fairly reliably when someone is mean and weird to you on Tumblr, you can look on their blog and all their recent posts will be about how unhappy they are in their interpersonal relationships and/or how frustrated they are that their creative venture hasn't found success. and it's like ohhhhh okay, I get it. you're clawing at other people because you're actively drowning. my sympathies, that sucks, but I'm not a lifeguard so carry on.
Something that I get chills about is the fact that the oldest story told made by the oldest civilization opens with "In those days, in those distant days, in those ancient nights."
This confirms that there is a civilization older than the Sumerians that we have yet to find
Some people get existential dread from this
Me? I think it's fucking awesome it shows just how much of this world we have yet to discover and that is just fascinating
@makaeru peer review cos this made me check when the Sumerians happened and I forget how recent history is for every other continent. 7000 - 8000 years ago just isn't that long when you're in Australia, and the amount of detailed history we have access to here is wonderful and should be recognised more internationally
Source (non Aboriginal)
And a quote I picked out from a longer interview with an Aboriginal local elder about the area where he touched on the history
Source (the rest of the interview is really interesting and all transcribed, have a look if you're curious)
This is part of my Ancient Civilizations class that I teach, which does a whole week about Australia and the Torres Strait Islands because I was sick of never seeing them represented in USAmerican history contexts. With the help of @micewithknives and @acearchaeologist I've learned so many incredible things about Australia's past and it's been incredibly rewarding to share them with students.
My favorite fact about Aboriginal oral history is the fact that we pretty recently discovered that the Aboriginal myth of the 7 Sisters, an origin story for the Pleiades star cluster, accurately reflects a point TEN THOUSAND YEARS AGO when two stars in the constellation got close enough together to no longer be distinguishable by the naked eye.
The story? 6 sisters running from something that took their 7th sister.
A lot of criticism of delivery apps focuses on the fact that they offer convenience and variety, which I find much less compelling than criticizing the fact that the apps often send their contractors on fetch quests from Hell.
There are real labor problems here. Base pay is often insulting. Customer tips carry too much of the burden. Workers need better protections, more transparent algorithms, protection from arbitrary deactivation, and actual recourse when the app or a customer screws them over. Car-dependent delivery is also an environmental and infrastructural problem, though in a denser city I’d still be doing this work; I’d just be doing it by bike.
But when people talk about delivery work, I rarely see them talk to actual delivery workers. I see a lot of abstract arguments about convenience, consumer decadence, “hustle culture,” and internalized neoliberalism. Meanwhile, when I’m out working and waiting in restaurants for orders, the other Dashers I meet are usually people who only speak Spanish, people who read as neurodivergent, visibly physically disabled people, or some combination of the above.
I have not met this mythical Disco Elysium poor ultraliberal hustlegrinder-wannabe people seem to be arguing with. Maybe that archetype exists somewhere. If it exists among any kind of gig worker, it would probably be rideshare drivers. But most of what I see looks less like “rise and grind” and more like “this is one of the few forms of work available to people who need flexibility, low barriers to entry, limited managerial surveillance, or a way to work around language barriers, disability, burnout, chronic illnesses and injuries with symptoms that come and go unpredictably, caregiving, résumé gaps, or discrimination.”
That does not make the current system good. It means the current system is filling a real gap that a lot of supposedly better systems do not even acknowledge.
As a disabled person who is burnout-prone and demand-sensitive, contracting as a delivery driver has given me an unprecedented level of financial flexibility. I can work when I have capacity. I can stop when I’m deteriorating. I can build my day around my actual body instead of being trapped under a manager who thinks “reliable” means “able to perform the same way every day no matter what.” That matters. It does not cancel out the exploitation, but it is also not fake just because it is politically inconvenient.
And delivery itself is not some inherently decadent evil. Sometimes people live alone. Sometimes they are sick. Sometimes they are disabled, exhausted, overwhelmed, grieving, overloaded, or recovering from something else - perhaps the stress and fatigue induced by their own job. Sometimes they need medicine, groceries, or a meal that will actually unplug their sinuses instead of whatever generic community-care slop someone thinks they should be grateful for. Humans are allowed to need specificity. “Food” is not the same as “the food I can actually eat right now.”
A serious labor critique would ask how to make delivery work safer, better-paid, less tip-dependent, less car-dependent, less algorithmically punitive, and less precarious. It would ask what kinds of flexible, accessible work should exist for people who cannot thrive in conventional employment. It would ask how cities could support bike delivery, worker cooperatives, public infrastructure, and real protections without simply replacing one bad system with a moral sermon about how nobody should ever want takeout.
But a lot of the discourse does not do that. It treats convenience itself as suspicious. It treats wanting flexible work as false consciousness. It treats the needs of disabled people, immigrants, and other people who can't fit into traditional employment structures as details to be swept aside in favor of a cleaner political image.
I guess the opinions of delivery workers only count when they are politically convenient.
For those who don't remember, here's the lawsuit two years ago where Tumblr (or specifically Automattic) settled with the New York City Commission on Human Rights regarding Tumblr's terribly implemented porn ban targeting LGBTQ folk more than it should. Here's an excerpt detailing what the NYCCHR ordered Tumblr to do:
The settlement gives Tumblr 180 days to hire an expert on sexual orientation and gender identity (SOGI) issues and provide related training to moderators. It must also hire someone with experience in this area as well as expertise in image classification, who will review Tumblr’s moderation algorithms to see if they’re more likely to flag LGBTQ content. As part of an overall review, Tumblr will reexamine 3,000 old cases where a user successfully appealed a takedown, looking for patterns that could indicate bias.
Now, on a totally unrelated note, here's the complaint page for reporting discrimination to the NYCCHR. Completely unrelated to what's going on right now or the rest of this post, I swear.
i’m sure this opinion will get me killed for some reason but it’s wild how almond milk seems to be the dominant alternative milk when it tastes like nut based cerebrospinal fluid meanwhile Oat Milk is right there being sexy and thick and delicious
So, you know how certain Christian missionaries are trained to act in a very obnoxious way, so that most people they preach to will reject them outright, so they feel like the world hates them for being Christian and they can only be friends with fellow Christians? You know that thing?
I think as activists, we sometimes need to stop and ask ourselves whether we're acting like those missionaries. I think this type of behavior is a little more ingrained into our society than some of us realize, and some of us have internalized it without realizing what it's actually meant to do.
OP I know that this is probably a different direction than you were going, but genuinely this advice would do so so much to help people not fall into secular political cults.
A lot of high control groups use this tactic to isolate their members. It’s absolutely not just evangelizing Christians. New age wellness cults often encourage their members to make outlandish and offensive accusations regarding the mental and physical health of other people or their children, because they know that the backlash their members receive will reinforce the idea that the “mainstream” simply has no room for people who like crystals and essential oils. White supremacist cults will seed the vocabulary of new recruits with Nazi dog whistles that fly over those recruits heads, specifically so that they will get clocked as possible neo-Nazis and shunned by anyone who might offer them another perspective and help them to get out before it’s too late. And a lot of left-leaning political cults strongly encourage members to share their views in the most inflammatory ways possible, and then say “you see? everyone outside of this small circle is evil and cannot be relied on” when, inevitably, that produces bad results.
Sometimes I think that activists fall into these patterns completely accidentally, either because they were raised in culturally Christian evangelical environments and never unpacked it, or else because they just aren’t any good at approaching things in a non-inflammatory way and no one’s shown them how.
…But sometimes, these structures emerge in activist circles because those circles are legitimately becoming high control groups.
I think some things to watch out for especially in this regard are:
Are you being directed to behave in an extremely hostile and alienating way? (even if it’s by someone who you trust!)
Does the group you are in immediately shut down any conversation about the effectiveness of an antagonistic strategy? In particular, do they shut that conversation down using in-group stock phrases?
Is experiencing harsh rejection seen as something of a rite of passage?
Do you receive more validation from the group you are in after you have been rejected by someone outside the group than at any other time?
Have you ever been concerned that the antagonistic strategy you are using hurt someone you cared about, only to be quickly advised by members of the group that that person was toxic and that you should actually completely cut them out of your life?
These to me are all pretty significant red flags about the group in question, whatever the specific thing that brings people together there is. If you start noticing them in a group that you are a part of, be that an in-person activist circle or a Discord server or anything in between, take a step back and seriously consider the possibility that the good thing that you joined is turning into something different, and possibly dangerous.
In the words of Jonestown survivor Deborah Layton, “Nobody joins a cult. You join a self-help group, a religious movement, a political organization. They change so gradually, by the time you realize you’re entrapped – and almost everybody does – you can’t figure a safe way back out.”
this is a pdf detailing the BITE model of authoritarian control, a method for determining whether or not you're in a cult.
even if you feel confident you are not and have never been in a cult, it's a good idea to familiarize yourself with the signs, just in case one begins to sneak up on you in the future.
Ok, I actually want to talk about this for a moment.
Jonestown, one of the most infamous cults in history, with a mass suicide / mass murder that left more than 900 people dead of cyanide poisoning, hundreds of whom were children… was a leftist political cult. That fact is an unambiguous and completely undebatable matter of historical record.
This isn’t a footnote in the story of Jonestown, and it isn’t a weird anti-leftist gotcha either. Jonestown attracted people to their cause with anti-segregation and anti-poverty activist work, and they did actual, meaningful good for those causes. The People’s Temple was a leftist org, unambiguously. They created mutual aid networks for food aid, and rent assistance, and job placement services, and clothing donations, and winter heating. They leaned heavily on the Indianapolis Human Rights Commission in order to push desegregation, and led sit-ins and boycotts and protests. They participated in significant voter registration efforts. They led the fight against the eviction of tenants from San Francisco's International Hotel.
People joined The People’s Temple because it was a good thing when they joined it. They didn’t start out as brainwashed cultists, and they didn’t gravitate towards the leadership of Jim Jones out of masochism, or inherent submissiveness, or a perverse love of creeping authoritarianism. They fell in line under Jim Jones because he’d built a community that was genuinely helping people, and was advancing a political cause that seemed worth fighting. They followed Jim Jones because he earned their trust.
Jim Jones then used the trust and the social capital that he had gained from all of the above in order to elevate himself to the status of a messianic figure, and abuse and profit off of his followers. Slowly but surely, he boiled the frog. It was all good – and then it was mostly good – and then, well there was some abuse, but it wasn’t that bad, and it wasn’t really his fault – and then there was a lot of abuse, but the outside world would destroy them if given the chance, so wasn’t it the lesser of the two evils? And then, eventually, it got so bad that hundreds of people poisoned themselves and their children at his command, and murdered everyone in the compound who refused and resisted.
Your cause of choice is not immune from abusers taking advantage of it!
It doesn’t matter if you’re right. It doesn’t matter if your cause is just. It does not matter if your good thing really is a good thing, because there is always the possibility that it will one day be co-opted by a monster. And if the fact that it started good is enough for you to ignore that gradual, subtle change, you could end up in a truly horrible situation.
One of my best friends in undergrad got sucked into a cult. Years later, we talked about it, and he told me something that I’ll never forget which is, it’s only when you look all the way back at things that they seem crazy. You start off with things that are totally normal and innocuous: “we’re stronger together”; “oppression is bad”; “you can accomplish more if you believe in yourself”; “empathy is important and we should all try to bring more of it into our lives”; etc. Then, you move to something that’s just a little step away from that. And then again. And then again. And then again. But it never feels like a big jump, because it’s not! A -> Z is crazy, but A -> B wasn’t, and B -> C wasn’t, and C -> D wasn’t, and…
This friend was smart, and rational, and independent, and normal, and by the time he and his wife left, they’d gone from just thinking that we should all practice more emotional mindfulness, to being terrified that leaving the cult and the cult leader would literally kill them, via the cult leader having magical powers.
If your only analysis is “Where I started was good, and no single step since then has been crazy” that is utterly insufficient to keep you safe.
“This can’t possibly be a cult, because when I joined it was a leftist political org and there’s never been a single instance where it suddenly changed” is literally the exact logic that kept people in Jonestown until it was too late.
A few weeks ago, a small but higher-than-normal number of accounts were mistakenly suspended. The suspensions were quickly reversed, but our response wasn't good enough, and we want to say more.
We're sorry it took us this long to address this. Trust and safety issues are difficult to discuss publicly, and we can’t share details about specific individuals or how our systems work without exposing Tumblr to bad actors. But caution led us to say too little, too late.
We’ve heard from members of the trans community on Tumblr that they were disproportionately impacted, and that deserves a direct response. According to 3rd party researchers, Tumblr’s userbase has the highest proportion of LGBTQIA+ folks on social media, so it makes sense that when something goes wrong, those communities might feel that disproportionate impact.
One thing we want to emphasize is that we do not moderate people's identities. We moderate behavior. We know that identity shows up across a Tumblr profile in many ways, from followed topics to the flags people put in their bios, and more. However, these signals play no role in how our moderation systems make decisions. We monitor those systems for evidence of bias and take corrective action when we find it.
We understand that the communications sent to affected users, and our broader silence to the community, didn't meet the standard people expect from us. That feedback is fair, and we apologize. We've updated the messaging sent to people impacted by these incidents. We are also overhauling our process with a goal of responding to mistaken suspension appeals within 24 hours, and have instituted an ongoing internal review of how suspensions and appeals are handled.
Going forward, we're committed to finding a better balance: being more transparent with our community about issues that matter, even when we can't share everything.
Tumblr belongs to everyone. We take that seriously, and we intend to earn back your trust. We are not afraid to have tough discussions with you or make updates based on your feedback, though on occasion, it might take some time.
To the people whose accounts were affected, and to the members of our trans community who felt targeted: we are truly sorry.
this is meaningless corporate boilerplate. this issue has existed for years and in that time it has been plain to see for everyone that @staff both condones and actively facilitates the hostile & discriminatory atmosphere toward transfem users on this site. you have openly terminated users who've brought attention to this in the past. you have lied about this before. you are lying now.
@humans you are publishing this statement now because the ban wave to which your post refers was finally so blatant that it was noticed by the press, and because posts have been circulating calling for legal action and for official complaints of discrimination. nobody is fooled that you are addressing this for any other reason, and nobody is satisfied with your mealy-mouthed consultant-approved non-apology drivel. this post is a load of horse shit and everybody knows it. fuck you all.
Skyrim deepdivers are critical to the loreslop ecosystem because how else would we have found out through cut content of a removed house whose key persists in pickpocketed inventories that Nazeem's wife is cheating on him
The Tarasque dwells in the waters of the Rhone river near the town of Tarascon, where it devours travelers and destroys dikes and dams to flood the Camargue. Saint Martha chained it, and the people of Tarascon killed it.
The ruins of the amphitheaters of Metz were infested by hundreds of snakes. The largest of them, the Graoully, had a venomous breath, a mouth bigger than its body and devoured men. Saint Clement chased it away into the Seille River.
King of serpents, the Basilisk takes many forms throughout history and appears in many tales. One of them takes place at the Gate of Saint-Eloi in Bordeaux, known today for its Big Bell, where a well was occupied by a Basilisk. It petrified with its gaze anyone who went there to fetch water. It was defeated by a man returning from the Egyptian crusade, who petrified the beast with its own gaze using a mirail (mirror).
The Cocatrix is born from a rooster's egg incubated by a toad. The egg has magical properties but must not be broken. People who cross its gaze die immediatly.
Made of wicker and covered in flowers, the Grand Bailla wanders the streets of Reims three days a year and feeds on gold and sweets. It was banished by Archbishop Charles Maurice le Tellier.
The Grand'Goule haunts the marshes of Poitou, the waters of the Clain and the flooded cellars of the abbey of Sainte Croix. It feeds on nuns and casse-museaux (snout-breakers, cakes). Saint Radegonde chased it away with holy water.
In the rivers of the Jura and the Alps there is a group of diverse dragons, the Vouivres. They are generally flying serpents covered in fire and guardians of treasures. Many have for a single eye a gigantic carbuncle with extraordinary powers, desired by those in search of wealth and power.
Hidden in the caves and cliffs of la Pointe du Roux near La Rochelle, the Rô Beast traps and devours travelers in the coastal marshes. It was impaled by seven heroic pagans from the seas.
Mythical dragon of the Basque Country, Herensuge gave birth to the Sun and the Moon, swallowed all of Creation in ten days then regurgitated it in flames. Now asleep in the mountains, it sucks up flocks and shepherds in his sleep. When it wakes up, it will destroy the world in flames and blood. (illustration)
Durandal is the mythical sword that Charlemagne gave to the knight Roland. Some claim that it was inherited from Hector, the warrior of the Trojan War. At war with the Saracens in the Pyrenées, Roland wanted to break the sword so that it would not fall into the hands of the enemy but Durandal split the mountain. So he threw the sword, which went to stick miles away, in the rock of the town of Rocamadour.
The belief in the Tooth Fairy is widespread in several countries in Europe, and is sometimes amalgamated with La Petite Souris (little mouse). It exchanges baby teeth for money. No one knows what it does with all these teeth.
The Camecruse is a bogeyman that haunts the moors and marshes of Gascony. It is agile, can jump and hide in the night to better devour lost children. No one knows exactly how it feeds.
The caves under the hill of the town of Hastingues are home to Lou Carcolh, a monstrous snail, long, slimy and hairy. Its shell is as big as a house. With the help of its tentacles, it grips people to devour them.
The Questing Beast is hunted by kings and heroes in Arthurian legends. It symbolizes evil, incest, violence and chaos, and takes it name from the loud noises that come out of its stomach, similar to the barking of dozens of dogs.
The fairy Mélusine, cursed princess of Albania, was condemned to change into a snake below the waist every Saturday. She married Raymondin de Lusignan with whom they had 10 prodigious children. But Raymondin broke his promise never to see Mélusine on Saturday : he surprised her in her monstrous form, and she left her family forever.
