Colored Glass With One Flaw

art, history, misc fandom, queer shit, things that make me smile. sometimes politics. 36 she/her in the us

[spankerella]

@ perfectunion

[massachusetts-official]

Official Post of Massachusetts

[athanza]

From Veronica Tucker via Pinterest

[politijohn]

Source

Happy Pride Month!

[irishkae]

[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.

[hypokeimena]

#'this is present in the text' is often a good first step #but those second and third ones (naming it; describing its function) are vital (via @elucubrare)

[pencil-line-deactivated20241029]

method actor this method actor that. toshiro mifune played a guy getting shot at by arrows by getting shot at by arrows

and yeah i believe it. ^ this is the face of a guy getting shot at by arrows

[lysenkoite]

[weaselle]

[abz-j-harding]

i can't cope

[thememedaddy]

[chucktaylorupset]

(via hornedchick)

Kurt Vonnegut wrote: “When I was 15, I spent a month working on an archeological dig. I was talking to one of the archeologists one day during our lunch break and he asked those kinds of “getting to know you” questions you ask young people: Do you play sports? What’s your favorite subject? And I told him, no I don’t play any sports. I do theater, I’m in choir, I play the violin and piano, I used to take art classes.

And he went WOW. That’s amazing! And I said, “Oh no, but I’m not any good at ANY of them.”

And he said something then that I will never forget and which absolutely blew my mind because no one had ever said anything like it to me before: “I don’t think being good at things is the point of doing them. I think you’ve got all these wonderful experiences with different skills, and that all teaches you things and makes you an interesting person, no matter how well you do them.”

And that honestly changed my life. Because I went from a failure, someone who hadn’t been talented enough at anything to excel, to someone who did things because I enjoyed them. I had been raised in such an achievement-oriented environment, so inundated with the myth of Talent, that I thought it was only worth doing things if you could “Win” at them.

[viralfrog]

[hms-no-fun]

THE SPIRIT OF BUSTER KEATON LIVES ON

[quietwingsinthesky]

did i tell you guys i failed at being sexually harassed at work today?

[quietwingsinthesky]

okay so, guy at work, who i find out afterwards is famous at this place for being a sex pest, comes up and starts with what i also learn is his favorite opener to conversations where he’s going to be a sex pest, namely: “Do you know where the term ‘blow job’ comes from?”

and here he made his first fatal error. his moment of hubristic sex pesting. because of course i know where the term blow job comes from, i love learning about sex and the history of sexual terms! i know so much about oral sex that i could write a book on it!

his second error: approaching a little autistic freak with what he intended to be an uncomfortable sex question that would make me feel weird and gross. Friends, Romans, Countrymen, I Have Never Misjudged A Man’s Intentions So Incredibly In My Life. because i did not realize he was trying to harass me. because i love talking about sex facts, albeit not usually at work. unless. someone prompts me. my coworkers are the kind of people who are generally online enough to know terms, but not exactly what they mean, and they realized they could ask me a while back and get good answers without the resulting awkwardness because i do not experience shame. i am primed to answer questions like the one he has proposed.

So I Answered It.

and well, really, what happened is that I began answering it, then realized the answer required a bit more context. I mean, you can’t just say “oh, well, the term first appears in writing in the 1940s” without first explaining that ‘blow’ by itself already had sexual connotations for centuries, and then, really, are we talking about the origin of the term or the origin of the act. and well we have a ton of literature and art depicting fellatio throughout human history, did you know a lot of it was men performing it on other men? oh, that reminds me, there are a multitude of latin words for oral sex performed on penises, and hold on let me quote you the entirety of catullus 16 from memory and explain it’s fascinating insights into the roman world of homosexuality-

i do not know how to turn any of this ^ off, by the way. i’m sure some people out there have a switch that disables their infodumping mid-speech. i do not. and i also didn’t realize he wasn’t looking for a real answer until my other coworker explained so hours later. he could not excuse himself from the conversation he started, and i made a conservative man at least 30 years older than me to listen to my catullus recitation. i will sodomize and facefuck you, indeed.

anyway, i think i got a bad grade in being sexually harassed. my pro tip is maybe don’t start with what a very autistic individual will misconstrue as you earnestly asking them to explain sex to you. the special interest shield will cause splashback damage.

[i-speak-graffiti]

🫵 HEROES in the tags

[no-sharks-on-the-sun]

[no-sharks-on-the-sun]

they killed him for this

[4rtmusic]

[smtskulltrumpeter-blog]

‘arent we supposed to have antlers or something’

‘fuck if i know’

[womeninspace]

Actress Nichelle Nichols, who played  Lieutenant Uhura in the Star Trek series, fitting an Apollo helmet.  With her are likely, from left to right, Ann Whitaker, Carolyn Griner and Mary-Helen Johnston. These three woman were part of the Mercury 13 program. (Retro Space Images /  Ed Hengeveld)

[gwydionmisha]

Mamdani Administration Recovers More Than $9 Million in Unpaid Amazon Idling Fines

[prokopetz]

I enjoy a joke about fucked up German fairy tales as much as the next nerd, but it's genuinely striking how often the source for the really fucked up stuff turns out to be "yeah, this is only in the Brothers Grimm version and doesn't appear in any extant oral tradition, and we're like 80% sure they added it themselves". To a large extent it's not German fairy tales that are fucked up, it's two specific German dudes.

[thelovers-thedreamers-and-me]

in retrospect we probably should have given the fairy tale writing to the Brothers Happy instead

[theunfairfolk]

my little cousin confidently declared that mother nature had a counterpart named daddy electric and i feel like this concept needs to be explored

[chassdraws]

Daddy Electric and Mother Nature sounds like a cute 70s act

[discordion]

When he was 2 years old, he fell out of a second story window and fractured his skull

When he was 6 years old, he mistakenly drank boric acid.

When he was 9 years old, he fell over a small cliff and broke his leg.

When he was 11 years old, he contracted measles and was in a coma for nine days.

When he was 14 years old, he broke his arm when he caught it in a carriage door.

When he was 19 years old, he was struck on the head by a falling brick.

When he was 23 years old, he almost died from the effects of tainted wine.

When he was 29 years old, Adolph Sax invented the saxophone.

[lord-of-the-nerds]

clearly someone didn’t want that saxophone invented 

[queelez]

#incompetent time-travelling saxophone haters

[saucefactory-deactivated2019103]

THIS NEEDS TO BE A 300-PAGE SCI-FI NOVEL BECAUSE I WOULD READ THE HELL OUTTA THAT

[chiltonisaquack]

that’s a harsh way for the universe to teach someone to play the blues

[wifehaver103947]

imagine cloth mother and wire mother in family court competing for custody of the baby monkey

[clothmotherofficial]

I Have Softness For You

[officialwiremother]

i have milk for you

[babymonkeyofficial]

Stop.

[kingsolomonofficial]

Cut the baby monkey in half