ain't that just like me

@just-like-that-bluebird

Abbey, 25, he/him

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.

Community Label: Mature

not going to lie the mature post filter on text posts on my phone is about as useful as a censor bleep in a song where the starting and ending sounds of the word are still clearly audible

man im so glad they put this community label here so i can’t read what it says unless i hit that button. so glad i can’t see any part of the post right now

Community Label: Mature

Sexual themes

sometimes when I'm bored, I go through the list of recent bad faith Wikipedia edits that have since been reverted. a lot of them are politically contentious/offensive topics that attract crazies and trolls in general, but sometimes there are completely innocent inoffensive articles that people attack for no reason. some guy yesterday vandalized the article on the chemical element francium

If you are taking the car to Chicago, can you even call yourself a feminist. There are Women on that train who want to have gay sex with you but can't because you are taking a fucking car to Chicago

Right now there is a very buff Butch woman all alone in the Cafe car and she could be having steamy gay sex with you and be moving into your apartment if you were just willing to take the train to Chicago

I'm busy trying to get more lesbians to ride the train instead of taking their Subarus to Chicago

It’s good to encourage people sometimes if they want encouragement. But sometimes, if someone says they can’t do something, it’s better to say “that’s okay” and take them at their word. Sometimes we really can’t do something. Sometimes our disability stops us. The narrative that “you can do anything you can put your mind to” can cause harm in some cases. The truth is, some of us just can’t do certain things. Sometimes we can’t do them some of the time. And sometimes they are things we can never do. And that’s okay. We need to learn that sometimes what people need is acceptance and a reminder that they’re worthy, regardless of whatever they can and can’t do.

my brother had a brilliant idea that i wanted to share with other people who have four-legged family members: he trained our two cats to go directly to the door when they hear the fire alarm.

obviously at first the fire alarm sent them scrambling for cover, but he started slowly by giving them treats whenever it went off, when someone burned food or forgot to open the fireplace flu. he then progressed to calling them to the door to offer treats immediately after the alarm went off. and it actually wasn't too long before the cats voluntarily started going to the door upon hearing the alarm.

i think this was genius because in the event of a real emergency we know exactly where the cats will be and we will not have to waste precious time trying to find them to rescue them. i think this method would work equally well with dogs and probably other free-roaming pets such as rabbits, ferrets, etc. and i certainly encourage others to give it a shot!

I trained Neelix to alert me to Sounds. So in the even of A Sound he'd find me to let me know about it. Oven timers, knocking at the door, weird creature stuck in the yard, etc. This has the added effect of being able to scoop him up and bring him to safety in the event said sound is a fire alarm or a tornado siren.

The downside is, when I had a baby, every time it cried he'd barrel into the room to let me know. Even if I was already in the room. And if I couldn't make The Sound stop (because an infant works differently than an oven timer), he'd start biting me urgently. 😅

Confused, but doing his best:

Oh, context is that I'm deaf not that I wanted to create a beast that'd harass me over sounds.

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i am not calling twitter fucking x

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im deadnaming that shit

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Twitter is removing the bird logo and rebranding as X. Just an X. To quote the bullshit, "The platform now aims to transcend beyond a traditional social media hub, integrating cutting-edge technologies such as AI to facilitate seamless audio, video, messaging, and mobile payments. "

I assume no one noticed yesterday because it was announced via tweet and Twitter made it so no one can fucking see tweets due to rate limiting.

not me realizing that with tumblr moving the icons to the side, it eliminates xkit, which was situated at the top. what a scumbag move

xkit rewritten, which should be used instead of the shambling corpse of old xkit, lives in the addon bar of your browser! And it handled the new layout like a champ, removing all of the garbage (if configured to do so). https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/xkit-rewritten/ https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/xkit-rewritten/ehgbadgnkmeeldglkmnplolneidgpbcm

I know people on tumblr looove stories of underwater cave diving, but I haven't seen anyone talk about nitrogen narcosis aka "raptures of the deep"

basically when you want to get your advanced scuba certification (allowing you to go more than 60 feet deep) you have to undergo a very specific test: your instructor takes you down past the 60+ foot threshold, and she brings a little underwater white board with her.

she writes a very basic math problem on that board. 6 + 15. she shows it to you, and you have to solve it.

if you can solve it, you're good. that is the hardest part of the test.

because here's what happens: there is a subset of people, and we have no real idea why this happens only to them, who lose their minds at depth. they're not dying, they're not running out of oxygen, they just completely lose their sense of identity when deep in the sea.

a woman on a dive my instructor led once vanished during the course of the excursion. they were diving near this dropoff point, beyond which the depth exceeded 60 feet and he'd told them not to go down that way. the instructor made his way over to look for her and found a guy sitting at the edge of the dropoff (an underwater cliff situation) just staring down into the dark. the guy is okay, but he's at the threshold, spacing out, and mentally difficult to reach. they try to communicate, and finally the guy just points down into the dark, knowing he can't go down there, but he saw the woman go.

instructor is deep water certified and he goes down. he shines his light into the dark, down onto the seafloor which is at 90 feet below the surface. he sees the woman, her arms locked to her sides, moving like a fish, swimming furiously in circles in the pitch black.

she is hard to catch but he stops her and checks her remaining oxygen: she is almost out, on account of swimming a marathon for absolutely no reason. he is able to drag her back up, get her to a stable depth to decompress, and bring her to the surface safely.

when their masks are off and he finally asks her what happened, and why was she swimming like that, she says she fully, 100% believed she was a mermaid, had always been a mermaid, and something was hunting her in the dark 👍