male gaze is not 'when person look sexy' or 'when misogynist make film'

death of the author is not 'miku wrote this'

I don't think you have to read either essay to grasp the basic concepts

death of the author means that once a work is complete, what the author believes it to mean is irrelevant to critical analysis of what's in the text. it means when analysing the meaning of a text you prioritise reader interpretation above author intention, and that an interpretation can hold valid meaning even if it's utterly unintentional on the part of the person who created the thing. it doesn't mean 'i can ignore that the person who made this is a bigot' - it may in fact often mean 'this piece of art holds a lot of bigoted meanings that the author probably wasn't intentionally trying to convey but did anyway, and it's worth addressing that on its own terms regardless of whether the author recognises it's there.' it's important to understand because most artists are not consciously and vocally aware of all the possible meanings of their art, and because art is communal and interpretive. and because what somebody thinks they mean, what you think somebody means, and what a text is saying to you are three entirely different things and it's important to be able to tell the difference.

male gaze is a cinematographic theory on how films construct subjectivity (ie who you identify with and who you look at). it argues that film language assumes that the watcher is a (cis straight white hegemonically normative) man, and treats men as relatable subjects and women as unknowable objects - men as people with interior lives and women as things to be looked at or interacted with but not related to. this includes sexual objectification and voyeurism, but it doesn't mean 'finding a lady sexy' or 'looking with a sexual lens', it means the ways in which visual languages strip women of interiority and encourage us to understand only men as relatable people. it's important to understand this because not all related gaze theories are sexual in nature and if you can't get a grip on male gaze beyond 'sexual imagery', you're really going to struggle with concepts of white or abled or cis subjectivities.

:whispers: also Death of the Author means you have to exercise self-criticism and recognise the bias YOU as the audience bring to interpreting a piece of work. Yes, your reading is valid. But to what extent are you extrapolating from your own experiences, privileges & lacks of privilege, past traumas, etc.? How might this affect your interpretation of the text?

More people need to understand that part, too.

POPEYE?!?!??

Let's not forget this gem

wake up babe new gender just dropped (amphibious)

so that's why nonbinary people keep posting about frogs

Extremely niche but I want to look a little into colour theory or colour as a literary motif or really accessible colour science. Anyone’s read something good about this? (except for Goethe’s Theory of Colours which I have and is a blast and a little dizzying—Goethe you did it again you beautiful weirdo.)

Thank you so much for all your help, you’ve given me a ton to think about!

If anyone else wants to disappear into the rabbit hole, here are a few of the recommended texts available online:

And my own only amount to— J. W. Goethe’s Theory of Colours and Rebecca Lindenberg’s Love, a Footnote.

Environmental Storytelling

shocking

adhd gothic

Who gave you this summary of my week

Good for this person. This is exactly what you do. Screw the job.

I had a job that made me work an all nighter, 30 hours straight, over Thanksgiving. I resigned that Monday and it was one of the most satisfying decisions I’ve ever made.

Part 3:

Please pay attention to all the manipulation tactics this boss uses, because they’re pulling out every trick in the book.

This is like a 101 course in how employers use guilt trips to coerce you into putting up with their bullshit. This is precisely why you should never trust those employers who insist that they’re “like a family.” They are not. It’s just a ruse so that your boss can neg you into putting your job ahead of your actual life.

Also not all the “we need to” and “let’s do this”, that’s also part of the “we are a family/team” tactic. They talk about US fixing the issue together when it was solely up to OP, nobody else.

Also also, take note of them trying to call him. NEVER do this sort of negotiation through a call, use texts/e-mails so there’s proof.

I love how the boss mixes “I’m your friend/we’re family too” with mocking, belittling and threatening the guy. That’s not friend behaviour.

A fun thing about computer skills is that as you have more of them, the number of computer problems you have doesn't go down.

This is because as a beginner, you have troubles because you don't have much knowledge.

But then you learn a bunch more, and now you've got the skills to do a bunch of stuff, so you run into a lot of problems because you're doing so much stuff, and only an expert could figure them out.

But then one day you are an expert. You can reprogram everything and build new hardware! You understand all the various layers of tech!

And your problems are now legendary. You are trying things no one else has ever tried. You Google them and get zero results, or at best one forum post from 1997. You discover bugs in the silicon of obscure processors. You crash your compiler. Your software gets cited in academic papers because you accidently discovered a new mathematical proof while trying to remote control a vibrator. You can't use the wifi on your main laptop because you wrote your own uefi implementation and Intel has a bug in their firmware that they haven't fixed yet, no matter how much you email them. You post on mastodon about your technical issue and the most common replies are names of psychiatric medications. You have written your own OS but there arent many programs for it because no one else understands how they have to write apps as a small federation of coroutine-based microservices. You ask for help and get Pagliacci'd, constantly.

But this is the natural of computer skills: as you know more, your problems don't get easier, they just get weirder.

you know you've made it when you're googling problems and ending up with 0-9 results

#you don't actually have to be good to have these problems#you just have to be obsessed with a micro-issue that no one else cares about

One of my favourite bits of media history trivia is that back in the Elizabethan period, people used to publish unauthorised copies of plays by sending someone who was good with shorthand to discretely write down all of the play's dialogue while they watched it, then reconstructing the play by combining those notes with audience interviews to recover the stage directions; in some cases, these unauthorised copies are the only record of a given play that survives to the present day. It's one of my favourites for two reasons:

the crushing guilt of being unproductive vs the exhaustion of being burned out. fight.

#aaaaand its listless dissociation with the steel chair!!!

*stamps this as peer-reviewed*

Oddly Specific Tarot Card: Heavy

Meaning: Burden. Overload. Dealing with A Lot. It’s fine, really. You’ll be fine. Just…it’s a lot right now.

Reversed: Feelings dump. Trauma as competitive sport. No, no, it’s fine, you’re glad they feel comfortable talking about it to total strangers, really. It’s not healthy to bottle these things up. It’s fine. You asked. Well, you said “How’s it going?” and that’s basically the same thing.

A useful force multiplier for other cards in a reading. If it appears under the Tower, we suggest buying insurance. Preferably in the next twenty minutes.

but you can't keep holding on like this.

Man, they don't let you have any fun.

God forbid women do anything...

the proper response to "you'd be prettier if you smiled more" 😌

Hamlet as a D&D paladin.

Keep reading

some gems of insight from the reblogs (@aspiring-protagonist​ and @moderndayathena​):

Weren’t you listening? He’s praying. GOES HARD AS FUCK

what did you create today bud? maybe you created a thought about a balloon? maybe a breakfast this morning? maybe a look at a dog trotting by. maybe a heartbeat? it is incredible how much art you are making all the dang time. you are SO prolific

Why would you hide that in the notes

I want an ice maker and enough room in the freezer for a pizza and that is IT.

I want the dumbest fridge you got. Gimme the orange tabby of refrigeration. I want my fridge to pull the wrong lever and turn my enemies into llamas instead of killing them. I want the following features: keeps things cold, has compartment that keeps things colder, a door that opens and shuts.

"Here at Stupid Jeff's Dumb Appliance Warehouse we sell the dumbest fucking appliances. Check out this fridge. This fridge won't ask you about your day, this dumb fucking fridge doesn't know what an Elon Musk is and won't fucking tell you what bullshit that dumb monkey is slapping into his phone today when you try to get some fucking milk. We took out all those "smart" electronics and in their place we put a loaded Glock 9mm that is put right up to that light that turns on when you open the door, which is the smartest thing in this fucking stupid fridge and let me tell you that fucker is on thin goddamn ice, if it gets too smart and tries to turn on before you open that door, the Glock will blow it to hell. Speaking of ice, this stupid fridge makes it. It makes ice, it keeps things cold, it comes with shelves. It's sturdy enough that when your ex comes back to your place looking for their stuff that they think they left behind like nine months ago and they know that you don't have it, but they wanted an excuse to come start a fight with you and throw a chair at your head but miss you and hit your fridge MICHAEL, this fridge will keep trucking because it gives zero shits and it only lives to keep things cold. Come to Stupid Jeff's Dumb Appliance Warehouse, if you ask us if we have an app, we break your kneecaps."

Mental Crop Rotation

When farmers grow the same crop too many years in a row, it can leave their soil depleted of minerals and other nutrients that are vital to the health of their fields.

To avoid this, farmers will often alternate the crops that they grow because some plants will use up different minerals (such as nitrogen) while other plants replenish those minerals. This process is known as “crop rotation.”

So the next time you find that you need to step away from a project to work on something else for a while, don’t beat yourself up for “quitting” that project. Give yourself permission to practice “mental crop rotation” to maintain a healthy brain field.

Because I’ve found that when that unnecessary guilt and pressure are removed from the process, a good mental crop rotation can help you feel more energized and invigorated than ever once you’re ready to rotate back to that project.

: A crucial part of crop rotation is that the field is let fallow sometimes. You plant what’s called a “cover crop”, which is something you don’t expect to harvest– it’s there for its roots to hold the soil in place, and often it’ll be what’s called a nitrogen-fixer, i.e. a plant that can pull nitrogen out of the air and fix it into the soil with its roots (but sometimes it won’t, sometimes it’s really just there to shelter the soil surface), and then you’ll till in that cover crop, or let the frost kill it and the stalks lie as mulch, and then you’ll rotate productive crops back into that field the next season. 

It’s important, though, to understand that during the fallow period, no nutrients are removed from that ground, and nothing is expected of it. Whatever the land grows then, it keeps, and it gets tilled back in or decomposes in place, to return its energy to the earth.

We’re not allowed, in our current society, to just let our minds be fallow for a bit, to produce nothing for export, to make nothing that can be sold. But it’s part of good land stewardship, to give every field time when it doesn’t need to give you anything back. 

So yes, grow and produce different things from time to time, rotate them around your mind and exercise different mental muscles, take different things from your creative processes, yes– but also, give yourself a fallow spell now and again, and let the field of your mind grow things for itself to keep, to break down and save for later. 

Positive mental health AND agriculture??!?

*slams reblog button*