Definitely
okay. I am wheezing with laughter. beloved followers. let's play a game. take a look at this map.
what do you think this is a map of. just any guesses, just drop 'em in my replies, c'mon.
(if you've seen the video I took this from don't spoil it please)
All very good answers! The closest one was:
Because this is a map for Minecraft Steve's legality in Smash tournaments
oh btw just in case nobody ever told you. just because your life looks different than you thought it would doesn't mean that your life is bad or wrong or disappointing or less than. sometimes things aren't good or bad. sometimes they're just different
idk when we decided that explaining yourself shouldn't be part of an apology but like. if someone was a dick to me and apologizes but I still don't understand why they did it I'm not gonna feel any better
"Sorry for hurting your feelings earlier. I was trying to say x, but I guess it came across wrong. I don't think you're stupid."
or
"Sorry I snapped at you. I didn't get enough sleep last night so my patience is a little low today."
is a better apology than
"I want you to know that I am sorry that my actions offended you. I take full accountability for my actions and I am listening and learning. I hear you."
Girls will say "I just need to lie down for a little while" and then sink into a muddy river and get all their hard.tissues replaced with mineral deposits
when youre a kid learning the word "penultimate" is like a drug
So the other day I said a thing about how I felt like a line could be drawn between antis, and the rise of 24-hour news networks. I’ve given that thought some time to bubble to see what, exactly, my brain meant by that statement, and here’s what I’ve got:
When I was a kid (back in Ye Olde 1990s), we had three major news stations in my town: Channel 12, Channel 24, and Channel 35. These corresponded to NBC, ABC, and CBS, but I don’t remember which one was which so don’t ask me. Anyway–you had a half hour of news at 8 or 9 am (depending on which station you watched), an hourlong program at noon in which half the program was stuff like “here are today’s beach closures and some recipes and also if you’re looking for stuff to do with the kids this weekend here are local promotions,” and half an hour at either 5, 5:30, or 6 (again, depending on which channel you watched). One of the three stations also did a half-hour capper at 10pm. So unless you were watching all three stations, and picking the news every single time, the max amount of news you were going to get was like an hour and a half. If you wanted more news than that, you read the newspaper. When my mom was a kid (back in Ye Olde 1960s), this would have seemed like an inordinate amount of news–for her, it was half an hour at 6pm and ten minutes at 10pm and then the station (there was only one station that did the news) played the National Anthem and went off the air until 6am, at which time you might get like … the weather and a traffic report.
For anything else, you read the newspaper.
Now with only half an hour to present a whole lot of news, what are you going to do? You are going to stick to the facts. You don’t have a choice. You have a very short time to fit a whole lot of information. “Notre Dame cathedral caught on fire today. French firefighters are working to get the flames under control, and authorities in charge of the cathedral are doing their best to remove relics, paintings, and other holy objects while it’s still possible. French President Mr. Somebody addressed the nation and stated every attempt to save the building, and to rebuild the damage, will be made. In local news … “ And that’s it! If you want more information, you’ve got to wait for the newspaper in the morning, and you’re going to have to get a copy of the New York Times or USA Today, because the local paper will only have a blurb, and that blurb will mostly cover what you just heard!
But then the news changed.
By the time I was a teenager, the non-cable news looked like this: All three channels had a morning show that started at 5 or 6 am (depending on your station) and ran until 8 or 9 (depending on your station). The station that ended at 8am then had a half-hour morning news show. The mid-day news at 11 or 12 was still an hour. Channel 35 did a half-hour news segment at 5 and another at 5:30, back to back. The other two stations simply did an hourlong segment. And then one station did half an hour at 10:30, and the other two did hourlong segments at 10pm.
What do you do with that much time? Well, you expand. Yes, you can fit more news, but you can also fit more about the news. “Notre Dame cathedral in Paris went up in flames today. The fire began in the famous historic bell tower, and spread to the roof. At this time, portions of the roof appear to have caved in, and there are concerns about the integrity of the medieval stonework in the cathedral walls. French firefighters have been working since 8am Paris time to get the flames under control, and authorities in charge of the cathedral are doing their best to remove relics, paintings, and other holy objects while it’s still possible. Some firefighters are also helping with this project, as portions of the building have become too unsafe to enter. French President Mr. Somebody addressed the nation late this evening and stated every attempt to save the building, and to rebuild the damage, will be made. Of the cathedral itself, Somebody said, ‘Our Lady has weathered worse troubles than this. Paris as a city, and France as a nation, will overcome.’ In local news … ”
Still facts, but a few more facts. At this point the internet as a public thing is just past its infancy, and in theory you could go look up some stuff on, like, AOL, maybe, about what was happening.
(Nina, you were talking about antis … ?)
(Yes, I was. Bear with me.)
But at this point you also saw the rise of Fox News and CNN.
Now up to this point, I could trust the news. That is important to know. “Nina, American news is full of propaganda–” Listen, you’re not wrong, but the point is, if Scott Brennan told me Notre Dame cathedral was on fire and priests were trying to remove the holy relics, I could safely assume Notre Dame cathedral was on fire and priests were trying to remove the holy relics. If Channel 24 told me “the blizzard of the century” had occurred the night before, I could look out the window of my snowed-in house and go “yeah, that seems legit.”
I grew up, in other words, in a world in which facts were facts. We didn’t waffle or wring our hands over whether or not Notre Dame was on fire. And this allowed me to take a similar approach to fiction: it is a fact that murder is wrong, and knowing this, I can read a book in which someone commits murder for very good reasons, but still know they did something wrong.
But now you have 24 hours of news to fill.
No matter how you pad it, no matter how many voice clips you play or retrospectives you do, you cannot find enough news in the world to fill 24 hours, seven days a week, 365 days a year. You just can’t.
So they started adding “opinion pieces.”
Notre Dame is on fire–is it worth saving? Notre Dame is on fire–but is it as big a catastrophe as it’s made out to be? Notre Dame is on fire–but France has been steadily calling themselves a secular nation, so is this the punishment of G-d? Notre Dame is on fire–
–wait, what was that?
Yep. You saw it, I saw it, we all saw it. But as the “opinion pieces” slowly took over the regular news and stopped being called “opinion pieces” and started being called “programs,” it became less and less clear what was and wasn’t fact.
Now obviously Notre Dame is on fire. But now we have to ask ourselves: is it worth it to save it or not? Is the financial cost outweighed by the history? Will those answers change depending on how bad the damage becomes? And you, lonely elderly person in your chair whose predominant socialization these days is at church, how does this make you feel about French people? These are questions that once would have been asked of the church caretakers and the French government. Now every single person is being asked to think about them, without being provided all of the context that is available to the church caretakers and the French government. And along the way, you get these nice, nasty little bits of prejudice and slanted thinking and bias sneaked in.
I told you I’d come back to antis. And here we are.
The vast majority of antis are very young. They grew up in a world where those “programs” were the norm. They were not provided with a cultural basis of “these are the facts.” They were provided a basis of “here is what I think about the facts.” They were provided a basis of, as Mr. Banks said in Mary Poppins, “kindly do not cloud the matter with facts.”
There are no facts! Who fucking cares! An anti who’s 15 years old today was eleven years old when we were introduced to “alternative facts”! Is it wrong for a 27-year-old man to pursue a relationship with a 13-year-old girl? Depends on which news channel, and which presenter, you ask!
They literally grew up in a world in which critical thinking was discouraged. Once upon a time, you would have seen on TV that Notre Dame was on fire, and at dinner–or whatever your family did for together time–you might say things like “going to be expensive to fix that, I wonder what they’ll do,” but you wouldn’t have been hit with six presenters telling you exactly why Notre Dame should/shouldn’t be rebuilt. And don’t forget–even if you, personally, do not watch the news (or read it on the internet, which is just as bad, because everybody’s after those elusive advertising clicks, everybody needs the “scoop” two seconds before it happens), you know people who do. You hear their opinions and their hot takes and their retellings all around you. And those opinions and hot takes and retellings will be colored by which “program” that person saw first.
Watch the first thirty seconds of this:
Walter Cronkite, a legendary news anchor, giving his opinion on Vietnam. You will notice that he states, very clearly: “it seems very clear to this reporter.” This is Cronkite’s opinion, nothing more, and he makes it clear that he is speaking only for himself.
Now skip to approximately 1:05, and watch him report the Kennedy assassination. You can see he’s emotional, but also keeping it under wraps as best he can because he has An Important Job To Do, and that job is twofold: to deliver the news accurately and concisely, and to keep the American public calm (you can see this when he hurriedly says Johnson is probably taking the oath to become President; a missing VP would be a crisis at this moment). This is a man who’s just found out the most beloved president in modern times is dead. And not just dead–murdered. It’s not like Kennedy had a heart attack, his damn head was blown off. This news is still coming in so quickly that you can see him glancing off the screen to get fresh reports. He’s one of the first to receive this absolute blow–and he’s still holding it together, barely wavering. (When I was a kid, this role would go to Dan Rather. He was no Cronkite, but he tried.)
Where is that kind of rock for today’s teens? Imagine–heaven forbid, in the state our country’s in right now–that tomorrow we get the news Biden was shot.
How would we get that message?
Would it be delivered by an even-keeled, just-the-facts reporter like Cronkite? Or would we get it from a bunch of half-hysterical articles and crisismongering “programs”? And would it be delivered to us straight, like Cronkite did, or would it be buried in three days’ worth of opinions on his “legacy” and policies and What This Means For America?
Now: how are you supposed to build any kind of strong convictions and moral compass on a world like that? Where anything can be true if enough people have an “opinion” on it? Where the facts get immediately buried in a wave of bullshit?
Antis are reacting to a world of “opinions” and “programs” being thrown at them 24/7 by trying to create a world they can control, where there are in fact things that are true, in a world that has actively refused them the opportunity to learn how to parse and process facts. And so what they’ve come up with is this grossly distorted version of facts, because gross distortions of facts are all they know. It’s all they’ve ever seen. They’re perpetuating a system they don’t even realize they’re part of, because they never experienced life before it existed.
They’re not lying when they say they were heavily influenced by fiction because the bounds between fact and fiction have been actively erased. On purpose. And it’s difficult to grok that, if you grew up in a world where you didn’t have to go seek out photographic evidence to be absolutely certain that Notre Dame was, indeed, on fire.
So what we need to be doing, first and foremost, is rebuilding that wall of facts, that line of truth. Otherwise, what we’re going to see is more of this, but getting worse daily.
We set them up for this, and now we’re paying the price for it.
Hey, I know I don’t say this often but if you scrolled past this post because it was a long wall of text, I really do recommend reading all the way through. OP explained this fantastically.
i’d like to add that the last twenty years of capitalist advertising trying to co-opt environmental activism by telling us to vote with our wallet has also seriously fucked everyone over too. we have come to accept that the products we use, the stuff we consume, says something about who we are as people and what we stand for and the kind of world we want to live in. our cars, our clothes, our soap, our candy.
don’t like slavery? be picky about your chocolate. don’t like queers? buy a bigger truck. don’t like sexism? this leg-hair razor is so empowering. like sexism a lot? buy this extremely manly yogurt.
of course kids think that the cartoons they watch and the books they read and the pictures they look at and the very *things they think about* are all meant to be an ongoing demonstration of their own morality. that’s what they’ve been told they are. you are what you eat. you become what you consume. you align yourself with a tribe.
except, you know, corporate monopolies have fucked us over and all that is left is this illusion of choice, this forced complicity in unjust systems. and kids often know this too. but they can’t escape it either.
so they scream at people online for having problematic favs, because it’s something they might actually be able to change.
jokes that will literally never not be funny to me:
- saying “speedrun strats” every time you fuck up
- saying “first try” when you’ve tried the thing like 15 times, minimum
I actually really like the thing when you're starting to get the hang of a new language, enough to understand and say simple sentences but you gotta get creative to get more complex thoughts across, like a puzzle. I remember a time in the restortation school when a classmate who wasn't natively finnish and did her best anyway dropped something and sighed, telling me "every day is monday this week. I have had four mondays this week." And I understood.
I don't think I speak much of spanish anymore, but in the nursing school training period I did there, I did manage to get by with making weird Tarzan sentences. I got a nosebleed at some point and startled another nurse. Not knowing the words "humidity" or "stress", I managed to string together: "This is ok. It is hot, it is cold, I have a bad day, I am sad, I have blood. This is normal for me." And she understood.
And sometimes you just say things weird, but it's better than not saying it. One time, I was stuck in a narrow hallway behind someone walking really slowly with a walker, and he apologised for being in the way. I was not in any hurry, but didn't know the spanish word for "hurry", but I did know enough words to try to circumvent it by borrowing the english "I have all the time in the world."
The man burst into one of those cackling old man laughters that they do when something in this world still manages to surprise them. He had to be somewhere between 70 and a 100 years old, and I guess if there was one thing he wasn't expecting to hear today, it would be a random blond vaguely baltic-looking fuck casually announce that he is the sole owner and keeper of the very concept of time.
theglowpt2-deactivated20200101
every word out of guillermo del toro’s mouth is the most hardcore thing i’ve ever heard and he says it all so casually like he doesn’t even realize how much of a gothic visionary he is
tonyahardingapologist
“Since childhood, I’ve been faithful to monsters. I have been saved and absolved by them, because monsters, I believe, are patron saints of our blissful imperfection, and they allow and embody the possibility of failing”
I STILL THINK ABOUT THIS EVERY DAY OF MY LIFE
Yo okie Guillermo has some of the best quotes and lines I’ve ever heard, here are just a few of his quotes that have me questioning life:
“What is a ghost? A tragedy condemned to repeat itself time and again? A moment of pain, perhaps. Something dead which still seems to be alive. An emotion suspended in time. Like a blurred photograph. Like an insect trapped in amber.”
“I knew that monsters were far more gentle and more desirable than the monsters living inside ‘nice people.’ Accepting that you are a monster gives you the leeway to not behave like one. When you deny being a monster, you behave like one.”
“When you see something or experience something extraordinary, you can’t go back to normal… I think that that’s the way I see the supernatural-as happening in mundane circumstances or to people who are unprepared”
“To learn what we fear is to learn who we are. Horror defines our boundaries and illuminates our souls”
“Any legend, any creature, any symbol we ever stumble on, already exists in a vast cosmic reservoir where archetypes wait. Shapes looming outside our Platonic cave. We naturally believe ourselves clever and wise, so advanced, and those who came before us so naïve and simple…when all we truly do is echo the order of the universe, as it guides us…”
And the last but certainly not the least:
“In fairy tales, monsters exist to be a manifestation of something that we need to understand, not only a problem we need to overcome, but also they need to represent, much like angels represent the beautiful, pure, eternal side of the human spirit, monsters need to represent a more tangible, more mortal side of being human: aging, decay, darkness and so forth. And I believe that monsters originally, when we were cavemen and you know, sitting around a fire, we needed to explain the birth of the sun and the death of the moon and the phases of the moon and rain and thunder. And we invented creatures that made sense of the world: a serpent that ate the sun, a creature that ate the moon, a man in the moon living there, things like that. And as we became more and more sophisticated and created sort of a social structure, the real enigmas started not to be outside. The rain and the thunder were logical now. But the real enigmas became social. All those impulses that we were repressing: cannibalism, murder, these things needed an explanation. The sex drive, the need to hunt, the need to kill, these things then became personified in monsters. Werewolves, vampires, ogres, this and that. I feel that monsters are here in our world to help us understand it. They are an essential part of a fable.”
Fantasy Is A Metaphor For The Human Condition, a comic about magic, and art, and speculative fiction, and being sick, and how they all intersect. Originally laid out/pencilled November-December 2017, when I was in a very difficult place emotionally as I was relearning how to draw post-brain injury.
See more of my Brain Injury Comix at this link & in Dirty Diamonds #9: Being
The pastoralist fantasy of "modern life is too stressful so I should move to a remote area and do hard labor" is so funny
I have a theory about that.
I think that what people want, when they talk about a pastoralist fantasy is actually an anti-capitalistic fantasy: i noticed, even from my experience, that most people don't mind phisical labour if it gives them results: actual, tangible, results.
Once my boss asked me to copy every article from a website and paste them in the new one. It took me roughly four hours for three days to do and my soul was slowly leaving my body. It was easy work, i mean who wouldnt want to earn money to just click here and click there, rinse and repeat? But it was boring, ripetitive and basically useless.
But when I take some time and clean my house, i sweat, i am tired but... satisfied. I see in front of me the result of my hard labour and I am happy, or at least i don't think i wasted my time.
So the fantasy of working hard but at least getting something out of it is appealing: why do people work in kitchens? Or bakeries and wake up at dawn to make bread? Or any hard job like that? I knew a guy that had the possibility of having every job he wanted, but he opened a bar and couldnt be happier.
This is my idea, i'm not a student in sociology or anything but I hope i made a point.
I mean I Don't Want To Move To The Country, I have done living in the country and it sucks and I like to be in the city where I can do stuff and see people. and I have enough experience of the level of daily physical work involved in farming or subsistence gardening to know I don't want some. and I agree with OP that people have some very off ideas about the stress and work of running a farm or kitchen garden
but aside from the alienation of labour thing there's also a pretty huge difference between the type of tired most people get from like. spending 8 hours a day doing lots of separated microtasks and social performance and stuff where most of the work is mental and not physical, versus the type of relationship to physical labor most people who don't already do it as a job have, where it's a lot of work that's mostly in the body.
like I work an office job of the kind that you're also turning over in your head and holding threads about all through your free time. for me, some of the most relaxing stuff I can do is heavy labour; laying rocks or building stuff or woodwork or moving furniture or digging beds and cutting down trees for hours. it produces the same relationship as swimming or weightlifting or hill walking do for me - it's so physically engaged that you don't have the spare focus to be tying yourself in knots about whatever you're picking at. plus you get a big endorphin rush and, yeah, that sense of a job well done at the end.
the problem isn't that it's stupid to think that physical labour will be less stressful than mental labour (it might be a lot more tiring but people aren't wrong about it having stress-relieving properties). the problem is that farming and gardening aren't a series of simple physical tasks. I think that a lot of people overlook how much physical work goes into farming or gardening or DIY homebuilding but I also think even the people who don't have a tendency to think in physical-tasks terms. running a subsistence farm off-grid will be differently stressful to working a 9-5 office job or 12 hour cafe shifts, but it will definitely be stressful. the job is like 10% physical work and like 90% logistics, planning, problem-solving, maths, research and balancing books (literal or metaphorical). that's why a lot of farmers hire on labourers for even small farms, bc there's a whole lot of labour involved that isn't heavy lifting.
there's a big difference between helping on a farm for 2 months and owning and running a farm for your whole life, and one of them is genuinely a really good destresser for a lot of people. the other one can be good but it's not low stress. but a lot of it I think is just about getting out of your rut. I think people fantasise about physical farming or building work because it's the thing they're missing in their current life, even though after a few months of that being their whole life they'd be utterly miserable. but they're not wrong about it being a need. sometimes you need to dig some holes for your mental health 🤷♀️
to anyone who needs to hear this,