Ferret Nietzsche.
2025 on Tumblr: Trends That Defined the Year

Love Begins

Product Placement
Xuebing Du
Show & Tell
Lint Roller? I Barely Know Her
Monterey Bay Aquarium

Origami Around

★

blake kathryn
hello vonnie

titsay

if i look back, i am lost
occasionally subtle
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Kiana Khansmith
DEAR READER

Kaledo Art
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@flanneryogonner
Ferret Nietzsche.
a Kickstarter project
Hi friends!
If you don’t already know, one of my favorite people/friends,Nick Desjardins, is publishing a book!
I'm one of the lucky people who already got to read it (as my blurb in this kickstarter attests--that's right, I'm a blurb-er now!!), and it's so fantastic.
Please consider backing this project, or at least giving this page a read and passing it along/sharing. I really think this book should be "out there" in the world. Nick has been writing and sharing his work with people for as long as I've known him (that's even how we met, thanks to tumblr), and he totally deserves compensation, recognition, and the ability to disperse his lovely writing throughout the human population (or at least the U.S. population, for starts) via book and bookstores.
PLUS, the rewards are all super cool.
Help me out! To start my non-profit, I have to file applications costing around $475 to be recognized as a business and achieve non profit status! More about our mission below: Co-Pilots is an organization dedicated to resuscitating life after trauma through companionship and caring. Starting our...
Dear friends,
Please consider helping a friend of mine, Tosha, start her amazing non-profit!
“Co-Pilots is an organization dedicated to resuscitating life after trauma through companionship and caring. Starting our work in incarcerated populations, we train service and therapy dogs to help regain viability after incarceration. Our co-pilots are scouted for or rescued, and then trained by inmates inside of jails, who will continue caring for their dogs upon reentry into their communities.”
If you can’t donate it would also be amazing if you could share/reblog
Thanks y’all <3
“In this nation there is, it is true, relatively little force in the public domain compared to other nations, relatively little intrusive governmental interference. But we risk instead the life-crushing disenfranchisement of an entirely owned world. Permission must be sought to walk upon the face of the earth. Freedom becomes contractual and therefore obligated; freedom is framed by obligation; and obligation is paired not with duty but with debt.”
Patricia Williams, The Alchemy of Race and Rights
Stone Butch Blues - Free PDF
in honor of Leslie Feinberg’s birthday, a PDF of Stone Butch Blues is now available for free.
it’s been almost a year, and I’m not done feeling this loss. Feinberg’s last words - “remember me as a revolutionary communist” - still ring in my ears. if you can, read Stone Butch Blues. it’s a hard, emotional read, but it’s worth it.
How we drift in the twilight of bus stations, how we shrink in overcoats as we sit, how we wait for the loudspeaker to tell us when the bus is leaving, how we bang on soda machines for lost silver, how bewildered we are at the vision of our own faces in white-lit bathroom mirrors. How we forget the bus stations of Alabama, Birmingham to Montgomery, how the Freedom Riders were abandoned to the beckoning mob, how afterwards their faces were tender and lopsided as spoiled fruit, fingers searching the mouth for lost teeth, and how the riders, descendants of Africa and Europe both, kept riding even as the mob with pleading hands wept fiercely for the ancient laws of segregation. How we forget Biloxi, Mississippi, a decade before, where no witnesses spoke to cameras, how a brown man in Army uniform was pulled from the bus by police when he sneered at the custom of the back seat, how the magistrate proclaimed a week in jail and went back to bed with a shot of whiskey, how the brownskinned soldier could not sleep as he listened for the prowling of his jailers, the muttering and cardplaying of the hangmen they might become. His name is not in the index; he did not tell his family for years. How he told me, and still I forget. How we doze upright on buses, how the night overtakes us in the babble of headphones, how the singing and clapping of another generation fade like distant radio as we ride, forehead heavy on the window, how we sleep, how we sleep.
martín espada, sleeping on the bus (via arianathepoet)
towards a gentle academic
be up front and honest about the things you do not know
acknowledge the intrinsic value of others’ knowledge bases, even if they do not seem important to you from your institutional context
do not feign mastery where you have none
respect the gaps in others’ knowledge bases
be generous, not only with others
but also with yourself
you overwork yourself at the risk of legitimizing a culture of overwork
privilege voices and perspectives that have historically been left out of the academy
nothing is ever neutral or apolitical
support the progress of other scholars
collaboration over competition
“For blacks, describing needs has been a dismal failure as political activity. It has succeeded only as a literary achievement. The history of our need is certainly moving enough to have been called poetry, oratory, epic entertainment-but it has never been treated by white institutions as the statement of a political priority. (I don't mean to undervalue the liberating power for blacks of such poetry, oratory, and epic; my concern is the degree to which it has been compartmentalized by the larger culture as something other than political expression.) Some of our greatest politicians have been forced to become ministers or blues singers. Even white descriptions of ‘the blues’ tend to remove the daily hunger and hurt from need and abstract it into a mood. And whoever would legislate against depression? Particularly something as rich, soulful, and sonorously productive as black depression.”
Patricia J. Williams, Alchemy of Race and Rights
Serious question: When a pregnant woman has an ultrasound of her baby, which is being determined, sex or gender?
The most “simple” answer would be sex because there’s nothing psychic involved on the fetus’s behalf. But then someone like Judith Butler would argue that sex is already gendered, in that it’s a gendered reading of a body that “projects” sex onto that body (though I don’t think she’d put it like this). Does that make sense?
Ugh man, because I had to pay to go to my previous grad program that was terrible for me, I had no money saved up coming to Atlanta in August, and this program didn’t give me my first paycheck till the end of September. So I got a loan for $1000 from the school to pay for mine and Nick’s expenses the first month and a half, not realizing all of it had to be paid back within 89 days (I thought interest was just added after 89 days). Now there’s a hold on my account and it won’t let me enroll for anything until I pay all that money (plus other stupid fees I owe), which I don’t have.
Just when I thought life was gonna be less stressful, y’all. This seems like a silly thing to make a crowd funding thing for, but... Idk what to do?!
“The destruction of logic by means of its genealogy brings with it as well the ruin of the psychological categories founded upon this logic. All psychological categories (the ego, the individual, the person) derive from the illusion of substantial identity. But this illusion goes back basically to a superstition that deceives not only common sense but also philosophers—namely, the belief in language and, more precisely, in the truth of grammatical categories. It was grammar (the structure of subject and predicate) that inspired Descartes’ certainty that “I” is the subject of “think,” whereas it is rather the thoughts that come to “me”: at bottom, faith in grammar simply conveys the will to be the “cause” of one’s thoughts.The subject, the self, the individual, are just so many false concepts, since they transform into substances fictitious unities having at the start only a linguistic reality.“
Michel Haar
Beyonce Gets Political, and I Get Snatched Bald: An Overview of Themes and Motifs in the Formation Music Video
It is important that you know, I am not even a Beyonce stan like that. This must be distinctly understood, or nothing wonderful can come of the post I am going to relate. If we were not perfectly convinced of Jacob Marley’s death before the play began, then there would be nothing remarkable about him showing up at his “business” partner’s house to bitch him out in the middle of the night.
It’s also important to note that Beyonce usually doesn’t go in for this sort of thing. She’s not really the Artist/Activist type. This video is the most political she has ever gotten, and I swear it took the convergence of Black Lives Matter, Black History Month, Mardis Gras, a Nat Turner Rebellion movie, the blatant disrespect of casting a white man to play Michael Jackson, and all the planets to bring us this blessing. Many have said Formation is the phrase, “I love my blackness, and yours.” given physical form. It is all that and more.
This opening line prepares us for the realness to come
Let’s start with the fact that Formation features a voice over by Big Freedia the Queen Diva of NOLA Bounce. If you don’t know Bounce music, or you don’t know Big Freedia–and if you don’t know Bounce, you won’t know Big Freedia–let me direct you to Youtube so you can educate yourself. I recommend you start with Excuse, and Y’all Get Back Now. Big Freedia also has a very nice feature in Ru Paul’s Peanut Butter.
All throughout this video we are treated to imagery from Black queer culture, from Big Freedia’s voice-over, to dancers, to queens just slaying in the beauty shop. Again, if you are unfamiliar with the richness of Black queer culture, I direct you to the internet, because there’s just too much to explain. Start with Paris Is Burning on Netflix and go from there I guess? Like, literal books have been written and it is too big an undertaking for me alone. But Formation is an anthem for Black Femmes as much as it is for Blackness in general.
Beyonce heard all y’all talking that shit about “Why is her hair always done, but she can’t make sure her baby’s hair is done?” Uh, because Blue is a child, and that is her NATURAL HAIR, and she clearly is ROCKING IT.
In fact, this video features A WEALTH of natural hair, textured hair, weaves, perms, braids, Black hair in general.
Note: Baby hairs are small, fine, wispy hairs on your hairline that your mother would brush or gel in a specific way. If you don’t know what a baby hair is, ask a Black person, or someone with “ethnic” hair (gag).
In fact, every single person in this video is Black except for the cops.
And let’s talk about that scene
A little black boy dancing his heart out in front of a line of cops in riot gear,
and the cops put their hands up. YES YES YES YES YESYEYSYESYES!!!!!
Please note the multiple nods to Majorette culture (okay ladies, now let’s get in formation, prove to me you got some coordination, slay trick or you get eliminated) which is very southern.
Formation is very southern
From Southern Gothic imagery
to people dressed for Mardis Gras
To the scenes with people dressed in 19th century Creole garb, in their parlors, with fans.
Now let’s examine some of the lyrics:
My Daddy Alabama, Mama Louisiana
This is more than a statement about Beyonce’s roots. The vast majority of Black Americans can trace their ancestry to the South, after many of us moved to northern cities in the Great Migration. To this day, the majority of Black people in the US live in the South. I’m a New Yorker for generations back on either side, but guess what? The family reunion each year is held in Virginia, because that’s where my people come from.
I like my negro nose and Jackson Five nostrils
There has literally never been a more full-throated, stalwart, stark as hell positive affirmation of Blackness in mainstream, popular media since the original Black Is Beautiful movement in the 60′s. Maybe not since the Harlem Renaissance? I predict In a few years, people will be inverting their contours and getting plastic surgery to achieve the coveted Jackson Five nostril. Only by then they’ll rename it something more palatable to the mainstream (Read: white people).
I got hot sauce in my bag
Let me tell you something about my septuagenarian Grandparents: they literally always have a bottle of hot sauce in their car. Like many retirees, they like to travel, take cruises, do old people stuff. Never have they ever gone anywhere without a bottle of hot sauce. Never has my grandfather been in a restaurant and not requested hot sauce–even though he always has his own.
As I type this, I have a bottle of hot sauce on my night stand, next to my bed. Why? Because I put that shit on everything, and it’s just more convenient to keep it handy. I put hot sauce on pepperoni pizzas. Sometimes I sip out of the hot sauce bottle like it’s a fine wine.
I make all this money, but they’ll never take the country out me
A reminder to never forget your roots, a statement about preserving your identity under the pressures of assimilation, or commentary on respectability politics–no matter how much money you make, how famous you become, you’ll always be Black to the powers that be? Trick question. It’s all three
BLACK AS HELL
Note: Red Lobster is known to be the de-facto Black date night restaurant. I have no idea why.
All of this culminates in Beyonce, sprawled atop a NOLA police car, sinking into the flood waters of Katrina. She metaphorically drowns the police in a flood caused by the colossal abdication of responsibility by those in power at the expense of the disenfranchised. She is prostrated on the symbolic corpse of the oppressor as it is subsumed by water.
I Literally Can Not.
Other images that made me want to praise dance:
Black man riding a horse down the street. Little known fact, Black people were some of the first cowboys in the American west. For the most famous example, see the actual man The Lone Ranger is based off of.
The newspaper with the picture of Martin Luther King and front page headline that read, “More Than A Dreamer.” A reference to the #ReclaimMLK movement, which is about countering the sanitized, white-washed, commodified version of his message with the reality of his radicalism.
The fact that the portraits on the walls of the mansion are of Black women
I slay, I slay, I slay
@crissle, @melinapendulum, @chescaleigh, @jemandthediazepams
What are your favorite songs that kinda sound like oldies but are pretty recent? OR your favorite oldies?
Chomsky was right: We do have a "grammar" in our head
A team of neuroscientists has found new support for MIT linguist Noam Chomsky’s decades-old theory that we possess an “internal grammar” that allows us to comprehend even nonsensical phrases.
“One of the foundational elements of Chomsky’s work is that we have a grammar in our head, which underlies our processing of language,” explains David Poeppel, the study’s senior researcher and a professor in New York University’s Department of Psychology. “Our neurophysiological findings support this theory: we make sense of strings of words because our brains combine words into constituents in a hierarchical manner—a process that reflects an ‘internal grammar’ mechanism.”
The research, which appears in the latest issue of the journal Nature Neuroscience, builds on Chomsky’s 1957 work, Syntactic Structures (1957). It posited that we can recognize a phrase such as “Colorless green ideas sleep furiously” as both nonsensical and grammatically correct because we have an abstract knowledge base that allows us to make such distinctions even though the statistical relations between words are non-existent.
Neuroscientists and psychologists predominantly reject this viewpoint, contending that our comprehension does not result from an internal grammar; rather, it is based on both statistical calculations between words and sound cues to structure. That is, we know from experience how sentences should be properly constructed—a reservoir of information we employ upon hearing words and phrases. Many linguists, in contrast, argue that hierarchical structure building is a central feature of language processing.
In an effort to illuminate this debate, the researchers explored whether and how linguistic units are represented in the brain during speech comprehension.
To do so, Poeppel, who is also director of the Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics in Frankfurt, and his colleagues conducted a series of experiments using magnetoencephalography (MEG), which allows measurements of the tiny magnetic fields generated by brain activity, and electrocorticography (ECoG), a clinical technique used to measure brain activity in patients being monitored for neurosurgery.
The study’s subjects listened to sentences in both English and Mandarin Chinese in which the hierarchical structure between words, phrases, and sentences was dissociated from intonational speech cues—the rise and fall of the voice—as well as statistical word cues. The sentences were presented in an isochronous fashion—identical timing between words—and participants listened to both predictable sentences (e.g., “New York never sleeps,” “Coffee keeps me awake”), grammatically correct, but less predictable sentences (e.g., “Pink toys hurt girls”), or word lists (“eggs jelly pink awake”) and various other manipulated sequences.
The design allowed the researchers to isolate how the brain concurrently tracks different levels of linguistic abstraction—sequences of words (“furiously green sleep colorless”), phrases (“sleep furiously” “green ideas”), or sentences (“Colorless green ideas sleep furiously”)—while removing intonational speech cues and statistical word information, which many say are necessary in building sentences.
Their results showed that the subjects’ brains distinctly tracked three components of the phrases they heard, reflecting a hierarchy in our neural processing of linguistic structures: words, phrases, and then sentences—at the same time.
“Because we went to great lengths to design experimental conditions that control for statistical or sound cue contributions to processing, our findings show that we must use the grammar in our head,” explains Poeppel. “Our brains lock onto every word before working to comprehend phrases and sentences. The dynamics reveal that we undergo a grammar-based construction in the processing of language.”
This is a controversial conclusion from the perspective of current research, the researchers note, because the notion of abstract, hierarchical, grammar-based structure building is rather unpopular.
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