Northern Unlights

Occasionally posting. Finnish.

[annasinthewalls]

It's that time again

[anexperimentallife]

[lyeekha]

via @5qui99l3

[riririn-yes]

I WOULD WATCH THIS

[parkayquarts]

EVERYTHING HAPPENS TO ME

[danhoemei]

My friends who just got their first glasses: i need this highly expensive special cloth to wipe them, I also have this eyeglass cleaner from the same company, did you know you shouldn't use your t shirt unless it's specifically soft

Me who's worn glasses since middle school: *slaps soap onto the glasses and washes them in the sink then wipes them with toilet paper* what

[danhoemei]

Did I stutter

[danhoemei]

No

[danhoemei]

Mah men

[danhoemei]

Our ranks are getting stronger

[annalyticall]

[dante-heller]

[godlessondheimite]

[fluffmugger]

#so did they miss the part where gatsby ends up floating dead in a pool and all the miserable deaths in wuthering heights#or did they miss that because there weren’t any chapters titled In Which The Sinners Are Punished For Their Errors#like. even if you require explicit moral instruction from literature it’s pretty hard to miss the comeuppance in those.

[pennie-dreadful]

“What I assume my teachers were trying to teach me”

[doctorbluesmanreturns]

Huck Finn is about a white Southern boy who was raised to believe that freeing slaves is a sin that would send you directly to hell who forges a familial bond with a runaway slave and chooses to free him and thereby in his mind lose his salvation because he refuses to believe that his best friend and surrogate father is less of a man just because he’s black. Yes it features what we now consider racial slurs but this is a book written only 20 years after people were literally fighting to be allowed to keep other human beings as property, we cannot expect people from the 1880s to exactly conform with the social mores of 2020, and more to the point if we ourselves had been raised during that time period there’s very little doubt that we would also hold most if not all of the prevalent views of the time because actual history isn’t like period novels written now where the heroes are perfect 21st century social justice crusaders and the villains are all as racist and sexist as humanly possible. Change happens slowly and ignoring the radical statement that we’re all human beings that Twain wrote at a time when segregation and racial tensions were still hugely prevalent just because he wrote using the language of his time period is short-sighted and foolhardy to the highest degree.

[mikkeneko]

I’m really kind of alarmed at the rise in the past few years of the “and we do condemn! wholeheartedly!” discourse around historical figures. it seems like people have somehow boomeranged between “morals were different in the past, therefore nobody in the past can ever be held accountable for ANY wrongs” to “morals are universal and timeless, and anything done wrong by today’s standards in the past is ABSOLUTELY unforgiveable” so completely, because social media 2.0 is profoundly allergic to nuance

please try this on for size:

there have always been, in past times as today, a range of people in every society, some of whom were even then fighting for a more just and compassionate accord with their fellow man and some of whom let their greeds and hatreds rule them to the worst allowable excesses. the goal of classics and history education is to teach you enough context to discern between the two, not only in the past but in the present

[three--rings]

My mind just boggles at the “There’s Racism In That Book” argument.  Yes, there is racism in that book, because that book is ABOUT RACISM.  The message is that it is BAD. 

My high school English teacher, who was a viciously brilliant woman, used to say that when people banned Huck Finn they said it was about the language, but it was really the message they were trying to ban, the subversive deconstruction of (religious) authority and white supremacy.

[lyricwritesprose]

Huckleberry Finn can actually be seen as a powerful case study in trying to do social justice when you have absolutely no tools for it, right down to vocabulary.  And in that respect, it’s a heroic tale, because Huck—with absolutely no good examples besides Jim, who he has been taught to see as subhuman, with no guidance, with everyone telling him that doing the right thing will literally damn him, with a vocabulary that’s full of hate speech—he turns around and says, “I’m not going to do it.  I’m not going to participate in this system.  If that means I go to Hell, so be it.  Going to Hell now.”

(I used to read a blogger who insisted that “All right, I’ll go to Hell,” from Huckleberry Finn is the most pure and perfect prayer in the canon of American literature.  Meaning, as I understand it, that the decision to do the right thing in the face of eternal damnation is the most holy decision one can make, and if God Himself is not proud of the poor mixed-up kid, then God Himself is not worth much more than a “Get thee behind me,” and the rest of us should be lining up to go to Hell too.  Worth noting that this person identified as an evangelical Christian, not because he was in line with what current American evangelicals believe, but because “they can change their name, I’m not changing mine.”  Interesting guy.  Sorry for the long parenthetical.)

Anyway, the point of Huck Finn, as far as I can tell, is that you can still choose to do good in utter darkness, with no guidance and no help and none of the right words.

And when you put it like that, it’s no wonder that a lot of people on Tumblr—people who prioritize words over every other form of social justice—find it threatening and hard to comprehend.

[riririn-yes]

I wonder if these same people are complaining about Gone With the Wind, which in fact is a pretty racist book. Because the message kind of is that the racist world was better.

[homunculus-argument]

Marrying your cousin, being drunk at 11 am, and having a kitchen table repurposed from an old door. Things that are trashy if you're poor, but totally fine if you're filthy rich.

[wilqw333]

yeah um

the last thing is okay if you're poor imo

the rest should be considered trashy in any and all financial situations.

[homunculus-argument]

Does every single post need a PSA graph explaining the differences between "things that are culturally commonly considered to be something", "things that are objectively something" and "things that OP as an individual considers something", and be conveniently colour coded in order to distinguish between the three, so that nobody ever needs to get into any deductive conclusions on their own?

[riririn-yes]

Dude yes, you forgot you’re on tumblr?

(For real, I feel your frustration.)

[prokopetz]

Not to be a technical writer on main, but I've been bumping into the idea lately that the only reason explaining yourself in more detail never seems to work is because neurotypical people are misunderstanding you on purpose, or because they have short attention spans, or because they just hate listening to you talk – and sure, occasionally that's even true, but most of the time the problem you're running into is more fundamental.

Every time you add more detail, you're running the risk of tripping over a bad assumption on your part about the listener's prior knowledge, or hitting the tipping point where they become overwhelmed with new information (and remember that you don't know which parts of what you're saying will be new information for them), or making a leap of logic that isn't as self-evident as you think it is, or any of a dozen other potential snags which, by definition, you will not see coming until it's too late to correct course.

Basically, every piece of information you add multiplies the odds of you getting blindsided by some vector of misunderstanding you didn't anticipate, even as it addresses the ones you did anticipate. The point of diminishing returns where continuing to elaborate increases the odds of unexpected miscommunication more than it decreases the odds of expected miscommunication is much nearer than you'd like.

The most effective act of communication is not the one which contains the most possible information, but the one which contains the smallest amount of information it possibly can while still getting its point across. It sucks, but it's the reality of the situation. People far more autistic than you have been trying for hundreds of years to invent a way of communicating which doesn't work this way, without success.

All of which is to say that "getting to the damn point" is legitimately a communication skill, not just an accommodation for people who aren't paying attention. If it's any consolation, it's something neurotypical people struggle with just as much as anyone else – if it was easy, technical writers wouldn't have jobs!

[riririn-yes]

As tech writer I told a colleague that it doesn’t really matter, from a user perspective, how our device works.

What matter is we tell them how they do the thing they bought it for. Get to the point.

[fullmetalfisting]

So back when I was a senior in undergrad, my partner went through, like, the craziest nervous breakdown I'd ever witnessed in my life. And like, maybe it makes me a back girlfriend or whatever but I was kind of like, "I'm gonna mind my own business on this one."

So my partner gets super close to two other students in his program. He was a film student so his senior year was being capped off by him making a movie. He decides he's going to make a movie about him turning into a salmon. He gets crazy into it. He starts eating salmon for every meal. He buys a bunch of salmon-related stuff. We found a T-shirt at Goodwill with a salmon on it and he thought it was divine intervention that he was doing the right thing. He walks into the freezing-cold Puget sound fully clothed several times to "get into it." He watches videos of salmon spawning and is like, "Nothing is more poignant than this." He gets a tattoo of three salmon on his arm.

The entire time the two students he got really close to are fully enabling him. It's a folie á trois sort of situation. They're out until six in the morning doing creepy art school shit and encouraging his (possibly no longer fictional) desire to become a salmon. My partner has an answer for everything. "Salmon get eaten by bears," I say. "That's a cool as fuck way to die," he says blithely. "And Salmon are free of the yoke of capitalism."

And if I dared to say, Hey, this is....getting a little odd..., he would throw a full-scale tantrum. I'm not supporting his dream (I wasn't sure at this point if it was his dream to be a filmmaker or his dream to become a salmon). I'm basically like, okay. Be a salmon! Fuck!

We had been dating for five years at this point and this behavior was such a left turn that I just decided to ignore it. And then after all that he basically went back to normal after graduation. Sometimes he'll be like, "That was weird, huh?" and has nothing more to say on the matter.

[foxes-in-love]

[riririn-yes]

Oh god it’s the season again.

[cheeseanonioncrisps]

Honestly bizarre that tomatoes get all the flack for “not being a vegetable” because they're technically a fruit when:

A) There are a ton of fruits that get categorised as vegetables. Like this also applies to pumpkins, squashes and cucumbers.

B) The fucking mushrooms are standing there at the back of the crowd in this witch trial, trying to look inconspicuous because they somehow got into the vegetable club with no fucking controversy despite the fact that they're not even plants.

[mortimermcmirestinks]

"technically tomatoes are fruits--" THAT MUSHROOM OVER THERE IS MORE CLOSELY RELATED TO A FUCKING SHIH TZU THAN IT IS TO LITERALLY ANY PLANT

[timothysnyder]

The ideal of masculinity: destroying things other people built, whining about it, blaming someone else.

[riririn-yes]

Is this for real? As in, did Fox News actually had segment like this?

Things seem even weirder and crazier than I thought.

[genderfluid-druid]

hurr hurr I'm a human body hurr hurr I'm gonna solve all my problems using mucus

[genderfluid-druid]

"i require more fluids" well what did you do with the fluids I already gave you. hmm? did you make more mucus with them? you made more mucus with them.

[viralfrog]

[ruttotohtori]

Kosmetologit kilpailevat Meikkausliigassa

[karvaiset-sankareidet]

Kokoomuspoliitikot Leikkausliigassa

[returquoise]

Väärentäjät Feikkausliigassa.

[triibulinekiisu]

Baarimikot Sheikkausliigassa

[varahai]

Murtovarkaat Keikkausliigassa

[kotitontunmanaaja]

Antiikin filologit ja kirkkohistorioitsijat keskenään Kreikkausliigassa

[dreamyholmes]

Hip hop tanssijat Breikkausliigassa

[iibislintu]

Kruunan ja klaavan heittäjät Teikkausliigassa

[korvapuustinen]

Rullalautailijat Skeittausliigassa

[holonyymi]

trollaajat heittausliigassa

[karu-selli]

Graffititaiteilijat Peinttausliigassa

[cheaphalloweencostume]

not to be insensitive but some of the salem witch trials were so funny bitches like “i saw her at the devils sacrament!!!” girl… what were YOU doing at the devils sacrament 👀

[altospaceangel]

If ANYTHING is a heritage post it’s this.

[charlesoberonn]

What do you mean it’s only from 2020???

[horreurscopes]

never forget the universal rule of the order of things: People Will Not Read It

[horreurscopes]

signs at stores? émail? menu ?? instruction ? post online ? caption with andswer to question ? group hand outs ??? street sign ??? no. The Written Word Is The Enemy

[horreurscopes]

americans are making this post about their shit education system and the literacy crisis whatever that is and i say this with love in my heart: it really is not that deep. pathology this pathologizing that. how about the universal human inclination to take da Path of least resistance

[millenianthemums]

sometimes plushies make me cry because it’s like. they’re little guys made to be loved. their only purpose is to be held and hugged and loved. we made them because we love making things and we love loving things. and they’re so cute

[morriganwarrior]

Years back, I was working at a specialty store, and we got this HUGE crate of plushy toys. They were all insanely cute and squishy. I knew kids would go nuts for them, as it was the first week of December, so parents and grandparents often had kids with them while shopping for furniture, lamps, cooking equipment, lights, etc.

One night, I was working my last hour of my shift covering the Customer Service desk, which meant when I wasn't busy, I was supposed to help clean up around the cash registers, including taking back items people changed their minds about at the checkout. Earlier, I had witnessed a kid carrying thos cute plushy toy. It was a brown and white hedgehog. The kid, at the checkout, saw a remote control car and he told his dad he qanted it. The dad told him, "The plushy or the car- you can't have both" (by the way, I respect boundaries with kids and parents sticking to their guns about it), and the kid picked the car.

So, I'm cleaning up, have less than an hour left of my shift, and I see the little plushy hedgehog. Somehow, he never got put back nor had anyone else seen him and decided to buy him. He was just sitting there, slumped to the side, unattended.

It's Christmas and I'm a sentimental old sap at heart. My brain starts replaying the scene from RUDOLPH where he's on the Island of Misfot Toys, and is told a toy is never truly happy until it is loved. I picked him up and quickly took him back to the bin with the plushies but... It was empty. He was literally the last plushy toy and my boss was about to wheel the bin out. We weren't getting any more toys till November, so that meant any toys left at this point needed to sell or they'd be sent to the dump.

I brought the little hedgehog to the front, figuring someone would see him with the candy, candles, & Christmas brick-a-brack, and fall in love with him. When I finished my shift, I went to ask my manager a question and as I passed the Christmas candle display - there he sat, the sad little slumped over hedgehog plushy. No one had bought him, or even moved him.

My manager, Phillip, saw me and the hedgehog. He asked how the hedgehog got there. I told him how I'd put him there when the bin got sent back, and he was the only plushy left. Philip had kids, I figured he'd probably get sentimental and buy it for his kids. Nope. He shrugged and said he'd send it back to be disposed of.

That night, I came home with a plushy hedgehog in my passenger seat. My mom saw him and just thought he was the cutest little hedgehog and asked what I wanted to do with him. I told her the story, then added I didn't know exactly what I wanted to do with him.

My mom is a child psychiatrist, specializing in children with PTSD and brain damage that results in learning problems/issues with processing their emotions. She asked if she could have the plushy hedgehog (even offered to pay me for him, she didn't expect me to just give him over), so kids could hug him when they were upset in session.

Murphy, the plushy hedgehog that still slumps a little to the left when seated, has been hugged by hundreds of kids. Little girls have held him tight while explaining about bullies, little boys have held him tight while crying over their panic attacks, younger siblings have held him to whisper secrets while elder siblings and parents talk about self-soothing techniques, teenagers have hugged Murphy while talking about the worst day of their lives. Murphy has also been hugged by kids excitedly chatting about a new friend at school, a teen girl excited to be called by her name instead of her dead-name, little kids proudly saying they've mastered their ABCs, and even staff members who just need to come chat over a case they are having trouble with.

Every now and then, my mom brings Murphy home for a weekend. He gets washed (she calls it a Spa Weekend, to her coworkers, all of them laughing), dried, and sits outside with my mom in the sunshine to get aired out, then on Monday, they are back to work. Some kids even just ask to hold Murphy while they talk, no matter their mood or what they want to talk about. They just want to hug Murphy.

So yes. Plushies are made for one purpose. To be hugged and loved. To be a comfort.

[theharlotofferelden]