JMetropolis @jmetropolis - Tumblr Blog

Ok extra context from your friendly neighborhood Master's Degree holding archivist:

Archives are "curated" according to what's called a "collection policy". That means a policy that dictates what you collect; usually along a theme. For example at the university I used to work at the collection policy was to collect archival material pertaining to the local area and its history/important figures. At the historic home I currently work at, the collection policy covers materials pertaining to the person who lived at the house.

AO3 collects fan works and original writing. That's it. That's how they "curate". They don't allow a copy paste of published works (for legal reasons) and they don't allow commissioned works (for legal reasons) . Everything else that falls under fan works and original writing is part of their collection policy. Everything. That's how archives work.

#ao3

chibird

As a self-employed artist, I have a hard time taking any time off. I'm responsible for everything for my business- the art, social media, manufacturing, finances. When everything is on my shoulders, it feels harder to rest. But it's important to prioritize that rest before I get burnt out, sick, or miserable! If I wait until after things have deteriorated, it'll take much longer to get back to a healthy state.

This applies no matter what situation or job you're in. Don't wait until you're running on fumes to rest!

Chibird store | Positive pin club | Instagram

#rest #taking breaks #important

beardedmrbean

Scientists invented a fake disease. AI told people it was real: Nature.com

I'm a bit frightened for the time when someone less ethical than the person that did this decides to repeat the experiment but leave out the part where they come in later and announce that it was fake and people wind up diagnosed with the fake condition and all kinds of wacky hi jinks ensues.

#ai #medicine #yikes

sush7959

the best time to read fanfiction is when you hv a dozen other things to do and the last thing you shud spend your time on is reading abt two idiots falling in love (again) but i swear it just hits harder then

#facts #ao3

the-wanton-house-wife

#kindness #one person caring changes trajectories #be the change you want to see in the world

dogpuppy

chickenmim

Dude... allow me to add to your trove.

I have a folder of these on my phone... I'm not sure what that says about me!

teaboot

This has always bothered me too and it didn't make sense until someone older told me that when they were growing up "scare quotes" were used the way we used *asterisks* or ALL CAPS for emphasis

No animals in the house, sweetheart

#the nice guys

yrbeecharmer

giving myself a merit badge that says SURVIVED MARCH

yrbeecharmer

oh fuck. I’m so sorry. listening and learning

#lol

coffee-n-kush

not-this-crude-matter

#lol

letterful

In Orwell’s essay “A Hanging,” the writer watches the condemned man, walking toward the gallows, swerve to avoid a puddle. For Orwell, this represents precisely what he calls the “mystery” of the life that is about to be taken: when there is no good reason for it, the condemned man is still thinking about keeping his shoes clean. It is an “irrelevant” act (and a marvelous bit of noticing on Orwell’s part). Now suppose this were not an essay but a piece of fiction. And indeed there has been a fair amount of speculation about the proportion of fact to fiction in such essays of Orwell’s.

The avoidance of the puddle would be precisely the kind of superb detail that, say, Tolstoy might flourish; War and Peace has an execution scene very close in spirit to Orwell’s essay, and it may well be that Orwell basically cribbed the detail from Tolstoy. In War and Peace, Pierre witnesses a man being executed by the French, and notices that, just before death, the man adjusts the blindfold at the back of his head, because it is uncomfortably tight. The avoidance of the puddle, the fiddling with the blindfold—these are what might be called irrelevant or superfluous details. They are not explicable; in fiction, they exist to denote precisely the inexplicable. This is one of the “effects” of realism, of “realistic” style.

But Orwell’s essay, assuming it records an actual occurrence, shows us that such fictional effects are not merely conventionally irrelevant, or formally arbitrary, but have something to tell us about the irrelevance of reality itself (…) There was no logical reason for the condemned man to avoid the puddle. It was pure remembered habit. Life, then, will always contain an inevitable surplus, a margin of the gratuitous, a realm in which there is always more than we need: more things, more impressions, more memories, more habits, more words, more happiness, more unhappiness.

— JAMES WOOD, from How Fiction Works.

letterful

What exactly do these irrational standards mean? They mean the supremacy of the detail over the general, of the part that is more alive than the whole, of the little thing which a man observes and greets with a friendly nod of the spirit while the crowd around him is being driven by some common impulse to some common goal. I take my hat off to the hero who dashes into a burning house and saves his neighbor’s child; but I shake his hand if he has risked squandering a precious five seconds to find and save, together with the child, its favorite toy. I remember a cartoon depicting a chimney sweep falling from the roof of a tall building and noticing on the way that a sign-board had one word spelled wrong, and wondering in his headlong flight why nobody had thought of correcting it. In a sense, we all are crashing to our death from the top story of our birth to the flat stones of the churchyard and wondering with an immortal Alice in Wonderland at the patterns of the passing wall. This capacity to wonder at trifles — no matter the imminent peril — these asides of the spirit, these footnotes in the volume of life are the highest forms of consciousness, and it is in this childishly speculative state of mind, so different from commonsense and its logic, that we know the world to be good.

— VLADIMIR NABOKOV, from Lectures on Literature.

#writing #life

keepthedelta

possibly the best ever piece of american sports journalism

theprofessional-amateur

"This morning, we posted NBC anchor Mary Carillo's 2004 rant about badminton because we had never seen it before and we wanted to share it with the world. Carillo just wrote an email to us, explaining how that monologue made it on the air:

"Can't believe that thing's still around. I was hosting a morning show in Athens that covered a lot of badminton—some table tennis too, but badminton, I'd been assured, was going to be "the curling of the Summer Games." (!) There was no script for that rant—just a little dead time—but it got some chuckles and a head shake from my producer. It was a pretty loose show—I'd already explained a team handball's size by comparing it against various members of the melon family, and when I found out that equestrian horses were listed as "equipment" I did a rant on the fact that horses needed passports to get into the country and dramatically produced one, so surely they needed an identity upgrade..

"That sort of nonsense got me a hosting gig on Torino's Olympic Ice show, which is still one of my all-time favorite scams. Don't know if it's still kicking around, but maybe my salute to Guido The Zamboni Guy is still out there from that wackadoodle show..

"Don't know how I stay employed,carillo

Mary Carillo is cool as hell. Also, someone please bring us her salute to Guido the Zamboni Guy.

Link to Deadspin article