will byers stan first human second
Cosmic Funnies
Mike Driver
★
taylor price
PUT YOUR BEARD IN MY MOUTH
JVL
izzy's playlists!
let's talk about Bridgerton tea, my ask is open
AnasAbdin
we're not kids anymore.
tannertan36
Love Begins
Xuebing Du
祝日 / Permanent Vacation
#extradirty
Aqua Utopia｜海の底で記憶を紡ぐ
ellievsbear
$LAYYYTER
Discoholic 🪩
seen from Malaysia
seen from Germany
seen from United Kingdom
seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from Türkiye
seen from Netherlands
seen from Belgium
seen from Sweden
seen from United States
seen from Malaysia
seen from United Kingdom
seen from Spain
seen from Brazil
seen from France
seen from Italy
seen from United States
seen from United Kingdom
seen from Germany
seen from United States
@lysariala
A Treasured Treasury of Beloved Characters (2024).
Wool felt, cotton lawn, strawboard, embroidery & poly cotton thread, recycled PET stuffing, armature wire, plastic eyes.
Here is a collection of characters I met when I was small, all of whom have stayed with me every day since. They are housed, stitched and squished in this felt book, akin to their arrangement in my brain.
Posters available here.
Angled sunbeam butterfly larva, Curetis acuta, Lycaenidae
Found throughout South and Southeast Asia
Gif for those who don’t want to play the video:
via Flickr: The caterpillars are remarkable enough for the twin periscopes on their hind ends which contain tentacle organs. When threatened, the caterpillar telescopes these structures outwards of their sheath in the form of a bouquet of hair-like tentacles which whirl around. This is presumably a defensive mechanism designed to alarm a potential predator, but it is hypothesized that they may also have a volatile secretion dissipation function as well.
Adult:
Photos by milind_bhakare
Luna moth and death head moth
new low for our brave and fearless CEO: individually targeting random trans women posting on TWITTER and taking the time to find and publicize a list of every sideblog. most normal tech bro
I think this response says it all:
This is not just a matter of popular users of a platform clashing with its rules, is the owner of a big company showing a pattern of abuse to people under his authority, and probably a very bad signal to the corporate partners of his company.
So I looked this up and the whole story is wild.
Basically, market research for japanese bakeries determined that a) they sell more breads and pastries the more different varieties they have, and b) japanese bakery customers prefer items which are not wrapped, because individually wrapped things give the impression of being like, preserved or something instead of fresh and good I guess? So the obvious solution is to sell as many different kinds of unwrapped breads and pastries as you can.
But! In actual practice, that’s a nightmare. No packaging means no barcodes to scan, so the cashier needs to know all like 200 different (often very similar) items by heart and add them up manually, which means training new employees is a slow and painful process and customer service in general suffers badly. And having a person handle all those un-packaged foodstuffs to count them or examine them, in addition to being slow and clumsy, is unsanitary as fuck.
So one bakery chain owner approached this computer guy in 2007 asking for a system to automate the checkout process. It took five years and the company barely survived a financial crisis in the middle, but long story short they developed a highly specialized AI that will look at the pile of bread a customer picked out and automatically identify everything, tally it up, and charge them correctly, while the live cashier is free to make small talk or help people out or whatever. The whole process is simple, fast, sanitary, and pleasant for customers and employees alike, and to an outsider it looks like fucking magical bullshit.
But then in 2017 a doctor saw an ad for this bakery scanning system and it occurred to him that cells under a microscope don’t look all that different from weird loaves of bread. And it turns out that yeah, you can use almost all of the same code to analyze a tissue sample and pick out any potentially cancerous cells in it. Other people have started buying the same program for everything from analyzing the readout from big physics experiments to labeling charms and amulets for sale at shrines to detecting problems in the wiring on jet engines.
I knew pastry would save the world one day.
This is a good use of AI! Do the tedious work so the worker can socialize with the customer. And then use that same AI to fight cancer. This is fantastic! I hate AI “art” but not AI as a whole.
For those who are mutuals.
It is my sad duty to report that @saint-batrick is no longer with us. They were rushed to the hospital earlier today unresponsive, and we have just learned that they have passed.
If I find out more, I'll update. Damn it, Bat.
I hate how long it'd been since I'd seen them and I hate that they're gone :( love you Bat-friend
imagine being on your little dried peapod shell of a boat with your fragile little human self and then
out of the depths below
the Divine
God-Beasts
come right up to YOU
capable of crushing you without even noticing you
and ever so gently
so gently
roll back and forth around the dried leaf you're sitting on
just to maybe examine you and see what you're doing in their world.
When I was in the hospital, they gave me a big bracelet that said ALLERGY, but like. I'm allergic to bees. Were they going to prescribe me bees in there.
So there's a medication called hyaluronidase. It's used to make other medications absorb better, because it makes the cell wall more permeable.
One common usage is to make local anesthetic more effective during surgery, for instance. It's used in a number of injected medications.
Bee stings contain an enzyme very similar to this medication, so sometimes, people with bee allergies have an allergic reaction to hyaluronidase.
This is called cross-reactivity, where your body mistakes something for the thing it's actually allergic to, and has an allergic reaction anyway. For instance, sometimes people with latex allergies also are allergic to bananas and other fruits. They don't actually contain latex, but there are some similar proteins.
Apparently, hyraluronidase used in humans is derived from one of four sources: sheep testicles, cow testicles, cow testicles again, and GMO hamster ovaries.
tl;dr: They won't inject you with bees, but they might inject you with purified cow testicle juice, and your body might say 'eh, cow balls are BASICALLY bees' and try to kill you anyway.
Your personal triggers and squicks do not get to determine what kind of art other people make.
People make shit. It's what we do. We make shit to explore, to inspire, to explain, to understand, but also to cope, to process, to educate, to warn, to go, "hey, wouldn't that be fucked up? Wild, right?"
Yes, sure, there are things that should be handled with care if they are used at all. But plenty more things are subjective. Some things are just not going to be to your tastes. So go find something that is to your tastes and stop worrying so much about what other people are doing and trying to dictate universal moral precepts about art based on your personal triggers and squicks.
I find possession stories super fucking triggering if I encounter them without warning, especially if they function as a sexual abuse metaphor. I'm not over here campaigning for every horror artist to stop writing possession stories because they make me feel shaky and dissociated. I just check Does The Dog Die before watching certain genres, and I have my husband or roommate preview anything I think might upset me so they can give me more detail. And if I genuinely don't think I can't handle it, I don't watch it. It's that simple.
#this excludes writing pedo or incest.
If you look at the tags on my original post, this post was originally about hospital horror, and how it's allowed to exist even if an individual has medical trauma and doesn't like the genre. But since someone wanted to go and put some shit on my post that I disagree with:
No, actually, it doesn't exclude those things. Dark themes in fiction are allowed to exist whether you like them or not.
Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita was not a real little girl who really got brutalized. She was a fictional character. No real child was harmed. People are not reading Lolita and going out thinking, "oh, this told me to abuse children, and clearly it's morally okay now." The existence of Lolita is not responsible for the existence of CSA.
Wes Craven's New Nightmare was pretty meta, but Freddy Krueger was still never real and never hurt any real kids, either. He's a story. None of those kids ever died, none of them ever got abused, and Fred Krueger never got burned to death, because they're all fake and never existed. Murder and CSA in the real world aren't Freddy Krueger's fault.
Jaime and Cersei Lannister are not real people. They are fake. They are words on paper, and actors on a screen. Lena Headey and Nikolaj Coster-Waldau are not siblings, and did not ever have real sex in the show. It was fake, simulated, not real sex. No siblings actually fucked. Nobody is watching/reading Game of Thrones and thinking, "oh, I can totally go fuck my sibling with no repercussions now!" The existence of Game of Thrones is not responsible for real-world incest.
Guillermo del Toro's film Crimson Peak didn't kick off an epidemic of everyone deciding it's okay to fuck their sister and kill their wife. William Faulkner's "A Rose For Emily" isn't making people kill men and sleep with their corpses, and Emily never really killed Homer because neither of them actually exist in the first place.
John Wick isn't making people run out and become hitmen. The very cute doggy that infamously dies in the first movie was not actually a real dog death--the dogs in John Wick were treated very well, according to a ScreenRant article I found!
Ghostface was played by a combination of stuntmen and a very talented voice actor, and all his murder victims were actors who were filming a pretend story. It was all choreographed and nobody really died. The benind-the-scenes stuff for the Scream series is actually really cool if you're into that sort of thing like I am.
Arcane didn't put grenade launchers in people's hands and turn them into vigilante fighters juiced up on Super Drugs--and you know what, neither did any of the things the Batman franchise has churned out. The Joker and Scarecrow and Poison Ivy and Harley Quinn aren't out there terrorizing New York City, because they're fantasy supervillains who aren't real and can't hurt you.
The endless waves of bandits in Skyrim are pixels on a screen, and I'm not killing real men when I cut them down. No real people got hurt when my Sims 4 house caught fire. Playing Super Smash Brothers hasn't gotten me into underground fighting rings, and neither did watching Fight Club.
It's all fiction.
None of it is real.
The characters are fake and do not exist.
Curate your own media experience and get your head out of your ass.
[ID: a comment left by tumblr user msexcelfractal, which reads "Cool post OP, now do Birth of a Nation. End ID.]
Content warning: antiblackness, antisemitism, sinophobia, general discussion of bigotry and oppression
You really want to try and go there as if that's some kind of gotcha on the subject of dark fiction? Fine. Let's go there. I've got sources and free time.
Birth of a Nation is a horrific hate crime of a film. It is flagrantly racist and was connected to a surge in KKK membership. Nobody should watch that film for enjoyment. It's horrific. Nobody should be forced to watch it, either. You don't have to watch the film, and I don't recommend you do, unless you're actively involved in studying it for whatever reason. It's a bad, hateful movie.
I have not watched it in its entirety and I don't really ever intend to. There are Black scholars who have already broken it down and discussed it at length, and I don't feel I'm going to get anything out of the film that they haven't already covered. If I need to study Birth of a Nation in more depth for whatever reason, I'm going to defer to Black scholarship on the subject.
But if you tried to ban the film altogether? If you tried to erase it from existence? I would ask what the fuck is wrong with you. Banning Birth of a Nation does absolutely nothing to combat the racism that created it. It wouldn't stop racists from making racist art. It wouldn't erase the damage done by the film. It wouldn't go back in time and make it retroactively never made.
You know what banning it would do, though? It would strip film scholars of the ability to discuss it. It would prohibit people from talking about exactly why it was bad. It would inhibit honest conversations about what the film was and who it affected.
You know what you do with horrific bigoted art like Birth of a Nation? You have content warnings, like the one I put at the beginning of this reply. You don't spring it on people who don't want to discuss it. You don't put it on for people to watch without warning. You don't tell everyone you know to go and watch it and give it money.
You do things like what Warner Brothers did with their Tom and Jerry disclaimer:
“These animated shorts are products of their time. Some of them may depict some of the ethnic and racial prejudices that were commonplace in American society. These depictions were wrong then and are wrong today. While the following does not represent the Warner Bros. view of today’s society, these animated shorts are being presented as they were originally created, because to do otherwise would be the same as claiming these prejudices never existed.”
You damn sure don't erase it from history and pretend that ignoring it will solve bigotry. Censorship is not the answer, because censorship is always enforced harder on marginalized artists. You ban racism in film, you ban films by Black artists who are exploring the topic from their own perspective.
When the Hays Code banned "offense to other nations," you know what happened? It didn't stop racism in film, that's for damn sure. It instead gave bigoted censors a perfectly legal and easy way to shut down art by marginalized people, which they did gladly.
The rise of the Nazi Party in Germany resulted in the Reichsfilmkammer demanding the removal of all Jewish workers from Hollywood's European locations. American films began receiving heavy censorship and bans in Germany, and so American studios complied with the Reichsfilmkammer's demands in order to avoid legal trouble in Germany.
Despite the Nazi party's outright hostility toward Hollywood, the MPPDA office discouraged any negative depiction of Germany or the Nazi party. Germany had been such a huge market for American cinema that the Reichsfilmkammer's censorship codes for German films began impacting American-made cinema. Jewish representation in cinema all but disappeared overnight. Joseph Breen, the head of the censor board, was an open antisemite, going on open tirades against Jewish people. His censorship policies were flagrantly bigoted and only served to reinforce that bigotry on a systemic level.
In 1933, Herman J. Mankiewicz and Sam Jaffe tried and failed to make an anti-Hitler film titled "The Mad Dog of Europe." The Hays Code was used to deny the film's production. On July 17, 1933, Will Hays himself ordered the filmmakers to cease and desist, all in the name of "not offending Germany."
Said Joseph Breen, "It is to be remembered that there is strong pro-German and anti-Semitic feeling in this country, and, while those who are likely to approve of an anti-Hitler picture may think well of such an enterprise, they should keep in mind that millions of Americans might think otherwise.”
Variety said about the subject, “American attitude on the matter is that American companies cannot afford to lose the German market no matter what the inconvenience of personnel shifts."
Anna May Wong, a Chinese-American actress, lost out on a leading role in the film "The Good Earth," due to the Code's explicit ban on interracial relationships. The leading man had already been cast with a white man wearing yellowface, meaning that Wong was unable to be cast as the leading lady and love interest, even though the characters were supposed to both be Chinese. The role instead went to a German-American actress wearing yellowface, who went on to win an Oscar for the role.
Censorship doesn't help anyone. Censorship does not protect anyone. Censorship does not prevent bigotry, and in fact only serves to reinforce it.
Anyone who read this far and learned something: being an independent media censorship researcher doesn't exactly pay the bills, so check out my Ko-Fi or Patreon if you learned something and feel generous.
My main sources for this post are:
Pre-Code Hollywood: Sex, Immorality, and Insurrection in American Cinema, 1930-1934, by Thomas Doherty
The Dame in the Kimono: Hollywood, Censorship, and the Production Code, by Leonard J. Leff and Jerold L. Simmons
The Encyclopedia of Censorship, by Jonathon Green & Nicholas J. Karolides
Morality and Entertainment: The Origins of the Motion Picture Production Code - Stephen Vaughn
Sin in Soft Focus: Pre-Code Hollywood, by Mark A. Vieira
Forbidden Hollywood: The Pre-Code Era (1930-1934), When Sin Ruled the Movies, by Mark A. Vieira
Hollywood's Censor: Joseph I. Breen & the Production Code Administration, by Thomas Doherty
And since you made me talk about Birth of a fucking Nation, here are some additional resources for people who are actually interested in Black media history:
Birth of an Industry: Blackface Minstrelsy and the Rise of American Animation, by Nicholas Sammond
Archival Rediscovery and the Production of History: Solving the Mystery of Something Good - Negro Kiss (1898), by Allyson Nadia Field
Humor and Ethnic Stereotypes in Vaudeville and Burlesque, by Lawrence E. Mintz
The Original Blues: The Emergence of the blues in African American Vaudeville, by Lynn Abbott and Doug Seroff
Waltzing in the Dark: African American Vaudeville and Race Politics in the Swing Era, by Brenda Dixon Gottschild
Darkest America: Black Minstrelsy from Slavery to Hip-Hop, by Yuval Taylor and Jake Austen
Love & Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class, by Eric Lott
The Prettiest Girl on Stage is a Man: Race and Gender Benders in American Vaudeville, by Prof. Kathleen B. Casey
Dancing Down the Barricades: Sammy Davis, Jr. And the Long Civil Rights Era, by Matthew Frye Jacobson
Blackface, Whiteface, Insult and Imitation in American Popular Culture, by John Strausbaugh
A Change in the Weather: Modernist Imagination, African American Imaginary, by Geoffrey Jacques
Hollywood Black: The Stars, The Films, The Filmmakers by Donald Bogle
The Blackface Minstrel Show in Mass Media: 20th Century Performances on Radio, Records, Film, and Television, by Tim Brooks
Oscar Micheaux and His Circle: African-American Filmmaking and Race Cinema of the Silent Era, by Pearl Bowser, Jane Gaines, and Charles Musser
America on Film: Representing Race, Class, Gender and Sexuality at the Movies, by Harry M. Benshoff and Sean Griffin
White: Essays on Race and culture, by Richard Dyer
Black American Cinema, edited by Manthia Diawara
Colorization: One Hundred Years of Black Films in a White World, by Wil Haygood
Framing Blackness: The African American Image in Film, by Ed Guerrero
Toms, Coons, Mulattoes, Mammies, & Bucks: An Interpretive History of Blacks in American Films, by Donald Bogle
White Screens, Black Images: Hollywood From the Dark Side, by James Snead
Reel Inequality: Hollywood Actors and Racism, by Nancy Wang Yuen
The Hollywood Jim Crow: the Racial Politics of the Movie Industry, by Maryann Erigha
“Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell.”
― Edward Abbey
The kids on TikTok think that just because he was a classic country singer, Johnny Cash was conservative??? My babies he covered a Nine Inch Nails song in his seventies.
Classic country singers (the majority of which came from poor roots) were always talking about how much The Man sucked because they were taking money from poor rural folk. You’re gonna tell me that’s conservative?? Get outta here.
And somehow on the opposite side of the scale with the same exact opinion the conservative kids say “I like the old country music, because there’s no politics to it” Woodie Guthrie’s got a “this machine kills fascists” sticker on his guitar? You think there’s no politics in 9 to 5 or Folsom Prison Blues?!
For anyone confused there was a sudden and dramatic shift in the country music genre. It used to be a genre fixated on the experiences of people. Lived or common experiences that resonated with the common people. It was music that you listened to and it thrummed in tune to your soul because you had lived it yourself. And a lot of that was about ordinary people getting ground up in the gears of society.
The hyper patriotism, beer, and trucks chimera we have now didn't show up until after 9/11 and the world is lesser for it
Allow me to post the entire lyrics to the Johnny Cash song "Man in Black", released in nineteen goddamn seventy-one and written about why he always wore black onstage:
Well, you wonder why I always dress in black
Why you never see bright colors on my back
And why does my appearance seem to have a somber tone
Well, there's a reason for the things that I have on
I wear the black for the poor and the beaten down
Livin' in the hopeless, hungry side of town
I wear it for the prisoner who has long paid for his crime
But is there because he's a victim of the times
I wear the black for those who've never read
Or listened to the words that Jesus said
About the road to happiness through love and charity
Why, you'd think He's talking straight to you and me
Well, we're doin' mighty fine, I do suppose
In our streak of lightnin' cars and fancy clothes
But just so we're reminded of the ones who are held back
Up front there ought to be a man in black
I wear it for the sick and lonely old
For the reckless ones whose bad trip left them cold
I wear the black in mournin' for the lives that could have been
Each week we lose a hundred fine young men
And I wear it for the thousands who have died
Believin' that the Lord was on their side
I wear it for another hundred-thousand who have died
Believin' that we all were on their side
Well, there's things that never will be right, I know
And things need changin' everywhere you go
But 'til we start to make a move to make a few things right
You'll never see me wear a suit of white
Ah, I'd love to wear a rainbow every day
And tell the world that everything's okay
But I'll try to carry off a little darkness on my back
'Til things are brighter, I'm the man in black
That right there is an anti-war, anti-bigot, anti-mass-incarceration, anti-war-on-drugs (Cash was an addict in various stages of recovery who was pissed as hell about how this country treats people with substance issues), eat-the-rich protest song. And it was arguably his signature song, his personal manifesto. Notice that even the Jesus reference, which today would be a signal that the song is about to drop some racist dogwhistles, segues immediately into a line about "the road to happiness through love and charity". As in "Motherfucker, our shared god said love thy neighbor and care for the poor and the outsider, and we both know he didn't fucking stutter." He's throwing shade at self-described Christians who use his religion as a cudgel to beat people with.
Johnny Cash wasn't a conservative. I'm pretty sure if he were alive and in reasonably good health today, he'd knock Jason Aldean's teeth out (or, failing that, write a song so devastatingly memetic about how much Aldean sucks that Aldean would never work in music again).
Johnny Cash was punk rock. He just happened to be punk rock in the body of a country singer.
I’ve been thinking about this daily since it crossed my dash
little mans is 100% correct.
I'm gonna put I AM BRAVE OF THIS MEETING on my cubicle wall at work and never explain it.
Think about the donuts of your day!
rule #1 of the world is that love is stored in the kitty cat
my apologies to puppy dogs everywhere
rule #1 of the world, fixed: love is stored in the Creature
rule #2 of the world is that biting is also stored in the creature
rule #3 is never talk to the police
I’m taking pottery lessons right now… and my teacher said “the kiln gods are being kind to me right now.” And that made me stop and think. Is there a god of pottery? I tried to look it up but it’s hazy.
In Ancient Greece, Athena was apparently the goddess of crafts, which is a bit vague. Hephaestus was the god of sculpting, but that’s not right either.
In Ancient Egypt, I found Khnum who made the other gods and humankind on his potter’s wheel.
I found two gods of pottery in Southeast Asian cultures, Lianaotabi and Panthoibi.
But I wasn’t able to find anyone else. Pottery being such an important part of daily life all around the world, it seems like there would be more. Does anyone know of any other gods of pottery?
kiln gods are also A Thing!
they're little sculptural critters that potters make and leave on or around their kiln for good luck. a lot of them have to do with fire or are holding pottery (Calcifer from Howl's Moving Castle is one I've seen multiple times) but a kiln god can be anything
I share a kiln so I don't want to take up space on or near the kiln, so I just put a kiln god through with every batch of pottery
here's a selection of mine (all holding pottery)
the head of the ceramics dept learned his wood fire techniques in Japan, including a Shinto take on the kiln gods.
wadding is a material glaze doesn't stick too, and it's used to prop up pieces in a wood fire kiln because otherwise the wood ash would weld them to the shelves.
everyone has to make a little wood fire idol out of wadding and place them on top of the kiln
and unlike a gas or electric kiln that can be programmed and then left alone aside from a few checks, a wood fire kiln needs to be babysat for the full 2-3 day fire (for our size kiln anyway).
cool thing is there's an external pit where we burn thin pieces of wood to get a good ash layer on the pieces, and you can cook in said pit while you're watching. but our prof required us to throw a little bit of whatever we cooked into the main fire as ordering
he also opened the firing by sharing some sake with the kiln before lighting it
we have so little control
the kiln can finish our work
and make them functional
or it can destroy it all
so we make offerings
and protectors
and pray
- Clay Pigeon
