[drdaanvondutch]

in law school, my mom took me to this stress retreat because my family was vaguely aware i was a suicide risk. and they didnt allow phones, so i brought this huge bag of books. and one of the options for "destressing" was this fake cave grotto thing, where they'd decorated a room to make it look exactly like an underground cave and the air was like -10 degrees, but there was a like 4ft deep pool in the middle that was kept super super hot, so you would just switch between the hot and cold. and they would bring you an endless supply of this weird syrupy drink thing that was like super caffeinated and tasted like sugar and mint. and so i spent multiple days sitting half submerged in this fake grotto drinking mystery liquid and reading. and i have to be honest i really did feel less stressed

[batsandbutch]

[thefugitivesaint]

oakoak, 'Free Rothko', 2024 Source

[freshcuntgrass]

The best thing about this is how much love for Rothko there is in it. Like... here. Here is a rectangle, and if you stand far away it's just two or three colors a bit streaky, and the closer you get the more it opens up until it swallows you whole with the idea of how vast it is, how much bigger than you. If someone framed the real-life sea and sky and told everybody that's what my artwork was like to them I'd kiss them

[historicity-was-already-taken]

Person who has read a book and maybe taken a college course or listened to a podcast episode: oh yeah I’m a real History buff I know everything about this field

Person who focused on it in undergrad: yea I’m a bit of an expert on that field; it was my major

Person who has done at least some graduate level work on the topic: yeah I specialize in [subsubfield]

Person with over a decade of focused study on the topic, at least partially in an academic setting: here is an in-depth powerpoint highlighting everything I don’t know about my field with footnotes and a bibliographic essay

[kstarlitchaotics]

then people who literal have ancestors who lived in those times: hold my beer

[historicity-was-already-taken]

So I’m going to push back on that. Having ancestors and relatives who lived through those times doesn’t make you an expert on those times; it makes you a recipient of memory from within your in-group.

I am a Holocaust historian, I am Jewish, and I’m part of the 3G survivor community. Judaism is fascinating in terms of memory construction, because our history is deeply intertwined with our liturgy and observance. This leads to many Jewish individuals considering themselves experts on Jewish history, when actually they’re conversant in a very specific, highly curated version of Jewish memory.

As a Holocaust historian, this becomes more acute because people with survivor grandparents assume that having those bonds and receiving their relations’ memories makes them well-versed in those histories. No, it makes them well versed in receiving their grandparent’s memories.

And that’s fine. That’s important. But memories aren’t the same as history. And when we receive our descendants’ personal histories, we are receiving their MEMORIES, shaped inevitably by lack of context, time, and trauma. Or to put it differently, we are receiving their primary source documents.

And that’s important. We need primary sources; without primary sources we would be literally unable to practice history. BUT, the practice of history requires that we interrogate primary sources within all aspects of their context, not accept them at face value.

This can became really messy when you study the history of your own minority identity group. In those circumstances, the experiences of y/our ancestors become a mythology that a large portion of y/our group accepts as fact. But then, when put under the scrutiny of critical historical interrogation, a lot of those agreed upon truths can be exposed as myth, and not fact. And that’s when y/our identity group turns on you.

As a Jew who studies Modern Jewish and Holocaust history, and a 3G Jew who received her grandmother’s memories of growing up in interwar Poland and fleeing from said state in 1939, I have experienced all aspects of this, and it’s weird and frustrating and fascinating. I recommend Zakhor Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi for a deep dive on this.

[historicity-was-already-taken]

And that enforced silence? IS a primary source.

[abfark]

Every story has context, every person creates their own narrative of the events that have happened to them. I love asking family members to tell their version of a story that has not been told and retold by their/our family, because you get disagreement! It’s a beautiful thing to see first-hand how people can experience something and have a different takeaway.

[historicity-was-already-taken]

There are parts of my book where the primary sources contain mutually contradictory versions of events. I handled it by including on-page footnotes explaining the various versions of the story in the sources, and the reason I am presenting the selected one.

A notorious example of this are the multiple versions of Tosia Altman’s death. The parts everyone can agree on:

-the attic of the celluloid factory where Tosia may or may not have been hiding in caught fire, potentially because someone didn’t dispose of a cigarette correctly, or because Tosia was heating ointment to treat the wounds she’d received in the fall of Mila 18 and the fire got out of control

-she jumped from the attic

-the Gestapo showed up and cleared the scene

-she was dead

That’s where the similarities end. Some say she was already dying from smoke inhalation when she jumped. Others say she was gravely injured and close to death on account of burns, wounds sustained in the fighting, and injuries from the jump. Some say she died immediately after the jump. Some say that she was alive after the jump, and then arrested by the Gestapo, and taken to the hospital where she was either: interrogated and denied medical care until she succumbed to her wounds, or tortured to death.

I presented the version of events which seems most likely based on writer and proximity, and explained that in the footnote. We’ll still never know for sure. And it’s that questioning and those determinations and contradictions that make history such a fascinating field.

[pterribledinosaurdrawings]

Two days in a row and still nothing! And a couple weeks ago, AND again a few days before that. give me my thunderstorm!!!

[pterribledinosaurdrawings]

Hmm.

[pterribledinosaurdrawings]

It did not.

[pterribledinosaurdrawings]

100% chance of precipitation? right now and for the rest of the day?? Well you said that 2 hours ago and it's still sunny out

[pterribledinosaurdrawings]

Well it wasn't nothing, but that was definitely only sample sized. The kind of portion of thunderstorm they'd give you in a little paper cup at the grocery store to entice you into buying the full thing.

[pterribledinosaurdrawings]

It's done this twice in the past week, and once we got some big clouds and a bit of strong wind and some thunder, but then nothing happened. Please. take away the humidity.

[should-be-sleeping]

You are 60% water and every lake, river, pond, swamp, creek, and ocean you encounter wants to reclaim it desperately. Be careful out there.

[should-be-sleeping]

[should-be-sleeping]

Good, I hope it haunts everyone about to enter a body of water so bad that they wear a life jacket. 🙌

[should-be-sleeping]

Every single person I knew (past tense) who has drowned was "a strong swimmer." Water in the wild does not care how good you are at swimming.

[should-be-sleeping]

I mean this with all due respect:

You are not going to pass a skillcheck against a rip current once it has you.

Waves will not bow to your physical prowess no matter how impressive.

Shock does not care that you used to be on your school swim team.

If you hit your head, being good at swimming isn't going to turn you face-up while you're unconscious.

You may be unable to return to shore. Rescue may be unable to find you quickly.

[joanthreatt]

Scheduling this for when weather starts warming up. Be careful swimming this summer

[an-ruraiocht]

actually I think if you tell (non-climate-denying) people who complain about the heat that it's just gonna get worse forever now that you ARE being an arsehole and that's not helpful at all. cos they fucking know. we fucking know. what does that help. if you want to redirect conversations about extreme weather into climate action have you considered something like "god I know right? that's why I'm doing XYZ* to see if I can improve things locally so it doesn't get worse, want to join me?"

*local action, campaigning, planting trees, targeted politician lobbying, whatever: something CONCRETE and achievable with measurable results

otherwise all you're doing is making powerless and despairing people feel more powerless and despairing and that isn't helping shit

[mulchmouth]

Im going to hold your hand when I say this. It is not realistic to expect yourself or your family to be able to survive solely off of food you have foraged or grown in a garden. People with more knowledge and experience have tried and failed. What do you think happened to all of those communes in the 60s? Most of them failed. Famine and malnutrition have been constant companions to humanity until industrialized farming and food supply lines came along.

It feels like a uniquely American capitalist take to assume these traditions will make you completely self sufficient. You need a lot of people, a lot of time, a lot of knowledge across a lot of subjects, and a lot of luck to provide for everyone's nutritional needs.

So should you even bother trying to be more self sufficient with your food? I argue yes. Foraging and gardening are fun and will teach you so much about many things. They are deeply rewarding activities that can supplement your diet. There are herbs I haven't bought in years because I grow my own. There are dishes I can only make with foraged ingredients because I can't get them in stores.

You may not have the power to do everything, but that doesn't mean your efforts are wasted. Getting 5% of your nutritional needs from food you have grown or foraged, even for a season, is a massive accomplishment.

[trickstarbrave]

I have been enjoying seeing people experience food this World Cup

[redflagshipwriter]

The person who wrote this has almost certainly never been to Japan- if they had, they would know that Japanese restaurants also offer table appetizers in many contexts. Some of them? Mexican restaurants. You can get free tortilla chips when you eat Mexican food in Tokyo Osaka Kobe Kyoto and rural HIMEJI for fuck’s sake. Those are just places where I’ve personally had free tortilla chips in Japan.

This is chat gpt trash prompted to “sound Japanese” and it’s based off of racist old movie dialogue. There’s zero correlation here to Japanese grammar and how Japanese translates into English or how a native speaker of Japan uses English. It’s slop. It’s racist ai slop rehashing Western exceptionalism, fantasizing about a Japanese person being in awe of how great the USA is. It’s depressing that people fell for this. I know it feels good to think that other people like us, and sometimes they do, but this only works if you assume Japanese people have extremely limited experience and worldview. It’s mortifying.

If someone other than me would push back against this propaganda, it would be nice.

[mashedirises]

OP deleted the post, but OOP is a prime example of an alt-right grifter using “positive” stereotypes to stir up hatred against immigrants and other marginalized groups.

[checkoutmybookshelf]

Just made it to the end of chapter 1 of Dark Renaissance: The Dangerous Times and Fatal Genius of Shakespeare's Greatest Rival, and...

PROFESSOR GREENBLATT. DO YOU NEED A MUSICAL STING HERE!?

Like legitimately, this kind of massive claim is the sort of thing that would have gotten me AGGRESSIVELY pulled up short as an academic. Are we seriously crediting Kit Marlowe with single-handedly starting the English Renaissance!?!?!?!

[checkoutmybookshelf]

Ok, the tags on the reblogs of this have been just...the best part of my day today, so have at the tags that have been making me laugh:

[pangur-and-grim]

my humours have balanced. I have become mentally normal again

[pangur-and-grim]

no, mentally normal people can still write spider sex books

[teaboot]

YOU

[mmavverickk]

dear @teaboot i am sorry i mistook you for @pangur-and-grim

[consistantly-changing]

[Undescribed first two images, plus the alt text copied from the third image in case of deletion:

A comment on this post by mmavverickk which says ":( does this mean the spider sex book is off?"]

[A comment on another post by mmavverickk which says "is this a hint about your spider sex book".

User teaboot, the Original Poster of the post the comment is on, replies, "I think you may have me confused for someone".]

[mmavverickk's avatar (the among us sabotage button) and teaboot's avatar facing each other. mmavverickk's avatar is holding out doodled flowers. text above says "i apologize for the case of mistaken identity please accept these poorly drawn flowers"]

[hellenhighwater]

You tell em, yard boy

[hellenhighwater]

The Queen of Mulch Mountain

[hellenhighwater]

Mayhem Jane always finds the best lighting

[antigonewannabe]

x

[vampireapologist-archive-deacti]

I think a lot about who I am to other people in the world–particular who I am to strangers as a mere concept in their lives.

Today this woman called our information desk and said, “my son’s band is playing tonight. I want to come see him, but he never answers his phone…..I want to be there. Have you heard anything about his band?”

And I felt so bad for this lady but I’m not in the music scene around here so I had to tell her no, sorry.

Five hours later, I’m hiking and run into a group of guys setting up for some outdoor performance, and as I watch them unload the drums it hits me.

“Hey,” I said, “are y’all in a band?”

They said yeah and smiled and I told them “one of your moms called today. She wants to watch you play, but she can’t get a hold of you. Call your mom.”

And they all pulled out their phones and started discussing whose mom it probably was as they presumably dialed their own.

And now, unless we meet again and recognize each other, that’s who I’ll be forever to those guys–some mysterious courier for mom-messages who came out of the woods and told them their mom called.

I didn’t even tell them why their mom called me. Who am I to their mom?? Nobody even asked. They just took my word for it and called their mothers.

Amazing.

[vampireapologist-archive-deacti]

I’M LAUGHING!!! THEY DIDN’T EVEN ASK WHO I AM.

[mtf-the-gathering]

"gender is a social construct": fairly easy for leftists to understand

"race is a social construct": a bit harder to swallow for some but still reasonable

"mental illness is a social construct": this one gets you hate mail in your inbox

[thebookewyrme]

Gotta add previous tags on here, because this is gonna live rent free in my head from now on. The stars are real, constellations are not. Damn. Tags by @smoreofbabylon (if you don’t want me to put you on blast like this I’ll delete lol!)

[aquariumpacific]

It's our birthday! The Aquarium of the Pacific opened 28 years ago on June 20, 1998. That makes the Aquarium a Gen Z Gemini. No 🧢.

[shanehollandered]

someone takes a photo of david hollander texting ilya fucking rozanov pre ilya’s move to ottowa and everyone freaks out. why does shane hollander’s dad have ilya rozanov’s number?? why are they texting??? what does that mean????? people have the wildest (conspiracy) theories, ranging from david and ilya have a torrid affair, ilya is david’s illegitimate child, it’s a keep your friends close your enemies closer situation, ilya and david are actually buddies. nobody fucking knows and everyone is freaking out.

when asked about it, ilya cryptically says, “is for crossword puzzles in the new yorker” and winks at the camera, and nobody fucking knows what THAT means and ilya never offers more than that.

when shane gets asked about it, he stares blankly at the reporter for thirty seconds before he says, “they bonded” without any further explanation and in such a tone that nobody dares to ask follow ups.

when david gets asked (because ofc reporters manage to catch and ask him), he smiles politely and says, “ilya is a delightful young man. he asked me for old man hockey tricks and now he’s teaching me slang”

people are even more confused than before.

[gothiccharmschool]

Something something people not knowing the history something ...

[abigailnussbaum]

I am increasingly of the view that the besetting flaw of modern, internet-based, leftist-progressive culture is the tendency to take concepts that were intended as consciousness-raising, "have you noticed"/"makes you think" moments and treat them as all-encompassing rules for life. The Bechdel test is not a yardstick for feminism and/or artistic worthiness. It's not a test you were ever meant to apply to any single work. It's a thought experiment intended to illustrate how the entertainment industry as a whole discounts the interiority, desires, and relationships of women except as they relate to men. But again and again you'll see people - and perhaps especially people who define themselves as feminists - who treat it as the one and only meaningful measure of a work's value. In reality, there are feminist works that don't pass the Bechdel test, and works that pass the Bechdel test that are not feminist, and works with tremendous political value that do not foreground feminism because they're about something else.

And if the Bechdel test is a relatively old example, this is a phenomenon that keeps cropping up. "Some artifacts in museums were stolen or looted, with colonialism and racism providing a cover for acts that in other circumstances we'd easily recognize as criminal" has become "all museums are piles of loot and stealing from them is righteous even it it's to melt the artwork down and funnel the profits to organized crime." "Zoos sometimes abuse their animals and the goal should be to reintroduce specimens to the wild" has become "open all the cages and let the animals out (to spaces where they will almost certainly die/be killed to stop them killing people)". "Ethnic foods are sometimes treated as more palatable, and sold for more money, when they're marketed by white people" has become "people should only prepare and eat food from their own ethnicity". Again and again, it feels like these ideas that were meant to make us think, to pause a moment and notice the unspoken assumptions and elisions that exist in our world, have been turned into catchphrases that shut down thought. I think the reason that happens is that people enjoy the feeling of righteousness that comes from calling out institutions like museums or the film industry, but along the way you can become just as dogmatic and tunnel-visioned as the bodies you were calling out.

[chocolatepot]

Every time this post comes along I feel the need to remind people that yes, the actual novel Frankenstein does pass the Bechdel test. There are multiple female characters in the novel that the adaptation entirely leaves out.

I'm not saying this to tear down the adaptation, or the broader point that the above post is making, but I do think there's a secondary point to take away about how willing we often are to see people talking about gender/race/sexuality-based issues in fiction as ignorant. Even when we basically agree with the notion that sometimes fiction contains offensive stereotypes or tropes! It's still so tempting to let a rando's incorrect "that's factually wrong" win out because we buy into that narrative. "Newsflash. dipshit" sounds great, but witchofbonnechere isn't a dipshit, at least about this.

[chocolatepot]

The replies are full of idiots like this, btw, which is why you have GOT to be careful and nuanced when discussing problems with the Bechdel test and fiction that doesn't meet it.

The bar is so low for people that if two female characters speak to each other ONCE about something other than a man, that makes the entire story a feminist tract.

[marzipanandminutiae]

also for the record, it does pass the Bechdel test

Alma and Annamaria talk about the firewood the Creature gathered for them. or at least, they interact about it. Alma's name is only said briefly onscreen, but she IS a named female character who talks to another named female character about something other than a man

however, it doesn't pass the spirit of the test in its original context, namely: can you pretend these characters are lesbians? you cannot. they're mother and daughter. and the interaction in question is like five seconds long, and I think Annamaria says a few words at most, and it's background action to something else

and it's still a movie where there are only two MAJOR female characters, they never interact, and they both die before the end (to be fair, the dying is true to the book as well, although it's more like four main female characters and three of them die before the end. I do not actually like the book, but that's another conversation)

I feel like this highlights both the shortcomings of taking the Bechdel test literally and the importance of remembering its original purpose as well rather than Rules Lawyering it

(also to be clear I ADORE 2025 Frankenstein. I'm writing fanfic for it and I do broadly consider del toro to be a pretty decent filmmaker re: feminism. I'm just also aware of its...not shortcomings, I would say, because Elizabeth's and Claire's isolation in a world of men has a Point. but more what it does have, representation-wise, and what it doesn't)