To Read - Tumblr Posts
the more i write the more obvious it becomes that bioessentialism is essential to fash ideology and i feel so crazy lol. transmisogyny and antisemitism aren’t just intertwined, they fucking propel each other
You know that tumblr post that's like "Adults: why don't kids go outside?" and then there's a picture of a very pedestrian-unfriendly street from probably somewhere in the US?
I've been thinking a lot about how community seems to be lacking in fandom recently, and over on Dreamwidth people have been making some excellent points. I think modern social media is another place where adults have created a space that is hostile to young people trying to navigate their way online.
I get a lot of asks and see a lot of posts from young people lamenting the fact that they don't know how to make friends online. Because this isn't a problem that I experience, I've had a tendency to think along the lines of "kids these days" etc. But that's the easy out. Most of the people I'd consider "online friends" of mine are people I met online several years ago or they're people I met IRL and we just don't live near each other so our friendship happens online. I can't honestly say I'd feel confident in trying to make new friends on modern social media today.
If you start thinking about it more critically, it makes total sense that it's harder to make friends now. Modern social media has been optimized for "engagement." The goal of twitter or tumblr or instagram or tiktok isn't to help users find each other and talk to each other. The goal of those platforms is to keep people on those platforms. The more people they have on their platform, the more money they make. The more time people spend on their platform, the more money they make.
How do you make people spend more time on the platform? You make it as passive and entertaining as possible. Scrolling through tiktok is like channel surfing on a TV in the 90s or early 2000s. Scrolling through twitter or tumblr or facebook is just putting interesting or pretty or funny or angering things in front of your eyeballs until you get bored and switch to the next app, cycling your way through them.
Timestamps are hard to find. Content isn't chronological. Posts are dropped in on your feed from unknown sources, decided by an algorithm. I wouldn't be surprised if they did research into how casinos keep people inside and gambling when they made a lot of these decisions.
Each one of these decisions, all on its own, undermines our ability to find and form a community. Each one makes it harder to make friends to have a conversation. It's hard to get to know someone or have a discussion with them when you have no idea if what you're saying will be seen by 1 person or 1 million. I'm probably not the only person on this site that feels like I'm either an observer or a performer, but I'm rarely a participant.
The internet used to be a vibrant, weird, wonderful place where communities could pop up and grow. Now, our best shot at community is getting invited to a Discord server and hoping it still exists 2 weeks from now.
Web 1.0 wasn't perfect in a lot of ways, but I think it was a lot better for community than what we've got now.
Stone-age toddlers had art lessons, study says
Stone age toddlers may have attended a form of prehistoric nursery where they were encouraged to develop their creative skills in cave art, say archaeologists.
Research indicates young children expressed themselves in an ancient form of finger-painting. And, just as in modern homes, their early efforts were given pride of place on the living room wall.
A Cambridge University conference on the archaeology of childhood on Friday reveals a tantalising glimpse into life for children in the palaeolithic age, an estimated 13,000 years ago.
(via Stone-age toddlers had art lessons, study says | Science | The Guardian)
I need to print me out a list of everything they own so I don’t buy it when I go to the store
Honestly the biggest disappointment I had researching ABC was that medieval authors did not, in fact, see the creatures they were describing and were trying their best to describe them with their limited knowledge while going “what the fuck… what the fuck…”
finally making a part three of video essays ive enjoyed in the part few months! one, two.
movies + tv
in search of the distinctively human | the philosophy of blade runner 2049
the tragic beauty of blade runner 2049 explored
sia's music: the trap of symbolic autistic representation
remembering with a twist | a jojo rabbit & the book thief video essay
the stormtrooper paradox
the case against the jedi order
finn: the winter soldier of star wars
finn the lost protagonist
y'all still mad about cuties?
the fetishization of disney princesses of color // mulan revisited
the day rue "became" black
the confused politics of promising young woman
indiana jones – a primer on racist film tropes
exploring the blair witch mythology
what the hell is trolland? (the ugliest animated movie ever)
inspiration p*rn: oscar bait!
color grading and modern cinema – an essay on ugly movies
why terfs misunderstand the handmaid's tale
the tyra show, ego masquerading as empathy
hbo's euphoria is not "real" it's creepy
teen wolf, in retrospect
the secret life is the worst teen drama of all time
dinosaurs, the sitcom before time
the wasted potential of scream queens
fake anime in western media
the impact of dragon ball z: the series that changed everything
music
the dark side of one direction
the rise and fall of the 2000s video vixen
the misunderstood mind of left eye
mariah carey: the magnificence of 'butterfly'
the rise and fall of syco music
banned before debut? the controversial debut of honey popcorn
teen girls, boy bands and objectification, a video essay
video games
rationalizing brutality: the cultural legacy of the headshot
the girl games of lost media (part 1) (part 2)
a deep dive into animal crossing
books
'the secret' and its cult following
gabbie hanna vs rachel oates | authors, stop responding to negative book reviews!
a deep dive into the warrior cats fandom
the mortal instruments is... fine
internet
the man that lost everything for internet fame: dan bilzerian
tumblr's fakest story: the tale of oppa homeless style
msscribe: the harry potter fandom's greatest con-artist (trust me on this one. i wouldn't add this if it wasn't worth it)
family vloggers: something needs to change
we need to talk about true crime youtubers 🤨 | the ethics of monetizing tragedy
the tumblr iceberg (explained)
internet history: dramageddon 1
creepshow art | the lies, manipulation & slander that ruined a community
the weird phenomenon of youtube redemption arcs...
misc
grooming aaron taylor-johnson
why koko couldn't talk (sorry)
the problem with true crime
what we don't talk about in the jeffrey dahmer case: flipping the script
the "rampant transphobia" of bisexual history
a deep dive into littlest pet shop
tiktok is kinda bad for fashion
lifestyles of the rich and famous | wealth p*rn and you
the y2k aesthetic explained
god is weird: a close look at adam and eve
how hollywood damaged the olsen twins
the mouse utopia experiments
anti-maskers
tinky winky vs the religious right
the strange world of breatharianism
doomsday preppers | neoliberalism, f@scism and the apocalypse
let's look at the gruesome world of victorian medicine
make sure you add some neoliberalism when you talk about capitalism | i don't dream about labor
I don't think people remember the first Iron Man Movie at all.
Because everyone always focuses on the "War Profiterol Stops Selling Weapons" angle and completely forget the Pro American Military Interventionism Message in it.
Tony Stark specifically becomes Iron Man because he doesn't believe the US Military is doing ENOUGH in the Middle East. He specifically flies there to destroy some evil brown bad guys with a tank attacking civilians because he believes the American Military is not there to stop it. This is a Pro Military Occupation movie guys, it doesn't take a genius to understand it.
Hell, he specifically stops building weapons because he just discovered some evil brown people might also end up buying them, not because "bombs kill people," he knows bomb kill people he just thought only the US Military was using it to kill people.
Which is never taken into question. The US Military is not on trial in this movie, It's the evil brown people who use it on civilians instead, and they do it because they are faceless, nameless evil brown people.
The bombed village the reporter who ends up sleeping with him and is slut shamed for it mentions? Who do you think ultimately committed the war crime in universe? But why, the evil brown terrorists, the ones who got their weapons from his own company after all, there is no mention, in any part of the movie, of the US Military committing war crimes on anything with his weapons, the villains are ALWAYS evil brown people who got his weapons due to another, more self serving war profiteer, and only because of that.
Like, the ONLY thing that can be said in favour of this is that the greater scope villain is, like... Another rich white war profiteer, and even that still fucks over the supposedly "anti war" message when Tony specifically still only wanted to sell weapons to the US Military pre movie, and stops producing weapons the second he realizes evil brown people might get his shit too, and Stane wanted to sell it to Evil Brown Terrorists too.
People don't rember how boot licking this movie was and it shows.
finding out this was a real podcast between a mother with cancer and her son was so upsetting but also potent
Okay non-European tumblr, I’m gonna explain to you why ‘white’ isn’t as simple here as it is in the rest of the world
- Shades of white in Europe range from ‘freshly fallen snow’ to ‘I am frequently mistaken as being from the Middle East’
- White European is a thing. When you fill out a form, under ethnicity, there are several options for white; white British, white European, white other. Because people make that distinction
- There are Europeans who don’t class their ethnicity as their skin colour, but as their nationality. I have family who don’t think of themselves as white, they just think of themselves as Italian and don’t really give much thought to their skin colour
- People here in Britain always question if darker skinned white Europeans are ‘actually white’. I get it a lot myself. My response is always ‘well I’m not anything else, so obviously I must be’
- Despite being white, a lot of Europeans from Italy, Greece, Spain etc, don’t feel white in the traditional sense. We’re not white like white British people. We’re not white like white Americans. We’re our own white. White British is one thing. White Italian is another thing. White Greek is another, etc
- Which is why we have this notion here in Europe of ‘nationality over race’. Being white isn’t as important as where you’re from
- So this really only becomes an issue if you’re an immigrant
- So being white in Europe doesn’t save you from racial discrimination, because sure, you’re technically white, but you’re not white white. Not the right white
- Here in England, Europeans with really blatantly foreign names, such as myself, find it more difficult to get job interviews, because they take one look at our name and don’t bother reading the rest of the CV. A guy I know was actually told by his boss to reduce the pile of CVs he had by ‘chucking away any with a name you can’t fucking pronounce’
- And then even when you do get an interview, half the time you walk into the joint several shades darker than everyone else and feel like you’ve walked into the ‘Swedish supermodel’ clubhouse and you just know you’re not getting hired
This is all basic stuff and it’s very much taken for granted here. Race and ethnicity are not as clear cut, so it can be very confusing for non-Europeans to wrap their heads around. Which is fine. But I implore you to stay in your lane, because when you say things like ‘no white person anywhere in the world ever knows what it’s like to face racial discrimination’, it’s really fucking offensive to all of the European immigrants who are denied jobs, harassed by the police and beaten by racists, because foreign is foreign to these people, and they don’t give a shit if you’re technically white. So when you mean white American, say white American.
highlight quotes;
“… she returned to eating meat after learning that the soybean and corn monocultures that accounted for much of her vegan diet were wreaking havoc on the environment.“
“When we first opened, people were surprised at the prices,” he said. “But our costs are much higher than what a giant company pays. We are paying to have control over the quality of our animals, what they are being fed, how they are being treated, transported, slaughtered and cut up. Once people understood that, the business took off.”
“As soon as I started eating meat, my health improved,” she said. “My mental acuity stepped up, I lost weight, my acne cleared up, my hair got better. I felt like a fog lifted.”
“You can’t be healthy unless the animals you eat are healthy,”
“Rather than being passive and just not supporting an industry I don’t like, I’m taking an active approach by taking thousands of dollars out of it, “ he said. “When people come to me, they aren’t going to Costco for meat.”
A volcanologist finally answered the burning question on the tip of everybody’s tongues what Would eating lava be like?
hey, @bunjywunjy - this might be your jam (and any other dinosaur enthusiasts, it’s a heck of a read)
broke: midsommar is a girl power movie
woke: midsommar is a horror movie about a manipulative cult
bespoke: midsommar is a litmus test to tell how easily you could be indoctrinated into a cult and if your first thought after watching it is that it was a girl power movie you’re very susceptible to cult tactics and you should be aware of that
some people are reacting to this with “in other news, water is wet” and the like. but not only is it always valuable to have actual scientific data even for things we think are obvious – be real, y’all didn’t really know this for sure. we’ve all seen that comic about how anonymity turns normal people into raging dickbags.
but it ain’t so, and these folks did the science to prove it. irl jerks are online jerks and vice versa.
if there’s any action item we can take away from this, i reckon it’s that if somebody’s a button-mashing blowhard on the internet, it’s statistically likely they’re a lifestyle idiot, and there’s no point trying to talk them around. delete, block, shunnnnn.
With the IPCC report and climate change in the news, a couple of reminders are due:
"The wealthiest 5% alone – the so-called “polluter elite” - contributed 37% of emissions growth between 1990 and 2015."
"Luxury consumption by the rich concentrates economic activity and delivers negligible extra wellbeing, yet sucks up vast amounts of resources."
"Affluent individuals can emit several ten thousand times the amount of greenhouse gases attributed to the global poor."
"Half of all our economic activity – all the mines, all the factories, all the power stations, all the shipping, and all of the ecological impact that’s associated with these things – is done to make rich people richer."
"The wealthiest 0.54%, about 40 million people, are responsible for 14% of lifestyle-related greenhouse gas emissions."
The rich are primarily to blame for the global climate crisis!
"The world’s superyacht fleet uses over thirty-two million gallons of oil and produces 627 million pounds of carbon dioxide emissions a year . The world’s superyachts consume and pollute more than entire nations."
"The grim truth is that the rich are able to live as they do only because others are poor: there is neither the physical nor ecological space for everyone to pursue private luxury."
The wealthy pose our single biggest obstacle to environmental progress.
"The people who are actively cranking up the global thermostat and threatening to drown 20 percent of the global population are the billionaires in the boardrooms."
There no undivided, undifferentiated "humanity" that caused climate change. It is the fault of the ultra-rich, of capitalism, and of an economic system that prioritises growth over all else.
A better world is possible. It doesn't include rich people.
“I was a police officer for nearly ten years and I was a bastard. We all were.
“This essay has been kicking around in my head for years now and I’ve never felt confident enough to write it. It’s a time in my life I’m ashamed of. It’s a time that I hurt people and, through inaction, allowed others to be hurt. It’s a time that I acted as a violent agent of capitalism and white supremacy. Under the guise of public safety, I personally ruined people’s lives but in so doing, made the public no safer… so did the family members and close friends of mine who also bore the badge alongside me.
“But enough is enough.
“The reforms aren’t working. Incrementalism isn’t happening. Unarmed Black, indigenous, and people of color are being killed by cops in the streets and the police are savagely attacking the people protesting these murders.
“American policing is a thick blue tumor strangling the life from our communities and if you don’t believe it when the poor and the marginalized say it, if you don’t believe it when you see cops across the country shooting journalists with less-lethal bullets and caustic chemicals, maybe you’ll believe it when you hear it straight from the pig’s mouth.”
Read the full article here.
Via medium.com
Wednesday 16/6/21 - Cool Dinosaur Feather Facts
Microraptor, @Microrapterr on twitter
Hey Dino-Nerds. Rather than organise a structured information piece every time I wanna talk about Dinosaurs, I thought I could cover this topic more often if I just did a fun information dump every now and then. Today I will focus in on dinosaurs feathers, how and what we know about them, and just some cool factoids you may have not known.
How we know about feathers
A lot of sceptics will rag on modern dinosaur reconstructions with the preface of "all we have are their bones, so we have no way of knowing what they looked like in life." Well the thing about fossilation is that it's a game of chance on how well the remains are preserved. While it is true some species are known only from single bones, other species won the lottery and we have even soft tissues fossilised in what palaeontologists refer to as "dinosaur mummies".
Top: Borealopelta "Mummy", which preserved true skin and armour shape, as well as stomach contents of its last meal Bottom: Edmontosaurus "Mummy", which preserved forelimb "hoofs" and skin over the animal's face and back
Feathers actually preserve better than most soft tissue, and the first dinosaur understood to definitely have them had traces of feathers surrounding their bones (Archaeopteryx).
Left: the first discovered fossilised feather, Top Right: Archaeopteryx skeleton with the shape and impressions of feathers surrounding arms and tail, Bottom Right: the parts of the wing this primary feather likely came from.
Even when feathers aren't preserved, many dinosaurs with advanced wing-like arm feathers (called primaries and secondaries) had marks on their arm bones called Quill Knobs that would have served as an anchor point for these larger feathers in a living creature. The presence of Quill Knobs confirms feathers in species even when there are no specimens with visible feather preservation.
Quill Knobs in modern birds vs Dakotaraptor, a dromeosaur "raptor" dinosaur
It wasn't just the Bird Dinos!
I've previously said that feathering was a trait probably ancestral to all dinosaur groups. But when I say feathers, I don't mean the fully structured fan shape of modern bird feathers. Many scientists refer to them as protofeathers, or quills, because they would've been simple soft spines jutting from the animal's skin.
Psittacosaurus, Emily Stepp
Simple quills have been found preserved in many dinosaur groups, not just the meat eaters close to birds (therapods). The basal ceratopsian (horn faced) dinosaurs Psittacosaurus and Protoceratops have fossils of a brush of quills on their lower back.
Lord of the Spear
Ubirajara, Gabriel Ugueto
This tidbit is specifically about a recent dinosaur discovery. Ubirajara (Tupi for Lord of the Spear) was described in 2020 and was found to have what authors described as "spikes" on their shoulders, and a mane of feathers on its neck, back, and arms. There was no practical defensive use for these large quills and its feather mane, and most scientists agree that Ubirajara wouldve used them exclusively for display; a Cretaceous Peacock! This has excited many palaeontologists on how extravagant other feathered dinosaurs could get in their displays.
Dinosaurs Not Green Confirmed
In the best preserved feathers, we can observe the microscopic details of the actual structure of the integument. Scientists determined through comparison with feathers of living birds, they could determine pigmentation of some ancient feathers by the shape and size of the molecules making them up.
There are dinosaur species... WHERE WE KNOW THE ACTUAL COLOURS THEY WOULD'VE HAD IN LIFE. ISN'T THAT JUST THE COOLEST?!?!?
Microraptor was an oddball flying dromeosaur with wings on its legs too. And we now know they had feathers of iridescent black, like a raven.
Microraptor, Emily Willoughby
Anchiornis was a small paravian dinosaur that we know had black and white feathers on most of its body, and a red crest on its head.
Anchiornis, (my own art)
Sinosauropteryx was a small agile dinosaur with very primitive feathers. It had a very long tail that was striped white and orange like a red panda.
Sinosauropteryx, Gabriel Ugueto
Thanks for Reading
Anyway that's my dinosaur post for the week. Thanks for reading. If you wanna read more of what I have to say about dinosaurs, here's links to my past discussions on the topic:
Your Dinosaurs Are Wrong; A Brief Guide
Your Pterosaurs Are Wrong
Your Dinosaurs Are Not Dinosaurs
Edit: One last fun fact, @Microrapterr highlighted to me that some Microraptor remains display signs of sequential moulting, an adaptation necessary for a species that flies a lot. Pretty interesting stuff, read more here: Microraptor Moulting
some of my favorite video essays
lady bird, fences, and why you don't need to forgive your parents
racebaiting, queerbaiting, colorism, featurism, and performative diversity
girlhood disrupted : the pseudo-maturtiy of traumatized girls in film
let's talk about the japanese school girl
the coraline bug theory
breaking down true womanhood & black girlhood in media
bill cipher : one fatal mistake
the philosophy of mob psycho 1000
why only goblins matter
soul eater : beneath the surface
perfect blue : the fear of yourself
the villain of edith finch
art vs the artist
how regular show saved cartoon network
big plotholes in reality
detroit : become human retrospective
Byzantine warrior with gold-threaded jaw unearthed in Greece
A rugged Byzantine warrior, who was decapitated following the Ottoman’s capture of his fort during the 14th century, had a jaw threaded with gold, a new study finds.
An analysis of the warrior’s lower jaw revealed that it had been badly fractured in a previous incident, but that a talented physician had used a wire — likely gold crafted — to tie his jaw back together until it healed.
“The jaw was shattered into two pieces,” said study author Anagnostis Agelarakis, an anthropology professor in the Department of History at Adelphi University in New York. The discovery of the nearly 650-year-old healed jaw is an amazing find because it shows the accuracy with which “the medical professional was able to put the two major fragments of the jaw together.“
Read more.