occasionally subtle
bliss lane
Sweet Seals For You, Always
Game Changer & Make Some Noise
Kiana Khansmith
ojovivo
Not today Justin
hello vonnie
No title available
gracie abrams
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The Bowery Presents
#extradirty
"I'm Dorothy Gale from Kansas"
Xuebing Du
Andulka
Monterey Bay Aquarium
izzy's playlists!
ellievsbear
seen from Malaysia
seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from Türkiye
seen from France
seen from United States
seen from Albania
seen from Brazil
seen from United States
seen from United States
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@momo-with-a-knife
An Archive of Our Own, a project of the Organization for Transformative Works
Okay! Part 4 of Landscapes is finally posting! I’m expecting ten-ish chapters. Be on the lookout for Aangst, some heartwarming moments between soulmates, and liking Jet better than you were prepared to.
*breaks into your house & sticks googly eyes on all your sex toys and/or canned goods*
canned sex toys.
just... just a dildo in a comically dildo-sized tin can
rattling around...
trans people are not text books
I am absolutely not joking at all when I say that The Sixth Sense should be required as teaching material when you’re trying to get kids to learn about why color matters.
No, the red DOESN’T mean love or violence or passion, however the creators set it up so that in this particular work red means OH NO A SCARY GHOST IS HERE.
When I was in college (as a lit major) I ended up sitting down and talking to a returning student who was having trouble in one of our classes. He liked books, and he had GI bill money so he decided to be a lit major.
He was VERY confused about the “The Curtains Are Blue And It Means Something” approach to symbolism and I remember that he very seriously got out a notebook and a pen, sat down, and asked me “Okay so what to stars mean as a symbol?”
And I was at a loss because of course I was! Stars-as-a-symbol can mean a thousand things and are heavily dependent on context. Are you reading a book about sea travel? Stars mean a map. Are you reading Maus? Stars represent faith and community and the way that the Nazis dehumanized Jewish people. Are you reading something by a romantic author who has a thing for the classics? Stars probably have something to do with heroism and destiny. Are you reading science fiction? Stars are probably just stars but if you’re reading Whipping Star by Frank Herbert they are literally people and our entire conception of stars is reexamined.
So one one the things that I think a lot of people are missing in their high school English classes is that whether the curtains are blue matters or not depends on the work.
The fact that Hamlet is wearing black is an important part of the story and the antagonist commenting on it it is almost the first thing that happens in the play.
What color dress is Lizzy wearing at the first dance in Pride & Prejudice? It doesn’t matter, the curtains are just blue.
And that’s one of those things that it takes a lot of time and a lot of exposure to different kinds of stories to learn and when you’re in high school you just don’t have that experience and your teachers are just now telling you for the first time “sometimes it matters why the curtains are blue” and I know you’re going “okay, sounds fake” but the goal is to get you to look at blue curtains and ask if they do matter, which is why they hand you books with big obvious examples of the kind of shit they’re talking about. You read A Tale of Two Cities because it’s full of binaries and line motifs and it’s the perfect thing to teach a fifteen year old how to look for a motif because there are a shitload of them. You read The Scarlet Letter to look for color symbolism and to ferret out biblical allusions.
“The curtains are just blue” is just “yet another day has gone by and I haven’t needed algebra.” Most people aren’t going to need algebra in their day-to-day lives but it’s handy to know how to do a bit when you need it and it’s good to learn that the concept exists.
If you’re reading books just because they’re fun and you like them then that is cool and I’m glad you’re having a good time and you absolutely do not have to give a fuck about symbolism.
But I am going to laugh my ass off at you if you’re one of those folks who is like “the curtains are just blue it doesn’t matter” and then whines about why scifi and comics and cartoons and video games are all political these days. They were always political, you just couldn’t tell because the curtains were red.
(also because you were socialized to see certain things as apolitical and value neutral but if you’re going “WHY DO THEY PUT SERIOUS MORALS AND SHIT IN A KID’S SHOW, STEPHEN UNIVERSE IS FOR TEN YEAR OLDS IT’S NOT THAT DEEP, LOONEY TUNES WASN’T LIKE THIS” I’m afraid I’m going to have to refer you to all the actual war propaganda made by Disney and Warner Brothers.)
I’m sorry there’s someone in the notes who’s onboard with this except for the political stuff because they claim that overtly political works are forgettable and didn’t stand the test of time because of their political bent.
And then they claim that the political SJW stuff in Dickens is subtle.
Which they differentiate from the penny dreadfuls and popular magazines of the time. Dickens was GOOD, not like that by-the-word popular crap.
Just for the record, if you’re not familiar with Dickens, here’s a little bit from his wikipedia bio:
His novels, most of them published in monthly or weekly instalments, pioneered the serial publication of narrative fiction, which became the dominant Victorian mode for novel publication.[4][5]Cliffhanger endings in his serial publications kept readers in suspense.[6] The instalment format allowed Dickens to evaluate his audience’s reaction, and he often modified his plot and character development based on such feedback.[5] For example, when his wife’s chiropodist expressed distress at the way Miss Mowcher in David Copperfield seemed to reflect her disabilities, Dickens improved the character with positive features.[7] His plots were carefully constructed and he often wove elements from topical events into his narratives.[8] Masses of the illiterate poor would individually pay a halfpenny to have each new monthly episode read to them, opening up and inspiring a new class of readers.
Yeah, Dickens is nothing at all like the MCU with its crowd-pleasing shot of SJW WOMEN SUPERS trying to cash in on a moment. THE ENTIRE PLOT OF A CHRISTMAS CAROL IS WORKER’S RIGHTS WHAT ARE YOU TALKING ABOUT???????????
Anyway.
Shakespeare is intensely political - what the fuck do you think the Richard plays are if not anti-Plantagenet propaganda?
Austen is WILDLY, VICIOUSLY political like seriously how many fucking times does Austen write about women who are getting absolutely fucked by the society that they’re living in and have to throw themselves on the mercy of kind relatives or hope that they can marry a kind husband spoilers it is all of the times, that is just a huge, ridiculous, outsized portion of what Austen wrote.
Mark Twain is mind-bogglingly political. You know what didn’t stand the test of time? Tom Sawyer, Detective. You know what did survive? The Adventures of Fuck Your Racist, White Supremacist System.
My university required that students take one of three Major Authors classes before they could graduate with a degree in English Literature. Our choices were Shakespeare (already discussed for his political commentary), Chaucer (whose negative characterization of the church was so overwhelming that it’s one of the jokes that actually made it in to A Knight’s Tale), and Milton, whose work you can only consider apolitical if you know absolutely nothing about Milton:
The reality is that if a work survives a hundred years most readers are not going to recognize the politics of the work. Shakespeare seems apolitical to an American audience only until we cast someone who looks like Donald Trump or Barack Obama to play Julius Caesar and THEN we get why there might have been something to do with politics in the original play.
This post initially got started because I’d been commenting on a post about Twin Peaks and its symbolism and there’s a joke in there about how the curtains are red, sure, but people got mad about the “political,” anti-nuclear messaging of the new series of Twin Peaks while totally overlooking the fact that the first two seasons are ENTIRELY AND ONE HUNDRED PERCENT ABOUT HOW A SOCIETY ALLOWED AN ABUSER TO FLOURISH UNCHECKED. That is not apolitical! This is a work that says “what if a society allowed a teenage girl to be sexually trafficked, to be forced into drug trade, to be physically and mentally abused, and still expected her to project normalcy? What happens to the girl and the society? What makes that possible?” and the answer is AN OLD EVIL IN THE WOODS THAT HAS ALWAYS EXISTED AND THAT EACH MAN HAS TO FACE IN HIMSELF OR BE LOST FOREVER TO DARKNESS . Twin Peaks is SO FUCKING POLITICAL.
And we’re still talking about it thirty years later because it was also good.
And this commenter is saying “we don’t remember shitty didactic novels because they were too political and were bad, if it was good and the politics didn’t clutter it up we remembered it” and no, bud, almost everything that DID survive is hardcore political in some way or another but you don’t have the historical context to feel it’s political in the same way that you feel including “gay people for the sake of gay people” is political.
OSCAR FUCKING WILDE DIDN’T GO TO PRISON FOR BEING AS QUEER AS A THREE DOLLAR BILL FOR YOU TO PRETEND THE IMPORTANCE OF BEING EARNEST IS APOLITICAL.
Is it a cute play about cute characters saying witty things? Yes. It’s also about being separated from yourself and not knowing the fundamentals of who and what you are because that was taken away from you by the institutions society sets up to raise you. It is about falling in love with a name and wanting to have that name because it is what is named that allows you to safely function in society and have a pretty wife and cucumber sandwiches instead of being confirmed bachelors with your dear friend Jack who comes into your home uninvited to lounge beautifully on your sofa.
So if you’re talking about survivorship bias, if you are looking at any work that we consider to be “Important” or part of the “Western Canon” that book is, without exception, deeply political - you just don’t see the politics because you’re reading it completely out of context.
This is a really great post, especially that last addition about the politics of reading, but this pinged me hard in the “I did a presentation on this back in the day!” feels, and so I want to add something to the first section about symbolism! So, OP is absolutely correct in everything they wrote, but there are terms for symbols that require different degrees of context that can help you understand them. Literary symbols are symbols that change meaning depending on the text. This is where the curtains being blue might really matter—if the blue curtains symbolize the main character’s mother, they only symbolize that in this book. A classic example is the famous green light at the end of Gatsby’s dock—it symbolizes not just Daisy Buchanan but also class ascension, and it ONLY means that within the confines of the Great Gatsby. You put a green light into any other book, and it doesn’t mean that. It’s specific to the literary text. A cultural symbol is a symbol that has a generally agreed upon meaning within a culture or subculture, and might therefore mean about the same thing in many different texts. An example of that is a cross. To people in Christian cultures, a cross has a generally common meaning—Christianity. If you see a cross show up in even an explicitly non-Christian work written inside a Christian culture, the cross probably means Christianity. To someone NOT in a Christian culture, though, a cross might mean something totally different, or be totally meaningless—just a random piece of decoration. For a less widespread example—if you see a character in a queer contemporary movie lit in baby blue, pink, and white lighting, and a character in a different and totally unrelated queer contemporary movie wears a white shirt, baby blue pants, and pink earrings, there’s a good chance that we are meant to understand through symbolism that both characters are trans. If we find a character from a very unrelated context and subculture wearing the trans pride colors—let’s say we find a description of someone’s outfit in a Jane Austen novel that includes a white dress, a baby blue pelisse, and a pink bonnet—we know that this probably is not a deliberate symbol of trans identity. The trans pride flag is a culturally specific symbol. Lastly we’ve got universal symbols, which are where a lot of high school teachers may have confused us, because universal symbols are arguably supposed to mean kind of the same thing across texts, eras, cultures, and subcultures. This is where we get stuff like winter = death and spring = rebirth, which are pretty universal for humans across time and space* that have experienced winters and springs. (*This is where the “arguably” comes in, because of course there are many places that don’t have winters full of snow, and therefore many cultures that don’t have this same understanding, but you get the idea. It’s a very broad and overarching symbol that is pretty universal to any human who has experienced leaves falling off of trees and frozen water falling from the sky.) Stuff like “warmth” meaning “good” and “cold” meaning “bad” is universal, because as a species we pretty much like to be warm and don’t like being cold. I think what happens with a lot of people is that they’re taught about symbols really imprecisely, so they think their teachers are claiming that literary symbols are universal, when they’re obviously not, and so it all seems extremely made up, or like all the English majors are speaking a secret code and offering extremely and obviously fake explanations for how they’re cracking the code. Because sometimes your teacher says “the blue curtains mean sadness!” and you’re like “why” and you get an explanation that has to do with the color of the main character’s dress the night her mother died, and then the next class your teacher points at a different book and asks “what do the blue curtains mean?” and you’re like “sadness!” and then your teacher is like “nope!” and then you’re like “okay, fine, maybe in this book the sunrise means despair,” because surely anything can mean anything, and then your teacher says “actually sunrises almost always represent hope and rebirth!” and it just kind of feels like she’s lying to you, because what you perceive is that the answer is changing without the definition of symbolism changing. And that’s actually a simple confusion to clear up if we just talk precisely about the kind of symbolism we mean! anyway, I’m sorry for rambling on your post, OP, but this is one of those “at any dinner party I am prepared to get up and deliver a powerpoint on the subject” topics
the energy these have is like nothing I have ever seen
I know they probably mean ‘pull over first’, but they’re sure as hell not saying that.
nsw has ‘stop. revive. survive.’ but vic has ‘powernap now’. My dad, of course, decided to pretend to sleep every time we passed a sign in vic…
4got my fave
new ‘live laugh love’ motto just dropped
Unmute
In honor of Lord Byron’s birthday I would like to remind you all of the time that Shelley and Keats, having not heard from him for some time, became concerned for his safety and it was determined that Shelley would go looking for him. Keats received a letter some time later that Shelley had found him in Venice, where he’d been having so much sex that he’d nearly died from malnourishment and dehydration. Keats’ entire response amounted to essentially, “You should probably have let him.”
“I found him, he’s in a gutter.” “Well go put him back”
I made a meme for today
Trans🚨irl
This is about Sci-Hub. yeah we get it.. gatekeep knowledge and protect the interests of capital…
Listen, this is serious.
Do not use the website called Sci-Hub!
It lets people access scientific articles for free. This is dangerous. It helps the free flow of knowledge and reduces the competitive edge of all the people who worked really hard to have been born into a wealth.
Like, it’s literally a website where you can type in the DOI of an article and read it, without ever having to pay the publisher who exploited the author.
So, again, do not, under any circumstance, use Sci-Hub. I mean, can you imagine a world where knowledge is free and easily accessible to everyone? Even, y'know, poor people?
Libgen also has many books online, including textbooks, searchable by name, author, and ISBN. Can you imagine textbook companies not getting their hard-earned income from poor college students? Here is the link just so you make sure that you never accidentally stumble across this horrible, unethical website.
Oh, and while we’re talking about books, if you’ve managed to stay clear from Libgen, definitely don’t go to zlibrary, where you can also find a lot of textbooks, but unfortunately they’re completely free.
nooo don’t use sites that make academic papers accessible to everyone, why would you do such a terrible thing
This footage of Elmo after messing up a take on Sesame Street is peak relatable
In Elmo’s voice: “I only had three lines!”
Okay but please watch the whole video. It’s just over a minute.
1. Robin Williams making off-the-cuff jokes that are definitely not Sesame Street appropriate.
2. The slow zoom in on Elmo’s face at the end.
3. Robin Williams
[working link]
It’s NOT thursday
sources?
i will never be over the fact that during first contact a human offered their hand to a vulcan and the vulcan was just like “wow humans are fucking wild” and took it
Humanity’s first contact with Vulcans was some guy going “I’m down to fuck.”
Vulcans’ first contact with Humans was an emphatic “Sure.”
@sineala
#iiiiiiiiiiiiii mean vulcans had been watching humans for a long time#they knew the significance of a handshake but still#they had to find some fast and loose ambassador#willing to fuckin make out with a human for the sake of not offending them on first contact#lmao#star trek give me the story of this fast and loose vulcan
“sir…these…these humans…they greet each other by…” *glances around before furtively whispering* “by clasping hands…”
*prolonged silence* “oh my…”
“sir…sir how will we make first contact with them? surely we…we cannot refuse this handclasping ritual, they will take it as an insult, but what vulcan would agree to such a distasteful and uncomfortable ritual??”
*several pensive moments later* “contact the vulcan high command and tell them to send us kuvak. i once saw that crazy son of a bitch arm wrestle a klingon, he’ll put his hands on anything”
Elsewhere, w/ kuvak: “….my day has come.”
The vulcan who made first contact with humans is named Solkar guys. Y’all just be makin’ up names for characters that already have names.
Bonus: here’s a screencap of Solkar doing the “my body is ready” pose right before he shakes Zefram Cochrane’s hand:
I swear Vulcans only come in two types and they are “distant xenophobes” or “horny on main for humanity”. Also apparently this guy is Spock’s great-grandfather and frankly that explains everything.
Hey so I looked into this at one point and that handshake literally created a lifelong telepathic bond between the two of them, and basically all of Solkar’s descendants were later obsessed with humans, including freaking SPOCK, so I’m not saying that handshake was so gay and good that it created an intergenerational telepathic bond between Solkar’s descendants and humans, but I’m also not….not….saying that.
actual footage of first contact makeouts
The slow deliberation with which Solkar takes Cockrane’s–I’m sorry, Cochrane’s–hand… The sheer sensuality witch which Solkar infuses an otherwise borderline impersonal social ritual… It clearly shows a very conscious knowledge, on Solkar’s part, of what the significance of the handshake is in Vulcan terms and of how affected he is by it.
That’s why he’s so slow in doing it, and so sensual. A part of Solkar can’t believe this is happening, despite it being a perfectly logical thing to expect from a human, and the rest of him can’t believe how good it is.
I bet that if the camera zoomed in any further we would see the dilation of Solkar’s pupils and a quickly-repressed shiver of delight. Cochrane’s firm, businesslike clasp is probably (in sexual terms) being perceived as a deliciously carnal display of dominance.
No wonder Solkar is all like, “TAKE ME, YOU WILD-MANNERED BARBARIAN WITH ENTICINGLY ROUGH CALLUSES.”
And so we find out that yes, there is such a thing as bottoming in Pon-farr.
Every time this post comes round my dash, it just gets better.
#somehow the idea of vulcans being Horny On Main always gives me the giggles#like literally all they had to do#was be like actually#hand contact is very intimate for our species#and im p sure humanity as a whole would not find that insurmountably weird#there are human cultures that dont shake hands#vulcans are logical enough to think that through on their own#so clearly that vulcan was just down to fuck#down to fuck in a public#professional diplomatic situation no less#and he did not fucking care who knew it (via kittykatthetacodemon)
Some Vulcan: we could probably just explain that handshakes are intimate in our culture
Solkar, rubbing lip gloss on his hand: don’t tell me how to do my job
This is my favourite Star Trek post, complete with headcanons, corrections, the truth coming out of her well to shame Spock even. Seriously perfect fandom work.
@alexisvalarr
An Archive of Our Own, a project of the Organization for Transformative Works
Okay! Part 4 of Landscapes is finally posting! I’m expecting ten-ish chapters. Be on the lookout for Aangst, some heartwarming moments between soulmates, and liking Jet better than you were prepared to.
The Final Chapter is out! It has resolutions, endings, and Sokka’s urge to name things in the most ridiculous way available.
i saw this pic on pinterest and thought it’d be fun to draw my two otps innit
