revolution-starter

cuddly-cactass:

nanmarie:

revolution-starter:

This is sad. Are people really so very afraid of what it is to be human, to imagine, to experience complicated longing. It is different than acting on it, that is the whole point, to recognize all that goes into being human and to be at times messed up, to understand what internal forces are at work, and to then choose to act in a way that reflectes your actual values. Psychoanalysis talks about “the return of the repressed” - if you are always afraid of yourself and repressing so much, you will be even more likely to act out in some way at some point.

I have no doubt that this era of purity culture has had a hand in recent bouts of anti intellectualism. So many people will only interact with something that they can fully align their morality with, ignoring the fact that fiction imparts lessons onto us that can affect or change our own understanding of morals.

Facsim doesn’t want to test your morals, it wants to tell you what your morals are and stick to them.

You cannot tell an anti-war story without depicting war, you cannot tell a story about equality without first depicting inequality. But now that people aren’t interacting with moral challenging media they cannot tell the difference between a story deconstructing a social problem vs a story promoting a social problem. Which leads to people becoming susceptible to propaganda.

Of course there are stories that depict gratuitous, uncritical, unhealthy themes, but you will not know that unless you read it. One of my least favourite books of all time due to its racism and misogyny is also one of my favourite books to deconstruct and analyze. I could go for hours about how so many of the harmful themes go over people’s heads under the guise of ‘pro mental health’, but I would not have be able to have that conversation unless I had read the book.

balaclava-trismegistus

limpurtikles:

crazy-pages:

biohammer:

elidyce:

balaclava-trismegistus:

Sun Tzu is so fucking funny to me because for his time he was legitimately a brilliant tactician but a bunch of his insight is shit like “if you think you might lose, avoid doing that”, “being outnumbered is bad generally”, and “consider lying.”

My personal favourite is his lengthy lecture on the subject of Supplies Being Very Important I Cannot Stress Enough The Importance Of Protecting Your Supply Lines But Also Supply Lines Are Expensive As Shit So Steal The Enemy’s Supplies At Every Opportunity. 

via- @elidyce

One of the more important things to consider about any historical work is the audience it was published for. The Art Of War was aimed at fancy nobles high on philosophy with little practical military experience who were nonetheless leading armies.

Sun Tzu, after desperatly trying to explain extremely basic logic to a bunch of upper-class twits, basically sat down and wrote the most elaborate “As per my last email” ever

victusinveritas

gallusrostromegalus:

goddamnshinyrock:

victusinveritas:

Meeting of the Minds in the Outer Banks.

to everyone in the notes like ‘wow, I didn’t know sea turtles were that big!’: they’re not (aside from leatherbacks, which this is not), this is photoshopped. The horse image is a stock photo, to which the sea turtle (wildly out of scale) and the man with the camera were added.

source

Ah, thanks for pointing this out.

recently-reanimated

recently-reanimated:

This video has permanently changed my vocabulary so I need you all to see it

cottaegecore

cottaegecore:

when you start reading again and it’s like oh. oh . the sun actually does still shine.

nietp

yvesdot:

tepot:

nietp:

I went to a bookshop and I got dizzy at the amount of books on stuff like “astrological feminism” “reclaiming womanhood through numerology” and all that shit…… One was called “cosmic fanny” or for my french speakers out there, “foufoune cosmique”. I think the fight against patriarchy is going really well

“But I didn’t and still don’t like making a cult of women’s knowledge, preening ourselves on knowing things men don’t know, women’s deep irrational wisdom, women’s instinctive knowledge of Nature, and so on. All that all too often merely reinforces the masculinist idea of women as primitive and inferior – women’s knowledge as elementary, primitive, always down below at the dark roots, while men get to cultivate and own the flowers and crops that come up into the light. But why should women keep talking baby talk while men get to grow up? Why should women feel blindly while men get to think?”

Ursula K Le Guin, from What Women Know

One night we had a thrilling summer storm… We hadn’t been in the house long, and it was the first time in this house we’d had to close all the windows. In the morning I smelled gas, strong, unmistakable. “I smell gas,” I said to my husband. “I don’t smell it,” he said. He had a friend come over. “Why are you having a friend come over,” I asked, “when it doesn’t matter if he can smell it or not, and none of us can fix it?” His friend didn’t smell it, either. I called the gas company. The gas company employee didn’t smell it, either. He waved his reader around and it blasted off in three places, substantial leaks behind the stove and in the basement. “Always trust a woman’s nose,” the gas company employee said.

Yes, I thought, believe us.

Then, No, I thought, I’m not a fucking witch. Believe anyone who smells gas. If someone smells gas, believe them.

– Jane Dykema, What I Don’t Tell My Students About “The Husband Stitch”

queeranarchism

roach-works:

queeranarchism:

redvelvetrevolver:

queeranarchism:

Adulting advice: if you think you can’t do a thing because you tried it as a child or teenager and you sucked really badly: try it again.

You may not notice it, but as an adult you continue gaining motor skills, insight, problem solving skills and above all patience and resilience in the face of failure. Also puberty can be a nightmare. For some of us it’s just harder to do things when we’re full of insecurities, low impulse control and focus, heightened emotions, etc. A thing that was hard for 15 year old you might not be hard for 25 or 35 or 45 years old you.

I thought I was the absolute worst at sowing because I tried to learn it in my teenage years and failed spectacularly at the most basic tasks. Turns out I just didn’t have the patience and focus for it yet. I tried it again recently and it didn’t take long at all to learn how to make my own clothes. (And oh my, being able to make any outfit I want in any fabric is a queer superpower.)

It really sucks that we’re told quite early in life what our talents are and we end up assuming that there are some things we’re just not good at, when the truth is that learning as an adult is just completely different from learning as a child.

Oh man, since I’ve been like… 32+ ? So many things have gotten easier.

It’s not something anyone tells you. In fact, I think with our youth-obsessed culture, there’s a tendency to think that you’re going to peak young. Generally, this just isn’t true.

A lot of the improvement feels, like the OP says, kind of effortless. It’s me going back to cooking after not cooking for six years and suddenly, oops I’m pretty damn good at it. Why? I wasn’t cooking in the meantime, I wasn’t practicing. (I didn’t even have a stove.)

But other mental qualities were developing that make everything easier. My executive function, decision-making, motor skills, etc. are all better than they were, through completing thousands of other tasks. I can think, know, and focus better.

There’s a huge element of this, also, which is enabled by emotional capacity and maturity, which is even harder to describe. It’s easier for me to do things like tell the truth because I can actually understand the truth of how I feel and I am more likely to have the confidence to say it. It’s easier to make the right decisions, to weigh all the factors. Especially for me since I was really not consistently good at this in my teens and 20s (I was possibly more impulsive and risk-seeking than many people, but that just makes the contrast more apparent.)

The other thing to consider is that when you are a teen/child, you’re being taught things often in a very specific way that’s been determined by someone else. My dad, for example, wanted me to understand how engines worked, so he explained them to me while we both looked under the hood of his various cars or trucks. I learned absolutely zero things by doing this.

When I was 21, I decided I wanted to know, so I learned how engines worked from an educational website with animations and quizzes. And of course, I was able to learn it. It’s not that complicated. I was never unable to learn it, I was just not able to learn it that way.

YES.

And for the record: I don’t wanna shit on teens and young adults here or to discourage teens from trying complicated things. Everyone is different and not every teen is as much of a distracted and easily discouraged mess as I was. And as you say: a lot of why things are often harder for teens is because they’re not given the space to choose what they want to learn and how they want to learn.

Also, everyone at every age is allowed to make tons of bad decisions and mistakes and fail at tons of things or do things they enjoy without ever becoming good at it. 

it’s also why cycling through a lot of hobbies and interests is just fine in the long run. even if you don’t learn how to do anything well, you’re picking up plenty of foundational skills along the way. everything gets easier and more familiar the more experience you get at doing anything.

lastvalyrian

lastvalyrian:

One important thing that you should do as a queer person is to find another queer person whose brain works just like yours (romantically or not) and then adopt a cat together and then finally steal that fucking Pikachu and make it big

orcapologist

baristhyena-deactivated20230510:

orcapologist:

It’s Wet Beast Wednesday

cmon kid… we’ve gotta go save Wet Beast Wednesday…. TWO!

karyey

karyey:

NO girl dont ruin your early 20s by staying home every saturday and lamenting the death of your childhood while also being afraid to even act like a 20 something year old bc you still feel so young yet so old and lost all at once haha you’re so sexy!