The locked tomb 🤝 the scholomance
fucked up things to do to babies
An overwhelming theme of Greek mythology seems to be that things used to be better and everything sucks now. Which makes sense when you realize that the Mycenaean Greeks stopped doing big society for whatever reason and their great big palaces were left to crumble and the Greeks of the dark age didn’t know exactly why those were there but they did know that they used to be full of people.
And when they lost their trade routes, they lost their access to tin and couldn’t make bronze anymore and had to use iron instead.
Hesiod coined the term Iron Age. He claimed truly he was living in an age of iron but he meant this as a bad thing. Bronze is prettier than iron. We now know that iron is harder and better in many ways but they didn’t know that. Bronze was just better in their minds.
But by the time the Greeks had started writing down their opinions about all of this, life had started to return to a similar level of impressiveness to the way it used to be. Great big walked city states were created. Culture and trade in the Mediterranean began to be awesome again.
But still in the mythos and the literature was that feeling hanging over everything that the current day and age sucks in comparison to the far past. So when almost every Greek myth ends in tragedy you have to wonder if this was just the natural order of things to them. Things get worse.
In reality things don’t universally get worse, not do they inherently get better with every generation.
And is this an age of iron? And if it is, what does that mean exactly? Are we all doomed by the narrative or not?
What's interesting to me is that this kind of cyclical boom-and-bust of societal complexity, power, and accomplishment does seem to be a common feature, because the same classical writers looking back nostalgically on the past from across the gulf of the Greek Dark Ages belonged to the culture that Europeans would eventually look to in the same spirit! I often see people bag on the "technologically advanced precursor civilization" thing in fantasy and SF without seeming to realize that it's an artistic embellishment of this very common historical experience.
Iron is interesting because it was much worse than bronze, in that period. Eventually we'd do far better things with iron than we could ever have done with bronze, but it took a really long time of iron being the only practical source of hard metal before we figured that out! What's interesting about this to me is that it's so contingent -- it's not that a steel-like potential is latent in any substitute technology, awaiting our care and attention to draw it out. When we make this kind of transition, it might happen like that, or it might be worse forever despite our best efforts, or anything in between!
This is interesting to me because it gets at something I think popular conceptions of technological development usually miss -- imagining things as a "tech tree", or a linear progression, or a simple product of intelligence and time. If we'd always had as much access to bronze than we did iron, we might never have developed modern steel, or at least not until the era where we started working with crazy stuff like titanium. But there's no real error in this -- it would have actually been unreasonable to put that much effort into iron metallurgy when we didn't know in advance it would work out! Instead you'd just have a few hobbyists doing stuff with it in their garage, and maybe one of them would hit on good steel and maybe then it would propagate, but who knows!
One thing I'm curious about is, these cycles of "great civilizations" followed by "dark ages" are traditionally local, with nothing to synchronize them across large distances. But there are a lot fewer barriers between regions and continents now, both in the sense that we ship and communicate easily between them and that we share many of the same structural risks. How will that influence the pattern? We haven't really had enough time at this scale to know.
Well nowadays we have a pretty obvious manifestation of how these ideas play out in a global scale system: Fascism.
Looking back on a past time that was way better and has now "degenerated" is fundamental to fascism. By itself, it doesn't create fascism, but it's a really important ingredient. Fascists see the pluralistic, culturally heterogenous nature of many contemporary societies as degeneration, so maybe there's your answer.
But here's what you gotta keep in mind: It's all illusory. It's made up. From what I've read of various primary sources from throughout human history, basically everybody thinks Things Were Better ✨Back Then✨ and people will keep being nostalgic for an imaginary version of the past until the Sun engulfs the earth. It's not so much a methodology for understanding history as a cognitive bias.
"How will this pattern of understanding history change in the future" is a nonsense question because there is no singular all-seeing eye of History, just scraps and pieces of the words of folks that just-so-happened to write things down. There's no such thing as discrete, separated "civilizations" that are each the writer-downer of their own History and that each stay consistent throughout time, understanding themselves as a Group that forms a direct line of descent from the present to the past.
This idea of a present civilization being the same thing as a past civilization, changed over time, is often just a piece of propaganda that gets writ down because a ruler or somebody benefited from it politically.
What got written down isn't the disembodied voice of a group of people collectively, but an idea that was politically useful or attractive or viewed as important or (sometimes mistakenly) viewed as true, often by people who are just as biased and politically motivated as the people who got it written in the first place. And a shit ton of a historian's work is trying to squint through those warped lenses to see something that might have been reality.
So for one thing, the average person seeing themselves as part of a Nation and identifying with it is very new. A regime imparting identity to an entire people by virtue of governing them isn't a universal idea. And for another thing, history isn't actually what "people" or A people thought or felt or understood to be true, but rather, what one specific guy decided to write down for some reason, which was then preserved by others for their own reasons.
So my questions are: "Greek" mythology? What makes it Greek? How did we get ahold of it? Who wrote it down? Why did they write it down? Why was it passed down to us? How was it passed down to us? Are the themes we perceive in the stories a result of how their "original" (haha, as if that were real) tellers felt, how the people that preserved the stories felt, or how WE think and feel nowadays? And so on...
The idea of "ages" named after materials was re-appropriated in the 19th century to justify colonization, as a way of characterizing Indigenous cultures as less advanced. It borrowed from earlier ideas that societies passed through "stages" that the English had. In reality it's totally arbitrary and metalworking is just a random thing no more fundamental to a society than any other important technology.
One person's "Ough, the empire has fallen and everything is bad!" Is another person's "Yay, those bastards that are oppressing us are finally gone!"
And a lot of the things we see as positive technological advancements actually made things way worse for the average person. For example, the Industrial Revolution made the regular guy's quality of life worse, and the transition to settled agriculture can be detected in archaeological records by the evidence of malnutrition—when you stop the hunter-gatherer lifestyle, your diet dramatically drops in quality.
Some of the world's "greatest" and "most advanced" empires created some of the most severe and horrible destructions and declines in arts and sciences and culture by way of colonizing cultures, but of course in writings by historians being paid by the rulers they're like "We're the BEST and we brought PROSPERITY and ADVANCEMENT to the world."
Captions shouldn't be censored. If the video says fuck or cum or cunt the captions should say the fucking word.
Unless it's a slur! No one needs to see that.
If they say a slur in the video, the captions should reflect it. The disabled are not little babies who have to have life sanitized for them.
okay but I feel like ur forgetting that slurs don't just apply to the disabled... children don't need to be seeing the n-word or other racial slurs??
but children DO need to be hearing it? are you actually reading the post here?
Here's how it works when subtitles are done properly:
Audio: Let's BEEP go! Subtitle: Let's (censor tone) go!
Audio: Let's fucking go! Subtitle: Let's fucking go!
Removing swears and slurs from the subtitles without removing it from the audio is implying that deaf/HoH people need babying, unlike their hearing friends and family sitting right next to them. Which is frustrating.
The point of subtitles is to give the same experience to everyone watching, regardless of ability—not to be a more palatable version of what's being said.
broke: inviting a girl to a swimming pool on the first date to see her naked and without makeup
woke: allowing your childhood rival to use you as a battery in order to complete a stupid challenge, bringing you to the brink of death/brain damage, but at least letting you see her face without face paint for the first time (also she's naked)
Bespoke: inviting your childhood rival to a swimming pool to confess your darkest, most shameful secret. Also you’re both fully clothed and wearing full face paint.
antifascistelmo-deactivated2022
No matter how progressive or well-read you are, there are always going to be moments in your life where somebody pushes back against something that's so culturally ingrained you never even considered it before. And you'll say "Huh, it never occurred to me to challenge this but you're right" and that doesn't mean you were "morally toxic" before, it means you're a non-omniscient human capable of growth.
From The New Anecdota Americana, 1944
diversity win! this farmer is poly
st-pam
Oh my gods they’re adorable! Have a nice day at work, Employment Jelly
Your moral ocd is lying to you and tumblr is lying to you. you do NOT have to reblog any post you dont want to and you dont need to justify it and youre not prejudiced against a certain marginalized group if you dont reblog an Upsetting Post about a Current Issue said group is facing
Let's talk mobility aids!
Canes
Canes are for when you need to take a little bit of weight off of one side of your body, need a little help with balance, or need a little extra stability when you walk. It's an easy mobility aid to find and get, and it's pretty easy to figure out how to use. Have the cane sized so the handle sits at wrist level, then hold it on the opposite side to the one that hurts. Match your cane strikes to the steps on the hurt side. It will hurt your arm, elbow, and shoulder sometimes, but having a properly sized cane will help.
Rollators
Rollators are kind of the "next step up" in support. They come with more restrictions, you get limited to ramps and stuff, but they're also the least restrictive wheeled mobility aid because they're light and easy to pick up and toss around. They also have a seat a lot of times and a basket so you don't need to carry stuff. They're for when you need a place to rest, something to lean on when you walk, better balance assistance than a cane, and less weight bearing than a cane. I also found that it helped me with fatigue quite a bit. There's two main kinds, euro style like the first, and regular like the second. There are other fancier ones but I'm covering the basics here.
Rollators are my favorite mobility aid and I've used everything from canes to a fancy high grade power chair. They're just the perfect balance of help and freedom. They provide so much support for how far they go.
Crutches
Arm crutches are pretty neat! They're a lot more ergonomic than a cane. In fact, some people use a single arm crutch as a cane. They distribute the weight a little better, so it's not all on your wrists, and they support you better than a rollator can. The major cons I found are that they take two hands to use so you can't carry much and I had a really hard time trying to learn to walk with them. A lot of people who use forearm crutches have other mobility aids and use the forearm crutches when they want to or need to walk.
Manual Wheelchairs
These are for when walking becomes more difficult than pushing a wheelchair. There's no weight being put on your legs and feet and depending on your needs, you can get really specific with your adaptations if you have a custom wheelchair verses a standard wheelchair. My first custom chair looked like a monster truck because i took in the woods and gravel, my second custom chair after I got sicker has a head rest, a backrest that holds me up, and a little electric box that I can attach that helps me push. The difference between getting a standard and custom wheelchair is dependent on how much money the user has, what kind of needs they have, and what kind of medical access they have. (One is not more "real" than the other.) I highly recommend getting a cushion for under your butt if you have a standard chair without a cushion, I used a standard full time for 6 months and a cushion made a huge difference.
Mobility scooters
Mobility scooters are for people who can't walk long distances, but can still walk with the help of a cane or unassisted. If you can walk around your house, but not really much else, a mobility scooter might be the aid for you! There's a lot of different styles and battery life lengths and handling abilities so try a few different scooters out if you can.
Powerchairs
Powerchairs come in a couple different types or "groups" depending on your needs. Group 1 is the kind of chair you're probably most familiar with. It's basically for someone who needs a powerchair to get around their house, the doctors, office, and grocery store. You can't do any custom seat cushions or anything, but it's for people who don't need it. Think of like... someone who can walk pretty okay still, it just hurts to walk or they're off balance or a little weak feeling. A lot of times more elderly people will use these, if you're more active look into group 2
Group two chairs are little more durable, a little more stable, sometimes you can switch the captains seats out for custom seating... They're what a full time powerchair user would use if they don't need specialty functions like tilt or recline. They also often have 6 wheels rather than 4 like the group 1 chairs have.
Group 3 powerchairs are reserved for specific diagnoses like muscular dystrophy, ALS, and other severe neurological and neuromuscular illnesses. These are also called "rehab" chairs because they're for making sure severely disabled people have quality of life. The tilt function is for pressure relief, though you can also get things like elevation so you can raise and lower your chair, and some of them can recline flat. There are other avenues of moving grade 3 power chairs beyond the joystick as well in case someone can't use their hands or doesn't have them. (Head controls, torso controls, and straw controls called sip and puff are alternatives.) They can go on a little worse terrain than group 1 and two chairs and go a little farther, but if they get stuck they weigh 350 lbs and it's awful.
There's a few other types of mobility aid that I don't know enough about, like ankle foot orthotics and gait trainers, but these are the basic "mobility aid" most people will come across.
If you use another type of mobility aid and want to educate people, add it on!!
Happy Disability Pride Month, whether you have a visible or invisible disability. You are valid and you are seen🎗️
"do X to piss off a terf" what about doing things to make a trans person feep safe? what about building camraderie and community? what if you chose to center your actions around building bonds and uplifting others instead of making your main motivators spite and cruelty?
reblog to let your trans mutuals know that your blog is a safe space
As a trans woman I can tell you I need friends and community and support and people who will be there for me infinitely more than I need terfs pissed off. They already spend most of their time pissed off lmao. And if they need any extra help and I want one pissed off I can easily do it myself. What I need is friends who will be there for me, something it feels like is in increasingly short supply for me (and queer people in general) as we get our rights erased. Always be ready to punch a fascist. But what will almost always be a more immediate need is helping the minorities they target.
‘redditors need to know this’, ‘twitterinas need to know that’… no. you need to know one thing and that is that you are not allowed to complain about werewolf fuckers. this is the werewolf fucking website. grow up and go fuck a werewolf.
internalizedkryptophobia
Infighting only helps our oppressors.
Infighting only helps our oppressors.
Infighting only helps our oppressors.
Infighting only helps our oppressors.
Infighting only helps our oppressors.
internalizedkryptophobia
You don't have to understand someone completely to respect them and fight for their right to exist.
a friend of mine has been saying "de-escalate all conflict that is not with the enemy."
we have real, life-threatening forces to fight back against.
Source: godtasteslikecherrycoke