Hey welcome to my blog

lower your expectations immediately

licensed therapists when your problems aren't mild social anxiety and being sad once in a while

but really why did that cop go down the slide with his body face down and completely slack

fishing

visual gag where someone is thrown against a stained glass window and lands in the exact same pose as the holy figure depicted on it

saw someone say that they block "ageless blogs" and for a moment i imagined, like, cthulhu having a tumblr

I think the 'problematic media' issue is composed of two principle parts, one superceding the other.

Firstly, and the most important to address to cut the discourse off at the head; yes, media is a vector by which social systems reinforce themselves. This is the purpose of propaganda, and this dynamic is completely intelligible to us if we consider the cases of 'person whose sole source of online interaction was 4chan, and who exclusively watched History Channel hagiography about fascist war machines', or 'person who developed inappropriate ideas about sex through watching misogynistic media'. It is plainly clear that it is both possible and common for media to influence people ideologically, as an apparatus of a given social system. Material reality dictates which social systems are given ideological hegemony in media, but media is in fact an effective tool of those systems.

Secondly, while acknowledging the first point, it is not the dominating factor, here. While media can and does influence people ideologically, often commandingly so, it is not some sort of cognitohazard. It is plainly possible to watch, even repeatedly over an extended timetrame, some given piece of fascist propaganda, or abuse apologia, or what have you, without becoming any more beholden to its ideas - if anything, becoming more opposed. The crucial thing, here, is that doing so requires some level of understanding and defence against the ideas presented. Someone with no rebuttal to fascist positions, with no even kneejerk dismissal that what they're taking in is fascist, is unlikely not to internalise something if they're surrounded by fascist media. On the other hand, someone who has been innoculated with opposing political theory, who is capable of recognising the social systems being reinforced by a given communicative work and reasonably countermand them, can watch a thousand misogynist movies, read a thousand racist books, peruse a thousand transphobic news articles, and leave with only stronger convictions to oppose these systems. Clearly, the dominating factor here is not the content of the media itself, but the content of the audience - whether the audience is able to sufficiently recognise, interrogate, and oppose the messaging in a given work.

All this is to say - yes, media can and does influence beliefs, but that that influence is completely subordinate to the question of whether the audience has any level of political theory or critical analysis. A liberal reading fascist literature, not holding any real theoretical opposition to the content of fascism, is safe so long as they can recognise and reject basic fascist signifiers. A feminist is able to recognise misogynistic logic in a given work. A communist can recognise and countermand reactionary spin in a news article or wikipedia page. While the politically-unconscious man will not recognise that his favourite sitcom is instilling him with absurdly sexist views on marriage, the issue here is not the media itself. Fundamentally - the issue of 'problematic media' is one best and principally solved by the development of political theory and political education, not by any suppression of the media itself, which is cumbersome.

And it works the other way around: Nazis are universally considered bad guys, yet a ton of people unconsciously turn to fascism when their class interests are threatened, Christians constantly hear sermons about virtue of compassion and condemnation of cruelty, yet they are no more virtuous than people who don't, and there was and is a lot of bloodshed in the name of Christ. And decades of communist and atheist propaganda didn't stop the spread of reactionary ideas and cults amongst people of USSR from the '80s onwards.

After all, material conditions do influence culture

ppl use "death of the author" to mean fucking anything they want on this site. i've seen people use it to fucking defend transmisogynistic jokes in movies??? thats literally the opposite of Death of the Author. thats Death of the Text. that's just not engaging with the conversation.

lickety is basically the most classic thing to split

how quickly we forget the humble banana

NEVER draw an eye

i hate this type of clickbait. maybe there is useful information inside, but it relies on the novice's insecurity in their own knowledge. like it shows some completely fucking normal eyes or a normal midi piano roll or a normal epoxy resin mold or whatever and then tells you that some undefined unknown thing is RUINING your art, because you don't know anything abt art and you're still in the phase where you're windowdressing with a billion little tips and practices that are useful for maybe a year before you outgrow them so you can't actually verify whether you are inadvertently ruining your art by having not already memorized this particular one. anti-education material, this is.

where is the fucking reverence in knowledge and craft? where in these fucking thumbnails do we ever learn why art is worth making? why are you an artist if you only wish to serve your own ego?

p.s, a couple people are trying to guess what this video thinks is the problem with the eyes in the thumbnail, but that drawing is actually presented as the "good" version. creators literally spinning demons out of wholecloth for novices to fear.

i dont wanna single out digital artists, cus it's even worse on my turf

from al jazeera's live coverage following the ICJ decision, 26 Jan 2024

goals for 2024

- be an idgafer

guys I failed

capitalism breeds innovation

Yeah that will do it.

improved

That's such a fire hazard, it's gonna bend space and time to go back to prehistoric man and invent fire for them

Do you love the color of the house fire

biblically accurate power splitter