The Onion pulling zero fucking punches.
For those who have overactive guilt complexes like me…
Additionally, for the vast majority of human history the nuclear family either did not exist or existed as an integrated part of a larger family unit. People did not live alone. Which means people didn’t eat alone. Which means people didn’t cook alone. Meals were a large group endeavor with many people sharing all of the duties.
The idea that only one person would habitually do all aspects of cooking for multiple other people was invented in the comparatively severely recent history.
Human history is something like 200,000 years long. Urbanization which started some of these process that we consider normal today, started around about 7000 years ago. So the idea of anything like this at all, let alone being a dominant way, has only taken up about 3.5% of our most recent history.
That 3.5%, as above, was mostly in the context of people delegating food tasks for money and having other people cook for them a notable portion of the time.
We really only see the modern way of looking at things begin to emerge as a consequence of class division during the industrial revolution. Where how much time could be devoted to cooking and housework depended on socioeconic status. So we’re talking kinda around the mid-ish 1700′s. Or somewhere around the most recent POINT fifteen percent 0.15% of human history.
As the Industrial Revolution evolved. Poor people, men and women, had to spend most of their time at work. It was only in the growing middle class where there was enough wealth for one person to support a family and to therefore delegate the JOB of being a housewife. This was done in part to mimic wealthier people who could PAY for staff to do that work. Essentially having a housewife was a status symbol. It showed that the family was of a higher socio-economic level than the alternative. If you’ve seen Downton Abbey, then you have some idea of how the wealthy lived, there was no housewife making food and individual staff did not usually make food for their individual families, instead it was a paid group effort where everyone ate from the same stores and effort that was delegated around. It was the specific space of the middle class that was trying to thread that needle of the woman who had the wealth to have her primary task to be in charge of her household but did not have the wealth to delegate those tasks to others.
Behold the housewife. This is incidentally why she is shown as glamorous. Because she is that status symbol, a way to show the family’s wealth.
Then came World War 2. And if you really want to know where the modern way of looking at things came from this is it. Less than 100 years ago. Less than 0.05% of our history. WW2 started with all of this and then took male factory workers away, creating a deperate need for women to take over that job.
The state called:
There was active recruitment. Forget being a Housewife, the state needs you. there wasn’t really a rosie the riveter by the way, this was Rosie, the model, but Rosie was a fictional character the same as Paul Bunyan, a creation for the sake of advertising / propoganda.
Fine. But two things happened.
The majority of food production was taken over by companies delegated by the state, to provide food for the war effort and those in support of the war effort. This will come back later.
But of more direct import, the War ended. People came home. They needed work. The work currently being done by the women who were pretty happy with the personal autonomy it afforded them.
So policies were instated to help men get the jobs that the women now held. Such as promotions to hire veterans. And a new active campaign started. Instead of Rosie the Riveter, we get the created figure of the 50′s housewife
In commercial activities, Magazines, Radio, and Television, this mythic figure who never really existed in real life until families began to copy her. And there wasn’t only this myth. There was plenty of stick to go with that carrot.
To quote from The American Experience:
“Americans turned to the family as a bastion of safety in an insecure world… cold war ideology and the domestic revival [were] two sides of the same coin.”
Rigid Gender Roles The dramatic dichotomy in gender imagery in the 1950s makes people laugh 50 years later. In Dick and Jane readers, advertisements, educational films, and television shows, post-war Americans saw feminine, stay-at-home moms cleaning, cooking, and taking care of children while masculine dads left home early and returned late each weekday, tending to their designated roles as lawnmowers and backyard BBQers on the weekend. In More Work for Mother, Ruth Schwartz Cowan wrote that psychiatrists, psychologists, and popular writers of the era critiqued women who wished to pursue a career, and even women who wished to have a job, referring to such “unlovely women” as “lost,” “suffering from penis envy,” “ridden with guilt complexes,” or just plain “man-hating.”
Yet Married Women Worked With the international expansion of the American economy after the war, men’s wages were higher than ever before, making it possible for the first time in U.S. history for a substantial number of middle class families to live comfortably on the income of one breadwinner. Yet the figures reveal that by the early 1960s, more married women were in the labor force than at any previous time in American history.
Domesticity and Money Pressures The reality of many middle- and aspiring middle-class families’ finances didn’t match their dreams. Many families wanted extra income – and required a wife’s earnings — to afford the lifestyle they desired. Yet middle-class women felt the pressure of the culture telling them to stay home.
Why? Because it was what the US thought it needed to do in order to maintain social order and thereby international supremacy. On the housewife was put the burden of proving AMERICA’s wealth, she wasn’t just the family’s status symbol anymore, she was the nation’s. It’s also important not to forget that the end of WW2 marked the emergence of America as one of the two super powers. The US chose gendered division of labor to prove its ideology. While its opposite, the USSR, chose to show its ideological might by having women work the same as men, in an equally mythological fashion. So the two states had to double down, the housewife became part of the symbol of Americanness as opposed to the take of the Red Menace where women should work in the factory.
Remember, this was not literal. These were cultural myths designed to achieve an end. And it did its job well. Enough so that even some eighty years later, families still feel this pressure. And because of the US’s socioeconomic might, this message was exported. Americas largest export from WW2 on has been entertainment. So all the propoganda we put into our entertainment for our own purposes filtered out to the rest of the world.
But I include the Domesticity and Money Pressures bit at the end for a reason. This stuff wasn’t real. And most people couldn’t really do all this.
So we return to the first thing that happened as a result of WW2, having turned themselves in to food making machines for the war effort, the factories and corporations now had a problem. They were made to make food and for the most part that food was now unnecessary. But there’s another market. A larger market. A desperate market. All those “housewives” who can’t really do the housewife thing because it was a myth. But if they BUY help, they can fake it.
And there was faking it. There’s evidence that a lot of housewives lied about making food from scratch while they did not because their husbands were under the impression they SHOULD be able to, from all the propoganda, when they simply COULDN’T because it was propoganda instead of real life.
Vast amounts of psychological work went into getting people to buy this stuff and to carry on the lie. You add milk to Pillsbury cake mixes not because the mix NEEDS to have milk seperate, it’s entirely possible to have dehydrated milk as part of the mix so no one has to add anything. But having the milk added strengthed the myth of the Housewife’s work while giving her some capability to live up to it which wouldn’t exist without it.
This post WW2 miasma of mythology is the modern inheritance: more work than a woman can do, made maybe possible by spending even more money to get hidden help that the non-cooks never see. So the non-cooks assume that these tasks can be done and they tell everyone else, until even the people who know it isn’t possible start to believe it and struggle to make the “home cooked” meal with all those fresh ingredients.
It’s the same reason why there is plastic wrapped show furniture in a house. Because the myth says a woman should be able to keep a house spic and span while doing all the other things she needs to do. When it’s impossible. It can’t be done. Unless you cheat and have plastic wrapped show couches that the regular family can’t use normally just to show off to company. It’s a way to make the lie work instead of acknowledging that it IS a lie that a single woman can take care of herself, her husband, her 2.5 children, her house, all of their food, and bring in a little income on the side because her husband isn’t actually earning enough to make the income necessary to allow all this to happen.
But whenever a struggling woman goes over to someone else’s house what does she see? A home cooked meal. A perfect couch. The other woman perfectly back from the salon to be ready for company. She sees the lie as if it is real and has no choice but to wonder if there’s something wrong with her that she is barely able to do this when everyone else pulls it off.
Same reason discussion of salary is discouraged in the case of “traditionally men’s work,” because everyone seems to be making it work on the same lines so long as no one talks about the details. Talk about what is really happening and the lie falls apart. So it’s important to keep the secret recipe secret so no one sees that it isn’t really working.
A survey once found that the majority of a country’s (sorry, can’t remember which one) secret family recipes, all supposedly handed down along seperate lines, the recipe held close to the chest to preserve it as the family recipe. All actually came off the same Betty Crocker box. The silence was a way to preserve the illusion that the impossible could be done.
We, having grown up with those illusions, have ingrained in us that this should all be possible. So why can’t we? But that opinion was intentionally fostered to get people to behave the way we as a society think is necessary without regard to the history or capabilities of people.
The Housewife is a historical aberation that did not exist for most of history, was forced to live a lie while she did exist, and is already being forced out to die because of our economic policies with only the shame left over to keep people in place.
I also recommend a look at Peg Bracken’s I Hate to Cook Book (1960)
This is one of the most thorough explanations of the ‘housewife’ that I’ve ever seen. I think I need to read this a few more times to really drill it into my brain.
I hate Nintendo Switch Online. I hate the lack of optimization. I hate the expensive subscription service. I hate the lack of games. I hate the limited time releases. I hate that it's never gonna have the level of content that the Wii virtual console had. I hate what capitalism has done to gaming.
This collection includes: All the GBA, GB and GBC games currently available on the Switch!!
+ And a few extra bonus!! Mostly from the same series'seses
They're all ready to be played in HD on PC. Just drag and drop the files on the included program
Target audience right here!! The joy of gaming and sharing it with others is the reason i post and i made this blog. Enjoy the Kirbyses very much, and do remember to support the official release whenever possible
"Ma'am, you're using a company laptop. You're going to have to enter your password when you log in. No, we can't fix that. And even if we could, YOU WORK IN PAYROLL SO NO."
Shoutout warframe for having a random side vendor be canon trans and also have the best lines in the game
ppl will conflate ‘children’s media’ w ‘bad/shallow media’ and then when they come across a bit of children’s media that’s good they’ll be like ‘aha this isn’t actually for kids!! loophole.’
this sentiment always reminds me of my grandfather, who would say that he hated musicals and then my grandmother would be like ‘but you love Gilbert and Sullivan’ and he’d insisted that Gilbert and Sullivan made OPERAS, thank you ):<
anyway. ‘Spirited Away’ is a children’s film. ‘The Little Prince’ is a children’s book. ‘A Wizard of Earthsea’ is regarded as a classic in its genre and a children’s book. its completely fine to continue enjoying children’s fiction as an adult and also, to be blunt, children deserve fiction that is good and has important things to say about the world.
imagine if skyrim was the most popular game of all time by an order of magnitude and people caleld video games ‘skyrims’. and it cost ninety dollars and took up half the average computers hard drive. and then peoel would be on nexus being like ‘hi guys check out my farming sim skyrim mod’ and it just had you kiling draugr but on a farm. and people were like ‘yeah i think that you just cant do farm simulation in video games’ and if anyone brought up stardew valley theyd be like ‘okay well first of all its presumptuous to assume i can afford a second video game or have space for it on my hard drive. and Second of all when i play skyrim i just run back and forth around the towns picking up all the cabbages for seven hours on end so i don’t see why i’d need a whole game programmed to be about farming. i can play skyrim the way i want to. stop gatekeeping gaming.’ anyway thats what its like to like ttrpgs other than dungeons and dragons.
My favorite little subgenre of the occult is "Fake Martial Arts" because what if that was the one type of magic that was literally 100% real. I love the idea that there's some dude in a strip mall dojo named Sensei Todd Wayne who can teach you how to kill birds with ki blasts.
With October just around the corner, NASA has released its latest Galaxy of Horrors posters. Presented in the style of vintage horror movie advertisements. As fun and creative as all three posters are, they're based on real phenomena. 🎃
Can you hear this exoplanet screaming?
As HD 80606 b approaches its star from an extreme, elliptical orbit, it suffers star-grazing torture that causes howling, supersonic winds and shockwave storms across the planet. Its torturous journey boils its atmosphere to a hellish 2,000 degrees Fahrenheit every 111 days, roasting both its light and dark sides. HD 80606b will never escape this scorching nightmare.
This bone-chilling force will leave you shivering alone in terror!
An unseen power is prowling throughout the cosmos, driving the universe to expand at a quickening rate. This relentless pressure, called dark energy, is nothing like dark matter, that mysterious material only revealed by its gravitational pull. Dark energy offers a bigger fright: pushing galaxies farther apart over trillions of years, leaving the universe to an inescapable, freezing death in the pitch black expanse of outer space.
Cygnus X-1 Presents:
It’s Dinner Time and You’re The Meal!
Lurking in our galaxy, approximately 6,000 light-years from Earth, is a monster named CygnusX-1. This black hole, which has about 14.8 times the mass of our Sun, will stretch and squeeze anything it captures in its immense gravity. Cygnus X-1 is waiting, snacking on its neighboring star. Don’t get too close, or you’ll become its next meal!
This chillingly haunted galaxy mysteriously stopped making stars only a few billion years after the Big Bang! It became a cosmic cemetery, illuminated by the red glow of decaying stars. Dare to enter, and you might encounter the frightening corpses of exoplanets or the final death throes of once-mighty stars.
Something strange and mysterious creeps throughout the cosmos. Scientists call it dark matter. It is scattered in an intricate web that forms the skeleton of our universe. Dark matter is invisible, only revealing its presence by pushing and pulling on objects we can see. NASA’s Roman Space Telescope will investigate its secrets. What will be revealed?
In the depths of the universe, the cores of two collapsed stars violently merge to release a burst of the deadliest and most powerful form of light, known as gamma rays. These beams of doom are unleashed upon their unfortunate surroundings, shining a million trillion times brighter than the Sun for up to 30 terrifying seconds. No spaceship will shield you from the blinding destruction of the gamma ray ghouls!
These doomed worlds were among the first and creepiest to be discovered as they orbit an undead star known as a pulsar. Pulsar planets like Poltergeist and its neighboring worlds, Phobetor and Draugr, are consumed with constant radiation from the star’s core. Nothing but the undead can subsist in this most inhospitable corner of the galaxy.
This far-off blue planet may look like a friendly haven – but don’t be deceived! Weather here is deadly. The planet’s cobalt blue color comes from a hazy, blow-torched atmosphere containing clouds laced with glass. Howling winds send the storming glass sideways at 5,400 mph (2km/s), whipping all in a sickening spiral. It’s death by a million cuts on this slasher planet!
Immensely powerful thrift shop find, google drive to follow
watching a movie at home circa like, 2001 was like
- put your TV on channel 2 so the VCR will work
- open up the clamp shell case that held the VHS that has that satisfying crrlikkkkkk
- put in the movie
- gdi it has to be rewound
- press STOP and then rewind because its so much faster that way
- start the movie and it takes a few seconds for the movie to actually start cause you rewound to the VERY beginning
- FBI will get you if you illegally distribute or exhibit this movie
- and then. because you forgot that movies are always so much louder than TV
COMING SOON TO OWN ON VIDEO AND DVD
- QUICK LOWER THE VOLUME LOWER THE VOLUME LOWER THE VOLUME OH FUCK!!!!!!!!!!!!!
- Okay crisis averted.
- although. these ads are kind of quiet. a little hard to hear.....
- better turn up the volume...
THX
Thinking about a duct tape wizard
Skip Google for Research
As Google has worked to overtake the internet, its search algorithm has not just gotten worse. It has been designed to prioritize advertisers and popular pages often times excluding pages and content that better matches your search terms
As a writer in need of information for my stories, I find this unacceptable. As a proponent of availability of information so the populace can actually educate itself, it is unforgivable.
Below is a concise list of useful research sites compiled by Edward Clark over on Facebook. I was familiar with some, but not all of these.
⁂
Google is so powerful that it “hides” other search systems from us. We just don’t know the existence of most of them. Meanwhile, there are still a huge number of excellent searchers in the world who specialize in books, science, other smart information. Keep a list of sites you never heard of.
www.refseek.com - Academic Resource Search. More than a billion sources: encyclopedia, monographies, magazines.
www.worldcat.org - a search for the contents of 20 thousand worldwide libraries. Find out where lies the nearest rare book you need.
https://link.springer.com - access to more than 10 million scientific documents: books, articles, research protocols.
www.bioline.org.br is a library of scientific bioscience journals published in developing countries.
http://repec.org - volunteers from 102 countries have collected almost 4 million publications on economics and related science.
www.science.gov is an American state search engine on 2200+ scientific sites. More than 200 million articles are indexed.
www.pdfdrive.com is the largest website for free download of books in PDF format. Claiming over 225 million names.
www.base-search.net is one of the most powerful researches on academic studies texts. More than 100 million scientific documents, 70% of them are free
bpd-dylan-hall-deactivated20190
I’ve said this before and I’ll say it again but it is absolutely an example of civilizational inadequacy that only deaf people know ASL
“oh we shouldn’t teach children this language, it will only come in handy if they [checks notes] ever have to talk in a situation where it’s noisy or they need to be quiet”
My mom learned it because she figured she’ll go deaf when she gets old
My family went holiday SCUBA diving once, and a couple of Deaf guys were in the group. I was really little and I spent most of the briefing overcome with the realization that while the rest of us were going to have regulators in our mouths and be underwater fairly soon, they were going to be able to do all the same stuff and keep talking.
The only reason some form of sign language is not a standard skill is ableism, as far as I can tell.
emorawrites
For anyone interested in learning, Bill Vicars has full lessons of ASL on youtube that were used in my college level classes.
and here’s the link to the website he puts in his videos:
Update: you guys this is an amazing resource for learning asl. Bill Vicars is an incredible teacher. His videos are of him teaching a student in a classroom, using the learned vocabulary to have conversations.
Not only is the conversation format immersive and helpful for learning the grammar, but the students make common mistakes which he corrects, mistakes I wouldn’t have otherwise know I was making.
He also emphasizes learning ASL in the way it’s actually used by the Deaf community and not the rigid structure that some ASL teachers impose in their classrooms
His lesson plans include learning about the Deaf community, which is an important aspect of learning ASL. Knowing how to communicate in ASL without the knowledge of the culture behind it leaves out a lot of nuances and explanations for the way ASL is.
Lastly, his lessons are just a lot of fun to watch. He is patient, entertaining, and funny. This good natured enthusiasm is contagious and learning feels like a privilege and not a chore
And it’s all FREE. Seriously. If you’ve ever wanted to learn ASL
fyi the point of fucking up your data patterns isnt to avoid suspicion. it’s to make EVERYONE suspicious. same logic as the bloc, pals. protect your comrades, be suspicious. ESPECIALLY if you aren’t doing anything likely to get you arrested.
void-slvt
the state is less omniscient and significantly more incompetent than you’d think. overextend their resources at every possible opportunity. make them cry wolf repeatedly. run their data analysis agents fucking ragged. and strike. attack.
YES i’m a postgrad statistics researcher and i can tell you that the state honestly has NO IDEA what to do with the data it collects, it has an obsession with big data but it’s almost impossible to work with in practice. the traditional statistical approaches that are used can’t be scaled up, the adapted approaches are substantially weakened, and the machine learning approaches have the same problems and often tell them nothing. data scientists are only just coming around to these issues too, most still just push on with it anyway - incompetence is the word. above all this though, like you say, the biggest issue for the state is at the point of data collection. they will NEVER get anything useful if they’re collecting shitty messy data. they will eventually figure out that the real solution is working how to collect accurate and meaningful data, we should make it as difficult as possible for them to do that
This makes me think that we need WAAAY more apps that generate junk data
Apps that generate junk data? tell me moooore.
Ooh I know this one!
Ad Nauseum is an adblocker that stores the ads it blocks and continuously generates fake clicks, fucking with analytics and costing the ad companies money
TrackMeNot automatically does randomly generated searches on a variety of search engines to obscure your real searches and fuck with analytics, and you can set it up to work with anything that has a search bar (including facebook, twitter, amazon, youtube, etc)
WhatCampaign replaces analytics parameters in links with the string “FuckOff”. I thought there was a similar extension that used random strings, but I can’t seem to find it
Privacy Possum is a fork of Privacy Badger with a focus on costing tracking companies as much money as possible, and idk if my limited tech knowledge is enough to understand what it does but the description does say it falsifies some data so that’s good enough for me
Boy it SURE would be a SHAME if this were SPREAD AROUND for everyone TO SEE
Sometimes I’m looking for something online - often “how to” articles - and I want to filter for - like - a website that was clearly built in 2010 at the latest, which may or may not have been updated since then, but contains a vast wealth of information on one topic, painstakingly organized by an unknown legend in the field with decades’ worth of experience. I don’t want a listicle with a nice stolen picture in a slideshow format written by a content aggregator that God forgot. I want hand-drawn diagrams by some genius professor who doesn’t understand SEO at all, but understands making stir-fries or raising stick insects better than anyone else on this earth. I don’t know what search settings to put into Google to get this.
thank you for articulating this cri de coeur for me
ngl these days i’m just happy when it’s not a video
The search engine calculates a score that aggressively favors text-heavy websites, and punishes those that have too many modern web design features.
This is in a sense the opposite of what most major search engines do, they favor modern websites over old-looking ones. Most links you find here will be nearly impossible to find on a regular search engine, as they aren’t sufficiently search engine optimized.
“It is a search engine, designed to help you find what you didn’t even know you were looking for. If you search for “Plato”, you might for example end up at the Canterbury Tales. Go looking for the Canterbury Tales, and you may stumble upon Neil Gaiman’s blog.
If you are looking for fact, this is almost certainly the wrong tool. If you are looking for serendipity, you’re on the right track. When was the last time you just stumbled onto something interesting, by the way?
I don’t expect this will be the next “big” search engine. This is and will remain a niche tool for a niche audience.“
Oh my god. On their About page, they explain a movement called the Small Web – basically a return to the weird indie stuff of the late 90s and early 2000s. The thing I’ve been LOOKING for. Right down to a Geocities like website.
I love this.
This is about Sci-Hub. yeah we get it.. gatekeep knowledge and protect the interests of capital…
Listen, this is serious.
Do not use the website called Sci-Hub!
It lets people access scientific articles for free. This is dangerous. It helps the free flow of knowledge and reduces the competitive edge of all the people who worked really hard to have been born into a wealth.
Like, it’s literally a website where you can type in the DOI of an article and read it, without ever having to pay the publisher who exploited the author.
So, again, do not, under any circumstance, use Sci-Hub. I mean, can you imagine a world where knowledge is free and easily accessible to everyone? Even, y'know, poor people?
Libgen also has many books online, including textbooks, searchable by name, author, and ISBN. Can you imagine textbook companies not getting their hard-earned income from poor college students? Here is the link just so you make sure that you never accidentally stumble across this horrible, unethical website.
Oh, and while we’re talking about books, if you’ve managed to stay clear from Libgen, definitely don’t go to zlibrary, where you can also find a lot of textbooks, but unfortunately they’re completely free.
Reblogging so you know which sites to totally avoid
The BBC is releasing over 16,000 sound effects for free download
THIS will be sooo good for my soundboard. Those online sessions are about to become even better :D
First music, then voice modifiers... Now this. Perfect.
Also, I’m pretty sure it can be used for a lot of other activities.
Yay, no more Soundbible!
The direct link: https://www.nps.gov/yell/learn/photosmultimedia/soundlibrary.htm