@ladymothwing / ladymothwing.tumblr.com
"autism is a new phenomenon that's on the rise" do you really think the Gregorian monks who spent months writing a single letter H and drawing little pictures of snails on it in illuminated manuscripts were neurotypicals? is that really something a neurotypical would do
Special interest: THE LORD
Gen Z is awesome and generational fighting is bad, but I do sometimes talk to Gen Z folks and I’m like… oh… you cannot comprehend before the internet.
Like activists have been screaming variations on “educate yourself!” for as long as I’ve been alive and probably longer, but like… actually doing so? Used to be harder?
And anger at previous generations for not being good enough is nothing new. I remember being a kid and being horrified to learn how recent desegregation had been and that my parents and grandparents had been alive for it. Asking if they protested or anything and my mom being like “I was a child” and my grandma being like “well, no, I wasn’t into politics” but I was a child when I asked so that didn’t feel like much of an excuse from my mother at the time and my grandmother’s excuse certainly didn’t hold water and I remember vowing not to be like that.
So kids today looking at adults and our constant past failures and being like “How could you not have known better? Why didn’t you DO better?” are part of a long tradition of kids being horrified by their history, nothing new, and also completely justified and correct. That moral outrage is good.
But I was talking to a kid recently about the military and he was talking about how he’d never be so stupid to join that imperialist oppressive terrorist organization and I was like, “Wait, do you think everyone who has ever joined the military was stupid or evil?” and he was like, well maybe not in World War 2, but otherwise? Yeah.
And I was like, what about a lack of education? A lack of money? The exploitation of the lower classes? And he was like, well, yeah, but that’s not an excuse, because you can always educate yourself before making those choices.
And I was like, how? Are you supposed to educate yourself?
And he was like, well, duh, research? Look it up!
And I was like, and how do you do that?
And he was like, start with google! It’s not that hard!
And I was like, my friend. My kid. Google wasn’t around when my father joined the military.
Then go to the library! The library in the small rural military town my father grew up in? Yeah, uh, it wasn’t exactly going to be overflowing with anti-military resources.
Well then he should have searched harder!
How? How was he supposed to know to do that? Even if he, entirely independently figured out he should do that, how was he supposed to find that information?
He was a kid. He was poor. He was the first person in his family to aspire to college. And then by the time he knew what he signed up for it was literally a criminal offense for him to try to leave. Because that’s the contract you sign.
(Now, listen, my father is also not my favorite person and we agree on very little, so this example may be a bit tarnished by those facts, but the material reality of the exploitative nature of military recruitment remains the same.)
And this is one of a few examples I’ve come across recently of members of Gen Z just not understanding how hard it was to learn new ideas before the internet. I’m not blaming anyone or even claiming it’s disproportionate or bad. But the same kids that ten years ago I was marveling at on vacation because they didn’t understand the TV in the hotel room couldn’t just play more Mickey Mouse Clubhouse on demand - because they’d never encountered linear prescheduled TV, are growing into kids who cannot comprehend the difficulty of forming a new worldview or making life choices when you cannot google it. When you have maybe one secondhand source or you have to guess based on lived experience and what you’ve heard. Information, media, they have always been instant.
Society should’ve been better, people should’ve known better, it shouldn’t have taken so long, and we should be better now. That’s all true.
But controlling information is vital to controlling people, and information used to be a lot more controlled. By physical law and necessity! No conspiracy required! There’s limited space on a newspaper page! There’s limited room in a library! If you tried to print Wikipedia it would take 2920 bound volumes. That’s just Wikipedia. You could not keep the internet’s equivalent of resources in any small town in any physical form. It wasn’t there. We did not have it. When we had a question? We could not just look it up.
Kids today are fortunate to have dozens of firsthand accounts of virtually everything important happening at all times. In their pockets.
(They are also cursed by this, as we all are, because it’s overwhelming and can be incredibly bleak.)
If anything, today the opposite problem occurs - too much information and not enough time or context to organize it in a way that makes sense. Learning to filter out the garbage without filtering so much you insulate yourself from diverse ideas, figuring out who’s reliable, that’s where the real problem is now.
But I do think it has created, through no fault of anyone, this incapacity among the young to truly understand a life when you cannot access the relevant information. At all. Where you just have to guess and hope and do your best. Where educating yourself was not an option.
Where the first time you heard the word lesbian, it was from another third grader, and she learned it from a church pastor, and it wasn’t in the school library’s dictionary so you just had to trust her on what it meant.
I am not joking, I did not know the actual definition of the word “fuck” until I was in high school. Not for lack of trying! I was a word nerd, and I loved research! It literally was not in our dictionaries, and I knew I’d get in trouble if I asked. All I knew was it was a “bad word”, but what it meant or why it was bad? No clue.
If history felt incomprehensibly cruel and stupid while I was a kid who knew full well the feeling of not being able to get the whole story, I cannot imagine how cartoonishly evil it must look from the perspective of someone who’s always been able to get a solid answer to any question in seconds for as long as they’ve been alive. To Gen Z, we must all look like monsters.
I’m glad they know the things we did not. I hope one day they are able to realize how it was possible for us not to know. How it would not have been possible for them to know either, if they had lived in those times. I do not need their forgiveness. But I hope they at least understand. Information is so powerful. Understanding that is so important to building the future. Underestimating that is dangerous.
We were peasants in a world before the printing press. We didn’t know. I’m so sorry. For so many of us we couldn’t have known. I cannot offer any other solace other than this - my sixty year old mother is reading books on anti-racism and posting about them to Facebook, where she’s sharing what’s she’s learning with her friends. Ignorance doesn’t have to last forever.
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
This just applies to so many things in life. If you don’t know that you don’t know something, how can you ASK about it?
Also research is a skill, not an innate ability in all humans. Research is actually a variety of skills and they’re not always exactly the same when you’re talking about when and where you’re researching.
Knowing the best way to google something isn’t the same as knowing how to find something in a reference book isn’t the same as knowing how a card catalog works and how to navigate research when you have limited access to physical materials.
Sometimes even when people want to educate themselves, they’re lost and confused.
And then when they ask… They get beaten down for daring to ask instead of “educating themselves” because people forget that asking questions from sources you trust is part of trying to educate yourself.
Ten years ago I tried “educating myself” about trans issues and guess what, pretty much everything was by terves. If I hadn’t already met a very kind trans woman in real life, I could have educated myself into a galloping bigot.
Yes, it sucks when people ask the same basic questions over and over, but do you really want them getting answers from today’s non-tumblr internet?
I teach Intro to Psychology - I get a few nontraditional students (though most of those are still Gen Z), but most of my students are 16-20.
In the chapter on learning, I talk about Vygotsky’s Zone of Proximal Development and the fact that since he was doing research in Russia in the 20s-30s and died at the age of 37, his research didn’t get translated and make it to Western scientists until the 60s.
Last year I had one student ask me why. Why did it take so long for Western scientists to read his work? Were they just not paying attention? And I was floored for a moment because to me it’s obvious - then I realized that this student has never lived in a world without easy access to information.
Now, it happens that Vygotsky’s work was actually banned by Stalin even in Russia, but I didn’t go into that. I was like, how would they have found it? Remember, no internet. If you want to find a book, you have to rely on paper records or phone calls to people with paper records. How would these people who don’t speak or read Russian have even known his work existed if it was only published in Russia?
And it was clear that this was a little mindblowing for the students - they’d never stopped to think about how hard it was to access information. When I started my master’s program (less than 20 years ago), card catalogs had been online for years but many scientific journals were still paper-only. I had to go to the actual library and photocopy the articles I wanted - and if my library didn’t have that journal, I had to put in an interlibrary loan request and hope the librarians could find someone who had it. For most of these kids that was within their lifetime, but not within the time they can remember or have been looking for information. It’s changed so fast it can give you whiplash.
Finding out the fae are parasitic fungi, huh.
Wander into a fairy circle, just a circle of mushrooms, come back different from that. Wonder what happened there? Got mushrooms in the brain didn't they?
Wander into the woods, eat strange food drink strange water, see a strange world, keep going back to the woods for more and why has this happened, what enslaved them? Brain fungus isn't it?
They don't live in this world do they, they speak to each other in strange tongues, flit across the world invisibly, appear in many illusionary forms.
We built our world over top of theirs.
i’ve been hunting for one in specific, and during my quest, i have seen that very many beautiful poems about this creature have been written. I wanted to compile them.
you are welcome to add more poems to this post if you have any in mind to recommend.
There is no shame in loving without abandon. ✌️❤️
And the real trick to it is falling madly in love with literally everything. Gomez Addams isn't just madly in love with Morticia, he's madly in love with his house, with his train set, with his kids, with his brother, with his weird normie neighbors, with literally everything. Different kinds of love for each, but love all the same. For having such morbid tastes, Gomez is madly in love with life. THAT'S how you land a Morticia, by being unapologetically and madly in love with everything around you.
Bitches love me for my passionate swag and my unrelenting appreciate for the zest of life
Trying to get some face practice in by drawing some (sort of how i picture) Murderbot. I found a really cool looking model to reference who I didn’t do justice to.
The largest strike in decades is taking place in London - about 500,000 people are participating in the strike. Protesters are demanding higher wages amid rising prices in the country.
Love this for them.
Solidarity.
“No Loyalty to the Bosses.
No Loyalty to the Institution”
sketch I had to abandon due to The Agonies, but… thinking about when they were babies (………:
working my way through Realm of the Elderings, feeling many feelings about MANY things. [image ID: a triptych of three traditionally drawn vignettes: a knife on the ground surrounded by stone fragments, a closeup of hands gently touching a huge bearded face carved from wood, and a red whistle decorated with carvings of a bird and foliage. Underneath, the quote “It’s all connected. When you save any part of the world, you’ve saved the whole world. In fact, that’s the only way it can be done.” /end ID]
The underground city of Derinkuyu reaches a depth of 60m (200 feet) and used to shelter as many as 20.000 people; it’s the largest of the 200 underground cities discovered in Cappadocia, Turkey
Love goth culture but not really loving this prevalent shift into distinct gender presentation that's developed as its become accepted in society. Or the... I guess gentrification is the wrong word.
Like. You remember goths with huge ratty hair and KISS makeup and men in heels and corsets and women in huge shapeless sweaters till you couldn't tell who was under what? Remember when the clothes were hand-shredded from the thrift store for five dollars and some spit?
My first black lipstick was eyeliner. What's this Women Get Crop Tops Only For $60 crap. What's this Being Goth Too Expensive shit. Girl draw ur nails on with sharpie and embrace damnation wtfff
Alt fashion being gentrified (which is the right word, you nailed it) is the most bullshit thing. My forebears didn't thrift/shoplift leather and jeans and hold their clothes together with pins and dye their hair together at whoever's house had a sink sprayer just so modern punks could lament the cost of a good battle jacket and ripped pair of off-the-rack jeans like! Girl!! Rip them yourself!! Throw box dye in your hair and leave it on for an hour before rinsing in the sink!! Keep your jeans for so long they tear THEN pin that shit together!! The entire point was that we didn't contribute to the capitalist machine by buying new things!!
Cheap, shitty, and now!!
You want a fishnet/mesh shirt? Get those halloween costume tights, or others that are on clearance. You cut off the toes, cut a hole in the crotch, and that's your shirt. (Psst! You can also use striped tights for this.) I like the Halloween costume kind because they are usually all fishnet without the more solid upper shorts bit regular tights often have, and they're usually way cheaper even when they're not on clearance.
Get cheap black clothing, bleach, and cheap paintbrushes or cotton swabs (or a bleach pen). Put a layer of cardboard between the layers of fabric and paint whatever you want on it with your bleach. (Search for "bleach painting" for more detail and inspo.) (I think some people use spray bottles bottles, too, but I've never tried that.)
Add safety pins to everything. Hell, string them together into a necklace and dangle charms from individual pins.
Get your black lipstick (or other uncommon color, like green) when halloween makeup is out. Wet n Wild often have fairly inexpensive products, and they're pretty good quality in my experience. (Plus sometimes you can find them on clearance even cheaper.)
You can get chain from the jewelry making/craft section and diy jewelry, or add chain to belts, hats, jackets, bags, whatever. (You can also salvage them from things like old wallets or decorative belts made from chain, which you can sometimes find in thrift stores.) Dog chains also work.
You can also as lace trim to pretty much anything, if that's more your style.
Found something at the (thrift or other) store, but it isn't black? Fabric dye, to the rescue!
Think outside the ready-made box, my lovely creatures of the night. Experiment! Get creative! Don't be afraid of things not turning out perfect!
Also: you don't have to be in all black. Jewel tones are common, but so are pastels. Be unlimited by stereotypes, and flourish 🖤
