Ohno a robot

Beep Boop Bleep Blorp A robot with a heart of gold, literally. I enjoy posting about my latest obsession, often literature, film, or television.

[burlowbeanie]

I do love how both Cathy and Heathcliff are deeply aware of their respective Romantic Archetypes that everyone keeps trying to shove them into and both get rightfully pissed off about the boxes they are being shoved into and use those boxes as tools of manipulation to clobber other people with. Cathy talking to Edgar like "manic pixie dream girl means MANIC pixie dream girl, I'm gonna be ~~improper~~ about Heathcliff, fucking get over it." And Heathcliff's whole "relationship" with Isabella being leaning into the brooding "exotic rich brooding dark hero who can be civilized fixed by the power of feminine white womanhood true love" and then him being like jesus fucking christ you actually fell for that??? like, I didn't even lie to you, you just fully filled in the narrative of your pure love redeeming me with barely any prompting, are you for real?????? It's so fun how they play with the tropes imposed on them on purpose, in ways that betray how hopelessly trapped and paralyzed they feel by those narratives. Heathcliff says fuck you you don't get any story of me being a secret prince or a war hero or a rags to riches businessman or even evil highway robber for that matter. Cathy says fuck you you don't get any closure about of me growing as a person and being less selfish, or any clarity on the distinctions between selfishness/"ill temper" and physical illness and mental illness. I was always faking it when I was sick I was never faking it when I was sick but whatever story you tell you can't wrangle me as a saintly dead mother. I'm a gothic villain who will not be softened into a tale of family reconciliation. I'm a ghost story all godly folk disapprove of. I'm at peace in heaven, and I'm burning in hell unrepentant, and I walk the moors hand in hand with you. We are buried together. You're my one true love. Nothing could keep us apart. I never would have married you. Edgar also is there.

[aikonamida]

Tags by OP!

[capablecapybara]

it’s awesome how wuthering heights is mostly just longform gossip

[elodieunderglass]

Today the kids wanted to play Takeaway. I don’t mind playing Takeaway, because I can usually do something else with my hands. My role is to place an order on my pretend phone, and receive it from the delivery driver. I’m quite good at Takeaway.

Bear, aged 8, was the leader of this particularly chaotic takeaway. I overheard them pretending to phone another customer - customer order 125 - and explaining that their delivery would be delayed by approximately fifteen minutes due to a “rockslide.”

“Hey, wait a minute, what was that?” I asked.

“Are you order number 125?”

“No, I’m order number 165.”

Bear said severely, “we don’t give information about other people’s orders.”

“That’s very professional,” I said, “but what was that about a rockslide?”

Bear said, “that’s not your order.”

“Sorry,” i said, justly chastened. “Was it a big rockslide? Is it on the news?”

“If you need information about your order, you will get it.”

My pretend phone then pretend rang, so I had to answer it. It was the takeaway.

“Number 165? Your order will be delayed by five minutes.”

“Oh,” I said, “why?”

“Because that’s the time it takes us answering all your stupid questions.”

[singlecent]

[cryptic-curation]

This sick bleach shirt I made. Something to showcase my undying love for prehistoric cave art.

Some of the bleach burned thru the shirt bc this was my first time bleaching anything ever, but it kinda adds to it.

[iphigenesis]

in a way john watson is a fantasy (what if you had this brilliant enigmatic friend and what if he liked you in particular and what if he offered you the excitement of youth and adventures and a way out of boring society life and all without having to actually give up your status as a gentleman so you could have the best of both worlds) and in a way sherlock holmes is a fantasy (what if someone never got tired of you despite your various strange habits and mood swings and instead of simply tolerating you they genuinely liked you and what if you didn’t have to live alone forever and what if you never had to give up doing the things you love) and of course there’s the most fantastical part of it all (what if you could afford london housing prices)

[raina-at]

Well, famously they can't actually afford London housing, that's the whole reason they met.

[in-libris-liberta-s-deactivated]

Just finished hamlet & had to share THIS

[iamnmbr3]

btw this is literally what goes down. it’s great. 

[ovenroastedtwerkey]

You just know the ye olde peasants went NUTS at that last part

[elodieunderglass]

We don’t say sblood enough we should bring it back

[fforsythiaaa]

Once when I was in undergrad, someone described something as “problematic” in class and our professor was like, “That’s cool, but ‘problematic’ doesn’t really mean anything. It means that the thing you’re describing has a problem, and in and of itself that’s not bad. Art, especially, should always have problems, or else it’s not interesting and not art, either. It sounds like you’re trying to say that this is bad, but you don’t want to say ‘bad.’ Is that right?”

So from then on whenever one of us called something problematic, he would make us talk it out until we could name the “bad” thing we were hinting at. In this particular class, 7/10 it was some type of oppression, and the remainder was like, “I’m uncomfortable because this is very new/confusing/pushing boundaries that made me feel safe.”

Once we stopped calling things “problematic” and stopping at that, class got way more interesting and... we all had to say, like, “that’s racist” or “that’s misogynistic” or “ew capitalism gross” out loud, which a lot of us had never done in a classroom before. Or we had to be like, “Uhhh... I’m not sure what’s so bad?” and confront our own beliefs and that was maybe even more useful.

Anyway. Whenever I see the word problematic, I can’t help but think of this professor being like, “Good starting point, now let’s get specific.” I think when we have to commit to saying “that’s ___” it requires a lot more careful thought about the truth and impact and complexities of whatever we’re claiming. Sometimes there really is some bullshit afoot, and also sometimes it’s art, and it should be full of problems, because that’s what art is.

[crabussy]

trans women and trans men and nonbinary people and everyone else being friends and holding each other close and falling in love and thinking of each other. I'm making this my future. let's all be okay together

[itseasytoremember]

(To the tune of Rasputin): BLEH BLEH DRACULA, KING OF TRANSYLVANIA, HE IS A BAT AND ALSO A MAN

[dajo42]

i quit cold turkey

quit what?

cold turkey

yeah but what did you quit

im telling you, i quit cold turkey

alcohol?

no i quit cold turkey

i wasnt offering, im trying to figure out what you quit

and im telling you i quit cold turkey

wait. you quit cold turkey?

yes i quit cold turkey

like the meat?

no i dont like it thats why i quit it

cold turkey?

no im gradually weaning myself off it

[man-peach-reborn]

[corvophobia]

was in a painting mood

[kineticpenguin]

At the risk of sounding anti-intellectual, I think that college should be free and also not a requirement for employment outside of highly specialized career fields

[kineticpenguin]

At the risk of sounding like an effete intellectual, I do actually think you should be allowed to just take college courses indefinitely

[yourunderwaterskies]

technically you can, if you don't care about degrees.

Free Harvard courses. Free Courses from Stanford. Free Courses from MIT. Free courses from Yale. Free courses from Princeton.

Free courses on Coursera.

Free Courses on EDx Free Courses on Alison

For paid, there's The Great Courses+/Wonderium. 20$ a month for unlimited courses.

When searching, the phrases you're looking for are Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs), or you can do a general search of say, "free online college courses." Oh, and so you don't get surprised like I did, have an avoid: Hillsdale College is a conservative Christian site and not a valid MOOC place. Sign up with them and you will get things like THIS IS WHY THE LEFT IS TURNING YOUR KIDS TRANS AND GAY in your inbox.

[aloeverawrites]

@yourunderwaterskies I wanted to say thank you so much for adding these links, seriously, they've been life-changingly helpful to me-

And I also wanted to mention that humanitarian organisations have free courses too, like the Red Cross on international humanitarian law.

Humanity in War

Learn more about the Red Cross International Humanitarian Law (IHL) Program to train policy professionals, government officials, academics,

Kaya

Kaya is a free humanitarian learning platform which offers hundreds of training opportunities across a range of key topics, including the hu

[steveyockey]

affirmations they will not kill me at work today. it is not in my job description to get killed. if they did kill me at work that would be weird and probably not worth it for them

[proletprincess]

love is something you do with your teeth

[pyrrhiccomedy]

I am always one bad day away from quitting my job and living out of a van to track down every single person involved in making a decision in the production of Troy (2004) in order to force them to account for themselves

[souvenirs]

[spitfaggot]

happy birthday, gilbert baker. (june 2, 1951 — march 31, 2017)

[animate-mush]

The thing about the whole AD vs CE vs whether it's all just cosmetic discourse is that it totally ignores where this numbering system comes from. We should just call it what it is: Bede notation.

It was invented by one person for a specific purpose - to have a universalizable way of establishing historical dates, rather than having to deal with dynastically based date systems. And it was a really good idea. This is not surprising, since Bede is basically the father of Historiography. He also is the guy who gave us the notion of Primary Sources. Bede is amazing.

When a guy revolutionizes the entire way calendaring is done, he has the right to set his zero point wherever he pleases.

People have pointed out that one problem with CE notation is that it presents itself as neutral when it is exactly the same system as AD. What exactly is "common" about this era? The zero point doesn't become neutral just by effacing its source.

(Also BCE is nonsense. Just use negative numbers)

It makes sense for scholarly tradition to not want to be tied to a specific religion. But scholarly tradition is very enthusiastic about being tied to earlier scholarly tradition. The convention of AD was established by a scholar for a scholarly purpose. We know his name. We know what he was doing, and why, and how. And he was doing it better than anybody else. That is worth honoring.

Rather than pretending that it's a neutral system, acknowledge that it's not. It's not some naturally occurring "common era," it's the system developed by Bede, centered around dates that were important to him personally (but which he intended to be universally applicable).

Like we should be honest about the facts that (a) an awful lot of people have been measuring dates this way for nearly 1400 years and changing it in a non-cosmetic way would involve a lot of seriously obnoxious bookkeeping, and (b) the zero is where it is because that's where the guy who invented the system decided to put it. "Anno Domini" is meaningless to people who aren't into that particular Dominus, and "Common Era" is meaningless period (and imparts a false appearance of neutrality). Pinning it to its creator, though, is already scholarly convention and is objective. It may or may not be the year of Our Lord, and it certainly isn't Common (whatever that means) but it is unarguably the schema developed by Bede, for better or for worse. So unless we're actually going to rebuild it from scratch, we may as well call it that. And even if we do rebuild it from scratch, we should still call it that. Because that is what it is.

[animate-mush]

Reblogging in honor of the feast of St. Bede today.

I have been informed that Bede notation may in fact have been first devised by Dionysus the Humble of Scythia to calculate the date of Easter more accurately. But my broader point stands.

Bede, yo.