#senseless ramblings

[poikaboo]

not enough love for this line tbh

[ekebolou]

I get that people have complicated relationships with higher education, and that's 100% reasonable, but there's something I want to point out.

when you hear a popular podcast or youtuber or history show or see a popular history book or article say it's 'revealing' or 'uncovering' or 'bringing to light' or 'reevaluating' some story of the past, it's usually doing so off of academic history work done by people in academia.

Journalists and your average YouTuber are generally the worst about not crediting this work,* but it's there in the background, nonetheless.

That work - academic research, particularly of this kind, and the articles, books, and other information it produces - doesn't get done without institutional support. That is, like with everything, sure some enthusiasts will keep at their particular interests hell or high water, and rich folks can peruse to their hearts' content - that's what fueled the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries' ever-increasing investigative output.

And that should be concerning, not comforting.

Not because all of that output was wrong or terrible or misguided - a lot was, but much of it is still essential, foundational, exceedingly rigorous and useful - but because much of modern history work, twentieth century on, has been a century-long battle to correct some of deeply culturally embedded beliefs an almost wholly dilettante pursuit of the past generated. It's kind of a joke in English-language scholarship that the Victorians ruined everything, but like, for real, y'all, the Victorians left us some BURDENS, from fake relics created for ~the aesthetic~ to defaced and destroyed historical documents.

Academic research in itself is not some kind of panacea. we're not shitting on dilettantes (I am very much a dilettante, in my way) and so-called 'amateurs', who are vital and excellent contributors to knowledge. We're also not saying institutions are always perfect and good and don't need to change. I'm saying that robust, diverse, in-depth, careful, broadly reaching, and most of all interesting and new scholarship requires something on the scale of institutional support.

This is not just because that's where your historians live, but because in a very practical sense, that's where your archives live. You do actually need a big building stuffed with Things Of The Past well-maintained and with a core of well-trained and extremely cool (like librarians, all archivists are extremely cool in my books, even if they're kind of assholes, as long as they are good archivists).

Archivists are currently doing a lot with very little support - like a lot of academics and librarians, really - because that's what people do. When they care about doing something, they get along, they scrape by, they suck it up. But they need buildings, they need climate control, they need continuing training and new people coming into the field - if the idea is that we have so many documents from the past extant today because archives DON'T need institutional-level support, then you are severely misinformed about how much of the past has survived to the present day. And if the idea is that we'll preserve the IMPORTANT bits of the past regardless then you're also sadly misinformed about how good we are at determining what's important, and how frequently (and with growing frequency) disasters of various kinds wipe places out (Lisbon 1755, for example), and how robust any of our documentation (often ESPECIALLY the 'important' stuff) is in terms of long-term survival.

There's a theory going around that THIS period - like the 2000s through today and into the future - will produce a 'dark age' for future historians because the digital infrastructure which not only underpins almost all of our day-to-day lives but is how we've decided to 'save space' - by preserving things digitally rather than in hard copy - is so unspeakably vulnerable and weak. Everyday folks have already, for the most part, lost access to things like CDs, which have a lifespan of something like 100 years at the most. Proprietary softwares, black box devices with irreplaceable parts, flimsy modern materials with difficult to preserve features mean a whole of information that drives our lives today will simply become inaccessible in, actually, a very short time.

Archives - vast storehouses under careful supervision full of well-organized stuff that might potentially be important one day - need institutional support, but also, on their own, are kind of... well, let's just say, Historians will also say shit like they 'uncovered' a 'hidden history' in a previously 'lost, unknown' document that some archivist put in a special box on a special shelf and carefully catalogued for prime findability. It's a symbiotic relationship that doesn't always get its due. An archive on its own can be very useful to a local community, an individual business, a specific family, all kinds of things - but to get History out of it, you need some Historians or suitably rabid individuals of other castes. You need both, or you end up with the pseudo-histories of nineteenth-century rich folk that then get to determine what we believe is possible for the future by what we are told of the past. It's a bad scene.

Again, there are further steps to take - not over here defending institutions as they stand. We were, at one point, on our way to accessible higher education, meaning everyone had a chance to go to pursue their interests, before we started seeing Universities not as a social good and social resource but as job training and profit centers and cut social funding as demanded by business ghouls. Higher education and academia as it functions now has done a lot of damage to people's lives.

But institutions are much harder to build than to change, and change is hard enough. Once an archive is defunded, its collections distributed or destroyed, you typically don't get it back. Like certain species of sea creatures with long gestational periods, once you destroy the mid-range of the population - the bit that raises up the next generation - your population collapses and its very hard to get things back on track (historians and other academics who require lots of investment and training and time and experience are like the sea creatures, you see).

You can, of course, start new. We've done that a lot, as a species. It's always possible. But it's a bit like running out of a fire empty-handed instead of grabbing your wallet as you go. Sometimes you just gotta go, and that's always safest - sometimes you just can't think or there's no time to think and you couldn't get to anything useful if you wanted to - but if it's matter of looking at the wallet in your pants pocket and dipping down to grab it (and maybe pants!) while you bolt then yeah, ought to try. Maybe the pants catch fire and you've got to abandon them anyway to save your life. That's reasonable. (This is just an analogy - fire safety generally says to get ye gone with your life and health intact ASAP, just for the record - don't stop for shit and don't go back in).

The point of this is that next time you're enjoying some popular history content (please save me from this word) or learn some cool fact about the past, think about the fact that none of that get down to you without a big chain of people all joined together doing different things. And that big chain needs nice big social supports to exist. The social supports are hard to change, but the chain is easy to lose without them. It's a group effort all the way, even that little fucker who didn't credit the work they used to make fun videos is important.

That content doesn't happen without the structure to support it - or even worse, that content lies to you. Makes stuff up. The stuff it makes up isn't going to be fantasies of freedom and equality, at least going by what's been made up before.

Hate the academy, want it to change, act to reform it - all very good, go for it, no desire to stop you (except maybe the hating part, try to hate more specifically, like individual actions or aspects of the academy, if you're going to hate on stuff, but, like, hate can be unhealthy, get some peace in your life if you can). Things are bad enough without also feeling like you have to take on a crusade to save archives or other institutions - though honestly just participating in your local history scene, giving them time and attention, is really valuable help - so that's not really the call to action here. The call is just asking you to notice the big structures that enable these small joys.

Don't let yourself be convinced that they somehow happen in a vacuum, that they'll just persist somehow like getting Deliveroo at your off-grid mountain cabin. A lot people helped make that stupid podcast about Marie Antoinette's toenail fungus happen - and there's way more than that waiting! If we can just keep letting people make archives, study stuff, fuck off on fruitless searches for things that were never there and instead find stuff we never KNEW was there. There's so much of that to be done! The more the merrier on who should be doing it! But if we want that, we got to figure out how to support it, to keep what we've got, build more of it, or it'll be the same shit about Marie Antoinette over and over and over and over and over because that'll all we'll have to build from.

Anyway, if you've never done it, take a ghost tour. Visit a museum nearby. Pop into an archive and just ask them some stuff. Get on these web pages that do things like recreate Angkor Wat as a virtual tour, go watch a Youtuber do a frothing-at-the-mouth defense of Charles Lightoller, or even better, read this reddit thread about whether Dua Lipa would have survived the Titanic sinking based on her music video. And just think - holy shit, isn't it cool that we have a society, a whole social structure, that could produce such a thing? And it's right here, at my fingertips, ready to disappear.

*there are reasons for this, some related to format and legibility/accessibility that still shouldn't eliminate the need to credit others' work and others cowardly excuses for parasitism

[vinnieairhead]

i might as well talk about myself because I don ' t think many know that much about me . Well, I ' m obviously Minori . You all know that much . I tend to be here a lot at night because vinnie NEVER goes to sleep on time .. I think that I am very different from vinnie .. they are a lot more chill than I am whereas I .. I try not to post much here because I ' m scared I ' m annoying. Uhmm , I ' m a bit more upbeat I think but also not —— .. idrk . I like bunnies and you should think of me as like very sleepy but in a silly way yk ??

[liz19forever]

[pentacomet]

Hey fam, me again, and i have a new song hyperfixation :) Choice of today; headfirst for halos!!

Holy shit this one is insane and i feel like in general captures mcr’s vibe, especially from those early days, so fucking well. That starting riff like falling pebbles sounds so beautiful and almost classical, but with such unique punk underlying threads. Then we’re thrown into the wry scream of punk and emo clashing in such a harmonic way, with that pop of that gorgeous sounding bass in the backing. (I love mikey so fucking much, he knows bass as an instrument so fucking well, even in those bullets days when he had literally just started, and it was always just meant to be <3 he’s so talented)

Those lyrics, fam. ‘I can’t begin to let you know just what i’m feeling’ is the literal embodiment of so much emotional pain and is so incredibly heartbreakingly relatable. And of course that line ‘i think i’ll blow my brains against the ceiling’ is raw and clear, only to be followed by the only lines that could make it any more clear how fucked up some of our heads are. Adding ‘we’ll fly home’ is so gutwrenching, it feels like it’s referencing something from a childhood, something sweet and innocent and simple, but having it where it is really cements the core longing for simpler times. As well as the knowledge that those times were never really as easy as they seemed.

It seems to be the theme of the whole song, is the happy, wry regard upon how shitty so many of us feel and the wistful dream of simplicity other than the certainty of suicidal emotions. It’s genuinely one of the most raw and gut wrenching but real songs i’ve ever heard, and is the kind of song that makes you sit back to catch your breath after the avalanche of emotion that was just released.

There is genuinely no other song like this one and just cements further into place mcr’s talent and genius. Among my favs <3

Again, sry for the rant, and the weird cheesy descriptions, just infodumping to my fellow tumblr gremlins who will probably be the ones who will get this if no one else lol. Tag your fav parts about hfh :)

[laloozy]

Oh, they finally released some of the photographs that Rankin took at the Olivier- Awards 🥰

[thedreamerstoryteller]

Li Xiangyi and Di Feisheng are two legends, two myths, the two most powerful martial artists of the Jianghu, the heads of the two biggest sects. The Fastest Sword and the Demon King.

They are the characters of a story that everyone knows and tell. They are ideals. They are role models who embodies different values and different visions.

They are two faces of the same coin, opposite yet complementary. They are the sun and the moon. They are what people would like to be and what they would like to never be. They are hope and fear. They are meaningful and important names written in books and reports.

They are two abstract figures in the history of Martial Arts. The archetypes of the Hero and the Villain. Something to reach and something to fight.

But for Fang Duobing, beside and before all of this, they are and always be Li Lianhua and A-Fei.

The wandering physician with a sharp mind and silver tong and his old mysterious friend with an imposing look and a smug attitude.

The one who lives in a weird wheeled house with a dog, who can't cook (at least not so well), who grows his own vegetables and plants and just wants a simple and carefree life and the one who has appeared suddenly, who seems to not fear everything, who is straightforward, who seems always to have something to hide, who seems violent and hot-tempered but he actually isn't, who says he has no taste but it isn't completely true, who actually cares but does not want to show it.

For Xiaobao, before everything, they are his friends, the first people he has met in the Jianghu and he has trusted. When he discovers the truth about their identities, in his eyes they don't stop to be the myths and legends he has grown up with but they become real. They are real human people with strengths and weaknesses and he accepts them. This doesn't diminish their value, their roles or what they represent but in a certain way it makes them more reachable and tangible.

Can you imagine the faces of the people who sees this kid acting without restrains around these two legendary personalities who don't seem particularly bothered by his manners? I can and I can't help but laugh at that.

[trainerethan]

I wish red and green weren't so normal. It's really hard to try and fit them into Bloodborne au. Like I'm sure it can be done but I'm really into making it as close to 1:1 as possible. Like I could just draw them in Bloodborne gear but that wouldn't be enough. Which faction did they belong to. Does red fear the old blood. Would red even give a fuck about cosmic horrors. Oak would be at Byrgenwerth and green leaves to achieve their goals in a way those who fear the old blood refuse to even consider. Red as Gehrman is based but Gehrmans "secret" dialogue where he cries and begs for someone to free him from the endless dream is Not something I'm making my beautiful wife red do. But being the first hunter would be so awesome. Who's the doll. The great ones could be assigned very very barely similar Pokemon but I'm also not touching that with a 100 foot pole. Anyways. Sleepy time