Said it in the tags of another post, but I hate, really hate, those posts that are like "we shouldn't explore the ocean there are Scary Things down there uwu", yes, we should not let random rich tourists tour historical tragedy sites in shoddily made submarines, but ocean exploration by scientists using proper tools and attitudes is vital to understanding our planet and expanding our knowledge about the world, not to mention very, very cool
Even if it's a joke, to me it's just plain anti-intellectualism disguised as a joke, like "I don't care about this stuff and neither should you" well guess what, I care, lots of people do and they dedicate their lives to understanding how our world works
why are you afraid of the unknown? cringe and fail hp lovecraft ass thinking.
just to be clear this goes double for space exploration, Yuri Gagarin, son of a milkmaid and a bricklayer, did not become the first man in space for you to post stupid takes like "only billionaries go to space xdxddxxd", space is there to be shared by all humankind, the stars await all of us
embrace the human thirst for knowledge or die, I don't care
Anyway if you see this you have to reblog and tag with a delight from ur day -- even the littlest thing counts
As a longtime Too Beautiful to Live listener, I am tickled to see Live Wire on here.
Feel free to elaborate further in the tags, especially if you picked Option 3 because as a professor myself it MYSTIFIES me that there are students who do that! (Also, unless it is just the Culture at your school or something, you should not do that. For future reference)
I went to community college (twice) and a private art school (once, and once was more than enough). I can't recall calling any of my professors anything but their first names.
I've never related more to anyone in my entire life than I do to this kid waiting in line to see Maria Callas sing Tosca.
Gonna pretend his friend in sunglasses is Tim Lincecum
damnit I knew i was forgetting something when i made this poll, I forgot to add deviantArt! 😭
Source: San Bernardino Sun, 13 March 1987 by Donald Kaul
This review from 1987 is too funny and I love that he calls Valjean the student’s uncle but also, it’s too optimistic about American politics lol.
Save your McGovern buttons, folks; liberalism shall rise again. And soon. You can feel it. It’s not merely that the air is going out of Ronald Reagan’s balloon, it’s that the times they are achangin’. Many liberals these days don’t even bother with a secret handshake when greeting each other. Others have taken to openly advocating such controversial liberal ideas as public education, clean water and help for the homeless. You think I’m rushing it, don’t you? Well, perhaps, but you’ll have to forgive me. I’ve just seen “Les Miserables.“
Perhaps you haven’t heard about it yet? You will. "Les Miz,” as we on the fast track call it, is the latest stage phenomenon to hit this country. It is a grandiose musical — really more of an opera — based on Victor Hugo’s novel. Like the last such phenomenon, “Nicholas Nickleby,” it comes from London, and like “NickNick” (fast track again), it is going to be a smash hit. It is a genuine, hand-tooled, gold-leafed, can’t-miss, must-see show.
Overlooked in the hoopla of a hit, however, is the fact that it, again like “Nickleby,” is a liberal show. Its story is the triumph of bleeding heart liberalism over hard-hearted conservatism. And people are going crazy for it.
“Rambo” is out; “Les Miz” and “Nick-Nick” are in.
“Les Miz” is the story of a poor Frenchman during Napoleanic [sic] times who steals a loaf of bread to feed his sister’s starving child (which is, basically, the only reason liberals ever steal). He is caught and given 19 years in prison. Released from jail, Valjean is unable to get work because of his prison record, so he breaks parole and assumes a new identity. He is a great success in business and becomes mayor of a small town.
Valjean is pursued through the years by a cop, Javert, who wears black clothes and smiles only when he steps on a butterfly.
Javert keeps rediscovering Valjean and trying to arrest him, but the ex-con is too smart for him; he keeps slipping away. In the meantime, Valjean helps any widows and orphans he finds in his path. He is a sweetheart of a guy.
But does this cut any ice with Javert? Not a cube. He’s determined that Valjean pay the price for breaking parole. He reminds one of Chief Justice William Rehnquist, actually. (If Valjean had been arrested for income tax evasion instead of stealing bread, they’d have probably let him off with a warning.)
Finally, or almost finally, Javert is captured by idealistic rebels during a student uprising and is delivered into the hands of Valjean, who is being a sort of uncle to the students. Javert, naturally, expects to be shot. Instead, Valjean does the liberal thing; he lets him go. Javert later has a chance to return the favor and does, but he feels so unhappy at having violated the conservative code of honor by helping a liberal that he commits suicide.
Anvway, it all ends happily. Valiean dies, but he goes to heaven, where all good liberals go. Javert is conspicuous by his absence.
It is a great snow, the night I saw it at the Kennedy Center, Washington’s liberals clapped so hard I thought their jewelry was going to fly off.
The production is a return to the drama of the late 19th and early 20th century, before movies, when one of the things you went to the theater for was spectacle, crowd scenes, chariot races, waterfalls. The effects in “Les Miz” are magnificent. A pitched street battle with students and troops is reproduced on stage, then within moments we are in a Paris sewer with the escaping Valjean. The next minute we stay with Javert as he jumps from a bridge and plunges to his death.
As I said, it’s a great show and a harbinger of things to come. You still don’t believe me? Listen: in his current film, Sylvester Stallone plays an arm-wrestler. Conservatism is being downsized. In his next film he’ll probably play a social worker.
Remember, you read it here first.
I didn’t see a lot of the nominated shows this season, and/but I am pleased with the Tonys this year! (The ceremony and the winners.)
I know beanie feldstein is throwing things at her tv screen and her new wife is like “babe it’s ok…. At least you can read”
sometimes musicals are about sillyguys jumping around and sometimes they reach deep deep deep into your chest and rip something out
if you're lucky it's the same musical
STOP! are you operating on an arbitrary set of terms and rules known only to you? have you created an ultimatum or specific if/then scenario for someone else without communicating it to them? have you considered making a decision and calculated all the consequences and potential reactions to those consequences and consequences for those reactions before you actually made the decision? it may be time to say some words out loud to another person!
I think of this post constantly so I made a graphic to send to other people
[ID: a graphic displaying the above text. End ID]
I can actually speak to this.
Mind you, I’m of the opinion that people should be dragged into the twentieth century, kicking and screaming if necessary. But… here’s the thing.
Until relatively recently, most of this stuff wasn’t mandatory. Cash is becoming increasingly expensive to use, and it wasn’t that long ago that you could just hand your card to the clerk. And it doesn’t help that what started out as “swipe your card” is now a five step process where you have to decline a store discount card, a donation to a shady charity, and a new loan on your house.
And the thing is, these older people are scared. Because they’re vividly aware that the world they know how to operate in is going away. The added benefits– which really aren’t as many as you think– of doing it the new way weren’t worth the effort of learning a completely new way of doing things before– and now they’re faced with the reality that the old way just isn’t there.
I don’t think a lot of younger people truly understand how much the process of getting and spending money has changed. When I was in my early twenties, I went for two years without a bank account at all. My job would write me a check, I’d endorse it, and they’d give it to me in cash.
I was able to pay my rent and phone bill with money orders, and my internet service was tacked onto my phone bill. As far as buying things online… that…. that wasn’t a thing. If you wanted to buy something online, you were still going to be mailing someone a check or money order.
And while the new way of doing things is more convenient, it’s not actually better. Don’t get me wrong, data breaches and identity theft happened before 1997, but… they weren’t a goddamn industry. I did not ONCE during the twentieth century walk into a place of business only to learn that the credit card machine wasn’t working anymore. And it really does not help that movies and tv shows actually make the problem sound somehow worse than the cyberpunk dystopian hellscape we’re currently in.
And you laugh, but this is going to happen to you. 25 years ago, nobody NEEDED the internet at home. For anything. Oh, there were things that could be accessed with the internet, but as a general rule it wasn’t anything you couldn’t get elsewhere. Sixteen years ago (as of this writing), the first iPhone had not yet been released, and there really wasn’t such a thing as the “mobile internet.”
Think about that. The people born the day before the first modern smartphone hit the market have not yet graduated high school.
And the fun thing? The rate of change is increasing, and it’s affecting everything. And it’s not going to be much longer before you find yourself saying “I just want to buy a goddamned pizza. No, my credit card doesn’t have Wi-Fi R capability. Why the fuck would I even want that? No, I don’t have a bioimplant with the details. That’s just madness. That’s how the four corporations that control the world track you. Just give me the thing to scan my card AND WHAT DO YOU MEAN IT’S BUILT INTO THE CEILING? ”
I mean maybe it’s gonna be different but I would like to believe that 30 years from now I would get a Wi-Fi R capable credit card suitable for ceiling scanning with bioimplant security if that is what the standard was, even if my old chip card were still technically compatible.
Maybe I’m wrong, idk, but right now as a Young Millenial I love the fact that I can pay for stuff at the grocery store with just my phone and my fingerprint, and I’m sure it will get more convenient as society progresses.
Oh, don’t get me wrong. I absolutely adore being able to pay with my phone. But “convenient” is a relative term– it’s convenient for you because you have a smartphone, and know how to use a smartphone.
But sooner or later a technology is going to come out that you’re not going to need. Maybe you appreciate it, maybe you think it’s pointless. It provides a new way to do X, but you already have a way to do X, and either don’t have the money or just plain don’t see the need to have the new shiny, since you can still do X perfectly fine, the way you’ve always done it.
And then ten or fifteen years later, you’ll discover that you no longer can do X, because the only way to do X is with a technology that has been absent for the first 40 years of your life, and optional for the last ten or fifteen, but suddenly you just can’t. Not without buying this new technology that you don’t know how to use and don’t want.
Here’s a real-world example that’s absolutely fucking the over-sixty crowd: Two Factor Authentication.
When it first rolled out, it was only in high-security operations, and consisted of an electronic keycode generator– the little keyfob. Then they added the ability to send codes over text. Then they developed smartphone apps.
Now, the thing is– each one of those options require its own technological infrastructure. And when 65% of the client base is using the app, and and 30% is using text, the 5% that’s using the little keyfob generators are now an unreasonable expense. You’re maintaining the infrastructure to work with the keyfobs and a business relationship with the manufacturers of those keyfobs, not mention the manpower required to add the keyfobs to individual accounts. So you drop the keyfobs. A few years later, only 5% of the people using text messages for 2FA, because smartphones have really caught on, and once again– you’re spending a huge chunk of your budget on the servers that generate the 2FA codes, the capacity to send the codes, and a per-code cost. (Admittedly, usually broken up across a batch of thousands, but still.) So you drop that capability.
Now, a lot of 60-70 year olds have never owned smartphones, and are being declared “unavoidable collateral damage” by companies that use 2FA, because the cost of supporting such customers is more than the profit they generate. To make it worse, the apps themselves are, by necessity, getting more advanced, and in some cases older phones won’t run them.
And that’s a change dictated by security, market, and cost factors. That’s not even getting into things like… well, have you noticed a lot of companies are trying to get you to order and pay with the app? It has nothing to do with YOUR convenience, and everything about how McDonald’s wants to spend less money on cashiers. There’s a lot of technology out there that’s “for your convenience” but really it’s “for our profit”, and “for your protection” but what they’re protecting you from is saving money or spending it somewhere else.
I mean, hell… you don’t even have to leave [tumblr] to see Millennials complaining about how physical copies are going away and you can’t OWN things anymore, whether it’s music, software, or movies. Or how we used to have a cable provider, then it was a cable provider and Netflix, now it’s fifteen streaming services and a cable provider.
I can’t tell you what it is– though as Gen X, I will probably start complaining about it before you do– but some major component of how you interact with the world is going just go away. And maybe it will just be the steady march of progress, or it may be the forward offensive of capitalism. Maybe you WILL be keeping up with the technology, but the company that makes the technology goes out of business and you have to learn something new. Maybe the company that makes the technology gets bought by another company for the sole purpose of shutting down the easier, better technology instead of the one that is more difficult and makes the new owner more money.
But I assure you, you will find yourself saying “It doesn’t need to be this complicated. I could do this LAST MONTH. I have been able to do this since before you were born, and there is absolutely no reason I should not be able to do this now.”
This problem will be complicated by the fact that the first time it happens, it will turn out to be totally possible, it’s just that this particular clerk doesn’t know how. The second time it happens, it will be hidden behind a menu option that maybe makes sense once it’s in front of you, but neither you or the clerk feels like they should have been expected to figure that out intuitively. There will probably be more than one case where the problem is, in fact, the little shit behind the counter doesn’t want to admit they they might be wrong, or just doesn’t want to spend forty-nine seconds to find out/do it the hard way because they could spend that time talking to the cashier in the next line. And then one day there will be a hardware upgrade, a policy change, or the last guy in the store who knew how to do it accidentally was talking about going to Communion and management just heard “union” and now he’s not allowed within 500 feet of the store or any of its employees.
(Although I did not know it at the time, when I left my first help desk job, I was the last person who knew how to use the cockamamie Rube-Goldberg system that was used for…. well, in modern terms, dial-up VPN. They didn’t know it at the time, either, and because the damage was done, there was absolutely nothing they could do to help the guy who HAD to use the legacy platform, and if it weren’t for the facts that he remembered my name, I was listed in the phone book, I remembered HIM as a caller who was always easy to work with, I had the time, I had the patience, I had the kindness, and most importantly, I am a goddamn robot who was able to sit down on the floor and pull up all the configuration screens for an app I had not even seen in three months in my head like a fucking terminator HUD, he would have blown a I-shit-you-not EIGHT FIGURE SALE. To this day I’m mad that extortion didn’t even cross my mind.)
But the day is going to come where you Just Can’t Do It Like That Anymore… and that day is going to come sooner for you than it will for me, and sooner for Gen Z than for you. Technological growth is exponential, and prone to sudden leaps forward that nobody can predict until mid-leap, and even then we’re not even sure where we’ll land.
As a person here in the Tumblrverse who has a number of DECADES on the vast majority of you, I’d like to comment as someone who has seen lots of change. I can remember when you had to take your paycheck to the bank and wait in line for a teller just to deposit it and get some cash back. And that’s assuming you were able to make it to the bank when it was open. Then ATM’s came along and things got a little easier. You still had to make regular visits to the bank and you had to know which times and places might be a bit sketchy to be depositing your paycheck as this would typically be after work at night. Direct deposit cut down on some of this. But then you still had to make regular visits to get some cash. And you had to think ahead a little bit in case you were going to be doing something for which you needed money but wouldn’t have time to swing by an ATM. I gave up using cash and started using my phone a good number of years ago. Each step along the way may have been incremental. But when I look back at how dramatically things have improved from long ago, I fucking love it!
Same thing with phones. The only time I ever locked my keys in my car was when I was depositing my paycheck at an ATM. It was at night and there was pouring rain. This was before cell phones. I had to walk a block to a nearby mall which was thankfully still open as I knew it had a payphone. I got soaking wet and I had to wait a long time for a teenage girl to finish her conversation. So cell phones that were affordable to the general public were a blessing but all they really did was to allow you to avoid all of the headaches and hassles of trying to find a payphone or convincing someone else to let you use their phone in their home or business. Over time the capabilities on phones grew and grew until we got to smart phones. And remember how there were cameras on cell phones before we got to smart phones? I was an IT professional and let me tell you I was the only one in my group who ever bothered to figure out how to copy a picture off my phone and move it elsewhere. People never bothered to use their phones as cameras until smart phones came along. Again, changes were incremental at each step but the overall evolution has been great.
Grumbling about change is easy if all you ever do is look at each individual step. But when you’ve been able to see how the evolution has played out over an extended period of time then you might be more appreciative.
forgive yourself again and again and again and again and again
love letters, victoria chang
hes an old man to YOU to me hes a beautiful young maiden. and also an old man
Rhamphorhynchus I watched some gulls dancing over waves today, plucking out morsels after each breaker. I managed to snap some photos because I thought they would make good reference. I didn’t plan on using the photos so soon, but there you go. Sometimes inspiration strikes.
I haven’t painted anything in a while. The gulls became Pterosaurs. This probably isn’t strictly accurate, but I wanted to catch the feel of the creatures as real animals rather than lizardy death machines.
[Image description: a digital illustration of a flock of rhamphorhynchus flying over a cresting ocean wave. They are small pterosaur dinosaurs, with brown wings and white underbellies, long tails with pink tufts and sharp teeth. /end ID]