Welcome! This is a safe space and no bigotry or hate will be tolerated 27 | Minors DNI | she/her/hers | Star Wars, D&D, ATLA, LOK, & video game enthusiast Feel free to stay awhile
can we bring back the term "fair-weather friend" bc I feel like if fair-weather friends got called that more this whole argument about whether or not you should be there for your friends when it's inconvenient/at what point of personal inconvenience it's ok to bail on your friends would kinda fall apart bc like. we literally have a word for "friend who's only there when you don't need something from them" because the baseline expectation is that a friend should be there even when it sucks. like we used to make fun of people for bailing on their friends.
I thought about just tagging this 'nuff said, but it's not.
I want to say something to all of the women under 50 on this site. Ready?
You do not have to be over 50 to start taking up space.
Can I make that blink? Is that a thing Tumblr can do? Because, seriously. The sooner you believe you are allowed to take up space, the better life will be.
"Tomato girl, that girl, clean girl, coconut girl, downtown girl, it girl, soft girl, dark feminine girl, light feminine girl, ballerina girl, coquette girl, cottage core girl, vanilla girl, strawberry girl, party girl, indie sleaze girl, west village girl, east village girl, french girl, italian girl, riviera girl, mermaid girl, rockstar girlfriend, trophy wife, old money girl, new money girl, office siren, pilates girl, yoga girl, beach girl, farmer’s market girl, e-girl, cool girl, weird girl
What was once a fun way to find your niche or like-minded people has now become a part of the cyclical hell now known as the micro trend. These ‘aesthetics’ used to be lasting and instantly recognisable like the more foundational subcultures that came before them, but nowadays we’re really just saying shit. What do you mean you can just order a whole pre-curated style package because a TikTok slideshow told you that you’re like soooo #y2k?
Now the art of personal style is dying, and we all look the same.
Punk was a response to Thatcherite Britain. Rave culture was a reaction to the Criminal Justice Act. Goth emerged from post-industrial bleakness. These subcultures had music, politics, community; you didn’t buy into them, you lived them. So what on gods green earth is Tomato Girl reacting to? A slow summer and a Pinterest board? What does coquette stand for politically? What is the Guinness moustache 2 dot swap boy rebelling against? Nothing.
We’ve kept the aesthetic shell of subculture and hollowed out everything that made it mean something.
And look, let’s not get too nostalgic about it, we’re not sat here pretending there was ever some golden age where fashion was pure and untouched by money. Malcolm McLaren was selling punk from a shop on King’s Road before half those kids even knew what they were rebelling against. Subculture and commerce have always been in bed together; obviously, that’s not new. The difference is the speed; people used to spend years, genuinely YEARS, developing a look.
Trying things, abandoning them, finding a silhouette that felt like theirs, wearing something until it fell apart. Now you get three weeks before the algorithm decides it’s over, and you’re already behind. It’s not that fashion got commercialised, it’s that the commercialisation got so fast and so all-consuming that there’s no breathing room left to develop an actual point of view before someone’s already packaged it, sold it and moved on.
“Now the art of personal style is dying, and we all look the same.”
Now, back to my previous list of micro niche TikTok aesthetics or whatever you want to call them. I wonder if you may have noticed a word repeating itself a wee bit. We’re no longer women, we’re now, in fact, perpetually girls. And honestly, I don’t think that’s an accident. A girl is easier to package than a woman, easier to sell back to herself, easier to reduce to a mood board and an Amazon storefront; a girl can be a Pinterest board. But a woman, she has contradictions and weird phases and a jacket she’s had since she was seventeen that doesn’t go with anything, but she’ll never get rid of, and quite frankly, that’s a lot harder to shift units with. The word girl implies youth, softness, the kind of smallness that makes you easy to categorise and easier to market to. Which, if you’ve been paying attention, is exactly the point.
As Rayne Fisher-Quann, aka the Internet Princess, famously stated in her essay “Standing on the Shoulders of Complex Female Characters,”
“It’s become very common online for women to express their identities through an artfully curated list of things they consume or aspire to consume…the aesthetics of consumption have in turn become a conduit to make the self more easily consumable.”
These ‘aesthetics’ previously known as subcultures are now entirely about consumption; it’s no longer about politics and musical taste but more about buying or being perceived as someone who might buy something. For example, the quiet luxury trend was not about actually being rich and being quiet and graceful about it, but in fact, the point was more for people to think that you might be.
And although many would argue, really, there’s no such thing as personal style - cue the cerulean blue scene from The Devil Wears Prada - there’s no denying that across all media, people both facially and in terms of fashion are all starting to look the same, slowly moulding into one big beige lip flip slick back bunned fox eyed blob. Yet to make ourselves seem original, we declare that we’re wearing these items in a different way than the ‘other girls’.
“I’m not wearing Ugg boots in a clean girl way, I’m wearing them in an off-duty ballerina Slavic girl winter way”
Okay, girl, whatever you say. Either way, you’re still following the trend, and these big corporations don’t care whether your shoes are being worn in a basic way or a coquettish way because the money is still going into their pockets.
It’s become a performance of proximity, who got there first, who’s wearing it in the right way or the new way, who is in the know, who started the trend or really gets the trend and who is just a follower, like seriously if I had a quid for everytime I heard or even said myself “but they just don’t GET IT like I do” I would be lying on a beach in Thailand right now.
We speak of those with basic style as less than not for political reasons, or because we want to help the less fashion inclined, but because we want to inflate our own egos, we are better than you because we chose to follow a different trend. Although you may deem it as cooler, a trend is a trend, no matter the outcome.
And it’s not just how we dress, it’s who gets to be in the room. There’s a Reel doing the rounds at the moment that’s said what we’ve all been thinking – stop inviting the same rotating cast of freeloading influencers to everything and bring back actual curation.
Invite the film nerds to the screenings, the fashion nerds to the shows, and the music nerds to the listening parties. Right now, we’ve got people who couldn’t name a single track standing front row at gigs time and again that they got into for free, and will leave before the encore to make sure they get their post up while it’s still relevant. Proximity to a scene is not the same as being part of one. But I suppose when the whole point is just to be seen there, does it even matter if you give a shit what any of it is actually about? Apparently not, babes. Open bar, free food and a branded photobooth? Guess we’ll see you at the next one.
We’ve now reached what people call cultural stagnation. To paraphrase Walter Benjamin, whenever the aesthetics become politicised, then fascism is in trend, when it seems like art, beauty and fashion have hit a wall because we keep repackaging the same shit. The average person is no longer developing their aesthetic taste, and nothing feels new because we only seek algorithmic approval, so our taste is intrinsically tied to whatever gives us the most social clout. After being told what is considered to be the pinnacle of beauty, we find ourselves all trying to wear the faces of Hailey Bieber and Kylie Jenner while trying to achieve the bodies of the likes of Gracie Abrams (convincing women to dedicate all their energy to worrying about their weight is a whole other conversation). And we really do sit and complain about “everybody looks the same” until somebody actually looks different, then we hit them with the “Greek gods would go to war for you/ I love your confidence!” type comment section.
“Stop inviting the same rotating cast of freeloading influencers to everything and bring back actual curation.
Invite the film nerds to the screenings, the fashion nerds to the shows, and the music nerds to the listening parties. Right now, we’ve got people who couldn’t name a single track standing front row at gigs time and again that they got into for free, and will leave before the encore to make sure they get their post up while it’s still relevant. Proximity to a scene is not the same as being part of one. But I suppose when the whole point is just to be seen there, does it even matter if you give a shit what any of it is actually about?”
We buy bags with pre-added charms and jackets that are pre-distressed because the trend cycles go so fast, our clothing doesn’t even get the chance to feel lived in, everything is a signifier and can’t just be worn because it’s loved, but more to show or prove that you are someone. If she wears tabis, she’s a ‘real’ fashion girl; she goes to art galleries and posts fit check TikToks with her photographer boyfriend; if she wears Arcteryx, she’s chill, she drinks Guinness and goes on hikes for the gram. If she wears fur coats, she loves a messy night out, smokes tabs and is let in everywhere, no questions asked, because she knows the band. If she wears Tom’s trunks, she went to private school, loves drum and bass and goes skiing on the weekends.
None of those things have to be true; we just have to believe that they could be. It’s like we’re all desperately trying to make a point about ourselves, and really we’re all just performative asf. And duh, life itself is a performance, but we’ve essentially turned getting dressed into a personality test we administer to ourselves every morning, desperately asking, are we niche enough to be interesting but still hot enough to be desired, weird enough to have taste but not so weird that nobody wants to fuck us?
And when you actually clock what these aesthetics are, they are almost entirely built around a femininity that exists to be perceived. Not felt from the inside but read from the outside, filed correctly, appreciated from a distance. Somewhere along the line, the question stopped being how do I want to feel in my clothes and became will they get it? We absorbed the male gaze so young and so completely that we now curate ourselves for it voluntarily, document it ourselves, post it ourselves, tag the brand ourselves and call it self-expression. And babes, that is not self-expression, that is free advertising.
“Are we niche enough to be interesting but still hot enough to be desired, weird enough to have taste but not so weird that nobody wants to fuck us?”
Gen Z gets blamed for this, but it makes sense when you’ve grown up in an attention economy that demands you be legible at a glance. Personal style used to be the accumulation of a life: a concert tee, a dead relative’s coat, shoes worn down on one side. Now it’s a mood board made real, assembled to be read rather than felt. We’re not getting dressed, we’re making a case for ourselves. We’re at a point now where when we see somebody online showcasing their beautiful individual look, we are no longer inspired to find originality for ourselves, but instead find ourselves in comment sections demanding a step-by-step tutorial on how to copy the entire look.
And before you boys get too comfortable, you’re doing it too. The Salomons hiking boy who’s never been further than the Peaks but owns three shell jackets and needs you to know he could survive a Norwegian winter. The moustache mullet patchwork tattoo guy who keeps his keys on a carabiner, the boy who wears vintage band tees and beat-up Sambas, who’s definitely seen Fontaines D.C. four times and will tell you that every time you play ‘Favourite’. The raw denim enthusiast in full Oni selvedge who’s been to Japan once, visited one workshop in Kojima, and hasn’t stopped talking about it since. The record store guy in a deadstock flannel and New Balance 574s who needs you to know he has the original pressing and absolutely did not find it on Discogs. The “I don’t really follow fashion” boy who somehow owns every single piece from the Uniqlo U drop and is inexplicably head to toe Margaret Howell. The skater boy who hasn’t been on a board since 2019 but exclusively wears Rassvet, Fucking Awesome and one very specific Supreme drop from 2017, he got resale. The “I just threw this on” boy in a perfectly proportioned Rick Owens leather and Lemaire trousers, who, to make it clear, did not ‘just throw it on’.
Men have spent years mocking women for being trend-followers while quietly developing their own just as rigid aesthetic uniforms. The difference is they call it “having taste” rather than following a trend, which is somehow the most on-brand thing imaginable.
There was absolutely no need for us to reduce our interests to an aesthetic, to fit people into boxes. You are a complex, contradictory, multidimensional person; you are allowed to play and explore and like multiple styles of clothes and decor all at once. Not everything has to be curated to fit into a repostable TikTok. Unless it’s a really good one, in which case send it my way."
Younger people, one thing I want you to understand about Millenials is that, overall, our parents taught their daughters to aim for careers and employment, but they didn't teach their sons to keep house. This causes a whole lot of Situations.
My brothers are my half-brothers; they spent summers and some holidays with us. I love my brothers.
Their mother picked up after them. They were not required to take plates the kitchen or do the dishes or anything like that.
My mother, who would tell you she is for equality, came home one day, sighed at the mess of dirty dishes scattered about, and said, "Gayle, help me pick up."
"Those aren't my dishes," I said. "I picked up my dishes."
My mother sighed again. "Just help me pick up."
"No," I said again. "I didn't make that fucking mess."
She never approached my brothers and said, "Boys, in this house, you take your dishes to the kitchen." She did not tell our dad, "Hey, tell the boys they need to pick up after themselves."
It was, "Gayle, pick up the dishes."
And when I refused because it was not my fucking mess, I got lectured about being difficult.
See also: My brothers--in a classic dick-move of all siblings--figured out they could pop the lock on the bathroom door and throw it open, and I would freak out because I was in the shower and trying to get five fucking minutes of peace.
Guess who got yelled at for being "unreasonable"? Not the boys. Because a lot of moms of millennial boys still said shit like "boys will be boys" when they should have said "Boys, if you got body-slammed on the concrete, I'm not taking you to the hospital."
It was similar for Xers. I spent a lot of time in my 20's teaching romantic partners and friends basic household skills and having to be really hard ass about them carrying their weight.
It is stupid and infuriating and I hate that the "Boy Mom" trend is setting yet another generation up for unfairness and domestic strife.
One time when I was in high school, my mum came home w/ groceries. She needed help bringing all of them in. Did she ask my brother who was already outside playing basketball? No. Did she ask her husband who was sitting on his ass watching TV in the living room? Nope. She walked past both of them, through the house, and into my room where I was doing homework and yelled at me for not immediately coming out to help her.
I have been told that I am "the last of the millennials" or that I'm a "gen zer" or that I'm "on the cusp" by so many different people that I am 100% convinced this is not a generational problem. It is a societal problem. And millennial parents are not immune to raising their kids this way just bc they're younger than x'ers and boomers. Same goes for gen z'ers and every generation after us so long as misogyny remains the bedrock of society that it is.
I have been doing tarot for awhile but I don’t have anyone to bounce thoughts off of - today I did a reading about trying to leave my job or rather how much I hate my current career and how sad it makes me and how stuck I feel. I feel like the cards were a bit sassy in like here’s where you are right now and I know all of this but I’m curious if other witches have any thoughts or interpretations
Okay, American immigrant to the UK here to explain all the mistakes from Paul Hollywood happening here: there is one fundamentally American ingredient required to make a s'more correctly but which is basically not available anywhere at all in the UK, and that is graham crackers. A plain digestive biscuit close-ish, but still a very different beast.
From Wikipedia: A graham cracker is a sweet flavored cracker made with graham flour.
The next ingredient (which is also extremely traditionally American but slightly more variable) is typically Hershey's chocolate, but you could probably swap this out in the UK with any plain chocolate bar.
Last ingredient is big marshmallows, the kind you do the chubby bunny challenge with, like the size of your thumb and twice as thick.
A proper s'more, the most traditional possible variety, involves to graham cracker squares, two slab segments of Hershey's chocolate, and one to two marshmallows depending on your preference for filling and gooeyness. You put a slab of chocolate on one of the graham cracker squares. Your marshmallows should be toasted, usually over a campfire but if you're doing them at home over a gas stove burner is fine, but the fire part is critical. You can toast them to whatever degree you like, some people like them nice and golden brown but still kind of firm in the middle, me personally? I want that bitch to CATCH ON FIRE, I want it gooey and sticky as hell in the middle, crispy and burnt on the outside. Slap that motherfucker on your graham cracker and chocolate square, top with the other one so your marshmallow and chocolate are sandwiched together by graham cracker on the outside. You do this with your freshly toasted marshmallow because ideally it will be hot enough to start to melt the chocolate so it sticks to the marshmallow and the graham cracker and, combined with the gooey marshmallow, it keeps the whole thing together, and for that reason some people will let them sit for a hot second to let the melting process happen (especially if like me you have chocolate on BOTH graham cracker squares, not just one, because you're a sugar fiend), but if you are a young child you do not have that degree of patience and you eat that shit immediately, unmelted chocolate and all. Consume your summer camp delight like a tiny club sandwich, get gooey sticky marshmallow and chocolate all over your hands, and enjoy.
Important note: this is a kids treat. It is a traditional summer camping trip dessert. It should be something any ten year old with adult supervision and access to the ingredients can make (and make a mess of). They're called s'mores because kids always "want s'more". If you are using a blowtorch, chocolate biscuits, and merengue, you are so far beyond the bounds of s'more-hood that you have thoroughly lost the plot. If you offered Paul Hollywood's concoction to an American child and called it a s'more, they'd tell you flat out that not only is it not a s'more, it looks dumb and you didn't do it right because it's not gooey.
the point is the mess. the point is getting to make a food, at age seven, whose two basic food groups are 'sugar' and 'fire'. the other point is that this food item is so crumbly, chaotic, sticky, on fire, and prone to being dropped (outside, in the dark, while you are surrounded by other children who are also sticky and on fire) that your supervisors cannot accurately monitor how many smores you personally have consumed. the point is also that you may get away with a smore that is five blocks of chocolate and two marshmallows if you move fast and let nothing stop you.
if you haven't accidentally yet unrepentantly eaten a chunk of twigs or dirt or a bug that got enmeshed in the creative process around smore number 3st, you are too old to have any legitimate input into what makes a smore.
There's 2 other points that I think are important.
The first is that you don't pull the marshmallow off the roasting stick and somehow put it on the chocolate. Your staging area will look something like this, with the graham crackers and chocolate already set out (though not usually on the fire like this, for us it was always someone's lap or a picnic table or something)
And when your marshmallow has reached appropriate roasting perfection, you use the graham crackers to slide it off the stick.
and ideally, as a CHILD you are using a literal stick. Like you walked around and spent time looking for The Perfect Stick off the ground while the adults set up the fire. It has to be thin enough the marshmallow will fit, sturdy enough that it won't bow, long enough that you won't burn yourself roasting your marshmallow. And preferably doesn't have a lot of bark that's sloughing off, OR so much bar sloughing off you can peel it all back and get to the clean stick under it. If you're smart, you might stick the tip into the fire first to "wash" it/burn off anything that was still lingering, but. well, most kids don't.
When you bite in, the marshmallow and chocolate SHOULD ooze out all over you. If you don't kinda look like this eating it, you've probably done it wrong:
The description of the marshmallows as being either brown on the outside but still firm on the inside or fully melted but burned on the outside is missing the true art: fully molten in the middle, without the black burns. Not to say OP is wrong for preferring the burn! But there is a technique for perfection and it goes like this:
You find a spot, not above all the logs where everyone sticks their marshmallows by default, but at the heart of the fire. Ideally between a couple logs already glowing gold. Something like here:
Below the leaping flame. Near the logs. There's probably only one or two spots good enough for this on any given fire, but that's okay because everyone else is up above. They will get their marshmallows faster. They will be either firm or burned or both. That's not your goal.
Rotate the marshmallow slowly. Ideally come in at an angle so the part closest to the flame is the side, not the tip. The spot closest to the fire is the spot that turns a crispy golden brown, and you want that everywhere, on the tip and around the circle.
You keep going, slowly turning, for several minutes. Several people will rotate in and out of the higher sections, getting their fast delight. Eventually, your marshmallow will start sagging badly, risking falling. Maybe it does fall and got start over. But eventually it will be golden brown all over, and so liquid it no longer clings to the stick. It is ready, finally.
You say "who hasn't gotten one yet?" And deposit it onto their waiting graham crackers and chocolate. You've made an excellent marshmallow. It isn't for you. Get another while you're over by the bags and go back to the heart of the fire.
That's your evening. One, slow, perfect marshmallow at a time, given to whomever still wants s'more. You're making art for children to stuff into their mouths cheerfully. You're watching the movement of the fire and the heat of the logs, like you would if you were maintaining it — maybe you would be, maybe you were the one who built it — but right now that's not the goal. Let someone else put more logs on, while you take only the one stick and find the best spot for it to live.
You will, eventually, finish a marshmallow and find that nobody moves to accept it. Maybe they're all eating right now, or maybe they've gone through so many they're hesitating. Eat your masterpiece then. Enjoy it, the hardest and most perfect result from a fun and beautiful moment. Go back in for another, until you've run out of marshmallows and the fire is too low or until even you are done with s'mores, until you have made enough.
"We don't want a gooey mess" pfft even the artistry studied at the feet of my father is inherently a gooey mess. That's the whole point!
If staff reformed the ban system to stop banning trans women and used the resulting good will to re-introduce pornography, this site would become a juggernaut. It would swallow Twitter whole.
Fourth No Kings event will feature a concert with Bette Midler, Patti Smith and Rufus Wainwright streaming nationwide
Joseph Gedeon at The Guardian:
The No Kings movement has announced a nationwide event on 14 June, directly counter-programming Donald Trump’s 80th birthday celebrations and a Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) bout on the south lawn of the White House.
The centerpiece is a 90-minute concert at New York’s Town Hall featuring entertainer Bette Midler, songwriter Patti Smith, actor Jane Fonda, musician Rufus Wainwright and commentator Joy Reid – streaming free nationwide, while local groups host watch parties across the country. The event is co-presented by the Committee for the First Amendment, a coalition of artists and cultural figures, and frames the US’s 250th anniversary as a moment of democratic reckoning.
The plans put two very different visions for the occasion in direct competition.
The US president is billing UFC Freedom 250 as a historic national celebration: a star-spangled octagon arena on the south lawn of the White House, with 4,000 ticketed guests, and a fan festival on the Ellipse expected to draw up to 100,000 people. The weigh-ins are reportedly set to take place at the Lincoln Memorial.
Trump has claimed that demand for tickets, for an event which will feature a title fight between the lightweight champion Ilia Topuria and the interim champion Justin Gaethje, has been unlike anything he has seen. The White House spokesperson Davis Ingle called it “one of the greatest and most historic sports events in history”.
The 4th installment of No Kings will be on Sunday, June 14th-- one year after the first No Kings protest. The event will be billed “Rise Up, Sing Out.”
>First, we’ve discovered that about a quarter of all the internet connection in or out of the house were ad related. In a few hours, that’s about 10,000 out of 40,000 processed.
>We also discovered that every link on Twitter was blocked. This was solved by whitelisting the https://t.co domain.
>Once out browsing the Web, everything is loading pretty much instantly. It turns out most of that Page Loading malarkey we’ve been accustomed to is related to sites running auctions to sell Ad space to show you before the page loads. All gone now.
>We then found that the Samsung TV (which I really like) is very fond of yapping all about itself to Samsung HQ. All stopped now. No sign of any breakages in its function, so I’m happy enough with that.
>The primary source of distress came from the habitual Lemmings player in the house, who found they could no longer watch ads to build up their in-app gold. A workaround is being considered for this.
>The next ambition is to advance the Ad blocking so that it seamlessly removed YouTube Ads. This is the subject of ongoing research, and tinkering continues. All in all, a very successful experiment.
>Certainly this exceeds my equivalent childhood project of disassembling and assembling our rotary dial telephone. A project whose only utility was finding out how to make the phone ring when nobody was calling.
>Update: All4 on the telly appears not to have any ads any more. Goodbye Arnold Clarke!
>Lemmings problem now solved.
>Can confirm, after small tests, that RTÉ Player ads are now gone and the player on the phone is now just delivering swift, ad free streams at first click.
>Some queries along the lines of “Are you not stealing the internet?” Firstly, this is my network, so I may set it up as I please (or, you know, my son can do it and I can give him a stupid thumbs up in response). But there is a wider question, based on the ads=internet model.
>I’m afraid I passed the You Wouldn’t Download A Car point back when I first installed ad-blocking plug-ins on a browser. But consider my chatty TV. Individual consumer choice is not the method of addressing pervasive commercial surveillance.
>Should I feel morally obliged not to mute the TV when the ads come on? No, this is a standing tension- a clash of interests. But I think my interest in my family not being under intrusive or covert surveillance at home is superior to the ad company’s wish to profile them.
>Aside: 24 hours of Pi Hole stats suggests that Samsung TVs are very chatty. 14,170 chats a day.
>YouTube blocking seems difficult, as the ads usually come from the same domain as the videos. Haven’t tried it, but all of the content can also be delivered from a no-cookies version of the YouTube domain, which doesn’t have the ads. I have asked my son to poke at that idea.
Seriously, get and run PiHole if you can. It changes your internet experience so much for the better. I get shocked when I visit a website when I'm someone else's network, by just how many ads the internet is flooded with now. Take back control.
There's a recurring online tendency to aestheticize consensus itself. The imagined future village is full of emotionally compatible people who enjoy communal gardening, conflict resolution circles, acoustic folk music, mutual aid potlucks, and repairing bicycles together at sunset. Which is nice for the people who genuinely enjoy that lifestyle. But plenty of humans are solitary, prickly, obsessive, urban, nocturnal, sensory-seeking, technologically attached, contrarian, novelty-seeking, private, or just plain difficult. Those people do not evaporate after the revolution. They do not get Left Behind while you are Raptured into the Utopia. They become your neighbors.
Every time you catch yourself going, "Fuck, are humans just inherently evil and naturally inclined to selfishness and harm???" you HAVE to remember that that's literally a core ideal of Christianity.
So if it feels inescapable and like evidence of it is everywhere, whether at times or always, that might just because you're in a Western country where you're surrounded by Christians who believe that, fundamentally, in their worldview. And also they talk and make art about it all the time and run the vast majority of news outlets. And spent over a thousand years burning any art or texts that disagreed with them. Etc. etc.
If you're gonna come to as drastic and painful a conclusion as that, at least take the time first to make sure you're not working with biased evidence (surrounded by too many people and cultural products that believe original sin is real)
And if it turns out the feeling WAS partly the result of cultural Christianity, then hey, that's great news, because it means there's that much (and it really is SO MUCH) less evidence that humans inherently suck. Which is good, because we don't
ignore that cultural trauma, ask an archeologist / paleontologist.
how often do we find human remains / burials attributable to a peaceful death of old age, or at least to disease / wild animals? and attributable to human violence, i.e. with traces of weapon impacts?
to use an old quote, the last ape became the first human not when he picked up a stick to reach some fruit, but when he used that stick to bash another ape over the head and take away his fruit.
I disagree with pretty much all of that, actually. Modern archeology is only just in the process of pulling itself out of hundreds of years of racism, bias, colonialism, disproven assumptions, widespread graverobbing, and massive, blatant pseudoscience; many ideas and publications in the field that older than about 20 years are of highly questionable provenance.
I personally am much more convinced and compelled by newer theories that, if any piece of technology made us human, it was not the weapon - it was the carrier bag, the story, and/or fire. (But not fire with the primary purpose of violence, mind you - fire with the primary purpose of heat and food and sanitation)
Here's a quote on this from one of my absolute favorite thinkers and writers, Ursula K. Le Guin:
If you haven't got something to put it in, food will escape you-
even something as uncombative and unresourceful as an oat. You
put as many as you can into your stomach while they are handy, that
being the primary container; but what about tomorrow morning
when you wake up and it's cold and raining and wouldn't it be good
to have just a few handfuls of oats to chew on and give little Oom to
make her shut up, but how do you get more than one stomachful
and one handful home? So you get up and go to the damned soggy
oat patch in the rain, and wouldn't it be a good thing if you had
something to put Baby Oo Oo in so that you could pick the oats with
both hands? A leaf a gourd a shell a net a bag a sling a sack a bottle a pot a box a container. A holder. A recipient.
The first cultural device was probably a recipient. . . . Many
theorizers feel that the earliest cultural inventions must have
been a container to hold gathered products and some kind of
sling or net carrier.
So says Elizabeth Fisher in Women's Creation (McGraw-Hill, 1975).
But no, this cannot be. Where is that wonderful, big, long, hard thing, a bone, I believe, that the Ape Man first bashed somebody
with in the movie and then, grunting with ecstasy at having
achieved the first proper murder, flung up into the sky...? I don't know. I don 't even care. I'm not telling that story. We've heard it, we've all heard all about all the sticks and spears and swords, the things to bash and poke and hit with, the long, hard things, but we have not heard about the thing to put things in, the container for the thing contained. That is a new story. That is news...
It sometimes seems that that story is approaching its end. Lest
there be no more telling of stories at all , some of us out here in the
wild oats, amid the alien corn, think we'd better start telling another
one, which maybe people can go on with when the old one's fin-
ished. Maybe. The trouble is , we've all let ourselves become part of
the killer story, and so we may get finished along with it. Hence it is
with a certain feeling of urgency that I seek the nature, subject,
words of the other story, the untold one, the life story.
-via Ursula K. Le Guin, The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction. Originally published 1986, new edition with forewords and commentaries published 2024.
Oh also if any technology did make us human, archeological evidence currently very strongly argues it was when we harnessed fire and invented cooking.
Fire is literally the reason our brains are larger than any other species of ape's, because harnessing fire meant we spent radically less energy spent on digestion - and those excess resources instead changed the evolution of the human brain.
Also fire is probably the reason we're not fully covered in hair anymore, evolutionarily - because we evolved in equatorial Africa, where not wearing a fur coat everywhere was an evolutionary advantage due to, you know, the temperature of it all. Once we could make our own heat to survive the cold nights and winters, less insulation was a huge evolutionary advance in equatorial regions especially
Cooking may be more than just a part of your daily routine, it may be what made your brain as powerful as it is
Wherever humans have gone in the world, they have carried with them two things, language and fire. As they traveled through tropical forests they hoarded the precious embers of old fires and sheltered them from downpours. When they settled the barren Arctic, they took with them the memory of fire, and recreated it in stoneware vessels filled with animal fat. Darwin himself considered these the two most significant achievements of humanity. It is, of course, impossible to imagine a human society that does not have language, but—given the right climate and an adequacy of raw wild food—could there be a primitive tribe that survives without cooking? In fact, no such people have ever been found. Nor will they be, according to a provocative theory by Harvard biologist Richard Wrangham, who believes that fire is needed to fuel the organ that makes possible all the other products of culture, language included: the human brain.
Every animal on earth is constrained by its energy budget; the calories obtained from food will stretch only so far. And for most human beings, most of the time, these calories are burned not at the gym, but invisibly, in powering the heart, the digestive system and especially the brain, in the silent work of moving molecules around within and among its 100 billion cells. A human body at rest devotes roughly one-fifth of its energy to the brain, regardless of whether it is thinking anything useful, or even thinking at all. Thus, the unprecedented increase in brain size that hominids embarked on around 1.8 million years ago had to be paid for with added calories either taken in or diverted from some other function in the body. Many anthropologists think the key breakthrough was adding meat to the diet. But Wrangham and his Harvard colleague Rachel Carmody think that’s only a part of what was going on in evolution at the time. What matters, they say, is not just how many calories you can put into your mouth, but what happens to the food once it gets there. How much useful energy does it provide, after subtracting the calories spent in chewing, swallowing and digesting? The real breakthrough, they argue, was cooking.
-via Smithsonian Magazine, June 2013. Emphasis mine. In the time since this article was published, what was considered a "provocative theory" in 2013 has become a matter of increasing scientific evidence and scientific consensus.
Richard Wrangham lays out his theory as a whole in his 2010 book Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human.
For more current summaries on the history of fire, and scientific and archeological evidence for its role in human evolution:
Evolutionary fire ecology: An historical account and future directions.
August 2023. BioScience, volume 73, issue 8, pages 602–608. Permalink: https://doi.org/10.1093/biosci/biad059, paywall-free.
The discovery of fire by humans: a long and convoluted process.
By J. A. J. Gowlett. June 2016. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B, volume 371, issue 1696, epage 20150164.
Permalink: doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2015.0164, paywall free.
Or, less scholarly:
It takes a lot of calories to power a human brain. Find out how cooking and gut microbes help us make the most of our food.
Humans are not defined by our capacity for violence.
Current archeological evidence suggests that humans are, if anything, defined by the hearthfire.
By cooking. By our ability to keep ourselves warm. By our ability to provide for ourselves and each other. By humanity's millennia-long quest to beat back the ravages of starvation and hunger.
By our millennia-long quest to make our lives, and the lives of those we love, more and more into something we can live
I've given myself heat exhaustion AGAIN (heck, I hope it's only heat exhaustion, rip) and I am not here for it ffs so to make sure y'all know about it, imma share the signs of heat exhaustion!
Heat exhaustion is quite literally your body getting too hot and Exhausting itself to cope. Heatstroke is your body Failing To Cope.
Heat Exhaustion signs include:
You get a headache that Will Not Go Away
You feel confused and dizzy (balance who? Idk her)
You don't feel hungry but you feel sick as well (this sucks and happens a lot in high heat so try and snack regularly)
Sweating and clammy skin like the kind that has people go "you're freezing!" because you've sweated so much you literally end up with a chill on your skin
Cramps. Feckin cramps. Arms. Legs. Stomach. They suck ass.
You have a heckin fast pulse or you're hyperventilating like you've just had a Scare
Your body temp is over 38°c (because you're literally boiling like a lobster in a pot)
You are Beyond Thirsty and no matter what you drink it Does Not Abate
If you end up experiencing any of these symptoms, or multiple, and you're in a hot/warm environment, then sit your ass down in the shade, get something to drink, and get a damp cloth on your head or a change of clothes that are cool.
Basically, stop what you're doing and give your body a chance to Not Keep Boiling
Heat exhaustion is NOT THE SAME as a heatstroke.
Heatstroke is So Much Worse™.
Heatstroke signs include:
Still feeling like utter shite 30 minutes after you sat your ass down, rested in a cool place, and rehydrated
Not actually sweating even though you really do feel like a lobster in a pot that has the heat up High
Your body temp is 40°c+ (which is bad btw, that's temp for causing your to pass out etc)
Hyperventilating/fast breathing or actual shortness of breath (I struggle with this because asthma so I'm always like "idk if I got this oops)
Feeling confused but in a like "I don't know what's going on, I can't think, I have no idea about anything, someone help me please I'm crossing into traffic and don't even realise" way
Having a fit/seizure because your body temp is so high your brain is Actually Getting Boiled In Your Skull 🙃 [upside down smiley emoji]
Passing out and not actually responding or waking up from a brief fainting spell (this is the Serious™ kind of passing out that has doctors going "oh shit, we need an IV STAT!" or whatever it is they say when Shit Is Going Down)
Heatstroke can be really dangerous if it isn't treated quickly so please don't ignore these signs. Right now, I'm in a cool environs, with hydration, and am avoiding moving and am gonna have a nap because I'm going very dizzy, can't focus properly, have a headache, and am only coherent here because I'm HyperFocusing on this post. I can't even understand words being said to me right now hence nap, hydration, and cool environs.
So please, y'all, take care of yourselves. Seriously.
If you have low blood sugar, but are having a hard time eating because you feel crappy from the heat, try sucking on some hard candy
If possible, after you get out of the sun/heat drink Gatorade or something similar to replenish what you've been loosing from sweating
When drinking water or Gatorade (no matter what you have it is important to stay hydrated!) it is important to drink slowly, even if you are very thirsty, because if you drink too fast the water might come back up
In hot weather, bandanas are very useful, even as a preventative measure, because you can pour some water from you bottle (or anything else) on them, and then put them on your head (as mentioned above) or neck. A few other areas help as well, like armpits, but I would personally recommend your neck.
It is not recommended to use a fan at or above 99°f or 35°c, because they can actually start to make the heat worse. (I know these are different temps, the recommendations come from different governments, 35°c is around 95°f, but this also depends on conditions like humidity, so just use your best judgement with this info)
Most importantly, if you think you are getting heat stroke call 911 or your equivalent, heat stroke kills several people each year, even in my area, where it normally only gets to 100°f for a few days each year
Well shit, I had most of those Sunday Morning, can heat exhaustion continue to hit even after you've moved into a cool environment, rehydrated, eaten, taken a long warmish-coolish shower and then slept for 7 hours?
Because those symptoms match the the symptoms I had last Sunday and made me feel like shit upon waking up.
They can yes @artisanscribbles because heat exhaustion takes time to go away. You may well feel a bit under the weather for a few days after experiencing it, and any sort of exposure to heat without proper precautions can make it flare up again and worsen into heatstroke.
It's why it's so important to rest and keep hydrated when it's warm. I hope you eventually felt better and maintained your hydration levels with water and other fluids.
I had three days of feeling the after effects of heat exhaustion myself and felt like I had a cold, a constant headache, and random chills all at the same time as having a dry throat, not sweating properly, dizziness, and even muscle cramps from the rapid dehydration I experienced.
In general, to anyone who sees or reblogs this:
It's really important to take care of yourself, both immediately after you recognise you've got heat exhaustion, and in the long term. It can affect you for days after.
