Once when I was in undergrad, someone described something as “problematic” in class and our professor was like, “That’s cool, but ‘problematic’ doesn’t really mean anything. It means that the thing you’re describing has a problem, and in and of itself that’s not bad. Art, especially, should always have problems, or else it’s not interesting and not art, either. It sounds like you’re trying to say that this is bad, but you don’t want to say ‘bad.’ Is that right?”
So from then on whenever one of us called something problematic, he would make us talk it out until we could name the “bad” thing we were hinting at. In this particular class, 7/10 it was some type of oppression, and the remainder was like, “I’m uncomfortable because this is very new/confusing/pushing boundaries that made me feel safe.”
Once we stopped calling things “problematic” and stopping at that, class got way more interesting and... we all had to say, like, “that’s racist” or “that’s misogynistic” or “ew capitalism gross” out loud, which a lot of us had never done in a classroom before. Or we had to be like, “Uhhh... I’m not sure what’s so bad?” and confront our own beliefs and that was maybe even more useful.
Anyway. Whenever I see the word problematic, I can’t help but think of this professor being like, “Good starting point, now let’s get specific.” I think when we have to commit to saying “that’s ___” it requires a lot more careful thought about the truth and impact and complexities of whatever we’re claiming. Sometimes there really is some bullshit afoot, and also sometimes it’s art, and it should be full of problems, because that’s what art is.
I think it's actually essential to children's moral development to be exposed to short stories moderately beyond their reading level where a bunch of fucked up shit happens and then instead of offering a moral lesson or any sort of emotional or narrative resolution it just ends.
(Ideally these stories should be presented in the form of poorly curated anthologies with the most generic titles imaginable, thereby rendering their contents impossible to identify or find later in life and leaving the affected individual wondering whether they dreamed the whole thing.)
(live) preview 1 & preview 2 | get the code | support me on ko-fi?
a custom Tumblr theme inspired by the art deco movement, designed with gifmakers and other artists in mind. no coding experience required; everything can be tweaked in the customisation panel. completely free. don't be shy to inform me of bugs and/or ask questions about the code. more info under the cut.
features
night/day mode;
tabs: updates, about me, socials, side-blogs, other links;
sidebar includes ask button + 3 extra links;
search bar with entries;
custom title;
custom description;
custom sidebar image (max width: 300px);
tags on click;
scroll to top button;
tracking tag highlight (with info);
featured posts;
mobile friendly;
HIGHLY customisable.
terms
please reblog if using;
do not remove the credit;
full credits in the code.
night/day mode: optional, can be turned it on and off by toggling the option in the customisation panel. it is activated by clicking the moon icon on the bottom right corner.
tabs: all are optional, and can be toggled on and off.
sidebar buttons: if you don't have asks enabled, the ask button will not appear. all 3 custom links are optional, and will not appear if no link is provided in the customisation panel.
search bar (with entries): optional, and so are the tag suggestions. you can have up to five; if you know a bit about coding, you can add more by making some tweaks.
custom title: while there is no official limit, i would not recommend making it too long, especially while using a big title font size. optional.
custom description: you can add basic html to it. optional.
custom sidebar image: max width is 300px, but you can upload smaller images without problem. if no sidebar image is provided, the code will default to the user icon.
tags on click: tags are hidden until the tag button is clicked.
scroll to top: what it says on the tin. optional.
tracking tag highlight: optional. you can add your tracking tag (or anything else) and, when the box is hovered, additional text will appear (for example, what media you will and will not reblog). if the box is clicked, the user is redirected to browse the tag on Tumblr in general (and not on the blog).
featured posts: optional. 3 featured posts at once. they are defined by the last 3 posts tagged with a certain tag (of your choice). they don't have to necessarily be original posts, or image posts/gifsets. all types of posts can be featured in the featured posts box.
mobile friendly: it has its own version for smaller screens like mini desktop screens, cellphone and tablets.
highly customisable: everything can either be tweaked or turned it off, all without any coding required (everything can be done in the customisation panel). the only obligatory elements are the sidebar, the ask button icon (if ask is enabled), the posts container, pagination and credits (that i ask for you not to remove).
a reminder: the Tumblr customisation panel is buggy, so you might have to toggle on and off some elements you want/do not want to make it work. i also recommend you "reset" your custom theme before installing this one (ie, select the default Tumblr theme), so no preferences of your previous theme are inherited by this code. it's not a necessary step, but it helps when customising.
again, let me know if anything happens. thanks for using and liking the theme! 💖
i know it's been years since tumblr started pushing all the mobile-first stuff and javascript ban that resulted in the death of customisation, and i know it's only a part of the reason why theme making isn't as big as it once was, but it still makes me so sad to think about. i've been on tumblr since 2011 and i remember how active the theme/page coding community was for a whole decade or more, and how the majority of tumblr users truly enjoyed setting up their custom themes on desktop. even all these years later i still remember old theme makers i followed and i love going back to look at the themes that were so revolutionary 10 years ago, even though almost all of the people who made them left in 2020-2022. i'm still mad that tumblr chose the lazy route of (mostly) squashing such a creative ecosystem that was a major part of the platform's charm in favour of looking more like a typical social media feed. i miss seeing literal dozens of examples of experimental web design every day done by teenagers and college students as their hobby outside school!! i miss watching their skills evolve from simple two-column layouts to full-on interactive designs with fun scripts and pages to explore. i miss the personality you would see immediately upon visiting someone's blog - now like 80% of users i check out don't have a custom theme at all.
all that to say it gives me an even greater appreciation for the people who do still create themes despite less engagement than before, and especially despite tumblr always screwing over creators. when i made this blog in january of this year i immediately took on one of @phantomcodes's themes, and then recently changed it to their newest theme, and i always get giddy to see new things from them. same with @glenthemes - in fact i just recently made a playlist page using one of their codes that i had on a blog 10 YEARS AGO LOL. there are still several theme makers out there trying their best and i think all of you are the coolest. it almost feels like finding a relic, like, oh, this still exists! someone's still doing this and there are others who still enjoy it! and i'm so glad for that.
btw, if you base whether or not you have been Wronged in a situation on how bad you feel? that's bad. hurting other people feels REALLY BAD. FREQUENTLY. you feeling REALLY BAD does not = other people have mistreated you terribly.
experiencing consequences for legitimately bad behavior often feels absolutely terrible. even worse than being punished for something you didn't do, in my experience! if you allow your emotions to dictate whether you think you have been mistreated, you're going to treat the people YOU mistreat like they have harmed you unforgivably.
this is the logic that leads to DARVO. it is imperative to recognize the paths that lead to this behavior. your feelings are real and hard and they're also not telling the truth about every situation. they don't dictate reality.
The AMOUNT of therapy I have been to that never had a satisfying explanation for the behavioral consistency of DARVO across multiple culturally distinct individuals-
it's an empathetic injury, that's why it's *so* fast, so severe, and the "reasoning" can change so much even when the same story is told again; it's not pre-planned, there's no mastermind string-pulling or whatever, it's "Ah fuck, why do I feel so bad, it can't be my fault, so I need to explain why it is your fault".
I wish I could tell past me this. It would have shattered a lot of the illusions of control built into my environment if I had been able to see how many of the lies were just made up on the literal spot and that the people telling them were not expecting their actions to have consequences.
Many thanks, I will be taking this information with me both in terms of "How to not hurt others like I was hurt" and in terms of continuing my knowledge project of "Everyone is a person with their own internal motivations and reasoning"
I really do think that the narrative about ppl who DARVO being intentionally evil mastermind manipulators has fucked with our ability to understand when we are hurting others. hurting people you care about feels bad. being TOLD you have hurt someone you care about feels bad, even if you intellectually knew it. people without skills to tolerate distress experience feeling bad as an Attack and an Emergency which triggers Defense Mode. people can be VERY manipulative and just be acting in blind panic -- they're unthinkingly doing what works! none of this makes it okay! at all! but it's a version of something that we all have an impulse towards, I think, just totally unexamined and Writ Large/taken to the furthest possible level. at its core abusive behavior is about not being able to tolerate or manage your own emotions and believing that people besides you are ultimately responsible for this, I think. it's emotional fragility and usually a lifetime of practicing a specific kind of lashing out in order to get some sort of relief from the Big Bad Feelings. like.
the biggest thing I've learned about people who get into abusive and manipulative behavior patterns is that something can be absolutely terrible and indefensible and also, at its core, DEEPLY pathetic.
we don't want to see people who do that kind of harm as pathetic because there's this feeling that that somehow excuses their behavior. it doesn't. a lot of the time its behavior that they saw Work for people with power over them when they were children, and now they think it's the only behavior that Works when interacting with people over whom they have power. because it connects back to early developmental learning re: interpersonal interactions, this also often explains why people approach these situations like they're the victim -- it's a child headspace, it's a path that was originally trodden during childhood, and childhood is a state defined by a lack of autonomy. which I think also acts as a way to insulate people from the need to consider other people's experiences and feelings -- when you're a kid it's absolutely vital to defensively hyperrocus on your own experience because nobody else will do that for you. no one does that for children, generally. and so, many people learn that prioritizing their feelings = dismissing other people's. anyway I'm rambling now and none of this is like. I don't have citations for it, lol, but this is the best way I have found to conceptualize these dynamics in Learning terms. because I truly do think that so many things in life are about Learning, and how we are initially taught that the world works.
I also think that in general we overestimate how much we understand our own motivations for our behavior; generally people act first, based on emotions, and then come up with intellectual explanations for their decisions after the fact. I think that's important to keep in mind and it's something that's helped me understand people a LOT better.
some hyper famous artists like Van Gogh transcend overratedness and become underrated because they're so normalized. Like I'll look at a van Gogh and I'm like wait this really is amazing you guys don't get it
May I also present some of my favorites from the wonderful Kröller-Müller museum?
The last one, Cypresses with Two Figures, is my personal favorite because if you look at it up close, you can see that the paint is packed so hard on the canvas that it makes the painting look like a topographical map
No photo can do it justice, but seeing the detail, especially on these lesser known pieces, really shows how much of an unparalleled master Van Gogh was. Each painting in the gallery was so beautiful and had so much detail and seeing them up close was special in so many ways
if you're an adult behaving immaturely i'm not going to "treat you like a child" about it because i have a lot of respect for children as an oppressed and vulnerable class of people. i will however treat you like an embarrassment. which you are being.
This reminds me of the fact that "Ancient Egypt" goes back so many thousands of years, that the most recent "Ancient Egyptians" were already studying (even more) Ancient Egypt.
For context, the last Pharaoh, Cleopatra VII, lived in the 1st century BCE. Prince Khaemweset, known as "the first egyptologist", was as ancient to her as the pyramids and tombs he was studying were ancient to him.
This has totally be mentioned in another fork of this post, but it reminds me quite a bit of Ennigaldi-Nanna's museum, a museum in Ur, c. 530 BC, which housed mesopotamian artifacts dating back in some cases to the 20th century BC
Oh sorry i took a long ass time to reply and didnt say anything. I got arbitrarily scared and tired myself out so now i cant say much. Oopsie teehee. it makes you feel like a huge dickhead
hate when motherfuckers try to talk to me about AFAB Experiences and how "we were all raised as girls 🥺" like brother i was socialized as a weird thing. i didn't have a "girlhood". don't talk to me
i was not included in the Girl peer group. i was also not included in the Boy peer group. i was in the freak peer group that consisted exclusively of autistic dudes and trans eggs of both directions and the one girl who thinks she's a vampire 😭
it's always in a thinly veiled way of trying to make me ally myself with them against trans women on basis of our "shared afab experiences" when closeted transfems were the people i was confiding my darkest secrets to at 14
If you've committed a crime and a detective gathers everyone involved in the room, especially if he's not actually a detective and is instead a novelist, puzzle-setter, psychic, fake psychic, dog, chess grandmaster, etc. ...
YOU SHOULD NOT CONFESS.
Every year, hundreds of people are put away by non-traditional "detectives" who have either inserted themselves into the case or are working with the police in a dubiously legal capacity as advisor. In 99% of these cases, the murderer gives a full confession even though the evidence against them is circumstantial at best and often requires a long just-so story which can only guess at motive.
If this happens to you, stay quiet, do not attempt to defend yourself or talk your way out of it, only say "I want a lawyer".
Now if you find yourself being investigated by a boy genius, magician's assistant, anthropologist, classics scholar, or philosopher, it's likely that refusing to talk to the police (or investigator with no legal authority) is merely the end of the second act, and by the end of the third act they will have you dead to rights.
YOU SHOULD STILL NOT CONFESS.
Make them take it to court. Force the eccentric detective and his straight-laced police partner to take the stand and explain their methods to a jury of your peers. Have your lawyer look at the chain of custody on the evidence, especially if you believe it to have been handled by someone who has only bumbled into detective work through their natural charm and/or unique set of skills and outsider perspective that come in handy more often than they should.
Know your rights. Don't let eccentric detectives put you away.
How “you shouldn’t falsely malign trans women as inherent sexual predators” got warped into “and you should never criticize members of your own community for promoting rape culture or abusing other members of your community” is just shocking to me. Basically a get out of jail free card for people who predate on young trans women.
The European Union already forced Apple to abandon its proprietary charging port and adopt USB-C across its entire iPhone lineup. It just did something bigger. A new EU mandate requires every smartphone sold in Europe including Apple devices to feature a battery that can be replaced by the user without specialist tools, without voiding a warranty, and without sending the device to a manufacturer approved service center. Batteries must maintain a minimum capacity threshold after a set number of charge cycles and replacement parts must remain available for up to ten years after a model goes on sale.
The consumer electronics industry built its current business model around batteries that degrade, cannot be replaced at home, and create a natural upgrade cycle every two to three years. The EU just legislated that model out of existence in the world's largest regulatory market.
Apple, Samsung, and every other manufacturer now faces a choice between redesigning their devices for the European market or accepting that their current hardware architecture is no longer legally sellable there.
Given that no company walks away from European consumers voluntarily the phones are going to change and once they change for Europe the rest of the world will ask why theirs still do not.
