Let's just take a moment to remember that my gender expression is inextricably linked to this song in ways I cannot communicate effectively.
every single bumper sticker hits like a fucking train
moment of silence for everyone who's just like their dad but a girl
Here’s the cover and opening pages of Arthur C. Clarke’s 1986 future-telling book July 20, 2019. Published 17 years after the moon landing, it predicts what the world will look like on the event’s 50th anniversary.
“Clarke invokes what you might expect in the way of supercomputers and laserdiscs that will respond to your voice command and place the world’s learning at your fingertips. Meanwhile, lovable robots will do the drudge work, provide companionship, and allow you leisure to pursue entertainments like movies that outdo each other in special effects or sports that will be based on a new breed of brainy/steroid-built superjocks. Had enough? Wait. Clarke also supplies his versions of hospital days and death-defying regimens. The scenarios here smack of Coma with illicit dealing in organ transplants, aborted babies as source of brain cells and so on.
Clarke also hypothesizes war in 2019–an affair that starts as a rebellion in East Germany and escalates. An epilogue laments the decline in the United Nations, but sees hope in further developments of one of Clarke’s own favorite: projects: satellite communications. It will make earth a global family yet, he predicts. This note of optimism and a long, Clarke-at-his-best description of life in a 2019 space station (based on present experience) lift the book out of the veil of joyless hardware.”
Happy July 20! Are we all having a day in the life of the 21st century? I know I sure am. Here’s a cover with Tim White art.
also literally fucked a man so hard yesterday that today i found pieces of my bed on the floor
I read this too fast and thought it said “pieces of him on the floor”
I'm sorry, I don't want to come across as harsh, but this is honestly ignorant as fuck.
I'm not gonna claim to know everything about the importance of studying dead languages, but I think I can safely say that it would probably be a really bad thing if we lost these languages to time if we didn't have people studying them.
We can lose hundreds if not THOUSANDS of years of story-telling history if these languages end up forgotten.
I can't put it into clear words right now because I'm busy or go int depth because I only have a common sense understanding, but I just wanted to address this. So if anybody on Tumblr who's more qualified to speak on this kind of matter wants to explain, then please take the floor for me.
- Many, many English words have Latin roots, so studying Latin can expand your English vocabulary to the point that you won't even need to check the dictionary meaning if you can recognize its Latin roots.
- Additionally, you can make up new words as needed by mashing together Dead Words.
- Lots of scientific jargon use Latin and Ancient Greek exactly because they're dead languages - the meaning of those words are set in stone. Studying those languages can help you understand and remember the extremely complex strings of words common in those topics.
- Latin is the Mother of Romance languages. Just studying Latin can make it easier to adapt to the grammar rules of the other Romance languages, or even help you Frankenstein out a meaning of a simple paragraph.
- All translation is a series of compromises. Even if Ye Olde Latin Text has been translated to English again and again and again, there WILL BE several points where the translator had to circumnavigate the translation to a phrase because the exact tone and concept is difficult to convey in English!!! (I am bilingual and this problem frustrates me to no end!!)
- And that's approaching this problem in good faith. We have a history of people outright lying about their translation credentials, deliberately translating a text "wrong" for their own benefit, or adding flourishes that drastically change the tone of the translation. Reviewing that 18th-century English translation of some 13th-century Latin book instead of just thoughtlessly reprinting it is vital to having a clear understanding of that book and placing it in its proper context.
- We have a LOT of untranslated archived material that have text written in dead languages, Latin included. Translating these provide us history.
And last but not the least:
Things do not have to be "useful" to have value.
also dead does not mean no longer in use, it means no longer CHANGING. No new words are being added to that dictionary. That’s all it means. Latin is only dead bc new words aren’t being added to its dictionary
she doesn't need to read to know exactly what they've been writing about
my instagram explore page loves showing me those like erotic dark romance novel tiktoks and i really have to wonder: why do all these straight women desperately want to fuck a mafia boss
Okay, let's try and break this down.
Sexual fantasies are, by their very nature, transgressive. Yes, even the fluffy, romantic ones. As long as general culture remains negative about sex and sexuality in any form that isn't cishet procreative sex within the confines of matrimony with the woman not as an equal actor but an object sex is performed onto, this is going to remain true.
And the thing about fantasies is that our brains like to take the things we crave the most and mix them up with our fears, anxieties, pain, and trauma into a melange of, sometimes, truly epic levels of fuckery.
But here's the secret - things we fantasize about, from the most wholesome to the bizarre to seriously fucked up? They are very, very often NOT what we literally want.
Being into dubcon or noncon doesn't mean you actually want to be raped or rape. Being into monsters doesn't make you a zoophile. And fantasizing about violent, obsessive men doesn't mean you wouldn't run as far the fuck away from a man like that the second one of them set their sights on you.
If you're really interested in the subject, I recommend reading My Secret Garden by Nancy Friday, a compilation of anonymously submitted women's sexual fantasies. And, as it turns out, women fantasize about a lot of really violent, uncomfortable, and just plain screwed up stuff.
And, for most of them, even when they don't actively realize it, it's about reclamation. Of fear, of trauma, of loss of power. It's about THEMSELVES and how THEY feel. As weird as it's gonna sound, the men featured in those fantasies don't really matter, they're just a vessel, a manifestation of the extreme version of what you're dealing with and/or crave. A safe, cathartic way to experience something profoundly unsafe, unwise, and terrifying.
For women fantasizing about criminals, villains, monsters, and anti-heroes, it's very often about the idea that someone like that - intense, violent, with single-minded focus, and immense power - would love her, want her, always put her first, go against all his instincts/training for you without a second thought and be a clear and present danger to everyone but warmth and safety for her and only her, and burn the world itself down for hurting her in even the slightest of ways. It's a sexual version of the fantasy of having a pet tiger, one that would never, ever attack you or hurt you in any way.
And just like the people who want to boop the forbidden snoot, the women fantasizing about their fantasy Mafia Boss Lover are very well aware of the fact that 1) men like that don't actually exist, 2) the criminal world of their fantasy has all but nothing to do with reality, and 3) that the thing they're actually fantasizing about is being loved, wanted, and safe... just in a REALLY intense, exaggerated way. And, let's not mince words, there's also often a more or less strong D/s dynamics at play in the scenario, too.
Now, you can choose to be judgy bitches about it (goodness knows plenty of you in the replies, comments, and tags are), in which case I would suggest you examine why you're feeling such a profound need to shame women for enjoying themselves in their own little world, or you can apply the YKINMKATO mantra and understand that straight women, living in the constant state of preyhood, sometimes consciously or subconsciously reclaim power over that situation through transgressive sexual fantasies.
Also, fuck this idea that queer people only fantasize about healthy and wholesome relationships, romantic, sexual, or otherwise, as if at least half of Tumblr isn't simping for, oh, for example, Hannibal fucking Lecter. Do you have ANY idea how many Mafia and Thug BL content there is out there?! FFS, Tom of Finland, a WWII veteran who fought against Nazis, drew art of exaggeratedly masculine men in Nazi uniforms in pornographic situations as a way to dissociate himself from those traumas and fascists themselves as far back as the 1950s!
So yeah. Less judgement, and more taking some responsibility for curating your online experience if seeing someone's kink truly offends you this much.
"Booping the forbidden snoot" is a good way of putting it
prev tags, text ver. below the cut
I'm going to try to explain this without sounding completely deranged but like, okay: IMO, there are two kinds of fantasies. let's call them horses and unicorns.
a horse fantasy is something that is theoretically possible. I do not currently own a horse, and the reality of owning a horse would involve boring stuff like paying for its food and mucking out its stall, but it is something I could do in real life. like, horses exist and can be owned by humans. lots of fantasies can fall into this category: traveling to a foreign country, living in a cute house with just you and a cat, winning a marathon, basically anything that is technically achievable even if it would be difficult to do so in real life.
a unicorn fantasy is something that is definitely (or almost definitely) impossible. I do not currently own a unicorn, and there is no version of reality where I could own a unicorn, because unicorns are not real. the actual logistical issues that might arise from owning a unicorn, like paying for its food or mucking out its stall, are completely immaterial because it's not something that could ever actually happen. and like, it's in my brain! I control it! I can imagine a unicorn that only eats marshmallows and shits potpourri if I want to!
I think the disconnect comes in when people assume that a unicorn fantasy is actually a horse fantasy. to use the tiger example from upthread: you can own a tiger. you can't have a completely domesticated tiger that would never hurt you, not even by accident. so saying "I want a pet tiger" is a unicorn fantasy, because everything necessary for that fantasy to work (it being completely domesticated and incapable of harming you) are not things you can have in real life.
now, serial killers/war criminals/normal criminals/etc. are all things that exist. and there are definitely people in relationships with them in real life! so it's tempting to assume that something like "I want to fuck a serial killer" is a horse fantasy: something you would want to do, and could do, if given the opportunity.
but for the vast majority of people, that's not the fantasy. the rest of the fantasy ("he's a serial killer, BUT he only kills bad people and he's nice to me and is both able and willing to protect me from literally anything and has sex exactly the way I want to because he magically knows what I want because, again, this is happening in my brain") is what makes it a unicorn.
...huh. My thanks to @bemusedlybespectacled for putting NAMES to those things, “horse fantasy” and “unicorn fantasy”; because I’ve come across those concepts before, but never with WORDS for them. I hope that those terms become commonly understood, so then people can have discussions about them without having to spend an hour ahead of time just making sure that everyone’s talking about the same thing.
