Retro Rambles About Things Nobody Else Cares About @retrocontroller - Tumblr Blog

aurevoir-mes-amis-deactivated20

Not pertinent to anything in particular but I do think it's kinda weird that we keep depicting cavemen in media crawling around on all fours covered in dirt with tangled, matted hair, speaking in broken, cobbled-together toddler language when like.

They were us.

Like literally genetically they were US, just like. A while ago.

Would you trust a TV caveman with a baby? Probably not

A real life caveman though??? I think they'd be at least okay at it

sheilikhal

This is actually really important and comes up in Anthropology classes all. The. Time.

As long as homo sapiens have existed, we have had the same emotional and mental capacity as you and I do today. You nailed it. They were US. Even Neaderthals existed alongside and had offspring with Homo Sapiens for many thousands of years.

There's much evidence that cavemen would have had complex spoken language, culture (learned information passed down), symbolic interpretation, and I think they most certainly would have been able to handle holding a baby. In fact I have my suspicisions that an ancient homo sapiens mother may be a more present, attentive, and knowledgable mom than I could be today.

Do not let media trick you into believing we are the pinnacle of humanity. Unilinial evolution theory (google it quick I beg) is BUNK, GARBAGE, and the root of so much evil.

We've been human for a long, long time, and we are not inherently better than all those who came before.

fresne999

One the most profound experiences of my life was visiting Font de Gaume, which has 12 thousand year old paintings. They use a technique where the horses appeared to run across the wall when seen in flickering firelight. There was a bison the wall staring at us with such attitude, I could practically hear him. I had the most profound feeling of those ancient artists reaching forward to lay their hands on my shoulders. To say, "This was my world." It was a profoundly moving experience.

Some years later, I went to the Orkney islands where we visited a tiny family run museum of artifacts from the chambered tomb at the other end of the farm. They handed me a pestle once held by some neolithci human.They'd worn groves where the thumb and forefinger would be for better grip.

cymbie8

One time, in a French history class, my teacher randomly at the end of the class had all of us draw a sketch of a horse. And we were all like ??? Okay???

At the beginning of the next class, my teacher showed us a cave painting of a horse. And then he showed all of our horses, which he had scanned and put into the presentation.

He then pointed out all the ways that our horses looked similar to the prehistoric horse. Same features, drawn from the same angle, etc.

And then he asked us, "Isn't it cool that you draw horses the same way as someone who lived 20,000 years ago?"

Yeah. That stuck with me for a while.

catgirlthecrazy

In Spain, there's a cave full of ancient, ice age era drawings of bison and reindeer and other animals of that period... And one small section of chaotic scribbles just a little away from everything else. These scribblesv were so incomprehensible, they were originally just called the 'Panel of Enigmatic Signs'... Until it occurred to someone that drawings only three feet off the ground probably weren't made by adults.

Scientists are now pretty sure the scribbles were made by kids ages 3-6, more or less on their own. The adult cave artists were probably doing what any modern parent might do when they want to keep small children out of their hair for awhile: they gave the kids some drawing tools of their own and a small section of wall to work on, out of the way but still close enough to keep an eye on them, and let them have at it.

What's most charming about the whole thing is the way the cave scribbles look exactly like what you'd find on the wall of a preschool today. Artistic styles vary widely across different times and cultures, but child development is as near to a universal human experience as it gets.

mikkeneko

Wisher made detailed 3D scans of the drawings, which helped her understand the uneven pressure applied to the charcoal and the direction the lines were drawn. The team then compared the panel’s composition with age-appropriate artistic efforts by modern children. Kids across cultures go through the same developmental stages, which influence their physical ability to draw, until about the age of 6, Amir notes.

The team compared the ancient art with the developmental stages exhibited by modern children: the furiously scribbled circles and push-pull lines typical of 3-year-olds just learning to control their bodies, for example, or the wobbly, right-angled figures of slightly older kids beginning to master fine motor skills.

Both are apparent in the cave, superimposed on each other as though two or more kids were drawing at once. That’s a clue the Las Monedas marks were likely made by “siblings or a mixed-age play group within the sphere of safety around adults, but also within their own space,” says co-author Felix Riede, an Aarhus archaeologist.

...

Adults at Las Monedas would have been aware of what the kids were doing and presumably had lit fires or torches; without ample firelight the cave is pitch black.

petition to rename the usa ‘south canada’

mellowminty

what about alaska

are we then normal canada

saahs

canada a bit to the left

officialvatican

conflagreat

What about South America? Is that just America? Or South South Canada?

starshipenterprisee-blog

danyinfj

te-odora

i cried my ass of laughing

plonts

prinxessleia-deactivated2016032

WARM CANADA

i caN’T BREATHE OH MY GOD

hypnomega

I’m not even from Canada but I approve this change of names

pebbles5ever

the-archivist-system

@valentine-villefort

fizzyfr0g3

@hellsite-hall-of-fame

orpheusilver

peeling those sour rainbow gummy strips into long thin strings and putting them into cheap energy drink to create something im calling battery acid spaghetti will update once ive finished it

orpheusilver

dont do this

babblingbranches

I really hope its not too bad bc i actually love both components.

it forms a dry skin at the top made of the sour pellets. not a great start.

tastes really good actually. i also feel like i am about to explode.

do not do this.

jenjensd

Unanimous consensus: Do not do this

Other people: Hold on I’m about to do this

jenjensd

Rip to y'all, but I'm built different. Trying this tonight

Best I can do with what I have (I'm at work rn)

Oh that is a... fascinating smell

worldheritagepostorganization

Don't do this

ab-arts

Alright now I’m curious

ab-arts

Didn't have strips so I made what I call battery acid cereal

ab-arts

Don't do this

World Heritage Post

writingdose

Reblog if you do NOT want the new Tumblr update

Apparently, from what I hear people say, in the new Tumblr update, if someone reblogs your post and adds a comment of their own, that reblog is counted as a new post and it belongs to the reblogger. Not you. You, as the OP, do not get the notifications if someone else later reblogs from the person who reblogged your post with their own comment. You can’t see what comments people leave on the reblogs of the post you originally made unless they reblogged directly from you.

If this is actually true, it will just open doors for harassment. And also it takes the credits away from the OPs. Tumblr’s etiquette has always been “reblog don’t repost”. So this new update, if true, contradicts the whole core values of Tumblr as a community.

Respectfully, we don’t want this @staff @support @tumblr @changes please listen to your users.

I’d also like to clarify that this is what I hear from what a lot of people are saying, and it bothers me. But if I got anything wrong, I do apologize.

zero1infinity

tsukiyamas

why does this have 32k notes? it’s just a picture of a knife in a ranch bottle, is there some unspoken joke that 32 thousand people share? what is going on here, i dont get it. it’s just a fucking picture of a knife in a ranch bottle. is there some spiritual connection people have to this picture? is there some ominous and mystical reasoning that this has 32 thousand notes? do people reblog this because it makes them look like some indie blogger? or is there just something funny to this? someone please explain

diggly

no one tell him

dso-agent-kennedy

Do you like My Chemical Romance Leon

Classified information

I do like System of a Down

Sleep Token

Korn

Pink Floyd

Those are just some of them I am willing to expose.

#he doesn’t want to admit that he’s emo #< prev #he has the same 90s flippy boy band haircut he's had since he was 21 #I don't think it's a secret lol

blackboxprophet

#resident evil #resident evil 4 #resident evil 6 #leon kennedy #leon scott kennedy #capcom #meme

weibun-art

not a request but hav u ever drawn tsum leon?? :0

you mean this pathetic creature?

#picking him up and shaking him like a rag doll #“stinky bastard man” (affectionate)#Leon is such a fucking disaster I love him so much lol

Forever grateful to have learned the term “Negative Affect Interference” because before I had a word for it I was just like “if you do something to make me think you are a genuinely kind and good person who wants to be around me then I will be forced to kill one or both of us immediately” like some kinda fucked up emotional misophonia

the experiemce ✨

sky-on-blog

For those of you who also experience this, is it because the kindness feels like a trap? Like you can't trust whether or not the person means it, or anxiety that you'll inevitably do something to change their opinion?

... asking for a friend

#Another cool and groovy reminder that I am not a fully well person btw #< op's tags #mental health #wow okay #I'm fine I promise I didn’t just relate to this super hard #keep moving folks #nothing to see here

I mean idk but for me personally it kinda feels more like you were a little kid who was obsessed with magic and fairytales and flying carpets

so some nights you laid awake and cried and wished that magic and true love and fantastic adventures and portals to other worlds did happen so you could find a place where the kind of wrong and different that you ARE is exactly what they’ve been looking for, like you were somehow switched at birth and grew up in the wrong place, but finally for once you’d matter and belong and actually feel like you were special

but then over the years that followed you slowly learned to find a sense of peace and place and use, and while you still sometimes like to fantasize you don’t really cry about it anymore, until one day you’re talking with someone and you laugh and admit how badly you wished as a child that you could ride a dragon, and instead of saying something like “me too” they ask, “why didn’t you?”

And you think that it’s a joke but as you look around it dawns on you that everyone else got to have a superpower, or found a magic amulet, or a world inside their closet, and YOU were the wrong one, because YOU were told that things like that weren’t real, but now you’re all grown up and everyone else got to have their incredible childhood fantasy adventure with love and friendship and family and you didn’t, and now you’ve aged out of that genre, you’ve missed your window, there was a chance to sail away to somewhere incredible and you missed it because everyone told you that the boat wasn’t coming

And now you understand that everything you ever hoped and dreamed was right there all along, except that nobody was thinking about you, nobody loved you enough or wanted you around enough to notice that you weren’t there

And all of those sudden epiphanies and understandings and new realities and emotions pass through your mind in the fraction of a second, and the whole entire time you’re standing in line for a gas station bathroom and you have to act like you’re fine and normal and not about to puke

*and sometimes you can pull it off and other times you kind of have to lock yourself in a dark closet and scream until it stops hurting

**And then in a couple months it happens again with something else

retrocontroller

wintersoldierfell

you've heard of death of the author, now get ready for death of the audience: where instead of basing your reaction on a thousand uninformed opinions online, you actually read the text and engage with it

wintersoldierfell

girl help there's people on this post who can't actually read my text

wintersoldierfell

#the way that this is literally how death of the author works lmao

OKAY i'm fucking sick of people who can't read leaving these comments so here we go, we're gonna read Barthes together. hold my hand

Barthes' 1967 essay The Death of the Author (La mort de l'auteur) loosely takes the form of a literary history: he relates the changing attitudes of criticism towards the text and of literature towards criticism down to his day. He is interested in what writing is, and thus, what a book is: "a tissue of signs," which the critic claims to be able to interpret. But Barthes argues that once the necessity of connecting the author to the book is removed, the critic has no work to do: "Once the Author is gone, the claim to 'decipher' a text becomes quite useless." This is a rejection of both the supremacy of the critic and the intentions of the author.

When Barthes says "critic," he doesn't "anyone who has encountered the text," however. He differentiates the critic from the "reader":

the reader is the very space in which are inscribed, without any being lost, all the citations a writing consists of; the unity of a text is not in its origin, it is in its destination.

For Barthes, the reader's understanding of the text is supreme because it weaves together the "tissue of signs" into a coherent whole, producing a singular interpretation. He concludes by advocating for the overthrow of the critical establishment in favor of individual interpretation: "to restore to writing its future, we must reverse its myth: the birth of the reader must be ransomed by the death of the Author." In other words, in order for us to allow readers their own experiences, we must stop prioritizing the critic -- not the reader, but the critic -- and instead allow the reader to engage the text.

We're gonna un-Barthes Barthes now, okay? Stay with me. Here's the context:

Barthes was responding to a stifling and rigid environment in which criticism was the sole province of the academic expert. As part of the deconstructionist wave, he wanted to upend the traditional hierarchy that dictated how a text should be understood and what it was for, instead prioritizing language and reaction.

He got his wish. We live in a world of reaction.

Gone is the tyranny of the formal critic; gone even is the formal literary education of the reader. Our "tissue of signs" is no longer the text, but an infinite mirrored hall of reactions to reactions to reactions in which the text diminishes into a vanishing point, as the Author once did on Barthes' literary stage.

We do not need to resist the tyranny of the academy. The academy has been destroyed. Adjunctification, the widespread corporatization of universities, the resulting devaluation of college degrees, the devastation of humanities departments in widespread shutdowns, and now the revocation of billions of dollars of government funding have left the academy on its knees. Public trust in academic expertise has declined so sharply that people on this very hellsite will tell you that if someone has an advanced degree in a specific field, that actually makes them less trustworthy.

And in Ozymandias' place, we have the reader.

The reader consumes a variety of "content" and regurgitates its reactions in a variety of "posts." It transmutes text into more text which further readers wriggle eagerly through, refining what might have had meaning into a rarefied fertilizer of emotion and echo. What it leaves behind becomes the literary history for new strata of reactions, nostalgia, and imitation.

This is the audience: an ouroboros of interpretation, a rat king of readership. It has no end but itself. Ultimately, it needs no text to function. In this world, the truly radical act is to disentangle yourself from the other worms and rebuild the edifice of meaning. This may require you to do such tasks as "read the actual book," but because we no longer have the support -- however oppressive -- of literary criticism to inform our reading, we must also learn how to read, explore the historical context on our own, and recover both the facts and the symbols from which the text is woven.

That is what death of the audience means: not a rejection of the critic in favor of language, but a rejection of endless language and infinite readers in favor of fact, history, and skill.

It's a pun, by the way: "La mort de l'auteur," spoken aloud, recalls Le Morte d'Arthur, a 15th-century collection of Arthurian legend which marked the turn away from the Middle Ages and into a nostalgic Early Modern period which valorized them. The Author becomes the mythic King; as myth, he can be severed from fact and dismissed.

Fact has now itself become the myth.

Fucking read.

#writing #death of the author #books and reading #literature

tobiornot-tobi

I think Yugi carries more then we give him credit for

#ygo #seto kaiba #yugioh #yugi moto

home-and-having-tea

You ever think about how unified humanity is by just everyday experiences? Tudor peasants had hangnails, nobles in the Qin dynasty had favorite foods, workers in the 1700s liked seeing flowers growing in pavement cracks, a cook in medieval Iran teared up cutting onions, a mom in 1300 told her son not to get grass stains on his clothes, some girl in the past loved staying up late to see the sun rise.

quecksilvereyes

there are scriptures all over the world painstakingly crafted hundreds of years ago with paw prints and spelling mistakes or drawings covering up mistakes. a bunch of teenage girls 2000 years ago gathered to walk around their hometown, getting fast food and laughing with their friends. two friends shared blankets before people lived in houses. a mother ran a fine comb through her child’s hair and told it to stop squirming sometime in the 1000s. there are covered up sewing mistakes in couture dresses from the 1800s, some poor roman burnt their food so well past recognition that they just buried the entire pot. there are broken dishes hidden in gardens of people no one even remembers anymore

theropoda

children eleven thousand years ago enjoyed jumping around in puddles made from the footprints of a giant sloth. children loved muddy puddles so long ago there were still megafauna alive

captainlordauditor

There’s a record of an emperor of Japan in the 9th century talking about his cat - how pretty it is, and how it stalks birds and curls up in a circle and meows mournfully for company and escaped its collar. All completely normal ordinary cat things. And then it ends with him saying “it is superior to all other cats”. I am delighted to be united across 1200 years with this fellow cat owner with exactly the same feelings about his cat that I have about mine.

dailycatsblog