"This story is a tragedy because it didn't have to end this way."

vs

"This story is a tragedy because it was always going to end this way."

I never really thought about this before but "suffer in silence" is a Christian thing? It's supposed to be a virtue and you're generally criticized for complaining. Even the Pope called complainers "whiners," and said we should suffer in silent endurance (in a homily on May 7th, 2013).

I grew up soaking in that attitude, and I know I've internalized it a great deal. I'm working on recognizing it, but I still catch myself thinking that way all too often.

I'm reading Why Be Jewish? by Edgar Bronfman, and he takes a different view. Complaint is a Jewish pastime, he says, with biblical roots, and he points out that it's both natural and necessary: "...complaint arises from a sense of deep dissatisfaction. Without complaint, there is no criticism, there is no vision of the way things can be. Complaint is the beginning of the vision of a better world. It rejects complacency and it rejects the status quo."

It occurs to me that the social enforcement of "suffering in silence" serves the ends of capitalism quite effectively. I'm going to make a point to complain a little more and a little louder in the service of change.

I don’t like feeling intimidated anymore. I heard from someone I trust that G B Edwards the famous jumping spider taxonomist is creepy towards young women - staring at their behinds and things like that. He also is honestly a really terrible curator and has loans sitting all over the place rotting.

NO ONE was allowed to touch the spiders after he retired, so the other staff and I had to carefully leave the whole space alone even though they obviously needed care too. My boss Felipe Soto-Adames (who has G B’s job now) refused to stand up to him despite knowing things were bad. I don’t know why.

If the National Museum of Kenya is wondering where all of their specimens have gone, FSCA has a special cabinet just for G B’s abandoned loans. I had to dig through it looking for the Causey millipede holotypes he lost. My job was curating non-insects and my boss, the head non-insect curator, had to tell me and my coworkers not to touch the spiders ever or the PREVIOUS curator would get mad at him. It was lunacy.

People are contacting me with stories of collections neglect, territorial behavior, misogyny, and everything in between from all over the world, and it’s making me so furious. Conservation is already miserably hard right now and I’m sick of horrible people making it worse. No more of this! Name them!

Friendly reminder for any other people on the autism spectrum:

It's not recommended to offer to kill someone's dad, especially if you're talking to a stranger

may I please have more context?

Sometimes dads are terrible and should die, and you can console people by offering to rid them of this troublesome parent, but you should be friends with the person before making the offer

how the fuck are we supposed to make friends if not through gestures of patricide?

Unknown. I'll provide updates if I ever figure it out

"producing food extremely efficiently" always comes with a huge human and enviromental cost, and is often with the aim of not producing food per se, but rather exports to make local landowners and overseas importers rich. Some places in the world have greater potential for agriculture and mining, so much that they can feed and supply the world over, and yet, the people in those countries do not benefit from their riches; if anything, they suffer for them. Is this an example of an 'efficient' system?

Orthodox economists call this the "resource curse" and it always struck me as a really interesting euphenism, they call it a "paradox", like, we don't understand how these countries, which are so rich in resources, are so poor and oppressed! what a wacky paradox, a true headscratcher! It's like, a curse, OMG!

Of course, calling it a paradox or curse is a manner to hide and muddle the imperialist relationships (supported by local oligarchs) that cause this. It's not a question about numbers, it's about how production is structured, who administers and for which purpose. But to start talking about that, you need to start talking about Marxism and imperialism, and then suddenly the economists who are so worried about this unsolvable paradox don't want to listen anymore...

it’s especially funny to consider what an astonishingly complex supernatural conundrum this economic situation is when you also consider that we all immediately know what happens when you let a bully near a smaller kid with a nicer lunch

because they were fucking good!

“WTNV walked so [insert whatever media] could run” no. WTNV did not walk, it was fucking running marathons while other media was crawling on the ground gasping for air. it’s still running and the world needs to catch up

attempting to animate on twitch rn https://www.twitch.tv/missusruin

finishing this lagtrain hell this month or so help me https://www.twitch.tv/missusruin

✦ Soup ✦

I have had the honor of working on two different comics projects with Don Hertzfeldt. But this is the story of my first interaction with the man.

is there anything funnier than somebody who has a tumblr account trying to seem like theyre above fandom

via @coniello

Corn dogs are named for their traditional meat, the unicorn. As unicorns are now extinct, they can only be referred to properly as ‘Corn Dogs and not “Unicorn Dogs” as they were prior to 2009.

This is actually a common misconception! While the Unicorn Dog did exist and was discontinued following the extinction of unicorns in 2009, the Corn Dog is not a rebranding of the Unicorn Dog! The Corn Dog was created in 2003 by James H. Corn, though it remained a relatively unpopular Ohio treat until 2010 when Mr. Corn took the opportunity left by the Unicorn Dog’s exit from the market to take over the niche.

“Check out these blogs” and one of them is “beemovieerotica”

I-

No. No, I don’t think I will, thanks.

Pop culture reduces It's a Wonderful Life to that last half hour, and thinks the whole thing is about this guy traveling to an alternate universe where he doesn't exist and a little girl saying, "Every time a bell rings, an angel gets its wings." A hokey, sugary fantasy. A light and fluffy story fit for Hallmark movies.

But this reading completely glosses over the fact that George Bailey is actively suicidal. He's not just standing there moping about, "My friends don't like me," like some characters do in shows that try to adapt this conceit to other settings. George's life has been destroyed. He's bankrupt and facing prison. The lifetime of struggle we've been watching for the last two hours has accomplished nothing but this crushing defeat, and he honestly believes that the best thing he can do is kill himself because he's worth more dead than alive. He would have thrown himself from a bridge had an actual angel from heaven not intervened at the last possible moment.

That's dark. The banker villain that pop culture reduces to a cartoon purposely drove a man to the brink of suicide, which only a miracle pulled him back from. And then George Bailey goes even deeper into despair. He not only believes that his future's not worth living, but that his past wasn't worth living. He thinks that every suffering he endured, every piece of good that he tried to do was not only pointless, but actively harmful, and he and the world would be better off if he had never existed at all.

This is the context that leads to the famed alternate universe of a million pastiches, and it's absolutely vital to understanding the world that George finds. It's there to specifically show him that his despondent views about his effect on the universe are wrong. His bum ear kept him from serving his country in the war--but the act that gave him that injury was what allowed his brother to grow up to become a war hero. His fight against Potter's domination of the town felt like useless tiny battles in a war that could never be won--but it turns out that even the act of fighting was enough to save the town from falling into hopeless slavery. He thought that if it weren't for him, his wife would have married Sam Wainwright and had a life of ease and luxury as a millionaire's wife, instead of suffering a painful life of penny-pinching with him. Finding out that she'd have been a spinster isn't, "Ha ha, she'd have been pathetic without you." It's showing him that she never loved Wainwright enough to marry him, and that George's existence didn't stop her from having a happier life, but saved her from having a sadder one. Everywhere he turns, he finds out that his existence wasn't a mistake, that his struggles and sufferings did accomplish something, that his painful existence wasn't a tragedy but a gift to the people around him.

Only when he realizes this does he get to come back home in wild joy over the gift of his existence. The scenes of hope and joy and love only exist because of the two hours of struggle and despair that came before. Even Zuzu's saccharine line about bells and angel wings exists, not as a sugary proverb, but as a climax to Clarence's story--showing that even George's despair had good effect, and that his newfound thankfulness for life causes not only earthly, but heavenly joy.

If this movie has light and hope, it's not because it exists in some fantasy world where everything is sunshine and rainbows, but because it fights tooth and nail to scrape every bit of hope it can from our all too dark and painful world. The light here exists, not because it ignores the dark, but because the dark makes light more precious and meaningful. The light exists in defiance of the dark, the hope in defiance of despair, and there is nothing saccharine about that. It's just about as realistic as it gets.

Pensions sound so fake as a zillennial. You work for one place for decades (already sounds fake) and then afterwards you leave and they just. keep paying you. the same amount of money. to do nothing. for the rest of your life. if i wasn't already aware that this was something that readily and commonly existed during my grandparent's days then it would sound like some kind of socialist pipe dream

American pensions sound incredibly fake as an Australian, you just expect your fucking employer to put aside and manage your superannuation all by themselves and it's with them until the second they pay it out to you? It sounds like someone scamming you out of your own retirement money.

good news! they do scam you. like all the time.

Australian super funds were scamming people by charging too many fees so we started a royal fucking commission about it and it completely changed the industry.

our banks and corporations got together and explained very nicely to the government that they want to keep all of our money for any reason they can make up and our government said ‘sure’

The thing about killing an oil executive to lower carbon emissions, or similar ideas, feels fundamentally like dream logic. It's bizarre to me how common this kind of thinking is. Like the thing about how the planet isn't dying, it's being killed by people with names and addresses. It's like...sympathetic magic. That if you kill someone associated with a bad thing, it will stop the bad thing. Like climate change is the boss in a video game and you have to hit its weak points

okay hear me out: we put a cup over them (rocket ship), and slide a piece of paper under them (launch pad), and we put them outside (in space)

Behind the scenes of Godzilla (1998)

man why didn’t they just have this guy fight him off. dude’s huge

i wouldn't fight godzilla if i was this dude's size, for roughly the same reason i wouldn't fight a komodo dragon at the size i currently am

Not even to save New York?

what has new york ever done for me

Pirate jokes