Sade Olutola
official daine visual archive
Doug Jones
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if i look back, i am lost
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PUT YOUR BEARD IN MY MOUTH
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@thoughts-from-the-toy-box
We need the obnoxious atheists back. I know they engineered their own destruction by being annoying and pretentious, but it has become apparent how essential to the ecosystem they were. The religious fanatics have become too bold without their natural predators. Jesus wojaks would have been torn to shreds in 2011.
ā¦huh.
a few days ago I started my college class with "goldfish have long memories, Einstein never failed math in school, and the brain does not stop developing at 25, these are all things people just repeated until they sounded true, so let's talk about media literacy" and I could tell I had broken every brain in the room
The thing you have to keep in mind about Moby Dick is that itās an explicitly anti-racist text written by a white guy in the 1850s. So you end up with stuff like Ishmael spending an entire paragraph complimenting a Polynesian guy on his skull shape.
by @kleefkruid
There was a TikTok post about an advertisement for āblood-making pills for weak womenā someone found in a newspaper from the 1890s and everybody seemed to think it was just an example of the weird misogyny of the day and age but no. Anemia was a massive public health concern. It always has been through history but part of the reason we have this idea of old timey women thought history being physical weak, chronically cold and pale and fainting is because they often they were. Anemia was also a massive problem for men in that day but even now it disproportionally affects people who menstruate. So tonics full of stimulants and āhealthful vitaminsā were marketed at young women in pages upon pages of advertisements in every newspaper. People generally felt like shit all the time back then.
I've seen old folk remedies for anemia, particularly cooking with cast iron and putting rusty nails in an apple, leaving them in overnight, then removing the nails and eating the rust-infused apple.
It was A Whole Thing.
Whatās interesting is that that would have worked better than a lot of the āmedicinesā being hawked during that time. To this day, adding a small chunk of iron to a cooking pot with a mild acid is being used to prevent iron deficient anemia.
Yep! Absolutely. It was a much more pervasive and deadly problem throughout history because of a lack of dietary variety and medical science not completely understanding the needs of the human body. Now it is less common because many foods are fortified with additional minerals and multivitamins are inexpensive and widely available.
people forget but before enriched flour people DIED like all the time of pellagra. a literal vitamin deficiency. people also died of tooth decay... until antibiotics and floriated water. people died and were paralyzed for life because they swam in the summer, or just drank water, or ate out at a restaurant of polio and cholera and typhoid until vaccines and effective health codes. it was expected that like a third of all kids born would die from things the MMR vaccine prevents.
learning about the history of public health is SO important to understanding why scary chemicals are WAY less scary than life without them.
this is also why vaccines are so important. 'well what did people do before then' I have heard a lot of that sort of sentiment from anti-vax folks and like... martha, they DIED. Babies DIED. In the thousands. Go to an old cemetery and look at the graves. Look at the ages. I have seen so many graves for children under the age of 3. For infants that hadn't been alive long enough to have a name.
Measles, mumps, rubella, and the seasonal--SEASONAL--plagues of water-bourne diseases (polio, cholera, dysentery) that diarrhea you to death killed thousands of children every year. Every fucking year. Vaccines can prevent the first three, can prevent chicken pox/shingles, can prevent, these days, even hepatitis. But there is no vaccine for dysentery, for typhoid, for a surprising number of the Old Plagues, because we eliminated them using a completely different method: Public Health and Sanitation, which kills them at the source.
In 1949, the government actually commissioned Warner Bros' animation department to put together a video explaining to people the importance of paying tax to fund the public health system--and it still explains the basics pretty well:
On the other side of the pond, there's a reason London celebrated Joseph Bazalgette's design and building of the first sanitary sewer. He saved lives.
Sometimes I think Present-Day America's utter squeamishness; and inability to talk seriously about things that have to do with bodies and bodily functions, is actually what is costing us critical health infrastructure. We already cannot get public toilets off the ground in this country bc the minute you mention 'toilet' people lose their fucking minds, and are so uncomfortable with the fact that Everyone Poops that they can't stop babbling jokes, and nothing can get done. But public toilets are a public health issue. People need to piss and shit, and if you don't give them enough places to do it in a safe sanitary way, they will still need to do it and will go and do it in an alley or on a building or what-have-you, and that's a public health issue!
Public Health is so often derided, indeed it's even dismantled because people don't like to acknowledge its worth or just plain never learn about it as anything but a joke. Oregon doesn't have fluoridated water anymore, did you know that? They literally rolled back a public health measure for not goddamn reason other than an acute breakout of hysterical ignorance. If you're out and about in just about any city in this countryāand even in Canada and the UK as wellāyou're still on a Bladder Leash, because there are just about ZERO bathrooms accessible to the public. That's a public health issue!
If you live in NYC, you get the importance of sanitation workers shoved up your nose every time you go outside. They used to have metal trashcans, but that was rolled back and now the bags just pile up on the sidewalks. That's a public health issue!
My small town has inadequate waste collection, meaning trash that doesn't fit the exacting rules and tiny single trash bin piles up in our home. There is no government sanitation, it's outsourced to a private company based out of state. That's ludicrous, and I imagine we aren't the only small town with this public health issue!
Children and adults aren't required to be vaccinated before going to school and work, where they could spread or start epidemics. Children and adults aren't required to mask in public places anymore, even when showing signs of communicable disease. Children an adults aren't required to stay home if showing signs of illness. That's also a fucking public health issue!
Eating out, swimming in public pools, going to water parks, concerts, conventions, parties, theme/amusement parks, theatres, rallies, and parades are all possible to do safely because of public health departments and public health measures. The fact that so many have been dismantled, made voluntary rather than mandated, and generally gutted is genuinely worrying. We have the technology to live without diseases, and to eradicate new ones within months, and the Western world just doesn't, because we fed so many generations the lie that we aren't part of a larger community and have no responsibility to other people.
That's so, so incredibly wrong, and Miss Rona pointed that out sharply.
it honestly is like...very meaningful to me that bashir supposedly had his [unspecified neurodivergence] "cured" and yet he is still so clearly autistic just in a different way. they couldn't cure him no matter how hard they tried and he grew up to be a successful autistic adult Despite their abuse and not because of it. makes me feel things
like yes he is no longer nonverbal. he is no longer the kind of autistic they knew how to recognize. and that's a terrible tragedy because there was nothing wrong with him! he was a whole person already!!
but even after their "cure" he is still so clearly and glaringly autistic. he cannot read social cues, he has trouble making friends, he is too loud and too passionate and too cold all at once, he infodumps about medicine and obsesses over spy movies, he hates certain textures and certain sounds and doesnt act how he is supposed to and yet! he is the brilliant doctor who made the crazy decision to go to a random space station rather than a decked out starship because he thought he could do good there, he is the professional who made tougher medical decisions and faced more ethical dilemmas than almost any other star trek doctor, he is jadzia and obrien and garak and kira's friend and has carved out a life for himself wholly independent of his parents. he is changed because of what they did to him but his best qualities have nothing to do with their meddling. his friends love him because he is autistic and not despite, he is good at his job for the same reason, which is something his parents never could have imagined. *goes insane*
there's a fascinating type of post on this site which boils down to "what if, instead of being clichƩ, such-and-such work of fiction instead dodged all genre tropes in a way that instead made it really boring"
"imagine an indiana jones or lara croft type who repatriates artifacts instead of taking them abroad" - kind of hamhanded and potentially white savior-y, but it is at least An Idea that meaningfully engages with the genre
"what if indiana jones was like a real archeologist and spent all his time filling out grant applications and carefully dusting off pottery sherds" - yeah I dunno man. what if he was like that. you could maybe get a five-minute SNL sketch out of it. good luck making it an interesting movie or video game though lol
I think a lot about that one post where it's like "why would a monster that subsists on fear / suffering inflict it when it could instead eat people's existing anguish, thus making them feel better"
and it's like. idk maybe because that isn't fucking scary or angsty or a particularly good allegory. and the monster is a Character or Plot Device, not a real fucking guy.
people are likening the last one to the plot of Monsters Inc. so I feel obligated to point some things out:
the "fear vs laughter" premise of monsters inc is part of a broader allegory about corporate greed at the expense of the health and well-being of the world at large. in particular, it's roughly analogous to the world's continued reliance on fossil fuels, which is due in part to fearmongering about nuclear power and wind farms.
a key element of the plot is that it's not just a matter of "the main characters don't want to subsist on fear, they want to be Niceys." the plot and characterization rely on sully and ESPECIALLY mike buying into the corporate line on human children, and thus going from "terrified" to "confused and intrigued" when it becomes apparent that human children are not actually dangerous
the result of all this is that "laugh power is just as feasible, and in fact more efficient" develops the themes and characters rather than shutting them down. if the premise of the movie were simply that sully and mike are Niceys to begin with, you lose the allegory, you have to rewrite the plot from scratch, and the characters - imo - become considerably less interesting, because you're robbing them of the tension between "maybe what I'm doing is wrong" and "I would like to have Money to Eat, not cause a mass panic, and not get thrown in jail or killed or written off as a crank"
attitude is a major element here. monsters inc isn't out here implying that the concept of monsters engendering fear/pain in order to harvest it is stupid. undertale isn't a game where "you're in a dungeon but everyone is friendly;" a pacifist run is a conscious decision that you make with people firing bullets at you. this one's a Twitter example, but - something like lovely lady rpg or clam man 2 isn't starting from the absurd premise that harry dubois and the setting he's in are Generic and therefore Uninteresting, only to tear them out and replace them with nothing of substance.
lastly, and imo this is key:
a short tumblr post is ill-suited for exploring ideas in any real detail, which tends to make it more annoying, not less.
more specifically: these posts rarely dive into the actual narrative implications of anything they're proposing, instead favoring vague gestures at pithy but underdeveloped ideas. there's a difference between saying "what if Indiana Jones didn't go on adventures lol" and "what if a normal, realistic archaeologist still got drawn into a pulp adventure and had to get by in spite of being terrified and under-equipped to deal with the situation." the latter would be A Story that engages with the genre, not just a cheap gag.
in conclusion:
the purest form of serotonin is when a cat looks at u and u go like āwhat?ā and it meows at u
like, that is a very unspecific response I still have no idea what you want but I applaud how adorably you meowed all the same, well done
This post led me to reminisce on the nature of catās meowing, and I have a funny story
I befriended a feral cat once who had spent her life in the forest without human interaction. I was worried about her because she had a paw damaged from an old injury and was emaciated but obviously nursing kittens that were hidden away somewhere. It took me weeks of putting out food and sitting across the yard every evening for her to trust me even a little and when she decided we were friends and she expected dinner every night she started coming to my door and trying to call for me in the evening, but she didnāt meow. Why would she? Cats only meow naturally as kittens when their vocal chords/ears arenāt fully developed, adult cats communicate with vocalizations that arenāt audible to humans. She probably tried making noises I couldnāt hear to call me but ended up sticking to the one I always responded to- a horrible yowling growl that she had made at me when we first encountered each other in the forest. Except once we were friends she would make this noise while purring and rubbing affectionately against a nearby tree or the porch railing (because she didnāt want to touch me yet). This understandably freaked my family members out but I was touched that she had taken the time to find a way to basically yell FUCK OFF in an affectionate way.
Fast forward to when she finally trusts me enough to bring her hidden kittens out of the forest to me, long story short I gained their trust and put them in this big pen, that I had previously used to keep chickens in, so theyād be safe and to keep her from having another litter. Except she was already secretly pregnant again! (Fix your pets, guys, they make SO many babies) and ended up having her new babies in this pen. I kept my distance, sitting on the outside once they were born until she seemed comfortable enough to let me come inside. The kittens were a bit wild, hissing viscously at me as soon as they opened their eyes, but they warmed up to me. There were four of them and soon they all wanted to be the center of attention during the twice daily play sessions. Iād be playing with one and another would meow insistently behind me and Iād immediately answer them and give them love, teaching them that humans could be friends that answer their needs- making them adoptable once they were weaned. Mama cat (Artie) would just watch me play with them, and I guess she was doing some thinking because one day when they were about a month old I was playing with them and one meowed behind me. I was confused because I hadnāt realized there was a kitten behind me and when I turned, there wasnāt. The only cat there was Artie looking at me really intensely. I turned back around to the kittens and I heard the meow again, I turned back to Artie and responded in the way I always did with the kittens āyes baby?ā And she meowed again in an exact imitation of her kittens! After that she would.not.shut.up. It was like she had cracked some kind of code, meowing for attention and snacks and just to say hi. Her two older kittens, the ones sheād had in the forest, had never meowed at me either but started to once they saw how I responded to their mom. and I find it endlessly fascinating because before that it had never occurred to me that cats only meow at humans because they were taught by other cats to keep meowing past kittenhood because thatās the best way to get a humanās attention.
Imagine befriending some weird giant with the wrong number of legs that you met in the forest who seems nice enough but doesnāt seem to be able to hear you, until your friend explains that all they can understand is fuck off! And Iām a baby give me love!
As someone around for 9-11 and the "NEVER FORGET NUMBER #1 GREATEST TRAGEDY EVER IN HISTURY" response to it I am in thrilled and invigorated by the fact that younger people just make amogus memes and TikTok nonsense about it. A huge chunk of America cared more about it than any entire genocide and thought you would cry learning about it. They hoped it'd make every generation patriotically angry forever and ever and want to join the military. Instead you Photoshop the towers into squidwards house and shit. Never stop lol
Iām physically unable to take 9/11 seriously, entirely because my grade 9 english teacher was bizarrely obsessed with it. We basically had an entire unit on 9/11. We watched that documentary from those students that were doing a documentary of firefighters and wound up getting the only footage of the first plane hitting. We did a novel study of a book about some kid being in one of the towers for take your kid to work day and him and his dad squeezing past the wreckage of the plane to escape in time. We watched that Nic Cage movie of him being a firefighter during 9/11 that gets stuck in an elevator shaft when the place collapses. I am dead fucking serious, we had to make up fictional people that died in the attack, write an obituary for our 9/11sonaās, and then write and deliver a eulogy as their grief-stricken parent. At one point in the unit the teacher clarified that she hadnāt personally lost anyone to the attack, nor was she anywhere near New York when it happened. She never bothered to ask if any of us had actually lost someone in the attack, which kind of seems like a thing you should do before making us invent fictional victims to give eulogies for. The unit began with her demanding to know where we all were on the day of the attack and what we remembered, and she started crying when we told her that 1. we were two years old at the time and couldnāt remember shit fuck, the closest thing was one of the older kids kind of thought they remembered being very confused at adults freaking out over the TV but that could have been literally anything, and so this meant that 2. we were the last class she would ever teach that could possibly remember 9/11. Probably didnāt help that someone pointed out that we were the class born in 1999, so in two years sheād have students that hadnāt even been born during 9/11. That may have contributed to the teacher crying over the whole thing.
Weāre Canadian.
That last sentence KILLED me. Jesus fuck.
Nah, it's the secret third option; I've actually told this story a few times before, but this version is just the one that happened to blow up. I don't remember the other post you're referring to, but I don't remember most things, so.
Itās so fascinating to me that weāve only been breeding Komodo dragons in captivity for thirty years. In that time, our understanding of them has actually really revolutionized the way we understand the social lives and behaviors of lizards in general, and itās mostly thanks to this lady right here, who was born 30 years ago on September 13, 1992.
Kraken was the first Komodo to be bred in captivity. She hatched out at GMU, but was raised at the National Zoo. Her parents were wild-caught dragons- thereās still WC dragons in the AZA today- and this one specific individual probably did more to revolutionize lizard care in professional settings than any other individual lizard throughout zoo history.
Until Kraken, social enrichment wasnāt a thing people thought about. It wasnāt something anybody felt was necessary for lizards, because they were justā¦ lizards. Sure, some keepers would play with their favorites, but it wasnāt until the National Zoo started documenting what she was doing that anybody realized how much Komodo dragons like to play with us too.
Krakenās not in that video, but sheās the one who inspired all of the social studies that have been done on captive Komodo dragons. When she was at the National Zoo, her keepersĀ started getting curious when, for no apparent reason, she kept gingerly stealing things from peoplesā pockets and tugging on their shoelaces. So they started giving her stuff- Frisbees, blankets, soda cans, anything she showed an interest in.
She played with them, just like a mammal might. The way play behavior is described in psychology is a given activity thatās voluntary, repeated, and conducted under ārelatively benignā circumstances. Keeper staff found that her conduct during the study met all of these criteria. āKraken,ā they wrote, had clearly demonstrated āplay-like behavior with objects and even with humans (tug-of-war).ā Moreover, she ācould discriminate between prey and nonpreyā while showing āvarying responsesā with different items (rubber rings, shoes, etc.). (Thereās an excellent book on Komodo dragons that has an entire chapter devoted to her.)
Kraken died several years ago, but her legacy continues today. Thereās several of her descendants still in the AZA, and the intelligence and social needs she demonstrated led to the improvement of life for these guys- and other lizards. The Komodo dragon program has been an eye opener, not just for reptile conservation, but for understanding reptile intelligence and how this incredible clade of animals functions.
Happy birthday to the lizard who changed it all.
Hereās another baby picture of Kraken! This is her with Dr. Geoffery Birchard, the George Mason professor who supervised her hatching:
She was five weeks old in this picture, which ran in the GMU student paper.
So, this week I ordered a new couch pillow because I had a husband pillow full of shredded memory foam, and the thing needs to be opened and shifted around about once a week with the way I use it so it doesn't shape up weird and actually fuck up my back when I bought it to NOT fuck up my back.
I now have a wedge pillow, made of one piece of foam. And I ordered a book cushion from etsy, and I just wanna say to anyone who has thought "that adaptive thing seems like it would be useful, but I'm not disabled, so maybe it's not for me?"
It's for you. Trust me. My back hurt because I was slouching weird on the couch. I got a husband pillow. It helped a lot. But, it turns out, what I need is one giant piece of memory foam, not a bunch of tiny bits.
And the book cushion? Books are heavy sometimes. Being able to rest it higher in my lap so it's easier to read and hold? Better for my body.
Also, do you wake up with pain in the mornings? Try a contour pillow and a knee pillow.
Get those extra-strong treaded soles to wear with your heels because you wobble otherwise.
Wear compression gloves when you type. Get those orthopedic shoes because you can walk longer distances in more comfort. Buy the bra that actually supports the weight of your boobs. Get a lapdesk for your computer. Use a neck pillow even at home to keep your neck straight. Wear socks to bed. Listen to audiobooks. Read large print books.
You see something that you think will work for you and improve how you feel? Use it! Let's fucking normalize adaptative shit for everyone!
Also, don't think "Oh but I'm taking this from a disabled person"
The more people who use assistive devices, and show demand for assistive devices, THE MORE THEY MAKE AND THE BETTER THEY GET.
The best example of this I can think of is canes. When I started using a cane 10 years ago, they were either one color, or old lady patterns. There were all of two grip designs, and they honestly kinda sucked.
Now, as more and more people have realized they need them, and have gotten them earlier in their lives for a variety of problems, canes are SO DOPE NOW.
You can get them in Galaxy print! Neon colors! Different ergonomic grips! You can even get what I have, which is angle-adjustable arm crutches!!
Overcome your internal ableism, and let yourself use the thing that prevents pain or makes your life easier. This disabled person can tell you it's 100% worth it.
Signs i have been on the internet Too Longā¢
What I thought a "Husband Pillow" was:
What a Husband Pillow actually is:
What a Husband Pillow could be if demand increases:
This is the greatest addition to anything I have ever put on this site, and I thank you for it.
a dragon finds a clutch of goose eggs and attempts to hatch them
āBrave heroes, please help us for our town is being terrorised. A great evil has fallen upon us, descending from the yonder dragonās cave in the mountainā āSo youāre being attacked by a dragon? Pardon me but I see no sign of fire damageā āWell, you see, itās not the dragonĀ thatās the problemā¦ā
your TAGS
#the dragon and the town are actually relatively amicableĀ #the dragon eats a few sheep a monthĀ #and the last warlord who tried to put the place to the sword got roasted alive because excuse me those are my sheep farmersĀ #however the Dragonās Children are another matterĀ #in this the dragon is not an intelligent creature per se but it can understand that the people maintain the delicious wooly thingsĀ #and should not be killedĀ #itās a sort of symbiotic associationĀ #its goose children terrorising the village though is Not Its Business
Untitled Goose origins and why the townspeople canāt actually hurt you. Also, a goose with a hoard is definitely dragon inspired.
THIS EXPLAINS SO MUCH ACTUALLY!!!
In case you were wondering if this situation has changed...it hasn't.
Are you still doing Horror High stuff?
yeah! I know I havenāt been posting about them as much as I used to but now that Iām in college Iāve been working on projects that demand the attention of the part of my brain that focuses on OCs lol. Iāve still been drawing them, I guess it just might be less noticable wedged in between fanart and other characters
I'm still working on my collector challenge month btw, but it turns out organizing things is hard when you're stupid.
I did pick a name though, we are officially "Just Look Back January".
here's a link to the blog I'll be posting the prompts list, rules, ect to.
there's nothing there rn, but you can see the little character I made for the icon/header.
Every single day people on tumblr say "what if the shit moral OCD tells you was true and living by it was the only way to be a real progressive"
Coming home from acceptance therapy to see some shit that says "not reblogging is a moral failure" "even if you forgive yourself you should still keep thinking about it" I dont like getting kicked in the head anymore guys
a lot of people are resonating with this so i want to share one of my biggest coping techniques that helps me a lot with moral, false memory, relationship, and harm OCD. disclaimer that i am not a psychiatrist, i am not fully recovered, and i still struggle every day so your mileage may vary as to if this is helpful.
when i struggle with obsessions about not being a good enough person, i have two steps i follow. first, i try to envision the kind of person i want to be. maybe i want to be more earnest. maybe i want to be more helpful. maybe i want to be kinder. maybe i want to be more assertive. i try to imagine a self that is calm, gentle, and confident. then i think of the simplest and most constructive steps to get there. i cannot put myself down. i cannot beat myself up. the steps have to be polite and reasonable advice i could give to someone without OCD.
tomorrow i won't ask my family if they love me, i will simply enjoy their company. i won't make that mean joke anymore. the next time i see my friends i'll ask for their opinion on something small and i will share my honest opinion as well. i will pick up a book and read for 20 minutes instead of avoiding what is a fun activity because i feel "dumb."
i repeat one of my favorite simpsons quotes a lot: "you can't keep blaming yourself, blame yourself once and move on." you have to move forward and just take the steps to be the person you want to be and do the things you want to do using advice that you would give to any person other than yourself. part of being obsessive-compulsive is being rigidly self-critical and scrutinizing yourself far more than you would any other person. it's hard to beat these feelings, but the reality is that self punishment doesn't make anything better. things only get better when you move forward. you have to treat yourself like a human being.
it can be really hard to follow through with this advice sometimes. other times it's shockingly easy to start doing the things i want to do. there'll always be ups and downs and lefts and rights when living with OCD, and medication, therapy, and stress management are really helpful. still, even if it's hard, i have to move forward. i have to construct a healthy self instead of destroying an unhealthy self.
All she needs now is a candelabra and a thunderstorm.
the pipeline of fixating over some thingy
