What am I doing here?

Karaoke maker, lurker, confused

[spaceshiprocket]

Alien by Paolo Rivera

[were--ralph]

cant stop thinking about this video

[were--ralph]

For context this was in response to someone saying their cybertruck was heavy duty

[sexygaywizard]

[things-about-cars-in-posts]

oh no no NO no no I am sorry my dear @thebirdtm you are NOT underselling one of the most seminal pieces of television of my entire childhood like that on MY watch.

"How is claiming they drowned a Hilux possibly underselling it" GREAT question.

To start with a little disclaimer, Top Gear's Hilux did not start off, as in the video above, in pristine condition. It started off with nigh-on 300k kms (for you yankees, that's about 8.4 million Boeing 737 wingspans) and a condition to match.

And it's only once careless driving around town yielded zilch in given shits...

(look, I found a local newspaper picturing it being driven around!)

...that they decided to drown it. Now, the underselling part: if you told me that they drowned a pickup the first place my mind would go to would be "driving it through a river a bit too deep for it, perhaps as deep as its height, until it stalls and then tugging it back out. You will concede that's rather different from tying it down on the seashore with the second highest tide in the world...

...and leaving it there until it engulfs the whole truck...

...only for the ropes to snap...

...and for the truck to be lost to the tides for FIVE HOURS.

(and for those wondering, yes, just as promised, well within an hour and the mandatory limits of basic tools and no spare parts, up the mechanic made the thing fire and away the presenter drove it - I must imagine doing a number on his clothes in the process.)

Oh also I would have mentioned the caravan.

Or at least the wrecking ball.

But hey, at least the fire was mentioned.

Still, I feel it's criminal to leave out how they celebrated it surviving all it did: by parking it at the top of a 23 story building for all to see! :)

Wait NO-

Well, that was uncalled for. Given what it survived, it deserved to rest in a museum instead of being unceremoniously cleared out with the other chunks of public housing that buried it.

Or at least, given that buried it wasn't...

...to be tumbled down from the rubble utop which it sat...

...and be fueled up.

"be fueled up", pfft, what for?, I hear you say. And you are right.

Look at that thing, you say.

Let's be serious now, however pretty of a story it would be that's not a truck that will do anything remotely in the ballpark of firing up, let alone running.

And again, you are right.

The battery was disconnected.

Sorted that, tho

"You can't be serious." Oh darling I sure can! "Well the presenters can't then" no no, I assure you, it lived. Go see it for yourself! It's at the National Motor Museum in Beaulieau, England!

I grew up watching Top Gear and it shaped me in many ways. My adoration of old Toyota Hiluxes is one of them.

[kyraneko]

The Toyota Hilux is absolutely the small god of endurance and defiance (and possibly masochism).

[thivell]

yes I'm reposting about a small god truck are you kidding me

[the-muppet-joker]

I have gone too soft. I need to become horny and evil again

[shiftythrifting]

Every page was one gut punch after another

[lopenash]

To any Americans that need to be made aware,

We are at a turning point, not only for our country but for the world. This upcoming election will dictate the course of this century and the following centuries. The decisions made by America and its citizens, by virtue of its position on the global stage, have massive influence over the safety and stability of the world. As goes America, so goes the world.

That's why it's so important that the Democrats win this fall at all costs. To do otherwise is to enable fascism. Donald Trump and his supporters intend to upend American democracy and install a dictatorship and every action taken to undermine the only feasible way of stopping this is complicit in aiding these fascists.

There are a frankly disturbing number of people who have come to deeply distressing conclusions about this race. There are those who say that the difference between the two parties is negligible at best. There are those who say that the Democrats need to lose because they've become too complacent and need a harsh lesson in order to push them to the left. And there are those who say that America deserves to have Trump win. All of these people are, at best, extremely ignorant and naive.

To those who say that the two candidate's politics are virtually identical: I implore you:

Get some fucking perspective.

You are saying that the man who embodies the past 50 years of American policy is comparable to the largest and most successful fascist since Adolf Hitler, who he resembles more every day. The man who enabled the Supreme Court to roll back Roe v. Wade, to dismantle Chevron, to legalize monarchy by installing ideologues hand-picked by the theocrats advocating for him and the ones who publicly outlined their plans for dismantling the protections of government. This is what you are saying is morally and politically equivalent to Joe Biden.

To those who say the Democrats need to lose because they've grown compliant: I envy you. I truly wish I was in your position to be able to skirt by the gaze of the ones who wish to harm me. But I and many others cannot do this. My ability to live is dictated by the whims of society and those whims could easily change under Republican rule. If you think that sacrificing people's lives in order to fulfill your fantasies of ushering in new utopian age is an acceptable course of action, I urge you to reevaluate your priorities and to remove yourself from the echochamber that convinced you your ideas are popular and mainstream.

To those who say America deserves to be subject to the rule of autocrats: you are a bad person. There is nothing else to be said. You do not believe in equality, in justice, in charity, nothing. This is just a game to you, and you are no different from the fascists that threaten us.

There are lives at stake in this election and anyone who perpetuates these views and discourages people from voting is tacitly endorsing fascism. We have been here before, less than 100 years ago and we're threatening to make the same mistakes our predecessors made. The rise of fascism in the 1920's and 30's was not inevitable, there were many times that they could have been stopped it. But, they didn't. They chose not to, after all, it would betray the Revolution if the Communist Party gave liberals a win. Or those that are the wrong kind of communist, they're just as bad as the fascists!

Don't let perfect be the enemy of good.

[thehmn]

I’m a strong proponent of lying to get the help you need. I always try the truthful route first but if that gets me nowhere? Lying it is.

I think it’s important to respect other people’s time, wellbeing and money so I don’t do it in situations where I know I’m in the wrong, like if I want to get into a place just for fun and someone could get in trouble for letting me in wrongfully I’d rather not.

But sometimes people just don’t understand why something is important in your situation so you have to turn it into something they understand. When I lived in England I constantly lied about being pregnant so gas station employees would let me use their bathroom because for some reason they didn’t have public bathrooms.

Or when my doctor’s secretary couldn’t get it into her head that my stomach pains were very serious and concerning and insisted I couldn’t get an appointment this month so that evening I “found” a lump that I was pretty sure was nothing but it meant I had a reason to call her the next day and get a new appointment immediately and when the doctor told me the lump was harmless I could tell her what my real problem was and she immediately scheduled ALL the tests and examinations because she understood how concerning it was. I just had to get past the fucking secretary with a lie.

Fuck I even support that elderly man who lied about having four children who were stuck in a house during a flood but when the rescue team got there in a dinghy they realized it was four dogs. The guy knew he had to lie because he was too sick to help them himself (able bodied people in the area were able to save their own pets) and they wouldn’t have helped him if they knew it was “just dogs”. In the video the rescue team can be seen choking up and padding him on the back while he cries with his scared dogs in his arms. The team is clearly not mad because they can see how important the dogs are to him but I have no doubt he was right in thinking they wouldn’t have helped if he had told them the truth.

So do what ya gotta do and lie lie lie.

[comicaurora]

I've been reading some stuff on punitive justice, and it made something click for me that I've observed a lot online but haven't been able to put into words before.

When someone does something wrong, that's bad, and the damage it does needs to be repaired while the person needs to try to do better in future to minimize repeating harm. We learn it in preschool - say sorry, don't do it again. If they keep at it, remove them from the situation where they can do the harm until they prove they're responsible enough to go back in.

So if it turns out someone DIDN'T do anything wrong, that should be a relief! There's no damage to fix, no internal errors to correct. Less work for everybody, literally no harm done. False alarm, all good.

The thing I've observed is, lots of people want them to have done something wrong. There's almost disappointment when it turns out there's no harm done. And I think that's because of this general undercurrent of punitive justice as morally righteous and desirable: someone does something wrong, you get to punish them. Turns out they're innocent? That's disappointing. Find another reason you get to punish them, or find another bad person you get to punish. But at the core of it is that desire to punish someone. Someone you can hurt in a way that makes you a better person for hurting them.

This particular brand of almost cannibalistic pseudo-justice is super common in tumblr, one of the most ostensibly liberal spaces on the internet; I see more borderline savagery in online discourse here than in the actually toxic parts of the internet that are just openly cruel for cruelty's sake. It's always thrown me for a loop, and has frankly also hurt me, because on the rare occasions I get personally dogpiled, it only actually stings when it makes me worry that I've legitimately hurt someone. If I did something wrong, or more realistically when I inevitably do something wrong, that would make it good and right for people to give me shit about it every day until I'm dead.

The thing that clicked for me most recently was this bit in Ijeoma Oluo's Be A Revolution:

Punitive justice is specifically, uniquely appealing to people who have suffered injustices. Of course it's the Tumblr zeitgeist. Everyone here is a marginalized person failed by at least one system. Punishing someone for perceived injustice is how someone the system has deemed worthless proves their value in blood, even if the person being punished hasn't harmed you directly - even if they haven't harmed anyone. "Righteous" anger isn't about the target in these cases, it's about the inflicter. This is how much my pain is worth.

And that kind of violent validation is so alluring and so very dangerous. It seeks an outlet, wearing the justification of justice. Who's in reach? Who's an acceptable target this week? What's a good reason to use?

Is there anything they could do that would make me stop?

[comicaurora]

I missed a spot. A crucial factor in all this is that the root of this, that righteous anger? It's not intrinsically bad. It's the burning white-hot core of self-worth and human dignity. It flares up when you are harmed, belittled, dismissed. It is valuable and it wants to protect you. Without it, it's difficult to know why and how to stand up for yourself. Without its warmth, very little will stop you from coldly doing whatever is expected of you, coldly going along with what others want.

But it's still fire. It can't be allowed to burn uncontrollably. Fire is good in a hearth and bad outside of it. It wants to keep you safe, but it's also your job to keep the world safe from it.

[patricia-taxxon]

imagine if the dadaist movement happened for the first time in 2021, and suddenly millions of rich grifters decided that they don't need to pay artists anymore if they can just appreciate the serendipitous beauty of the readymade, and then acted confused when the vast majority of the public was indifferent or annoyed with this. i think this is how i feel about AI art

[patricia-taxxon]

AI art fascinates me. it's the first time that something this fringe and modernist has attempted to become mass media. of course most people would be hostile to it, it eludes interpretation. come one come all to the AMC theatre to see the collected works of carl andre

[patricia-taxxon]

i respect carl andre vastly more than i respect most AI artists, not because of an ideological disagreement but because carl andre at least knows his work is completely fucking inaccessible

[becausegoodheroesdeservekidneys]

The thing with the Mari Lwyd, though, is that it's being... I don't know, 'appropriated' is the wrong word, but certainly turned into something it isn't.

Thing is, this is a folk tradition in the Welsh language, and that's the most important aspect of it. I feel partly responsible for this, because I accidentally became a bit of an expert on the topic of the Mari Lwyd in a post that escaped Tumblr containment, and I clearly didn't stress it strongly enough there (in my defence, I wrote that post for ten likes and some attention); but this is a Welsh language tradition, conducted in Welsh, using Welsh language poetic forms that are older than the entire English language, and also a very specific sung melody (with a very specific first verse; that's Cân y Fari). It is not actually a 'rap battle'. It's not a recited poem. It is not any old rhyme scheme however you want.

It is not in English.

Given the extensive and frankly ongoing attempts by England to wipe out Welsh, and its attendant cultural traditions, the Mari is being revived across Wales as an act of linguistic-cultural defiance. She's a symbol of Welsh language culture, specifically; an icon to remind that we are a distinct people, with our own culture and traditions, and in spite of everyone and everything, we're still here. Separating her from that by removing the Welsh is, to put it mildly, wildly disrespectful.

...but it IS what I'm increasingly seeing, both online and in real world Mari Lwyd festivals. She's gained enormous pop-culture popularity in recent years, which is fantastic; but she's also been reduced from the tradition to just an aesthetic now.

So many people are talking/drawing about her as though she's a cryptid or a mythological figure, rather than the folk practice of shoving a skull on a stick and pretending to be a naughty horse for cheese and drunken larks. And I get it! It's an intriguing visual! Some of the artwork is great! But this is not what she is. She's not a Krampus equivalent for your Dark Christmas aesthetic.

I see people writing their own version of the pwnco (though never called the pwnco; almost always called some variant on 'Mari Lwyd rap battle'), and as fun as these are, they are never even written in the meter and poetic rules of Cân y Fari, much less in Welsh, and they never conclude with the promise to behave before letting the Mari into the house. The pwnco is the central part to the tradition; this is the Welsh language part, the bit that's important and matters.

Mari Lwyd festivals are increasingly just English wassail festivals with a Mari or two present. The Swansea one last weekend didn't even include a Mari trying to break into a building (insert Shrek meme); there was no pwnco at all. Even in the Chepstow ones, they didn't do actual Cân y Fari; just a couple of recited verses. Instead, the Maris are just an aesthetic, a way to make it look a bit more Welsh, without having to commit to the unfashionable inconvenience of actually including Welsh.

And I don't really know what the answers are to these. I can tell you what I'd like - I'd like art to include the Welsh somewhere, maybe incorporating the first line of Cân y Fari like this one did, to keep it connected to the actual Welsh tradition (or other Welsh, if other phrases are preferred). I'd like people who want to write their version of the pwnco to respect the actual tradition of it by using Cân y Fari's meter and rhyme scheme, finishing with the promise to behave, and actually calling it the pwnco rather than a rap battle (and preferably in Welsh, though I do understand that's not always possible lol). I'd like to see the festivals actually observe the tradition, and include a link on the booking website to an audio clip of Cân y Fari and the words to the first verse, so attendees who want to can learn it ahead of time. I don't know how feasible any of that is, of course! But that's what I'd like to see.

I don't know. This is rambly. But it's something I've been thinking about - and increasingly nettled by - for a while. There's was something so affirming and wonderful at first about seeing the Mari's climb into international recognition, but it's very much turned to dismay by now, because she's important to my endangered culture and yet that's the part that everyone apparently wants to drop for being too awkward and ruining the aesthetic. It's very frustrating.

[carne-asada-fries]

I mean, 'appropriation' sounds like absolutely the right word to me, especially in regard to that last paragraph... If we were talking about a tradition that comes from somewhere outside of Europe, people would be absolutely howling the A word, but it doesn't necessarily ping on their radar in this case because Welsh folks are white and not as obviously a minority group to most of them. Which.... is its own can of worms with potential for some pretty gross takes in it, unfortunately (said as someone in a field that has to cope with neo-nazi types trying to misappropriate from it on the daily). It is awesome that the world is learning about endangered cultural traditions and are more keen to embrace them rather than condemn them as other and weird as was done in the past, but the key word in that should be learning. Good on you, OP, for calling this out.

[becausegoodheroesdeservekidneys]

You may be right. Though funnily enough, I actually think a lot of the acceptance of the Mari Lwyd in recent years is actually because of her being seen as Weird and Other, in counterpoint to your last point - that's why people like her. And like... sure, she is weird, I guess. But in a very mundane "now let's get drunk" kind of way.

I think it possibly varies by case - for example, as I say, I actually do love a lot of the Mari-Lwyd-as-cryptid art, I recognise that it's an evocative image, and it's fun to explore. One of my favourite pieces is this one:

Here's one from Shoggoth.net, where she is literally a cryptid:

And this is a fairly common motif:

And to be clear - I love all of these! These are great!

But equally, each of these is part of this overall make-her-a-cryptid trend. She's a creature in her own right; she's sinister; she represents the creep of untameable nature, the dead come to life, something that wants to get in. She has antlers in that last one, something horses do not have, but they feel... idk, correct? This is evocative of the Old God imagery, so she gets antlers. I have seen many antlered Mari Lwyd pieces at this point. It's a semi-common theme.

And if you google Mari Lwyd images, or even if you look in the Tumblr tag, this is the kind of artwork you get. Ancient, wild, untameable, sinister, thing-that-wants-to-come-in. It's fun! I do enjoy many of them!

But

There's a Welsh artist, Clive Hicks-Jenkins, and he has produced some amazing Mari Lwyd art over the years. Some of that is sort of cryptid-like, too. But he grew up as a child afraid of his dad doing the Mari and having nightmares about it, so is coming at it from an insider perspective, and I think you can tell. Most of his pieces make the human component clear:

And I think even the more nightmarish and abstract ones still, at their core, retain the idea that this isn't a magical creature from the woods of Annwfn but something constructed out of an actual horse and actual people:

Compare that to most of the Mari Lwyd art on Tumblr, and it's all "dark and wild creature representing the Old Gods"; because that's increasingly how she's known and seen.

And like. It's a hedonistic pageant figure who wants cheese and fun. She's not here to eat your children. She's here for fun and also fermented produce to get her bladdered. She is supposed to be silly. Her attendants - never mentioned, by the way, that's another thing - are fucking Punch and Judy characters. The pwnco isn't high art, it's not a faerie spinning riddles - those insults become "So's your FACE" type insults. It's supposed to be ridiculous, and stupid, and fun.

So it gets weird to me when people present her as a Dark Christmas alternative. Not appropriation necessarily? But certainly projection; she looks like an Old God kind of figure because she has a skull for a head, and she sings to come in, and if you phrase it like that, it can sound sinister and therefore like a very familiar type of aesthetic. I suppose it's then easy to project that aesthetic on, without even realising it. Plus, I think a lot of people like to try to reject the trappings of Christian culture including the iconography - things like Krampus and Mari Lwyd seem to run counter to them, so they get gleefully seized upon as anti-Christmas icons.

That said I would legit be much happier with all of the Sinister Old God shit if every artist who did it wrote the words "Wel dyma ni'n diwad gyfeillion diniwad, i ofyn am gennad..." in the air around their cryptid to include the Welsh. Like, that would genuinely go a long way to help the issue. Still weird! But much more respectful.

This is getting away from me! I shall finish by showing you all the absolute best Mari-Lwyd-as-cryptid art I have seen recently on Tumblr, though, which is this one:

Sillay.

[canadianwheatpirates]

There was a good paper about intercultural communication and performing stories from other cultures that I read in my comms studies undergrad, and I think its framework might be useful here. It's called Performance as a moral act: Ethical dimensions of the ethnography of performance by Dwight Conquergood.

The basic idea is that respectful performance of another culture's materials involves balancing two axes: Identity-Difference (i.e. how similar you treat the other culture's materials to your own) and Detachment-Commitment (how hard you try to faithfully reproduce that culture's materials). Going too far along these axes creates four "pitfalls" that the paper discusses.

In the case of Mari Lwyd I think you're getting a variety of positions. You're obviously getting the people who don't really want to look into it and just borrow the surface elements to make it a cryptid; they're detached from it, and viewing it as generically similar to their own culture, which Conquergood calls "The Custodian's Rip-Off".

However, I think you're also seeing the effects of people having the right amount of commitment -- wanting to treat it as its own specific tradition rather than just a cryptid -- but are still going wrong on the Identity-Difference axis in some way. Going too far into Difference is how you get people acting like it's ~spooky~ and impossible for foreigners to learn properly, so it simply has to be observed by outsiders; this is "The Curator's Exhibitionism". On the other hand, someone who goes the other way can overshoot into "The Enthusiast's Infatuation", which generally looks like the over-eager newbie who doesn't realise that there are certain cultural practises which are closed to them or take time to learn, and who doesn't acknowledge the differences between the culture they're meeting and their own.

(For completeness, "The Skeptic's Cop-Out" is the classic faux-anti-appropriation "oh it's never appropriate to engage with other cultures, even if the materials are being willingly shared" thing).

[becausegoodheroesdeservekidneys]

This is super interesting, thank you! I shall ruminate upon this

[theatrechatelet]

Bob Wilson au Châtelet

Avant Einstein on the Beach, Bob Wilson est déjà venu au Châtelet à plusiers reprises : Oedipus Rex, Winterreise, Orphée et Euridice, Alceste, Tétralogie de Wagner …

En 2000 il met en scène Orphee et Euridice de Gluck dirigé par Sir John Eliot Gardiner.

Ainsi qu’Alcetste, avec Anne Sofie von Otter

En octobre 1990, il met en scène The Black Rider - The Casting of the Magic Bullets sur une musique de Tom Waits et un livret de William Burroughs.

En 2005-2006, Bob Wilson monte le Ring de Wagner

©Marie-Noëlle Robert

En mars 2007, il présente La Passion selon Saint Jean de Bach, dirigée par Emmanuelle Haïm.

©Marie-Noëlle Robert

[lopenash]

Wish I could find more of his Ring Cycle

[patricia-taxxon]

self-infantilization is a surprisingly common way that people interface with the more confusing aspects of sexuality, it's just extremely taboo to say that out loud. but i dunno, maybe it shouldn't be. like i'm 23 and im too autistic to process sexuality with any more nuance than "need body close now," it feels exactly the same as it did when I was young. i'm an adult now though & i can give consent, its chill

[patricia-taxxon]

some of you really need to have the idea of "two consenting adults" reaffirmed in your heads

[gaystation4]

[lopenash]

I am born

[littlepeakydevil]

I originally had typed up a whole ass angry rant about how fucking awful some of the takes are about Oppenheimer (it seems primarily from people who haven't even seen the fucking film), but I decided against posting it (and then I wrote this which now that I'm reading over it, still ended up being a bit of an angry fucking rant so oops).

But what I will say is that the film does not glorify the bomb or what it was used for. So please shut the fuck up about that. Also, this is a story about J. Robert Oppenheimer. The bomb is a large part of the story because it was a huge part of his life. But the focus is on him and his emotional journey through the film. They are trying to pack about 600 pages of dense material into three hours. There is simply not enough time to go on a side quest to address a lot of the things many of you are insisting be addressed. Especially when Oppenheimer himself was not directly involved in them.

I've seen many people say that this story should never have been told. And, kindly, fuck you. We live in an age where people are constantly trying to change, discredit, or dismiss history. We desperately need more people to become engaged with it again. Prior to this film, there were a whole ton of people who had been so failed by their history classes they had no idea who J. Robert Oppenheimer even was. People still know alarmingly little about the bomb and the scientists who worked on it and if this film allows them to be more interested/educated in that topic, that's a win.

This film brings to light more than just the bomb. It's a discussion on morality and the relationship between scientists and the government.

Also, you don't get to say that a piece of art shouldn't be made just because it makes you fucking uncomfortable. Don't consume that piece of art, then. But you have no right to say someone shouldn't make something, or others shouldn't consume or enjoy it just because it makes you uncomfortable.

[hamletthedane]

Love that Oppenheimer is a deeply disturbing horror movie about a man forced to accept that he is, in a person, the representative manifestation of mankind’s evil in committing one of the greatest horrors of human history - LITERALLY acting as the modern Prometheus, tormented by his sins for the remainder of time. Knowing that he will never be pitied and his actions will forever be utterly unforgivable because the blood of genocide and the potential of total human annihilation will eternally drip from his hands.

But also the simultaneous indictment by the film that to blame a single person for the Manhattan Project is to refuse to accept your own capacity for great evil if the ends ever seem to justify the means, and the culpability of every member of a species that lets itself create something so unspeakably terrible.

Hate that twitter’s take on such a nuanced and brilliantly handled examination of those issues is “movie bad because protagonist not evil enough.”

[lopenash]

Good god I am getting real fucking sick of the discourse around Oppenheimer. It really feels like people can't tolerate seeing people they've decided are bad be portrayed as anything less than mustache twirling villains.

People can do awful things and still be ostensibly good people. The banality of evil is a thing.

[lopenash]

I have returned.