English: It fits like a glove. Spanish: It fits like a ring on the finger. Italian: It fits like shoes painted on with a brush.

Finnish: It fits like  a . FiST.   iN.   the  EYe .   (ง'̀-‘́)ง

tumblr meme culture is really just a form of neo dadaism

I’d like to clarify:

dada was a largely european art movement that took place after wwi. this time and place is not a coincidence. let me explain. 

dada art made no sense. the artists who made dada lived in a world in which nothing made sense - in which conventional logic led to the senselessness of a world war. so, making art that made no sense, making - well, you can’t really call it art, so making ANTI-art that rejected the conventions that brought about that atrocity in the first place - it made total sense. (if that makes any sense.)

so the artists did weird things. new things! putting things that were already made together and calling it sculpture, cutting up bits of pictures and putting them together and calling that something to frame - this site has some nice examples.

but from my perspective - there’s serious intellectual continuity between the absurdity of attaching a bunch of tacks to the bottom of an iron, rendering it useless, and say…. bath bomb posts. Put a fucking macbook in a bath. it’s useless now. Nobody fucking cares anymore. you want something funny? you want a punchline? gun. that’s your punchline. Take it. I am laughing

in a way it could be a method of venting some of the frustration and hopelessness and dissatisfaction that tumblr’s userbase (largely, disenfranchised millennials) feels in the modern day. I can’t really speak for anyone else, but… at least from a US perspective, there’s plenty to be disillusioned about. growing up in a constant state of questionably justified war, income inequality, an economic recession caused by the actions of a handful of wealthy fucks who didn’t even get properly punished, growing awareness of police brutality, being called lazy and self-absorbed by the generations that gave us these problems in the first place… I can’t help but think that these factors (and more) could produce a similar mindset to the one that precipitated the first dada movement. 

so of COURSE we make nonsense jokes. it’s a coping mechanism for a world which doesn’t make any sense.

related: this isn’t by tumblr but I have to plug UCLA’s atrocity of a virtual gallery once more. it really needs to be experienced, but… it’s definitely also millennial neo dada. from the presentation (like an unplayable video game) to the content (THE DOGS HAVE ARRIVED), it is exactly what I am talking about. it is a fucking shitpost. and it’s high art, too! I love this

tl;dr: my generation is fed up with this bullshit, and the best way that we can express that is by shitposting. alternatively, dada was an early precursor to modern shitposting and we should all thank duchamp for signing a fucking urinal

a dear friend has given a perfect update to some of my phrasing, courtesy of their word replace extension:

you see this? this is exactly what I’m fucking talking about. the thing that I’m talking about is:

I’d also say that while Dadaism was obsessed with the technological aspects of Modernity, of newspapers, of industrial mechanics and factory made clocks, neo-dadaism (of which shitposting but also the increasingly broad reach of the New Aesthetic and net aesthetics) is obsessed with the technological aspects of our time, or at the beginning of our time.

As just a comparison, the Clock in Absurdist and Dadaist art is both a symbol of the uplifting beginning of industrial relations (as one of the first complicated machines made by manufacturers, as the symbol of mankind’s ability to triumph and analyze nature and better ourselves) and as the deified symbol of horrific modernity (of demarcated time, labor hours, the oppression of the working class via managerial time), Neo-Dadaism/Absurdism has a similar relationship with early computers, which both symbolizes the utopian attitudes which we entered the digital age with, and the horrifying period we live in now, where the Digital is ever present and semi-deified.

My favorite dada satire is probably from Georges Grosz who takes the kind of robotic modernist tube people of folks like Leger:

and turns them into these mindlessly patriotic broken automatons chanting rote phrases:

And it’s so so funny to me that there’s all kinds of Gen X artists out there creating art about the millennials on their damn cellumar phones who think they’re the inheritors of this aesthetic but really it’s people who use the Madden gif generator to shitpost because they’re taking the technology meant for a coherent purpose for a particular narrative and they’re breaking it and turning it back on itself.

I think you might be onto something…

x

Aside from color palettes and materials used, I see literally zero difference.

This is one of the top 3 best posts I’ve ever seen on tumblr and I’ve been here for years.

Love

STATUS: DAY MADE.

o

This post has been on my mind constantly for ages.

it got better

Still one off my absolute fave posts

the human experience

[Retweet]

Ruth Negga as Hamlet

Gate Theatre - Dublin, Ireland | 21 September - 27 October 2018

Hence why Toph Beifong is my favorite badass character ever. Followed by Zuko of course. 😝

I love that Toph believes that she is one of the most badass people ever to exist in the Avatar universe, is not shy about saying so, and is absolutely correct.

Shit, just watch the way she curbstomps Korra without even trying.

The reason Toph Beifong has lived so long is that death is rightly afraid of trying to claim her <3

sea shanties masterpost

“one man cannot bring in the anchor. ten men cannot bring in the anchor. but together we can.”

making this because it’s useful for my specific brand of dramaturgy and i generally have a good deal of feelings about sea shanties. these are the result of far too much time searching around for shanties that are both authentic and have a tune that can be found on the internet. organized by theme.

these can all be done a capella, obviously, but if you want accompaniment, getting your hands on a concertina would be ideal.

General Shanties

Roll the Old Chariot Along (David Coffin)

Haul Away, Joe (The Eskies)

Rant and Roar (Howling Gael)

Haul Away the Bowline (The Exmouth Shantymen)

Departing

Away Rio (David Coffin)

Leave Her, Johnny (Coda)

The Rosabella (skip to 3:15) (Wareham Whalers)

Off to Sea Once More (The Black Irish Band)

Clear Away in the Morning (Great Bay Sailor) 

South Australia (Johnny Collins)

Randy Dandy Oh (Johnny Collins)

Girls

With You, Fair Maid (skip to 14:30) (Before the Mast)

Spanish Ladies (unknown artist) (psa this one is in moby-dick!!)

Bully in the Alley (skip to 24:10) (Before the Mast)

London Julie (Three Sheets to the Wind)

Excursion Round the Bay (The Fables)

The Maid of Amsterdam (The Roaring Trowmen)

Storms

Round Cape Horn (Cyril Tawney)

Fish in the Sea (youtube user threelegsomen)

To Old Maui (skip to 9:28) (Before the Mast)

Drinking

The Boatman’s Cure  (John Roberts)

Drunken Sailor (Irish Rovers)

Fifteen Men (unknown artist)

Newer/Environmentally Conscious

No More Fish, No More Fisherman (David Coffin)

The Last Leviathan (skip to 13:40) (Fisherman Friends) (bit of a stretch to call this a shanty per se but it’s really good and sad so)

NORMALIZE the thing that looks like an old man living in your basement

DESTIGMATIZE the act of closing your vent to stop his dry whispering– which you cannot tell whether it is random or directed at you– from reaching you

ROMANTICIZE the idea of counting the number of stairs he climbs each night and praying he never makes it to the top

GUYS THIS IS SO IMPORTANT

we HAVE to let people know its okay to experience:

@normal-horoscopes

Alright, I got many many messages about the recent bot epidemic.  

The bots are back. But it’s 10x worse. Right now, they only reblog posts with a link. They don’t post photos or use tags, so it’s harder to find them (at least for me). I think we should skip stage 3 & 4 all together. We operate within Tumblr’s framework and it’s kinda limited. So I suggest this:

We report the domains to the businesses hosting them. 

I am super tired but I recall that almost all hosts have a clause mentioning you can’t use their service for spam or fraudulent websites. 

Take this website for instance: lnjdn.freedating.mobi

I looked up who the host is here: https://www.whoishostingthis.com/#search=lnjdn.freedating.mobi

Amazon is the hosting provider. 

My suggestion is that we collect URLs and find out who the web host is, and that we then send an email to the hosting provider with prove they are violating their terms so they take the website down. 

There are a shitload of bots promoting only a handful of websites, so this should be more effective.

What do you think?

AWS = Amazon Web Services

https://aws.amazon.com/premiumsupport/knowledge-center/report-aws-abuse/

Lucas Cranach the Elder (1472 - 1553) - Lucretia

titties out! knife out! bitch where we going tonight

This is actually how these two finished the 200m Semi-finals.

Edit: Added a couple more photos. This is precious.

Portrait of a Noblewoman Dutch School Chequers Court

please for the love of god watch this clip from nathan for you

this is honestly one of my favorite scenes from any reality show ever, it completely defies explanation or description and it’s impossible to convey just how fucking insane it is to someone without showing them the clip

Peter Paul Rubens

Diana Returning From the Hunt

Netherlands (c. 1615)

Oil on Canvas, 184 x 136 cm.

Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister An interesting note: The Black man carrying fruit in this painting is probably based on this study of a man by Rubens:

.

.

Humans Are Weird

So there has been a bit of “what if humans were the weird ones?” going around tumblr at the moment and Earth Day got me thinking. Earth is a wonky place, the axis tilts, the orbit wobbles, and the ground spews molten rock for goodness sakes. What if what makes humans weird is just our capacity to survive? What if all the other life bearing planets are these mild, Mediterranean climates with no seasons, no tectonic plates, and no intense weather? 

What if several species (including humans) land on a world and the humans are all “SCORE! Earth like world! Let’s get exploring before we get out competed!” And the planet starts offing the other aliens right and left, electric storms, hypothermia, tornadoes and the humans are just … there… counting seconds between flashes, having snowball fights, and just surviving. 

To paraphrase one of my favorite bits of a ‘humans are awesome’ fiction megapost: “you don’t know you’re from a Death World until you leave it.” For a ton of reasons, I really like the idea of Earth being Space Australia.

Earth being Space Australia Words cannot express how much I love these posts

Alien: “I’m sorry, what did you just say your comfortable temperature range is?”

Human: “Honestly we can tolerate anywhere from -40 to 50 Celcius, but we prefer the 0 to 30 range.”

Alien: “……. I’m sorry, did you just list temperatures below freezing?”

Human: “Yeah, but most of us prefer to throw on scarves or jackets at those temperatures it can be a bit nippy.” 

Other human: “Nah mate, I knew this guy in college who refused to wear anything past his knees and elbows until it was -20 at least.”

Human: “Heh. Yeah everybody knows someone like that.”

Alien: “……. And did you also say 50 Celcius? As in, half way to boiling?”

Human: “Eugh. Yes. It sucks, we sweat everywhere, and god help you if you touch a seatbelt buckle, but yes.” 

Alien: “……. We’ve got like 50 uninhabitable planets we think you might enjoy.” 

“You’re telling me that you have… settlements. On islands with active volcanism?” “Well, yeah. I’m not about to tell Iceland and Hawaii how to live their lives. Actually, it’s kind of a tourist attraction.” “What, the molten rock?” “Well, yeah! It’s not every day you see a mountain spew out liquid rocks! The best one is Yellowstone, though. All these hot springs and geysers from the supervolcano–” “You ACTIVELY SEEK OUT ACTIVE SUPERVOLCANOES?” “Shit, man, we swim in the groundwater near them.”

Sounds like the “Damned” trilogy by Alan Dean Foster.

“And you say the poles of your world would get as low as negative one hundred with wind chill?” 

“Yup, with blizzards you cant see through every other day just about.”

“Amazing! when did you manage to send drones that could survive such temperatures?”

“… well, actually…”

“… what?”

“…we kinda……. sent……….. people…..”

“…”

“…”

“…what?”

“we sent-”

“no yeah I heard you I just- what? You sent… HUMANS… to a place one hundred degrees below freezing?”

“y-yeah”

“and they didn’t… die?”

“Well the first few did”

“PEOPLE DIED OF THE COLD AND YOUR SOLUTION WAS TO SEND MORE PEOPLE???!?!?!?”

My new favorite Humans are Weird quote

“PEOPLE DIED OF THE COLD AND YOUR SOLUTION WAS TO SEND MORE PEOPLE?”

aka The History of Russia

aka Arctic Exploration

aka The History of Alaska

Being from Alaska, this was sort of how I felt going to college in the lower 48′s and learned that no one else had been put through a literal survival camp as a regular part of their school curriculum, including but not limited to:

1. Learning to recognize all forms of animal tracks in the wild so you can avoid bears and moose and search out rabbits and other small animals to eat.

2. Extensive swimming and climbing on glacial pieces with competitions to see who could last the longest, followed by a group sit in the sauna so we wouldn’t get hypothermia (no, not kidding, I really did this many times as a kid!)

3. How to navigate using the stars to get back to civilization.

4. How to select the right type of moss from the trees to start a fire with damp wood (because, y’know, you’re in a field of snow. Nothing is dry.)

5. How to carve out a small igloo-like space to sleep in the snow to preserve body heat and reduce the windchill so you won’t freeze to death in the arctic.

“I’m telling you, I don’t think we need to worry about territory conflicts with the humans. You know all those deathtrap hell-worlds in the Argoth Cluster?” “Those worthless rocks? Yeah.” “80% of them are considered ‘resort destinations’ by those freaky little primates.”

This would be an interesting read if this was a book.

Like, an alien invasion is about to start and the book is a chronicle of how the aliens couldn’t handle both humans in general and the range of environments and ended up being destroyed through the eyes of one of the aliens.

Like a caption from the book would be something like

“So we sent a recon team to this place called Russia, but all we’ve heard back thus far is about the temperatures, giant monsters with fur the humans call “Bears”, and that once again, we have been reminded of how heavily well armed almost ever human settlement is.

Thus far we have lost more than a good chunk of our forces through experiments gone wrong, unsuccessful fire fights, and above all else, the humans seem to be more worried about these strange variation of their species calling themselves “Clowns”.

I don’t know what a Clown is, but sounds as if it is the dominant faction of this planet, and considering we only just found out humans practically poison themselves with this thing called beer and only get stronger and more violent, I don’t ever want to encounter such a being.

I believe this invasion was a mistake.“

I’ve been reading a bunch of these and all I can think about now is aliens finding out about our insane ability to walk away from accidents.

“Human Colony SDO435**, this is Gxanimi survey vessel 3489. We regret that we must inform you that the wreckage of your ship ‘Gecko Flyer’ has just been detected on planet F56=K=. We offer expressions of sympathy for this catastrophe.”

“Shit, thanks for telling us, we’ll be right there.”

“Why?”

“To find our people, of course.”

“… you wish to retrieve the corpses for your traditional death rituals, of course, we understand. We have sent the coordinates.”

“What do you mean, bodies? No survivors at all? There must be some.”

“Official mouthpiece of Human Colony SDO435**, the ship has crashed. It has impacted the planet’s surface at speed. Moreover, this might have happened as much as five vek ago. We do not understand why you speak of ‘survivors’.”

“Oh, there’ll be survivors. There always are.”

“(closes hyperspace voicelink) How sad that they are unable to accept the reality of their loss.”

“Hey, Gxanimi survey vessel 3489, thanks for letting us know about the Gecko Flyer. More than half the crew made it!”

“Made what?”

“They survived! A couple of lost limbs and so on, but they’ll be fine.”

“… but that vessel was destroyed! Images have been examined!”

“Oh, well, everyone in the fore-below compartment was crushed, obviously, but the others made it out.”

“… but the crash was vek ago! Excuse we… at least eighty of your ‘days’! How could they survive without a ship? Without shelter and supplies?”

“Well, the wreckage gave them some shelter, and of course the emergency supplies kept them going until they could start growing stuff. It’s actually a nice little planet, they said. Quite a lot of edible flora and fauna. T-shirt weather, in summer, too.”

“What is… t-shirt weather?”

“Oh, you know, when it’s comfortable to go around with only modesty covering over the epidermis. Exposed limbs.”

“That planet is so cold that even water solidifies in its atmosphere!”

“Well, in winter, obviously. But we like that. Listen, our people have been raising crops down there, and that’s usually how we rule a planet as ‘colonized’…. is anyone else using it, or can we call it?”

“Er… we have claimed the warmer planets in the system, but we believe we could come to some arrangement.”

It was really nice, the humans thought, how carefully most of the aliens kept an eye out for downed ships after that, once they found out that humans tended to survive anything less than explosive decompression or… well, explosions generally. They’d immediately inform the nearest outpost of a wreck’s location, or even ship survivors back themselves. It was very thoughtful.

They didn’t find out until a long time later that the Gxanimi had put out the word to every species they were in contact with. It was vital that everyone knew the things they had learned about humans after that first encounter.

1. Humans can literally walk away from an impact that renders a space-worthy hull so much scrap and would have actually liquefied a Gxanimi.

2. Humans will eat just about anything not immediately fatal to them - including, in extremis, the corpses of their dead crewmates. In fact, most human vessels keep a list of those willing to be eaten and those whose socio-religious scruples forbid it. They have a ridiculously high tolerance for dangerous substances, and if they can breathe on a planet they can probably eat something on it too. They also have something they call the ‘Watney Protocol’, which requires them to carry live soil samples, seeds, and simple tools that will allow them to start farming their own native foodstuffs on any remotely habitable planet immediately in the event of an accident.

3. Once they’ve farmed a planet, they bond with it. They’ll be polite, but it’ll take significant effort to get rid of them even so.

Conclusion: If a human ship crashes on a planet you like and want to keep, get other humans to come and get them immediately. Remove them yourself if you have to. Even the worst crash can result in a thriving colony in a few vek.

And don’t, for the love of gravitational regularity, try to solve that problem by killing off the survivors. Just don’t. It won’t work and it just makes all the rest of them mad.

This is the best one yet! 

if any humans spill on your planet, make sure to scrape them up real fast and repackage them or you’ll never get them out. 

Humans are space hornets