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if i look back, i am lost
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we're not kids anymore.
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Today's Document
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@brookriver-mudlark
Blog overview!
Hi! I'm Brook. I draw sometimes! Pretty much all of my posts are from a queue (if it's filled at all), and there is no theme.
My own art tag is #brookriver art; sometimes I reblog friend art too. I post my art to @brookriver, if you wanna see just that!
My tip jar is here, and commissions info is here, if you'd like to help support me financially. Here's my Carrd, if you want to find my other socials!
Thanks for reading!
i love collecting what i call "cis-isms" which is when a cis person tries to make a sentence inclusive to trans & especially nonbinary people, but has very little experience actually including trans people in sentences so they panic and just start slamming together vaguely gender-related words at random
examples i've heard:
"people who don't conform to the gender spectrum"
"people of nonbinary status"
#wheres that rihanna clip#'people of other gender appropriations' lol
another great one thank you rihanna. people of all gender appropriations and pronouns <3
i was about to say this is at the Toronto airport and then suddenly it definitely. Was. Not.
That’s just the Toronto Bannana Boa
Jörmungandr is trying to catch a plane they are late for ragnarok
we need less “trans women/men should be allowed in women’s/men’s spaces” and more “gender segregated spaces are inherently sexist and transphobic, and we should replace them with gender neutral spaces”
The argument that being intersex is a “biological mistake” or that nature made a mistake or that mutations are genetic mistakes or whatever is so incredibly stupid if you actually understand how evolution works. Aside from the fact that trying to use the appeal to nature fallacy about a natural event or process is incredibly stupid, mutations are supposed to happen. If we’re personifying nature here, nature wants them to happen. Mutation is what allows for evolution to happen. Yes, mutations can have negative consequences (or no consequences at all, or a mix of positive and negative consequences: for instance, the gene that causes sickle cell anemia is protective against malaria when a person is heterozygous for it. Yes, there are things that having CAIS increases my risk for, but I also am naturally less likely to get acne, for instance) but that’s what’s supposed to happen, evolutionarily speaking, because evolution is just about throwing mutations at the wall randomly and seeing what sticks. The genetic mutation that causes my intersex variation is a result of the most natural process there is. And also, mutations are what cause genetic diversity, which is incredibly important for the health of a population. People being intersex is nature working as intended.
I constantly think about how spotted hyenas must've favoured intersex females originally which lead us to having what is usually considered an intersex trait as something that's typical for the species
getting teary eyed thinking about gerda gottlieb's paintings of her wife after she transitioned
thing is, for a lot of these paintings it wasn’t “after” lily elbe’s transition. there was no after to it. the one op posted was painted in 1928. this was 2 years before lily legally changed her name and began undergoing revolutionary gender affirming procedures. unfortunately she died due to complications of an experimental uterine transplant in 1931.
up until that point, during the day lily continued to dress in masculine clothing and even attended galleries showing gottlieb’s paintings of her. which was kind of iconic. she got to stand in a room full of people who were marveling her beauty, not knowing she was right next to them. it must have been such a cute little secret for them as a couple.
here’s gerda and lilly together
not to mention that for most people there is no real “after” to a transition. especially for these trans historical figures who had to balance identity and safety at all times.
i think having a wife paint these portraits must have felt really amazing for lily. to be able to see herself through the eyes of someone who loved her. i’m very much seconding op on the getting teary eyed.
here are some of my favorite gottleib lily paintings
no but im so tired of how self-deprecation is always more accepted than self-advocacy. if i say i can't drive because im autistic i get questioned on how exactly that works and given a million suggestions on how to do it anyway and i look like im trying to be special so it's easier to just say im a loser. yeah i don't drive because im kind of a loser lmao. oh well. and people say lmao back and we move on. at worst they say "oh im sure you'll figure it out haha." but no interrogation!! being a loser is more respectable than being disabled. being a loser is something that doesn't make other people feel uncomfortable about their own biases. so no, no im not disabled. i don't struggle to keep friends and do the laundry and make quick trivial decisions and clean my room and brush my teeth because im autistic. it's because im a loser. it's my fault. it is what it is. at least im funny now. do you think im funny? please think im funny
Lmfaooooo me deciding every character with black hair and brown eyes is Asian no matter what. But really what got me was the assigned worksheet at the end
Hot take, but even if you ARE punching up (instead of punching sideways at a group that is in the same boat as you), there's a limit to what you can say without sounding like a violent facist but woke this time.
Making fun of a group of people that are privileged over you is one thing, but wishing non-cartoonish violence and death on them ("they should fall off a cliff" vs. "they should be wiped out"), wishing sexual violence on them, dehumanising them, claiming that they're less capable of creating art or living meaningful lives, saying that their relationships are inherently shallow and fake - these things are fucked up. I understand venting and saying extreme things when in pain, but when you find yourself regularly posting about wanting certain people tortured and killed, you need to examine that.
When the only thing stopping you from completely dehumanising someone is your own judgement regarding their privilege level relative to yours, you are not a safe person to be around.
"convince your followers that their Oppressor Class (whether real or imagined) is less deserving of human rights" is the oldest and most reliable trick in the book to incite mass violence, and you're not immune to it because you're a Good Person with Correct Opinions. you will continue to be a potential breeding ground for fascist thought until you stop dehumanizing people in any context, regardless of whether they deserve it or not, or how serious you are. there can be no acceptable targets.
This is something I think about a lot nowadays.
Witnessing such vile, rabid levels of hatred towards immigrants, refugees, and groups that are given labels such as "illegal" or "criminal," I think to myself, "How does a person get to be that way?"
I am made of the same ingredients as them. I am capable of feeling violent hatred. It is not a mystery that lives in others, it is a basic emotion. So I look at fascists, and their desire to punish and hurt others, and I think: When have I felt something like that?
One of the things I have been thinking about a lot, without having any useful epiphanies, is how the emotion of "righteous anger" is so close to the urge to retaliation, which is in turn so close to the urge to dominate and humiliate others. I don't have a good answer for the question, "What does it mean to desire justice, and what would the fulfillment of that desire look like?"
Because hurting someone who has wronged you, or seeing that person hurt, can be so pleasurable and gratifying and rewarding. And I can see that intense pleasure and gratification in the fascists that delight in the dehumanization and torture of people.
Are the emotions of someone oppressed towards someone with power over them different from the emotions of someone with privilege towards a person they think is inferior? I'm genuinely not sure about it.
A lot of racists feel a sense of being wronged or an urge for punishment when they see a person of color being relatively successful or rewarded, or simply being free to act in a way the racist doesn't like. They want to "put them in their place." But "putting someone in their place" violence (enforcing a difference in power and privileges) and "giving someone what they deserve" violence (correcting a perceived wrong in how power and privileges were given or exercised) are so, so close together.
To illustrate, in Trump's State of the Union address he claimed that Somali refugees were cheating the welfare system out of 19 billion dollars. One of the speakers in Trump's Madison Square Gardens rally claimed that "illegals" were given access to "five-star hotels." On top of that, they widely publicize incidents of immigrants committing crimes; at the State of the Union address they brought in a little girl who had become disabled after being hit by a truck that was (supposedly) driven by an immigrant (I'm listing these from memory so there might be some mistakes.). The Laken Riley Act was named after a woman who was murdered by a Venezuelan immigrant, with her story being widely publicized as a representation of the effect of immigration.
Therefore hatred of immigrants is often rationalized as anger and frustration at people that receive privileges and preferential treatment that other people are denied, and/or a desire for justice for people who have been harmed in a way that could have been prevented.
The feelings themselves aren't wrong to feel. So where does it all go so horribly wrong?
Where it goes wrong first is when people believe complete lies, but where it REALLY goes wrong is thinking it's okay to treat people like they're not human and torture them as long as they have done something to "deserve" it.
Because "deserving" can easily be twisted into whatever you want, as it has been with immigrants, labeling every undocumented immigrant "a criminal" (for entering the country illegally) and therefore in the same category as a person who committed murder, and therefore acceptable to torture and subject to inhuman treatment.
I feel that even the most evil of people often perceive their own anger as righteous and their own violence as justice.
I have been thinking of this another way: instead of asking when is violence acceptable, maybe I should start with when does violence happen in reality
The murder of Brian Thompson by the Claims Adjuster was so remarkable because an event like that, where a very powerful person responsible for a lot of suffering is killed by someone without much power in society, is so incredibly rare. In the USA, murder happens constantly and mass murder of schoolchildren in a school is a regular event.
I don't really know how the psychology of murder and violence might be different in other societies, so I can't comment on that. But in this society at least, the vast, vast, vast majority of people that are mentally capable of killing someone else and decide to do it at some point, don't target people that are their oppressors or that possess real power.
Basically, I'm curious about how the idea of justified political violence, or violence as a form of justice, compares with the real-world psychology of violence.
Perhaps the most common type of violent behavior in this society, the violence of adults towards children, is very clearly both an "enforcement of hierarchy" violence but also rationalized as "justice" violence (the adults think they are disciplining the kid for doing wrong). Which is interesting because literally everyone was a child at some point, meaning that everyone is vulnerable to this kind of violence in their life.
Even more interesting, people that endorse violence against children often use their own experience of violence as a child to justify it. It's like being the perpetrator of violence is more rewarding than being the victim of violence was painful.
[Image ID: Tumblr reply from royalhenoil reading: For real, this "anything goes so long as it's punching up" was a driving force in the Rwandan Genocide. The people who perpetrated the genocide believed they were punching up. /End ID]
i think it's very important that people know how common undereating is, esp. for feminized people, and how the lower calorie requirements for "women" are bullshit. you don't need to have a restrictive eating disorder (a psychiatric disability in which your relationship with food + body image is dangerous to your health [sometimes deadly] and prohibits you from participating in your daily life, forming relationships, and so on) to not be eating enough.
you could go your whole life not eating enough and not die or get really sick, but just be tired and grumpy a lot, or perform worse, or have brain fog, or a million other things. like there are so many gradations between "should have a snack" and "has a severe eating disorder". maybe you don't have an eating disorder, but you should still start eating more than iced coffee for breakfast. try it sometime!
Alexandra Kuzyk has been sentenced to 18 months in a Russian labor camp for “illegal pornography.”
this is the source article, if anyone was wondering. (here’s an archived version if you hit a paywall)
“I will have an undergraduate class, let’s say a young white male student, politically-correct, who will say: “I am only a bourgeois white male, I can’t speak.” … I say to them: “Why not develop a certain degree of rage against the history that has written such an abject script for you that you are silenced?” Then you begin to investigate what it is that silences you, rather than take this very determinist position-since my skin colour is this, since my sex is this, I cannot speak… From this position, then, I say you will of course not speak in the same way about the Third World material, but if you make it your task not only to learn what is going on there through language, through specific programmes of study, but also at the same time through a historical critique of your position as the investigating person, then you will have earned the right to criticize, you be heard. When you take the position of not doing your homework- “I will not criticize because of my accident of birth, the historical accident” - that is the much more pernicious position.”
— Gayatri Spivak (via fearandwar)
learning to notice an absence of people of color is crazy. you start seeing it everywhere. ill see a random pic of characters or people or whatever and be like "these are all white people. why"
all the babies in those baby youtube video memes. humanized character posts. like. its the little innocent shit. and like, the people making those baby memes probably arent seeking out white babies. maybe theyre just easier to find. but why are they easier to find? a complicated question, surely... but you know what it probably comes down to. someone, somewhere, maybe a lot of someones in a lot of places, made a choice. maybe knowingly, maybe not. but they made a choice. it starts to make you feel like a conspiracy theorist!!
its really funny that after 2 months this post is still making racists come into my askbox treating me like im a horrible person for pointing out that sometimes people of color are excluded from things in visible and offputting ways. cry about it
The importance of stupidity in scientific research
I recently saw an old friend for the first time in many years. We had been Ph.D. students at the same time, both studying science, although in different areas. She later dropped out of graduate school, went to Harvard Law School and is now a senior lawyer for a major environmental organization. At some point, the conversation turned to why she had left graduate school. To my utter astonishment, she said it was because it made her feel stupid. After a couple of years of feeling stupid every day, she was ready to do something else.
I had thought of her as one of the brightest people I knew and her subsequent career supports that view. What she said bothered me. I kept thinking about it; sometime the next day, it hit me. Science makes me feel stupid too. It's just that I've gotten used to it. So used to it, in fact, that I actively seek out new opportunities to feel stupid. I wouldn't know what to do without that feeling. I even think it's supposed to be this way. Let me explain.
For almost all of us, one of the reasons that we liked science in high school and college is that we were good at it. That can't be the only reason – fascination with understanding the physical world and an emotional need to discover new things has to enter into it too. But high-school and college science means taking courses, and doing well in courses means getting the right answers on tests. If you know those answers, you do well and get to feel smart.
A Ph.D., in which you have to do a research project, is a whole different thing. For me, it was a daunting task. How could I possibly frame the questions that would lead to significant discoveries; design and interpret an experiment so that the conclusions were absolutely convincing; foresee difficulties and see ways around them, or, failing that, solve them when they occurred? My Ph.D. project was somewhat interdisciplinary and, for a while, whenever I ran into a problem, I pestered the faculty in my department who were experts in the various disciplines that I needed. I remember the day when Henry Taube (who won the Nobel Prize two years later) told me he didn't know how to solve the problem I was having in his area. I was a third-year graduate student and I figured that Taube knew about 1000 times more than I did (conservative estimate). If he didn't have the answer, nobody did.
That's when it hit me: nobody did. That's why it was a research problem. And being my research problem, it was up to me to solve. Once I faced that fact, I solved the problem in a couple of days. (It wasn't really very hard; I just had to try a few things.) The crucial lesson was that the scope of things I didn't know wasn't merely vast; it was, for all practical purposes, infinite. That realization, instead of being discouraging, was liberating. If our ignorance is infinite, the only possible course of action is to muddle through as best we can.
I'd like to suggest that our Ph.D. programs often do students a disservice in two ways. First, I don't think students are made to understand how hard it is to do research. And how very, very hard it is to do important research. It's a lot harder than taking even very demanding courses. What makes it difficult is that research is immersion in the unknown. We just don't know what we're doing. We can't be sure whether we're asking the right question or doing the right experiment until we get the answer or the result. Admittedly, science is made harder by competition for grants and space in top journals. But apart from all of that, doing significant research is intrinsically hard and changing departmental, institutional or national policies will not succeed in lessening its intrinsic difficulty.
Second, we don't do a good enough job of teaching our students how to be productively stupid – that is, if we don't feel stupid it means we're not really trying. I'm not talking about `relative stupidity', in which the other students in the class actually read the material, think about it and ace the exam, whereas you don't. I'm also not talking about bright people who might be working in areas that don't match their talents. Science involves confronting our `absolute stupidity'. That kind of stupidity is an existential fact, inherent in our efforts to push our way into the unknown. Preliminary and thesis exams have the right idea when the faculty committee pushes until the student starts getting the answers wrong or gives up and says, `I don't know'. The point of the exam isn't to see if the student gets all the answers right. If they do, it's the faculty who failed the exam. The point is to identify the student's weaknesses, partly to see where they need to invest some effort and partly to see whether the student's knowledge fails at a sufficiently high level that they are ready to take on a research project.
Productive stupidity means being ignorant by choice. Focusing on important questions puts us in the awkward position of being ignorant. One of the beautiful things about science is that it allows us to bumble along, getting it wrong time after time, and feel perfectly fine as long as we learn something each time. No doubt, this can be difficult for students who are accustomed to getting the answers right. No doubt, reasonable levels of confidence and emotional resilience help, but I think scientific education might do more to ease what is a very big transition: from learning what other people once discovered to making your own discoveries. The more comfortable we become with being stupid, the deeper we will wade into the unknown and the more likely we are to make big discoveries.
Now that's the spirit I'm looking for!
sound off in the tags please what are everyone's favourite songs about divorce / lost love / Old Friends / empty houses / grief / death / other such miseries thank you
English added by me :)
[Following a recent trend of scientific studies on artwork, we study here the thermodynamics of a thermometer made of zisha ceramic, related to the Chinese tea culture. The thermometer represents a boy who “urinates” shortly after hot water is poured onto his head. Long jetting distance is said to indicate that the water temperature is hot enough to brew tea. Here, a thermodynamic model describes the jetting phenomenon of that pee-pee boy. The study demonstrates how thermal expansion of an interior air pocket causes jetting. A thermodynamic potential is shown to define maximum jetting velocity. Seven optimization criteria to maximize jetting distance are provided, including two dimensionless numbers. Predicted jetting distances, jet durations, and temperatures agree very well with infrared and optical measurements. Specifically, the study confirms that jetting distances are sensitive enough to measure water temperature in the context of tea brewing. Optimization results show that longer jets are produced by large individuals, with low body mass index, with a boyhood of medium size inclined at an angle π/4. The study ends by considering the possibility that ceramic jetting artifacts like the pee-pee boy might have been the first thermometers known to mankind, before Galileo Galilei’s thermoscope.]
Lee V & Attinger D. (2016)
here is the boy!
