Okay. For my money, the entire thesis of Chris Nolanâs 2026 film The Odyssey is that society chokes and sputters and dies when we abuse, ignore, or violate social norms like the laws of hospitality. That is not really what The Odyssey (the book/poem) is about, but I can clearly see why in the horror that is the 2020s, someone could read The Odyssey and go oh my god thatâs a lot of bad dropping in. Thatâs a lot of bad visits. Thatâs a clear vision of how the loss of social norms and cohesion fucks you up and how war, literal, brutal war, is a terrible wound that destroys your humanity and your understanding of what civilization and society is. I donât know that the iteration of Greek society that ultimately birthed the poem would agree with Nolanâs take, but I think this movie is quite ideologically coherent, that Nolan knew exactly what he was trying to say with each and every adaptational change, and I think he wasnât nuts for using one of the most famous classical western civilization works as a way to make that argument.
âA good tragedy is always both preventable and inevitableâ is one of my main hills to die on. Itâs literally so important to me. Iâm fucking correct
Itâs only tragedy if you convince yourself, for even just a moment, that everything could be ok, despite knowing it wonât be. Tragedy lies in âso close, yet so far.â Itâs avoidable because it would only take a tiny alteration to prevent disaster, but human nature is in the way- not maliciously, not knowingly, despite trying so hard.
If itâs just preventable, thatâs barely even sad. Why didnât they prevent it, then? If itâs just inevitable, thatâs only marginally better. Why would we weep? Our hopes canât be dashed on the rocks, we canât hope.
Every tragedy worth the paper itâs written on could be averted by a single word, a single choice, a single hesitation, but wonât be, because the subjects are only human. Not because they were weak, stupid, or evil- simply human. Their simple humanity makes disaster inevitable.
And in my opinion, the very best tragedy, the very most heartwrenching, comes from the hero making the right decision every time- from their perspective.
Itâs when you know you would have done the exact same thing in their shoes, and only because of your perspective as the reader are you able to see what it will cost. Thatâs what really rocks my socks
I've been using this tool called tumblr-utils to back up my tumblr blogs. it creates a locally navigatable archive of a given tumblr url's posts, which is more convenient than the post soup you get from tumblr's native blog export feature.
what that means is that I have a folder on my computer with the name of my url with an index.html file in it, and when i click on that file to open it in a browser I get a simple page with a list of years and months. selecting a specific month will send me to a list of the posts i made or reblogged in that month, similar to tumblr's own archive page. the contents of the post including images are stored locally on your machine.
It can also make a separate index file that organises posts by tag, which is great if you're a consistent tagger, but it will list every single tag you've ever used so it can take a while to find the tag you're looking for in the list if you're a habitual tag commentator. generating the tag archive also takes a while depending on how many posts have to be processed.
you can make it back up any blog as long as it's not set to private. I have backups of both my main and sideblogs and it keeps them in separate folders.
it's had some trouble going all the way back to the start of my main blog in 2012 just by sheer volume of posts, but by making it fetch posts from one month at a time I've been able to go back to 2015 (that's tens of thousands of posts), which was good enough for my purposes.
it might be a little scary to use if you've never touched the command line before, but there's both text and video instructions to set it up and using it is just a matter of typing the command and letting it do its thing in the background.
This document has a really good guide for setting it up, along with some other options for backup. I've been using tumblr utils for a while myself, and I run an incremental backup once a week.
When I was a teen in the 2010s boys would call each other Gay to say they were too effeminate but now itâs 2026 and weâre âBetter Than Thatâ so I just overheard a kid on the bus tell his buddy âyou gotta get on T man cause you are NOT passingâ đđđđđ
i. catching a moon by cecilia reeve ii. her shadows caress me by kremena chipilova iii. blue star by @/harteus on instagram iv. night covers the world with her hair by daphne allen (1914)
Saturn has an orbital period of 29.45 years, which is quite close to human life expectancy in paleolithic times. Uranus has an orbital period of 84.02 years, quite close to life expectancy in the most developed countries. This is a coincidence which has no particular relevance to anything.
Somebody expressed a desire to reblog my comment, so here it is in rebloggable form.
Yeah. Like, is this bait? No, because I can't be baited, because my reaction is just, "Sounds cool, you do your thing."
Maybe it's fake, maybe it's not, but if they say, "This is my weird gender situation," and I say, "Alright, gender's weird, if that's how you vibe then w/e," and then they tell me that it was a lie and they Got Me⊠Idk, what did they "get" me about? That I didn't say "that's cringe" and try to run them off the Internet?
Gender is fake, in the way that nationality is fake: it is something that is meaningful to people, and the meaning that it holds for people is real and valuable and worth an ounce of decency to me.
"I'm French," they tell me.
"Sounds fake bro," I am not going to say. "Frenchness was invented 400 years ago by Big Monarchy to sell you on More Taxes and More Wars."
I'm turning 30 this month, and for some reason have become suddenly interested in material possessions. like what if,,,,,,,,my couch was nice. what if my sheets were nice. is this what happens to you??
I think a couple of things combine: you now have enough experience in the persistence of material objects to understand that if they donât actively fail, they continue to define the shape of your material existence. The four stainless steel forks you randomly bought for your first place are now the forks you might, conceivably, have for the rest of your life.
You also have experience of the world around you. You realize, by comparison with your friends who like nice things, that your forks are shit. Incidentally, you also realise that despite having made choices that were defined by being broke or frugal, you do not actually get points for having shitty thin-handled forks that are annoying to use. You donât get respect or appreciation or comfort or pleasure. After ten years of use out of $5 cutlery, you have inarguably gotten your moneyâs worth. You will get nothing else from them. You only get, forever, the experience of using shitty forks.
You have probably lived on your own for a few years now, perhaps even for more than a decade. Some items have fallen behind and been lost, thrown away, broken or failed; both others are still your companions. Depending on how nice they are, this is a source of comfort and frustration. Love to the hiking boots that have lasted! Affection and allegiance to the 20 year old band t-shirt! Disgust to the t-shirt bought last year that is sent to recycling for being so shit. Increasing admiration to the grand-grandmotherâs mixing bowl, especially compared to the 2016 purchase of a mixing bowl that couldnât handle the fast-paced lifestyle. Annoyance, disappointment and sorrow to smartphone case number 241, what the fuck. Smug pride in oneself for having the foresight, in an earlier house move, to splash out on a decent new mattress. As these items persist, you cannot help but notice that quality of materials/items is now obvious and visible, because youâve spent more time with them. A 22-year old newly in possession of two knives - a cheap shitty kitchen knife and a good one they inherited - will have spent the same amount of time with both objects; when youâre 30, youâve worked for 8 years with the good knife, while the cheap one (if you even recall ever having it) was thrown out in a fit of annoyance six years ago.
You have, at this point, in addition to using them, also handled and cleaned most of your possessions several times. You have realized, very materially and fundamentally, that you must care for these items for the rest of your lifespan, or theirs.
You are (possibly) out of the early desperate scramble to suddenly, instantly furnish an entire independent life (sheets, mattresses, winter coat, forks) with no money. This naturally led to restrictions on what you chose.
You are (possibly) out of the eaves of how you were raised. Many people spend their early twenties reconciling how they were raised with how they want to live. Perhaps you were raised to feel guilty for wanting things, such as toys or attention, which you later dutifully applied to things like education or new forks. Over time, you will have surprised yourself with how you met, identified, addressed, and reconciled these tensions from your upbringing; through conflict and resolution with parents/teachers/church/internet/social media, you have now arrived at what you have. If you had big things to confront, like coming out as queer, you may have thought this work was done. Now you suddenly find yourself confronting the weird beliefs you have that âyou donât NEED new forksâ or âitâs bourgeois to want thingsâ or âNOBODY spend ÂŁ200 on HIKING BOOTS, what are you, rich?â And you might find yourself feeling like, well, actually, Iâm grown-up and I hike and eat, actually.
So yes, I think that when you are 30 you are in the danger zone of getting a new couch.
This has been posted to Reddit (fair in this case!), comments have a useful link to some subs like r/buyitforlife and other resources you may be interested in. https://www.reddit.com/r/CuratedTumblr/s/AKr18bV11n
Hey looking at the notes thereâs a lot more âoh, Iâve been beating myself up over my materialistic impulses, maybe itâs ⊠okay âŠ? to own shoes?â responses than I like to see in you guys, whom I like! Boring long rant under the cut (sorry guys itâs what tumblr is for I guess)
Letâs get it out of the way first; a lot of it is about money, and most people on tumblr have none. There. Done. Moving on.
if youâre a person at the stage of lifestyle where youâre considering whether you deserve things like âa mattress that doesnât disable youâ, you, a material being in the material world, are officially given permission to exist, you, yes, you! you ⊠a material creature with material needs that are at least as valid as a zoo animal or pet. Are we clear on the difference between existing in material space vs. being materialistic? One is a physical condition imposed by having a body; the other is the idea that money and possessions matter more than anything else.
That isnât being politically bourgeois. Even Marx allows for people to have toothbrushes and âprivate sufficiency.â Even Catholics own mattresses. Plenty of flawed, problematic, broke humans purchase mattresses every day; witness the continued existence of mattress shops.
Please bear in mind that the little voices criticising you on this are not just your parents; theyâre often weird little social media fleas. Theyâre quite specific to certain social media biomes and definitely not universal. If you post (idk) an expensive pet horse or a fancy coffee machine on some circles of instagram youâll likely get responses about how nice it is!! but if you imply on some circles of tumblr that you get caffeine in any way except for miserably spooning instant coffee granules into your mouth on the floor of a public bathroom while berating yourself for your carbon footprint, youâll be reminded that âit must be nice to have MONEY! SOME of us would be grateful for instant coffee and self-hatred in a public bathroom!â Which does, indeed, as intended, make you feel bad. Now ask: What else does it do? What will you mend with that thread?
Please be aware that these fleas are restricted to specific highly sheltered biomes; and most people on Earth, including the truly poor and impoverished ones, would prefer you to pull yourself together and just drink your coffee from a mug. Okay? Because a) it is not doing much meaningfully to improve the material conditions of the people who have less money than you, b) itâs a bit insulting tbh to people who have less money than you that the best activism you can do is âfeeling wretched on their behalfâ, c) itâs not a great use of your imagination and resources, d) you are taking an interpretation of political economic theory very personally, and worse, you are allowing this influence on your actual living life from people who havenât even read Marx; e) itâs a very immature view of the world that âsuffering is activism, somehowâ so in addition to being ill-read, your fleas are naive, if not malicious; f) there is no level of self-abnegation you can drop to that will please the fleas, and no reward for going lower. It isnât like speedrunning a game or something, where you get the appreciation of an audience if you finally clip through the floor. The fleas will just say, âwhile youâre at it, itâs awfully bourgeois of you to have a floor. Star-nosed moles donât have any.â Okay! These are absurd conversations to have, actually! You do not have to do a whole circus to appease fleas. Performing a pantomime of your empty wallet and sad clownface, to solicit the forgiveness of an audience who apparently hate you so much that they wish you were under the floor, is a foolish use of time.
(If you find yourself engaging in flea behaviour, âyeah Greer/Elodie it would be NICE to have a couch but SOME people have only three traumas in a shopping bag!â Thatâs pretty normal, and doesnât make you a bad person! I do it myself. I have never had any bloody money at all, and I get mad about it often. One immediate problem with doing this, though, is that someone will instantly tell you that they would be grateful to even have a shopping bag. The conversation does not move forward; and inevitably, if/when you get your own couch equivalent, and express a little pride in it (look how far youâve come from just having three traumas in a shopping bag!) it will happen to you too (must be nice to totally lose sight of people who donât even have shopping bags!) and it will be very unclear how anyoneâs soul progressed from the discourse. Oppression Olympics, being circular, has no winners and no prizes.)
Next please consider that in the general context of the planet, itâs considered reasonably respectable to have a material existence, and there is a vast gulf between âhaving a decent couchâ and âowning a megayacht,â this gulf being literal orders of magnitude of difference in resource and justice. I, politically, feel the good Earth has resource for many people to own a piece of respectable furniture, even if the good Earth does not have resource for billionaires. Surely the world we are seeking to build is something like the William Morris vision, of everyone surrounded by comfort and beauty and art; small plain humble handmade things, but made well, for everyone. Surely thatâs preferential to everyone gnawing coffee grounds on the floor together. Surely the healed world weâre aiming at has room for decent couches for everybody who needs one, right? The equity weâre aiming for is everyone having access to a dignified life, often this including a couch - not having everybody on the floor.
Next, I have noticed that while the actually wealthy can do whatever the hell they like, ordinary accessible people are only forgiven for having âšluxuriesâšif we can write a grant proposal justifying them. People like us may own a gaming console; disabled people are allowed the use of cleaning agencies; people are allowed to own cars if they need them to live. Nobody can reasonably criticise the purchase of a $5,000 prosthetic leg or a ÂŁ2,000 vet bill to save a petâs life - theyâre aware that they sound malicious and deranged if they do this - but they certainly feel comfortable criticising strangers on the internet for an expensive mattress that allows people to sleep without pain; expensive shoes that allow someone to walk; a mobility aid that helps someone go just a little further; a decent couch; a pet of their own, even if they arenât wealthy; a child, even though kids are expensive; elective healthcare; a steady table and a room of oneâs own -
. Do you see here how it becomes quite problematic, assigning âluxuryâ status to things that are to be used every day, and deciding who gets to have them, based on whether the person is easy to punch? Reflections to be had, here, on what is luxury, who is allowed to have it; why is nobody like you allowed to have what you donât have? By what parasocial means do we decide who is allowed to have what? why do people have more energy to criticise people-like-them for finally getting a good couch, but never have any energy to say a single word about Taylor Swiftâs frivolous private jet usage? What Iâm driving at is how itâs usually people in the same general income bracket (the Poors) criticising each other. Who does this help? If it truly helps for (personal finance/consideration for others/mindfulness/spending habits/the environment/you to feel better) then why is this necessary and effective weapon so rarely aimed at the powerful? Commentaries on materialism are usually quite clear that they are specifically criticising materialism, excessiveness, wastefulness, consumption. How does that get transmuted in our heads to âus personally not deserving usable forksâ? Much energy is wasted here, gnawing our paws bare and savaging our poor siblings, while the hand that withholds our food never gets bitten.
On that note: people, fleas and inner critics will allow the purchase of expensive hiking boots for someone who can explain that they hike a lot. I submit the ultimate solution. Purchase expensive hiking boots because you need them to walk across the top part of Spain. This is the assignment I have given you. The trails are safe, accessible, and punctuated with regular snacks; the fellowship diverse and incomparable; the pilgrim hostels can be as cheap as $7 a night; wine is $3 a glass; you can eat communal meals with fellow pilgrims, or save even more by cooking up porridge oats. I am talking about the Camino de Santiago, the famous Way, the great Christian pilgrimage, which even today convicted people in Spain may walk to receive a pardon. It doesnât matter your faith or lack thereof; if you quest in âan attitude of searchâ and stamp your pilgrim passport showing you have done the minimum miles, finishing in the great glowing city of Santiago, you will receive the campostela that counts as official absolution. Thatâs it, the official pardon, the written intercession with God. A pilgrim by the nature of pilgrimage has sought absolution and received it. Thatâs what pilgrimages are! Yes, even you.
And nobody denies the importance of good hiking boots on the Way. Pilgrimages are supposed to challenge - the Camino is a spiritual hike, and with perfect serendipity and geography it nourishes you with beauty and physical exertion in the great Pyrenees mountains before throwing you brutally to confront your own soul as you march the empty plains of Spain with your own self for company - but the point is, you do them on purpose, and at the end of it, youâre forgiven. While you are doing it, you cost just a bit more money to exist than the medieval pilgrims, and burn hardly any carbon at all.
Materialism is defined as âa tendency to consider material possessions and physical comfort as more important than spiritual values.â When you are battling your fleas of materialism, are you doing it to clear room for your spiritual life? What are you putting in your empty austere inner life? It just feels like if youâre being anti-materialistic for the (very good reason) of focusing on Higher Values, then equal processing time should be spent on the More Important Values, right?
I just thought if we were being Catholic, we might as well get the benefits as well as the suffering. You know? We should also claim the way of pilgrimage, the great journey of attention and intention, at the end of which your slate is summarily wiped clean by God Themselves. You get a certificate with Latin on it, to show everyone. You get a good grade in Pilgrimage. Why not focus on that theological concept for a change: the Way of absolution. A big homework you can do. A literal modern quest with your own forgiven self at the end of it. Thereâs the spiritual reverse of the materialism-battling coin. If youâre going to torment yourself with spiritual guilt, just go whole hog and work for the spiritual absolution too.
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