it the first time.
I think I want to reiterate that point: the Lost Generation were no stronger or weaker than Millennials and Gen Z are today. Plenty of both have risen up and fought back, and plenty have stumbled and been crushed under the weight. Plenty have been horribly abused by the people who were supposed to lead them, and plenty have done the abusing. Plenty of great art has been made by both, and plenty of it is escapist fantasy or scathing criticism or inspiring optimism or despairing pessimism.
We find humor in much the same things, because when reality is a mess, both the absurd and the self-deprecating become hilarious in comparison. There's a reason modern audiences don't find Seinfeld as funny as Gen X does, and many older audiences find modern comedy impenetrable and baffling -- they're different kinds of humor from different realities.
I think my point accumulates into this: in spite of how awful and hopeless and pointless everything feels, we do have a guide. We've been through this before, as a culture, and even though all of them are gone now, we have their words and art and memory to help us. We know now what they didn't then: there is a future.
The path forward is a hard one, and the only thing that makes it easier is human connection. Art -- in the most base sense, anything that is an expression of emotion and thought into a medium that allows it to be shared -- is the best and most enduring vehicle for that connection, to reach not just loved ones but people a thousand miles or a hundred years away.
So don't bottle it up. Don't pretend to be okay when you're not. Paint it, sculpt it, write it, play it, sing it, scream it, hell, you can even meme it out into the void. Whatever it takes to reach someone else -- not just for yourself but for others, both present and future.
Because, to quote the inimitable Terry Pratchett, "in a hundred years we'll all be dead, but here and now, we are alive."
This student emailed her philosophy TA after getting her wisdom teeth removed and it’s one for the books
Love you, bye! Read it and weep.
“I will most likely not be normal again until at least Thanksgiving turkey” is now my favorite sentence to use in the future
“please sir” and “i will buy you expo markers” killed me
Thanksgiving turkey and the casual love you bye killed me dead
THIS SHOW IS SO PURE!
It’s worth noting that Kenneth spent the entire episode making the game (and the subsequent fight) as inclusive as possible for JJ and his disabled friends (all of whom were played by disabled actors/actresses).
BONUS:
Bonus #2
Of course I had to show the best part:
i am a:
⚪ man
⚪ woman
🔘 gorgeous youth
seeking a:
⚪ man
⚪ woman
🔘 equal opportunity death match
I was so proud when he didn't spill the milk
True himbo representation
i need to make it clear in case people don't know this - this man is a straight up actual practicing Doctor
He what?
Do you ever eat popcorn out of the palm of your own hand with such ardent desperation that you feel like both a wild horse and the gentle schoolgirl feeding it treats to gain its affection
this is the funniest thing i have ever read
when you wear a sundress and one of the straps is loose so it slips off your shoulder and u feel… how shall i put this… harlotrous
My ancestors, watching me dump an entire stick of cinnamon, two cloves, an allspice berry, and a generous grating of nutmeg into my tea, sweetened with white sugar and loaded with cream, while I sit in my clean warm house surrounded by books, 25+ outfits for different occasions, and 6 pairs of shoes, in a building heated so well I have the windows open in mid-autumn:
Our daughter prospers. We are proud of her. She has never labored in a field but knows riches we could not have imagined.
I like this so much better than the idea that our ancestors would be embarrassed or ashamed of us for being “soft” or some crap like that.
honestly the best thing i’ve done in the past year was replacing “i wanna die” with “i wanna commit a crime.” same humor and sentiment without the suicidal ideation
thank you SO much for this tag
so did you lay in bed blasting fireflies by owl city as a kid staring up at the ceiling while imagining running away to a happier place bc you grew up on fairy tales and make believe stories since you didnt really have the best social skills due to undiagnosed neurodivergency and thus didnt have a lot of friends so you spent all that extra time you had induldging in fictional stories and then grew up believing maybe one day youd get to go on a magical adventure like those stories had so youd spent so much time just longing for an escape and to go somewhere you understood bc you didnt understand people but you did understand all those stories you read or are you normal
Either neurodivergent people need to stop being so relatable or I need to go to the doctor
