endure & survive

mads (they/them) | thirties alligator with internet access in the swamp

[ancientsstudies]

Some of the most important moments in life are those spent alone, in quiet communion with nature.

[pspsappho]

& honestly there's no debate to be had the zendaya earrings are orders of magnitude worse than kim kardashian wearing that marilyn dress. yes that piece was a one of a kind unique textile made so specifically for marilyn monroe she had to be sewn into it. at the end of the day it was a ~70 year old usamerican cultural artefact being repurposed by an american for an american cultural event and everyone involved knows exactly where the dress came from + what happened to it + where it went afterwards. zendaya is wearing the looted (or forged) cultural heritage of a people her government is currently bombing & whose lives they have been deliberately making unliveable for decades to a movie premiere that has fuck all to do with iran. we don't know where those discs came from where they were found or by whom & we never will. AND the jeweller appears to have altered them substantially from their original condition. destroying a people's cultural heritage at the same time you destroy their country + their lives so you can look good on a red carpet One Time i want to fucking hurl

[classicslesbianopinions]

it is like. i am deliberately not posting that much about the nolan odyssey because i don't have much genuine interest and i find the whole like outrage theater people do at adaptations to be exhausting and unproductive and often misguided + i don't really care what celebrities are doing. but zendaya's 3000-year-old iranian earrings are like. such an on-the-nose fuck you. like 1. you can practically feel the stylist going "oh, it's old, it must be on-theme!" without really considering that ancient cultures are not interchangeable. but also 2. there's a very clear and important difference between ancient greece and ancient iran, in that there's a reason zendaya isn't wearing ancient greek artifacts on her ears--ancient greece has a cultural cachet that ancient iran does not, by virtue of its position as the perceived origin point of "western" (white) civilization. they are just interchangeable enough that zendaya can wear the artifacts of one civilization to a premiere of a work based on the mythos of another, but just different enough that she can get away with one but not the other.

and of course there's 3. which is that modifying and wearing a cultural artifact of dubious provenance taken from a country the us is actively bombing (and in doing so presumably destroying plenty of historic buildings/artifacts) asserts a certain lack of respect for and/or sense of ownership over that country's people and culture. and obviously this is what makes it seem like such a specifically heinous move.

[perrenlore]

Really important to note when it comes to (3) that the elite (and frankly Orientalising) appropriation of ancient Near Eastern artefacts as jewellery has a long colonial history. Cylinder seals are these little cork-shaped cylinders with pictoral or written designs engraved on them, and work the same way as a signet ring in that you could roll them over wet clay to leave an impression of the engraved relief on the clay to dry. They look like this:

(Cylinder seal of First Dynasty of Ur Queen Puabi, found in her tomb, dated circa 2600 BC, with modern impression. Inscription: 𒅤𒀜 𒎏 - Pu3-abi(AD) Nin - Queen Pu-abi. Nicked straight off Wikipedia as it's a fab comparison of seal / relief.)

In the British Museum you can find "Lady Layard's jewellery". Austin Henry Layard is a guy whose academic efforts I'm admittedly very indebted to. He was passionate about Venetian and Roman glass and did a great job re-popularising both styles in the UK, but more importantly he was the assyriologist who excavated Nineveh and the Library of Ashurbanipal—where we've found the majority of the Gilgamesh tablets. Pioneer figure in terms of Near Eastern archaeology... but check this out:

This is a necklace Layard had made for his wife. It uses real cylinder seals.

To quote the British Museum's entry on the item: One cylinder seal is Akkadian (about 2200 BC) and four belong to the second millennium BC, but eight are late Assyrian (about 1000-612 BC). Late Babylonian and Achaemenid stamp seals (about 600-350 BC) are used for the pendants and clasp.

Enid later wrote in her diary that, when they dined with Queen Victoria in 1873, it was 'much admired'.

Ancient Near Eastern artefacts, repurposed as jewellery in a set that doesn't give a single fuck about accurately dating them, let alone treating them with the sort of respect you might perhaps expect of items over four thousand years old. Instead they've become a mark of elite colonial status, an Oriental curiosity utterly separated from their historical context. They're 'old'. They're non-descriptly 'other'. Time and place dissolve into an attractive and vague exoticism.

All while the place these seals have been appropriated from is busy being exploited by the very empire this "jewellery" is being shown off to!

So to bring it back to your third point: you're absolutely right!!! And this has precedence dating right back to the start of Western study (and plundering) of the Ancient Near East. It's a carelessness, it's an ignorance of historical context, and it's explicitly colonial.

[classicslesbianopinions]

thank you for the added context!

[mclennonyaoi]

reading this deposition that just got dropped where someone sued musk and ohhhh my god it is this funniest thing ever . i can see why his lawyer tried to keep this confidential . they’re both maybe the biggest idiots . this is like ace attorney

[mclennonyaoi]

Elon Musk Didn’t Want His Latest Deposition Released. Here It Is.

Musk is being sued for falsely suggesting a 22-year-old Jewish man was part of a neo-Nazi brawl.

Elon Musk Deposed In Lawsuit For Falsely Linking Jewish Man To Neo-Nazi Brawl

Elon Musk was deposed in a recent lawsuit for falsely linking a 22-year-old Jewish man to a neo-Nazi brawl. Musk, who attempted to keep the

PLEASE read this

[mclennonyaoi]

[mclennonyaoi]

[mclennonyaoi]

[mclennonyaoi]

bankston is my HERO he’s tearing these people apart

[mclennonyaoi]

damn

[mclennonyaoi]

HE LEFT

[mclennonyaoi]

????

[mclennonyaoi]

oh my god

[mclennonyaoi]

KILL HIM

[mclennonyaoi]

he is DONE.

[mclennonyaoi]

HELP ME .

[mclennonyaoi]

wow. ok.

[mclennonyaoi]

[mclennonyaoi]

genuinely first two pages he says that he thinks ben’s lawyer is the one who is actually suing him and admits he has no clue what the lawsuit is about .

[mclennonyaoi]

doing a reread now this is so cunty

[mclennonyaoi]

goddamn .

[cryptotheism]

fun fact: the Mr. Bankston here is Mark Bankston, the same lawyer who absolutely ruined Alex Jones during the Sandy Hook trial.

[ex-libris-craux]

how in the fuck did the muskrat's attorney pass the bar

[ruffboi-mags]

Mark Bankston is gonna make me fucking SWOON.

[bemusedlybespectacled]

I don't think Mark can ever top "INDEED, MR. JONES, INDEED" and "AND THAT IS HOW I KNOW YOU LIED TO ME" from the first Sandy Hook trial in Texas (not to be confused with Chris Mattei, the attorney in the Connecticut trial), but this part

MR. SPIRO: Do you give these lectures at all of your depositions? MR. BANKSTON: I do, and you can watch them.

is ESPECIALLY hilarious to me having listened to multiple depositions Mark has had to take in the Sandy Hook case, where he has needed to lecture EVERY. SINGLE. ATTORNEY. at some point in the case about how they're violating Texas Rule XYZ, because they all, to a one, did something seriously ethically questionable during the deposition.

like, YOU CAN WATCH/LISTEN TO HIS DEPOS. HE DOES HAVE TO GIVE THOSE LECTURES EVERY TIME. IT'S NOT EVEN A JOKE.

[gothmagic]

— IMPERIUM CONSILIUM.

[sabertoothwalrus]

maybe this is not my place to say because I am monolingual, and I'm sure it's part of a larger, more nuanced discussion about visibility and accessibility on the internet, but I think it'd be cool if people posted in their native languages more instead of in english. I see people do it way more on other platforms than on tumblr which is almost exclusively in english

[minothtime]

El problema es, como bien has dicho, la accesibilidad y la visibilidad.

Tumblr en concreto es muy anglocentrista y un gran número de los usuarios no habla más que inglés. Si quieres que tus cosas lleguen a gente con gustos u opiniones similares, escribirlo en inglés asegura que la gente por lo menos lo pueda leer. Suma a esto el hecho de que bastantes series y tal son originalmente de habla inglesa (y a veces ni se traducen a tu lengua madre), lo que crea un fandom principalmente angloparlante.

Más allá de eso, también hay que tener en cuenta las diferencias culturales que surgen entre fandoms de distintos idiomas. Por ejemplo, durante mucho tiempo el fandom de Vocaloid angloparlante y el hispanohablante han chocado con respecto a temas como la piratería. En ocasiones es complicado manejar estas expectativas, y si sabes varios idiomas, peor incluso.

A mí me gustaría subir cositas en español y encontrar a gente que comparta mis gustos, pero en Tumblr en concreto es casi imposible. Tumblr ya es de por sí mucho más «nicho» en espacios hispanohablantes que otras RRSS como TikTok o Instagram, y si tus intereses no son muy populares, despídete.

La lingüística de los espacios de fans también está hipercentrada en el inglés. No es una pareja, es un ship; no es un universo alternativo, es un AU; no es destripar, es hacer spoiler, etc. Incluso las siglas: en español es LGTB, pero lo que sueles ver es LGBT. Parece una tontería, pero esta disonancia cognitiva hace que resulte muchísimo más complicado hablar en tu propio idioma en un fandom. Por no hablar de las innumerables referencias a posts o a memes... en inglés todo, por supuesto. Como te atrevas a hacer cualquier referencia cultural no inglesa, no te entiende nadie. Pierde la gracia.

Casi todo esto se puede achacar al imperialismo cultural estadounidense. El inglés es útil para comunicarse con gente de todo el mundo, pero su omnipresencia sirve de barrera para todos los demás idiomas. Quizás habría que reflexionar un poco sobre por qué coño el resto del mundo tiene que tragarse años de clases de inglés para hablar del juego que le gusta en una red social mientras muchos angloparlantes no se dignan ni a meter un texto en un traductor automático y prefieren pasar de largo.

[mx-macintosh]

y'all need to relearn the word erratic and stop using schizophrenic/bipolar/psychotic as a replacement

[mx-macintosh]

y'all need to relearn the word particular and stop using ocd as a replacement

[weresoul]

People need to relearn the word "egocentric" and stop using narcissist/narc as a replacement.

[thatpreciousthing]

People need to relearn the word "impulse" and stop using "intrusive thought" as a replacement

[lindstromm]

People need to relearn the word "enjoy" and stop using "hyper fixation" as a replacement.

[kaltgestellt]

don’t let anyone else ruin your day. it‘s YOUR day. ruin it yourself.

[yyymmmrrr]

[coffinvows]

coterie having fun

not canon but this is what happens after a week of no session in the groups brain

[gothmagic]

— talks at laterum.

[sailermoon]

all my life I’ve felt like this guy

[daxtri]

"And if you do not see me ere long, know then what I have chosen."

[spectralarrovv]

you’re an angel, i’m a dog

[holy-leapin-splits-batman]

[gilly-moon]

a proper post for @coffinvows’s harriet because she deserves it ♡

[tourfilm]

living under a rock is so fun i love watching a movie that’s been famous for decades and being like wow this is so good.. did you guys know about this