Bzzap!

Millennial. They/them in that I don’t feel like I exist when I’m alone. Not really sure what I’m doing here. Dropout fan. Moby-Dick fan.

[greatestgargadon]

For the vast majority of homo sapiens' time on this planet, our dominant survival strategy has been something like 'find food, avoid predators and disease.' For most of written history, the dominant survival strategy for groups of humans was 'kill your neighbor and take their stuff.'

It feels like we're shifting into something else now. It might just be 'find food, avoid predators and disease' again, but with the added complexity of drones and global pandemics.

[riseofthecommonwoodpile]

i don’t think i’m exaggerating when i say that the average height for women in the US would increase by at least an inch if teen girls were allowed to eat as much as teen boys are

[riseofthecommonwoodpile]

and not to bring my own clocky bitch ass into this but if cis women weren’t so consistently starved their entire lives you’d see a lot more cis women with the kind of bodies that we currently associate closely with trans women. the amount that the standards of feminine presentation are culturally defined by malnutrition is crazy

[fitnessadvicethatfitsinyourlife]

I did not realize undereating could have such a profound effect on height so I looked it up and

HOLY SHIT !!

Feed your girls. Oh my fucking god, if you put your children on a diet, a pox on your house.

[consulships]

i do think theres something sad about how largely only the literature that's considered especially good or important is intentionally preserved. i want to read stuff that ancient people thought sucked enormous balls

[literaryreference]

Time to take this post entirely too seriously:

I often wonder if this is why you so commonly see the sentiment that we are in an era of uniquely bad literature, or at least that the fact that most books don't have artistic aspirations and are not aiming to be anything other than mindless entertainment is new. In fact what's new is the idea that everything is worth preserving (and also the internet making it easier to preserve it). The dumb artistically unambitious trash books of the past have survived only sporadically, because people thought of them as literally disposable.

When I was in college I had a professor who was an expert on detective fiction. He had a longstanding beef with the idea that "Murders in the Rue Morgue" was the first detective story. He thought that it seemed way too polished to be inventing a new genre, and also that the whole orangutan business had the vibe of someone subverting preexisting audience expectations and maybe engaging in a bit of stealth parody. With the help of some student volunteers, he went trawling through old magazines and newspapers and found hundreds of detective stories from the early 1800s that just hadn't garnered enough individual attention to be remembered. This was because most of them sucked balls. He created an online archive of them, so you too can read these mostly terrible stories.

[tricky-pockets]

I've spent a ridiculous amount of time on Project Gutenberg sifting through forgotten old fiction and lemme tell ya. a lot of that stuff sucks ass.

[depsidase]

[tyrannosaurus-trainwreck]

I'm probably never going to find it again, but there was a response to one of those "artworks we think we can make" posts that was like "Okay, go for it." Like, dead serious.

Are you going to come out of it with a Klein-level work? No. Dude was bonkers skilled. But I am here to tell you that if you've ever gone to Home Depot and shuffled through paint chips and been like "God, this is such a gorgeous color, I fucking love this color" and then immediately been like "...but I can't imagine painting a wall with it." and bought a can of soul-killing eggshell off-white or what the fuck ever, you absolutely can go pick up a $10 canvas from a craftstore and a $5 sample of that color and just hang 6 square feet of it on a wall and enjoy the fuck out of it.

For real, buds. If you see an artwork and you're like "Shit, I could have made that," that is a reminder that god can't stop you and probably neither can science.

[greatestgargadon]

In 20-50 years people will be studying the Marvel movies as examples of fascist cultural production

I could write a whole essay about the Avengers-Endgame film series, but I think putting these two images next to each other tells enough of a story. At the beginning of Tony Stark’s character arc he’s blowing up mountains with a gesture, and at the end he’s snapping his fingers to disintegrate an army. Such change. Such growth. These films are exercises in power worship.

[greatestgargadon]

[mary-philbin]

okay, i am deeply sorry, i know a lot of you on this website are not a big fan of kids and children in general but PRETTY PLEASE can we just NOT normalize the “i don’t like/i hate children but i don’t wanna hurt them”? because, that’s not fucking possible, okay? that’s two views you can NOT simultaneously hold.

because, let’s talk for real, the problem isn’t just direct violence — it’s the dehumanization of children, which feeds prejudice against childhood, childism, and adultism. this logic IS NOT neutral, and it’s one of the most sophisticated ways prejudice gets perpetuated.

“not liking/hating children” reinforces the idea that they’re annoying, dramatic, inconvenient... less human — and therefore easier to discard, silence, or sacrifice for adult comfort.

elisabeth young-bruehl defines childism as prejudice against children as a social group, comparable to racism, sexism, and homophobia. it functions like any other -ism: an ideology that legitimizes treating a group as property, as inferior, or as available for exploitation. she also shows that childism isn’t limited to extreme cases of violence — it shows up in a whole range of practices that aren’t in children’s best interest: neglect, underfunding of schools, the abusive use of medication on children…

saying “i don’t like/i hate children” isn’t an innocent preference or just a phrase — it’s literally the biased expression of a worldview that dehumanizes and diminishes this group. that’s exactly what childism is.

young-bruehl emphasizes that adults who practice childism “all rely upon a societal prejudice against children to justify themselves and legitimate their behavior.” [p.1] a lot of people may not consciously “hate” children or raise a hand to hit them — but the prejudice allows them to tolerate structures that harm children on a massive scale (child poverty, incarceration, violence, abuse, exploitation, neglect, etc.).

rebecca adami uses the concept of childism to analyze adult resistance to actually implementing children’s rights: prejudice against children gets translated into laws, policies, and practices that deny basic freedoms and normalize their subordination. just like a racist can say “i don’t want to see black people getting hurt” while supporting policies that harm them — an adult who “hates children” is, in practice, feeding the cultural climate that makes violence against children thinkable, justifiable, or dismissed.

adami also shows that childism helps us understand how children are exposed to “prejudices, negative attitudes and discriminatory structures in society” — and how this connects to the weak implementation of the un convention on the rights of the child.

the old idea that “children are just mini adults” has been challenged by childhood sociology, and children are now recognized as rights-bearing subjects who deserve to be heard and respected in their choices.

claiming it’s “fine to dislike and/or hate children” means refusing them that status — putting them back in the position of nuisance, of “noisy things,” of objects. which is exactly what critical theory identifies as the core of adultism and childism.

madeline lane-mckinley argues we live in a world that is “deeply against children,” where they’re treated as extensions of the family, the state, or capital — not as autonomous people. she also talks about “adult supremacy” and proposes a politics of solidarity with children, understanding them as comrades in the fight for a better future.

lane-mckinley also points out that the figure of the child has historically been weaponized in service of white supremacy, empire, and political projects that decide which children deserve protection — and which ones can be abandoned to poverty, war, forced migration.

in other words, discourses of hatred and contempt for children participate in the symbolic economy that makes some children’s lives more exposed to violence.

and finally — in ethical and political terms, there is no way to separate “hating” (or “disliking”) children from passive participation in structures that authorize harm against them.

the only position that’s coherent with children’s rights and with critiques of childism is to let go of that hatred and commit to recognition, listening, and active solidarity.

so yeah. there’s no neutral ground here.

[greatestgargadon]

AI is really drawing out the contradictions in intellectual property.

The original concept of property had to do with control over physical assets. If I ‘own’ a house, that’s to some extent a legal fiction but is also a description of my actual level of control over the physical thing. When assets are infinitely copiable, the actual control drops away and all that’s left is the legal fiction.

AI companies are copying and reselling information that’s all legally ‘owned’ by someone else, and the only thing in their way (in the US) is an overburdened legal system. How much longer will current IP systems hold?

[hometoursandotherstuff]

[hms-no-fun]

so i feel the urge to add a bit of context here because i find the vague on-screen text deeply underwhelming.

this is not just "a picture", it's Pale Blue Dot, one of the most famous works of astrophotography ever made public. and it was not just "a dying spacecraft", it was Voyager 1, a probe launched in 1977 to study the atmosphere and moons of Jupiter and Saturn, among other things. both Voyager probes carried on them a golden record meant as an introduction to humanity for any alien species that might discover them (if you saw Kane Parsons' Backrooms, you've heard the contents of that record coming out of a cardboard caveman standee). they did this because NASA planned to sundown these probes by letting them drift out of the solar system to parts unknown. Voyager 1 is currently 16 billion miles away, the farthest any manmade object has ever traveled from earth.

AND it's not even dead! despite supposedly being a "dying spacecraft" all the way back in 1990, Voyager 1 is not expected to be fully out of commission until 2036. to keep the probe alive they've switched off unneeded tools, adjusted its trajectory, even essentially updated the firmware, and through all that time it's basically never stopped sending back priceless data for scientists to analyze.

this is the original Pale Blue Dot, by the way:

it's relevant because "a single point of light smaller than one pixel" makes a lot more sense in the context of the original than it does in the heavily corrected version up top, where our pale blue dot looks more like a vibrant dwarf star. the difficulty of spotting earth in these waving curtains of space IS the entire impact of the picture! the blue dot is "pale" because it's hard to see! by making earth stand out so brilliantly, Terribly Interesting have inadvertently created the impression that earth is this vibrant glowing pearl, bright for all to see for billions of miles around. and it just isn't! the point is not that we can see earth from far away, but that we almost can't, because we aren't the center of the universe! when science educators past have used this image they often referred to one where the earth is circled in bright red, which only further emphasizes how small and fragile our home really is.

but hey, if you DO want an improved version of Pale Blue Dot you don't even need photoshop:

this is Pale Blue Dot Revisited, released by NASA in 2020. this is a reinterpretation of the original data using modern image processing techniques to create a more realistic or at least more high-definition rendering of the scene. it's important to understand that this is not the original image dropped into photoshop and airbrushed. strictly speaking, there isn't an "original" Pale Blue Dot the way there are negatives of traditional photography. astrophotography is almost always the product of raw data being deliberately interpreted by scientists, so the same data can produce many different images (ie if they want to emphasize the infrared spectrum vs visible light). similar work was done by Don P. Mitchell in ~2005 to enhance images taken by Soviet Venera probes of the surface of Venus to be less noisy.

here's an original:

and here's Mitchell's version:

i'm not here to argue which is "better" (and i highly recommend you read the source for this one because it's quite fascinating), just to give another example of the process in action and hopefully clarify how it's distinct from editing a jpeg in photoshop. also i just think it's neat!

which is the real reason i went to the trouble of making this post. Terribly Interesting may indeed find all of this to be terribly interesting, but it appears to be interest for the sake of a vague transient feeling of having been interested and little else. it doesn't name the probe, the photo in question, nor does it give historical context for the mission it was part of. the only substantial thing it says about the probe, that Voyager 1 is a "dying spacecraft", is so frustratingly oversimplified it may as well just be a lie.

so what's actually learned here, if you're someone who knows none of this history? that one time there was a thing and it did a thing? earth tiny from far away?? obviously it's just one image macro but i see this kind of thing making the rounds SO often, a screenshot with like two sentences on it explaining the image with as little descriptive text as possible. it's like there's a space-themed inspiration-posting rulebook that says you can't imply the existence of information not contained within the image. mention Voyager 1? mention Pale Blue Dot? nope! "a dying spacecraft" took "one last photograph", and here's a photoshopped version to make earth more visible.

and it might not even get to me nearly as much if this was any other space photo. i could accept that space stuff is complicated and this kind of fast-food image can only say so much if we were talking about Cassini or JWST's role in helping us find exoplanets. but this is Pale Blue Dot, the brainchild of arguably THE science communicator Carl Sagan! he wrote a book about Pale Blue Dot, he was on TV to announce the image personally! it's arguable that no astrophotograph exists whose context has been more digestibly packaged for laymen than Pale Blue Dot, which just makes it that much more egregious when someone doesn't go to the trouble.

so much of what i love about astronomy and studying the past & future of space travel is that everything you can learn is a doorway to learning more. you can't earnestly read about Voyager or Cassini or Venera or any other mission without finding some odd searchable detail and going "wait, what is that" and immediately falling down an hourslong rabbit hole to find an answer. and you'll never reach the bottom! i love reading articles about cutting edge astrophysics written for people in, like, early grad school, because i fully comprehend maybe 10% of it, vaguely understand 20% (on a good day), can kind of wrap my head around 30%, and find the rest totally inscrutable... but that's still a solid 60% scrutability rating even at the lowest-quality end of the spectrum! i'm no expert and i never will be, but in scouring the written expertise of others i almost always find one or two ideas that end up sticking with me forever. and it starts, every time, from questions about a photograph.

the sin of the above image is that it's solipsistic. it doesn't give you anywhere to put your curiosity or interest, doesn't invite you to leave their website and learn more than they have space to share, it doesn't even tell you anything useful about its subject! it reduces the entire history of Pale Blue Dot down to a vague and nondescript wonder that's just a pale imitation of the highly specific and ideologically driven wonder that Carl Sagan wanted us to feel.

here, feel it for yourself:

----

[P.S.: before you lament that this is an "AI" problem, while yes "AI" has radically increased the volume of low-value (often negative-value) inspiration bait like this, know that this has been a problem in online science education for a LOT longer than chatgpt's been around. this example isn't extraordinary, just close to my heart. nothing new under the sun and all that]

[redstonedust]

netizen is a really cute word for Person On The Internet im surprised i dont see it used in more english language stuff. lets all be netizens of tumblr together.

[greatestgargadon]

‘citizen’ originally meant ‘inhabitant of a city’, so properly the term should probably be ‘sitizen,’ as in ‘inhabitant of a (web)site.’

netizen is definitely cuter though

[0sbrain]

Tumblr added a bunch of tracking shit to share urls, so now ill teach you how to get rid of them

if you copy a url by sharing on the website, the link will look like this

getting rid of tracking in these is easy, just delete everything after the question mark and you are golden

in the case for the app, its slightly more complicated

first you have to delete at. that appears before tumblr(.)com the other tracking shit on this one has a lot more info, so please, clean app urls. after the first set of numbers, there's a / you have to delete everything after it

a clean Tumblr url should look like this

blog safely

[big-papa-huge-time]

Removing this garbage makes posts embed on discord btw

[sapphling]

and honestly it's just fucking insane that every time we try to talk about harm to children in particular we have to talk circles around the fact that these things are very, very overwhelmingly done by parents/family members/teachers/religious leaders/known and trusted adults in a position of power over a child, to the extent that many people's suggested solution to child abuse is "give the people most likely to abuse a child EVEN MORE strangling legal and material power over the kid"

[sapphling]

you're not supposed to actually address who is abusing children and what can be done to give those children recourse and the ability to leave abusive situations because nobody actually gives a shit about child abuse beyond the familial property rights violation it represents to them and the cudgel against minorities which it can be turned into

[willwantsyouthrights]

before the women’s rights movement women were viewed as property of their husband. If you went up to someone and told them you think women are an oppressed group they would laugh in your face. It was considered scientific fact that women were less intelligent and more emotional than men. Because of these “facts”, they were denied the right to vote. They did not have bodily autonomy. They could not own property . They were the most likely victims of rape and abuse. They could not divorce their husbands. They were not allowed to participate in government. They were not allowed to open a bank account. They often weren’t allowed in public without their husbands. They were not viewed as people.

Today children are viewed as property of their parents. If you went up to someone and told them you think children are an oppressed group they would laugh in your face. It’s considered scientific fact that children are less intelligent and more emotional than adults. Because of these “facts”, they are denied the right to vote. They do not have bodily autonomy. They can not own property. They are the most likely victims of rape and abuse. They can not divorce their parents. They are not allowed to participate in government. They are not allowed to open a bank account. They often aren’t allowed in public without their parents. They are not viewed as people.

the reason why the way women were treated so closely mirrors the the way children are treated today is because their oppression functions off of the same system; The idea that the father of the household has ownership over the wife, the servants/slaves, and the children. we’ve already the women’s rights movement and the civil rights movement but we’ve yet to have any youth rights movement, and until that happens children will continue to be treated like women were.

[thesituation]

i don’t feel like debating that topic much farther bc truthfully if it comes down to “women will lose to men in every sport bc they don’t have as much testosterone!!!!!” my elite feminist response is honest to god “ok we will lose with honor as equals instead of having our own special Easy Mode Female category so we can win amongst ourselves” like i’m sorry i just can’t be persuaded. i’m a brick wall. i want co-ed sports

[thesituation]

i bring a sort of “women can lose at some sports against men if it means being regarded as equals” vibe to the debate that “testosterone objectively increases performance” people don’t really like

[rage-cupcakes]

I just think it's important for sports where you can hurt each other that we limit how badly you can be hurt by someone much bigger than you, so we should have gender segregated sports hmm

segregate sports by weight

stop playing American football

[spiritbladed]

something something extremely sexy when magic users resort to physical violence. yeah i have the power of god and anime on my side but i also have THESE HANDS. i cast Punch You In The Face. i take my magic staff through which i channel the vast energies of the elements and the cosmos and i cast Severe Concussion And Skull Fracture. casting time for xenoglossy too long, chose the quicker route of Stab You In The Throat.

[doctorbluesmanreturns]

[greatestgargadon]

[headspace-hotel]

i was reading several articles written by random upper-middle-class people about how Kids These Days are too anxious because their parents don't teach them to "deal with discomfort" and coddle them too much, and This Generation uses "trauma" to refer to any mild discomfort and have broadened the words "abuse" and "bullying" too much et cetera

There is a very abundant supply of such articles and a recent one especially annoyed the hell out of me because it (without actually mentioning the idea of disability) repeatedly alluded to accommodating a kid's sensory issues as example of parents being too permissive or failing to teach kids to tolerate discomfort.

That's bullshit because being in tune with your own needs and discomforts sensory wise is so fucking important for being able to adapt and function in the world.

Like, just an example, I got rid of almost every piece of clothing I own that was polyester or a polyester blend and just doing that dramatically improved my life and gave me more ability to cope with stressors, because I figured out that a lot of my sensory issues with clothes came from bad temperature regulation and the scratchy pills that polyester blends make.

"Discomfort tolerance" has never been super helpful as a concept for me. I have no problem tolerating discomfort in the sense of like, not doing anything about the thing that's hurting me. It's just that if I do it for too long, I can't think straight and process what's happening around me and I eventually become so fatigued it feels like I've got a fever, or else become uncontrollably angry.

I think "discomfort curiosity" is way better concept. You feel uncomfortable. What is the feeling like? Where in your body do you feel it? What does your body urge you to do about it? When does it start? What is it responding to? What about that thing makes you feel that way? Feel it...Experiment with it...Dabble in it...Play with it. I say curiosity because curiosity is so closely related to fear and to some extent, disgust. Curiosity is a frontier zone between repulsion and fascination.

Curiosity is an instinct that encourages us toward unfamiliar things, not away from them. It is part of a large landscape of feelings where away-instincts and toward-instincts are blended together.

I think of the difference between curiosity and fear to be like the difference between solitude and loneliness, or like excitement and apprehension. Or, think of exploring an eerie abandoned place, one of the "liminal spaces" the internet speaks of. The place is "eerie" which is closely related to fear, but the "eerieness" shades into becoming a positive stimulus that our instincts are drawn toward. Liminal spaces, for those of us that enjoy them, are "creepy," but they are also "nice" at the same time. And the "creepiness" is part of the "niceness."

And curiosity is sensitivity. It allows for openness and playfulness toward the unknown.

Many humans' relationships with their own urges and instincts are based on domination and punishment. Tyranny over the body by the mind. The goal is to absorb without shock and endure without indulging the urge to seek relief, to reduce your attunement to your body.

But the ability to be "less controlled by" your body's urges is not positive, because your body is providing information about what your needs are. I find that the ability to make reasoned decisions about how and when and why to persist through something painful requires a deeper attunement to the body's instincts, not a greater ability to ignore them.

Stop treating your bodies like they're animals in a cruel experiment to be shocked with electricity until they lay on the floor whimpering in helplessness. It doesn't help.

Also, any article that suggests people are taking bullying too seriously should be launched into the sun because we don't take it nearly seriously enough i think.

[knitkninja]

There is a concept of the window of tolerance. It can grow or shrink day to day, with a bigger window allowing you to handle more stuff.

I think sensory discomfort, pain, etc shrinks that window. I noticed with my youngest that, when he started on medication for ADHD, his window grew because he was no longer wrestling with his brain as much.

Allowing our kids to wear the clothes they prefer, like pants, while getting them in materials like linen so they don’t overheat, isn’t coddling. It’s allowing them to then focus on more important things.

[headspace-hotel]

Exactly. Removing stressors of thing like clothes that are wearing you down allows you to be more adventurous in daily life.