I think Iâm literally never gonna be sick of this masterpiece. I think watching it on a loop for eight hours could fix me. Dancingâs what clears my soul. Dancingâs what makes me whole.
I just love that this very video is an accumulation of thousands of years worth of art made by people who have never met each other. The concept of this video was so completely unfathomable to every single artist who made the sculptures and yet theyâve all put something toward the creation of it.
Remember! When companies lay off all their staff because AI is cheaper, this sort of shit is what you can leverage for a better contract when they are inevitably forced to hire everyone back :)
heard someone say "who even owns a rolling pin anymore" and my brain froze trying to process it. what does that mean. are u implying rolling pins are outdated technology? did we come up with a shiny new 21st century method of flattening dough of which i remain uninformed? is there now an app on the app store people are using instead??? im losing my mind "who even owns a rolling pin" people who BAKE
Jewish baby named Edgardo Mortara is seemingly about to die in Bologna, 1851
Catholic nanny secretly baptises him to save his soul, which sheâs not exactly the kind of authority who can do that, but w/e, itâs interpreted by the church as valid later
Kid survives
1857 her secret gets out, a baptising makes a kid a Catholic according to the Church and a Catholic canât be raised in a non-Catholic household in the Papal States, so the church authorises the police to kidnap Edgardo from his family
Raised personally by Pope Pius IX, Jewish family not allowed to take him back due to Church doctrine, this action destroys the family with grief and despair
This case gets international infamy with the Pope not understanding why everyoneâs shiting on him for doing this, including allies
Emperor Napoleon III shifts from opposing Italian unification to supporting it as a direct consequence
Bologna falls the next year, 1859
Kingdom of Italy forms 1861
By 1870 Rome is lost to the Italians and the Papal States are no more
(Edgardo Mortara goes on to become Father Mortara)
(He dies in Belgium in 1940 three months before the Nazis occupied the nation, which if heâd have lived he wouldâve been persecuted as a Jew)
Fun fact: the Catholic Church did not stop doing this after Edgaro Mortara. During WW2, many Jewish children were put in convents or catholic-run orphanages for their own safety. Sounds nice right? Except after the war ended, when parents or surviving relative went back to claim their children, the church went, âuhhh, actually theyâre catholic now, no take backs!â
The most infamous of these cases was the Finaly affair. Two Jewish children in France, Robert and Gerald Finaly, were placed in a Catholic nursery in 1944 in anticipation of their parents being deported to Auschwitz, where they were both murdered. Their aunt, Marguerite Fischel, survived the war and went to find the boys so she could take them to live with her. However, the nun who had custody of the boys, Antoinette Brun, adamantly refused to give them up, reportedly saying that âThe Jews are not gratefulâ
What followed was a years long custody battle where despite being repeatedly ordered by courts all over Europe to return the boys, Brun took them to many different countries and hid them, with the support and help of other nuns and priests. It was suspected at the time, and later confirmed by documents released in 2020, that Pope Pius XII had supported the effort to keep the boys away from their surviving family and have them be raised Catholic.
Thankfully, after negotiations between a sympathetic cardinal in France and the chief Rabbi of Paris, the boys were finally recovered and reunited with their aunt.
Documents reveal the private discussions behind both Pope Pius XIIâs silence about the Nazi deportation of Romeâs Jews in 1943 and the Vatic
I wish I could say that the phenomenon of the Catholic Church kidnapping children and keeping them away from their families for the purposes of forcefully raising them Catholic is unique to Jews, but itâs not. From the mid nineteenth century to the mid twentieth century, the Church ran hundreds of residential schools in the US and Canada where indigenous children were kidnapped from their homes and forced into these cruel and inhumane âschoolsâ. The children were forbidden from speaking their own languages or practicing their own cultures and religions, their hair was cut, and they were subject to emotional, verbal, spiritual, physical, and sexual abuse. Many of the children died due to malnutrition or medical neglect, their bodies buried like dogs beside the schools. The Catholic Church was not the only Church to participate in this, but theyâve been the most reluctant to fully acknowledge and apologize for it. It was only in 2022 that Pope Francis apologized on behalf of the Catholic Church for their part, but some people found the apology inadequate.
Idk what my point is here, just that thereâs such a clean link between evangelizing, cultural/religious imperialism, and how damaging and horrifying a religion can be when it is thoroughly convinced of its own superiority. And that unless an institution is forced to change, it probably wonât change on its own.
The midjourney stuff just reminds of when we were trying to find a new platform to host the ao3 donation form, and companies kept trying to tell me about all their "ai" features that would track donor engagement, and figure out the optimal pattern to email individual donors asking for follow up donations, and all the ways they suggest we manipulate people into staying on our websites. It was a great way to filter out who either wasn't listening to us when we described our ethics and donor base, or just didn't believe us.
Now granted ao3 is a unique case based on a) the amount of page views we get in any given time period and b) the fact that most donors absolutely do Not want to be identified as such anywhere, (the default "list of recent donors" module got nuked Immediately) but it surprised me some that the concept of "donors who value their privacy and would be furious at even the whiff of AI" is unique. Some of us really are just existing in different worlds.
#I just started dropping '2.5 Billion page views a month'#into conversations as early as possible bc they would Not believe me otherwise#it was right up there with having to say 'csam attacks' to get them to take my compartmentalization of information concerns seriously#turns out those are the magic words#otw#op
The last part was kind of insane, honestly. When we started changing platforms for the donor database, I kept telling them that yes I was aware we already had an account for the volunteer database, and no that could not be connected to the donor database. And they said yes fine sure and then connected them anyway. And I called them back and said, excuse me, I'm confused, I can see both databases. And they said, well, yeah, but it's only you, someone has to be able to see both databases to give other users access. The other users can't see both. And I said, no, we have been asking for a completely separate database. I should not be able to see both. And they said, you are one organization, one organization can't have two databases. And I said, last year someone used our volunteer email list to commit approximately one thousand felonies. Please feel free to imagine how much worse it could have been had they had a way to use volunteers' email addresses to get their legal names. We do not want this to be something anyone can do no matter how much we trust them. Let me describe those felonies to you in more detail. And they emailed me two hours later and said, you can have two separate databases.
one thing it is imperative to know about the television show Widowâs Bay is that it was created by katie dippold whose name you may not immediately recognize but whose tweet from 10 years ago you definitely do:
you know what actually pisses me off? when I finally start to feel a smidge of confidence in my writing ability and then some JERK POSTS A SINGLE LINE FROM A TERRY PRATCHETT NOVEL AND ITâS BETTER THAN ANYTHING I WILL EVER WRITE NO MATTER HOW MANY MILLENNIA I SPEND TRYING!
Terry was a professional writer from the age of 17. He worked as a journalist which meant that he had to learn to research, write and edit his own work very quickly or else heâd lose his job.
He was 23 when his first novel was published. After six years of writing professionally every single day. The Carpet People was a lovely novel, from a lovely writer, but almost all of Terryâs iconic truth bomb lines come from Discworld.
The Colour of Magic, the first ever Discworld novel was published in 1983. Terry was 35 years old. He had been writing professionally for 18 years. His career was old enough to vote, get married and drink. We now know that at 35 he was, tragically, over half way through his life. And do you know what us devoted, adoring Discworld fans say about The Colour of Magic? âDonât start with Colour of Magic.â
It is the only reading order rule we ever give people. Because itâs not that great. Donât get me wrong, very good book, although Iâll be honest Iâve never been able to finish it, but itâs nowhere near his later stuff. Compare it to Guards Guards, The Fifth Elephant, the utterly iconic Nightwatch and it pales in comparison because even after nearly 20 years of writing, half a lifetime of loving books and storytelling Terry was still learning.
He was a man with a wonderful natural talent, yes. But more importantly he worked and worked and worked to be a better writer. He was writing up until days before he died. Â He spent 49 years learning and growing as a writer, taking so much joy in storytelling that not even Alzheimerâs could steal it from him. He wouldnât want that joy stolen from you too.
Terry was a wonderful, kind, compassionate, genius of a writer. And all of this was in spite of many many people telling him he wasnât good enough. At the age of five his headmaster told him that he would never amount to anything. He died a knight of the realm and one of the most beloved writers ever to have lived in a country with a vast and rich literary tradition. He wouldnât let anyone tell him that he wasnât good enough. And he wouldnât want you to think you arenât good enough. He especially wouldnât want to be the reason why you think you arenât good enough.Â
I only ever had a chance to talk to Terry Pratchett once, and that was in an autograph line. Iâd bought a copy of The Carpet People, which was his very first book, and he looked at it with a faint air of concern.  âYou realise that I wrote that when I was very young,â he said, in warning.
âYes,â I said.  âBut I like seeing how authors grow.â
He brightened and reached for his pen.  âThatâs all right then,â he said, and signed.
My spouse and I were talking last night and the jeans problem came up so I want to talk about it with tumblr here.
The jeans problem was the favorite lecture one of my philosophy professors in college gave about the history of jeans and how it ties into capitalism/mainstream culture absorbing and monetizing any counterculture it encounters. So prior to the 1950s jeans were mostly an item of work-wear that you wore on the job as a farmer or factory worker or miner because they were cheap, durable, and hard-wearing. If you were off the job you'd wear what we'd call now dress pants or slacks. This changes in the 1950s when youth culture start wearing jeans as regular clothing, again because they're cheap, durable, and hard-wearing. But then jeans get absorbed by the culture and we start getting designer jeans, acid-washed jeans, pre-ripped jeans, and now we got people shelling out hundreds of dollars for "povertycore" aesthetic. And now jeans aren't even cheap, durable, and hard-wearing.
This came up because my spouse was talking about thrifting and spooky things (two of her favorite things) and how there was this trend of buying a landscape painting from a thrift store which was probably going to end up in a garbage dump and painting a sheet ghost on it to make it art millennials would like. But now you can go to Michael's or Home Goods or wherever and just buy a landscape painting with a sheet ghost on it, mass-manufactured by a corporation. The counter-culture once again being monetized and absorbed by the culture. It's the jeans problem again.
Palaiciuc Tatiana, known as Pon Arsher, is a self-taught artist from ChiÈinÄu, Moldova,
Blending realism with abstraction, her paintings reflect inner conflict and unspoken feelings, using color, texture, and expressive forms to make emotion visible..
"You're smoking too much weed," says the guy who got addicted to manosphere podcasts on his orb and started a fascist militia with a side hobby of deliberate environmental destruction. Started cutting down trees to own the woke elves.
protip for everyone, but mostly boys in this case:
when you are on a date, and someone has an interest you don't quite get, instead of saying lol lame, try saying hmm i don't quite get that, please explain that to me, and then listen as the other person talks about why that thing is something they are in to.
you might learn something which recontextualizes the matter, and you will definitely learn something more about your date, which is the entire point of dating.
you don't have to be a superfan by the end, but you will have shown you can be chill and take an interest in stuff, which is much more likely to result in a second date instead of being ditched in a coffee line.
