they hated him for his stabbing people as a stim autism swag
what do you mean people are screenshotting this to put over their blorbos. i literally made this post 8 hours ago. it hasn’t even had time to bake yet cmon guys
So you mean to tell me that just by reblogging this I’m ruining an organizations plan, wasting them money, and uncovering some shitbag humans awful behaviour?
T R I P L E K I L L
DEFINITELY don’t Lt. John Pike by the nickname “Sargeant Pepper”; I know he HATES that.
Oh whoops my finger slipped.
Now what a shame it would be if I accidentally reblogged it… by accident of course /s
Oh boy, let’s hope I don’t perform any automated actions
The fact that there’s an actually functional website for the library of Babel is one of those things that fucks me up more and more the more I think about the implications.
So, if anyone hasn’t encountered the concept of the library of Babel, the idea comes from a story of the same name by Jorge Luis Borges, which is set inside a seemingly infinite library which contains every possible combination of letters, periods, commas and spaces that fits within 410 pages.
So like… It isn’t THAT out there that someone was able to make a digital version of it. Making an algorithm that randomly generates every possible combination of those 29 characters within that space and making a website that lets you explore those combinations are things that are pretty squarely within the scope of things you’d expect someone to be able to make a computer do.
But it begins to get pretty out there when you start thinking about all the things that are technically contained there (and that someone randomly browsing it could THEORETICALLY stumble upon) just by virtue of being one of those possible combinations of letters, spaces, commas, and periods.
Somewhere in that website there IS a book that specifically mentions me by full name before giving an accurate, excruciatingly detailed, 410-page long physical description of me. There’ also many more books that SEEM to be that but are actually factually inaccurate. There’s also versions of all of those containing every possible combination of every possible typo, spelling mistake, and grammatical error.
Somewhere in that website there IS a book that’s a perfectly accurate prediction of how and when I will die narrated in third person over the course of 410 pages. There’s also a book that contains the exact same events narrated in first person. Not only for me, but for every person in the world. There are many more that claim to be that but are actually inaccurate.
Somewhere in that website there IS a book that’s completely blank except for the world’s funniest dick joke written right at the end of the very last page.
But chances are no one browsing that website is EVER going to see any of that because for every book we would consider useful, interesting, or even intelligible there are millions upon millions upon millions more that are just completely full of gibberish from cover to cover.
Every single thing I will ever write (barring punctuation marks that arent periods or commas and the letter ñ) is already contained somewhere on that website.
I have a volume from the Library of Babel! it’s one of my most treasured books.
on the second to last page, about halfway down it reads “OH TIME THY PYRAMIDS” a singular grain of order in the sea of chaos.
The library of babel contains every book to ever exist and moreover it contains all information that can be encoded in a finite string of characters from its alphabet.
I cannot overstate how much I love the Library of Babel. it’s wonderful, it is my heart and soul.
at last we created the perplexing nexus, from the novel “wouldnt it be weird if there was a perplexing nexus?”
In the Chinese version of Super Mario Odyssey, Mario’s pirate outfit was edited and renamed into the “Nobility Outfit”, which removed all overt pirate references such as the skull on the hat and the eyepatch.
there’s a delicate balance between “seeing something on my dash so often i end up caring about it unexpectedly” and “seeing something on my dash so often that it gets added to the blocked list with extreme prejudice”
It gets even better, because he was doing all of this on a pitch black night. This dude swam towards a lure, slapped at it with his glove, and when it got caught; he let himself float and tugged on the line so the fisherman thought he had hooked a 100+ pound salmon. Once he was finally up to the shore, he turned a flashlight on in the guy’s face and walked out of the water, saying “good morning, gentlemen. State fish and game warden, you’re under arrest.“
At this point, the guy who had reeled him in had literally fallen over in shock, and the other people with him were scared shitless. The warden whipped some citations out of a plastic bag in his wetsuit, made the trespassers sign them, asked if they had any questions, and then gathered all of their fishing gear. And he just. Walked back into the river. And quietly swam away, without another word.
This man is a legend.
warden coming out of his river to shame fishermankind
Wizard: A spy is giving away every one of our battle plans. Rogue: You look surprised, Sorcerer. Sorcerer: I certainly am. I didn’t realize we had any battle plans.
Fighter: Are we almost there? Sorcerer: Screw this. I’m teleporting. Who’s with me? [teleports out] Wizard: They don’t have the address, so… Sorcerer: [teleports back] I don’t have the address.
HELLO! Welcome to-a City Seventeen-a! Hoo HOO! You have-a chosen or-a been chosen to relocate to one of our-a FINEST remaining urban centers! I-a thought-a so much of City Seventeen that I-a elected to establish my-a new game here! In the Castle so thoughtfully provided by-a Nintendo. I have-a been proud to call City Seventeen my-a home! Haha! And-a so, whether you are-a here to stay, or-a passing through on your way to-a parts unknown, welcome to-a SUPER MARIO CITY SEVENTEEN. It’s-a safer here! Wahoo!!
Learn to use filtering and blocking extensions like TumblrSavior to filter out stuff you don’t want to see, or stuff that triggers you.
Unfollow fitspo and thinspo accounts.
Remember that your life doesn’t have to look like a Pinterest board, and it doesn’t have to be Instagrammable.
It’s okay to have interests that aren’t marketable.
Fandom is not activism, and you don’t have to feel guilty about participating in it any way you choose.
Turn off the push notifications.
Take a step back from social media if you need to.
When Chicken Little starts posting about how the sky is falling, take a moment to fact-check. (And it might be best to unfollow or mute Chicken Little.)
Stay away from multilevel marketing, or MLM. They promise a lot of very tempting things (being your own boss, working from home, more time with your family, riches beyond your wildest dreams), but they don’t deliver on those promises. And they prey on vulnerable people.
No drunk-posting.
Unfollow your ex, and no “checking up on” their page. Keep your exes “out of sight and out of mind” as much as humanly possible.
Don’t start any drama, and don’t finish it either.
Heed the trigger/content warnings; they’re there for a reason. And if you know it’s something that’s going to upset you or send you into a downward spiral or necessitate a 3 AM emergency call to your therapist, don’t click on it.
it wasn’t “some reason”, it was 2D animators being unionized and 3D not being unionized. and the simple truth that capitalism kills art.
I remember when 2D faded out, the reason studios kept giving was “it’s because 2D is a lot more expensive to produce”. I was a child back then so I didn’t think too much about it, assuming it was about the process itself, but as I grew up and learned more about art as an artist, and gained friends who were professional 3D artists themselves, I started to question it. Because 3D is very different from 2D, but it’s definitely not easier or faster to make. Also, both European and Asian studios kept producing 2D animated movies
The answer was unions. The answer wasn’t “this kind of art is cheaper because it’s easier to make”, it was “this kind of art is cheaper because these artists can’t force us to pay them correctly”
Your personal triggers and squicks do not get to determine what kind of art other people make.
People make shit. It’s what we do. We make shit to explore, to inspire, to explain, to understand, but also to cope, to process, to educate, to warn, to go, “hey, wouldn’t that be fucked up? Wild, right?”
Yes, sure, there are things that should be handled with care if they are used at all. But plenty more things are subjective. Some things are just not going to be to your tastes. So go find something that is to your tastes and stop worrying so much about what other people are doing and trying to dictate universal moral precepts about art based on your personal triggers and squicks.
I find possession stories super fucking triggering if I encounter them without warning, especially if they function as a sexual abuse metaphor. I’m not over here campaigning for every horror artist to stop writing possession stories because they make me feel shaky and dissociated. I just check Does The Dog Die before watching certain genres, and I have my husband or roommate preview anything I think might upset me so they can give me more detail. And if I genuinely don’t think I can’t handle it, I don’t watch it. It’s that simple.
#this excludes writing pedo or incest.
If you look at the tags on my original post, this post was originally about hospital horror, and how it’s allowed to exist even if an individual has medical trauma and doesn’t like the genre. But since someone wanted to go and put some shit on my post that I disagree with:
No, actually, it doesn’t exclude those things. Dark themes in fiction are allowed to exist whether you like them or not.
Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita was not a real little girl who really got brutalized. She was a fictional character. No real child was harmed. People are not reading Lolita and going out thinking, “oh, this told me to abuse children, and clearly it’s morally okay now.” The existence of Lolita is not responsible for the existence of CSA.
Wes Craven’s New Nightmare was pretty meta, but Freddy Krueger was still never real and never hurt any real kids, either. He’s a story. None of those kids ever died, none of them ever got abused, and Fred Krueger never got burned to death, because they’re all fake and never existed. Murder and CSA in the real world aren’t Freddy Krueger’s fault.
Jaime and Cersei Lannister are not real people. They are fake. They are words on paper, and actors on a screen. Lena Headey and Nikolaj Coster-Waldau are not siblings, and did not ever have real sex in the show. It was fake, simulated, not real sex. No siblings actually fucked. Nobody is watching/reading Game of Thrones and thinking, “oh, I can totally go fuck my sibling with no repercussions now!” The existence of Game of Thrones is not responsible for real-world incest.
Guillermo del Toro’s film Crimson Peak didn’t kick off an epidemic of everyone deciding it’s okay to fuck their sister and kill their wife. William Faulkner’s “A Rose For Emily” isn’t making people kill men and sleep with their corpses, and Emily never really killed Homer because neither of them actually exist in the first place.
Arcane didn’t put grenade launchers in people’s hands and turn them into vigilante fighters juiced up on Super Drugs–and you know what, neither did any of the things the Batman franchise has churned out. The Joker and Scarecrow and Poison Ivy and Harley Quinn aren’t out there terrorizing New York City, because they’re fantasy supervillains who aren’t real and can’t hurt you.
The endless waves of bandits in Skyrim are pixels on a screen, and I’m not killing real men when I cut them down. No real people got hurt when my Sims 4 house caught fire. Playing Super Smash Brothers hasn’t gotten me into underground fighting rings, and neither did watching Fight Club.
It’s all fiction.
None of it is real.
The characters are fake and do not exist.
Curate your own media experience and get your head out of your ass.
[ID: a comment left by tumblr user msexcelfractal, which reads “Cool post OP, now do Birth of a Nation. End ID.]
Content warning: antiblackness, antisemitism, sinophobia, general discussion of bigotry and oppression
You really want to try and go there as if that’s some kind of gotcha on the subject of dark fiction? Fine. Let’s go there. I’ve got sources and free time.
Birth of a Nation is a horrific hate crime of a film. It is flagrantly racist and was connected to a surge in KKK membership. Nobody should watch that film for enjoyment. It’s horrific. Nobody should be forced to watch it, either. You don’t have to watch the film, and I don’t recommend you do, unless you’re actively involved in studying it for whatever reason. It’s a bad, hateful movie.
I have not watched it in its entirety and I don’t really ever intend to. There are Black scholars who have already broken it down and discussed it at length, and I don’t feel I’m going to get anything out of the film that they haven’t already covered. If I need to study Birth of a Nation in more depth for whatever reason, I’m going to defer to Black scholarship on the subject.
But if you tried to ban the film altogether? If you tried to erase it from existence? I would ask what the fuck is wrong with you. Banning Birth of a Nation does absolutely nothing to combat the racism that created it. It wouldn’t stop racists from making racist art. It wouldn’t erase the damage done by the film. It wouldn’t go back in time and make it retroactively never made.
You know what banning it would do, though? It would strip film scholars of the ability to discuss it. It would prohibit people from talking about exactly why it was bad. It would inhibit honest conversations about what the film was and who it affected.
You know what you do with horrific bigoted art like Birth of a Nation? You have content warnings, like the one I put at the beginning of this reply. You don’t spring it on people who don’t want to discuss it. You don’t put it on for people to watch without warning. You don’t tell everyone you know to go and watch it and give it money.
“These animated shorts are products of their time. Some of them may depict some of the ethnic and racial prejudices that were commonplace in American society. These depictions were wrong then and are wrong today. While the following does not represent the Warner Bros. view of today’s society, these animated shorts are being presented as they were originally created, because to do otherwise would be the same as claiming these prejudices never existed.”
You damn sure don’t erase it from history and pretend that ignoring it will solve bigotry. Censorship is not the answer, because censorship is always enforced harder on marginalized artists. You ban racism in film, you ban films by Black artists who are exploring the topic from their own perspective.
When the Hays Code banned "offense to other nations,” you know what happened? It didn’t stop racism in film, that’s for damn sure. It instead gave bigoted censors a perfectly legal and easy way to shut down art by marginalized people, which they did gladly.
The rise of the Nazi Party in Germany resulted in the Reichsfilmkammer demanding the removal of all Jewish workers from Hollywood’s European locations. American films began receiving heavy censorship and bans in Germany, and so American studios complied with the Reichsfilmkammer’s demands in order to avoid legal trouble in Germany.
Despite the Nazi party’s outright hostility toward Hollywood, the MPPDA office discouraged any negative depiction of Germany or the Nazi party. Germany had been such a huge market for American cinema that the Reichsfilmkammer’s censorship codes for German films began impacting American-made cinema. Jewish representation in cinema all but disappeared overnight. Joseph Breen, the head of the censor board, was an open antisemite, going on open tirades against Jewish people. His censorship policies were flagrantly bigoted and only served to reinforce that bigotry on a systemic level.
In 1933, Herman J. Mankiewicz and Sam Jaffe tried and failed to make an anti-Hitler film titled “The Mad Dog of Europe.” The Hays Code was used to deny the film’s production. On July 17, 1933, Will Hays himself ordered the filmmakers to cease and desist, all in the name of “not offending Germany.”
Said Joseph Breen, “It is to be remembered that there is strong pro-German and anti-Semitic feeling in this country, and, while those who are likely to approve of an anti-Hitler picture may think well of such an enterprise, they should keep in mind that millions of Americans might think otherwise.”
Variety said about the subject, “American attitude on the matter is that American companies cannot afford to lose the German market no matter what the inconvenience of personnel shifts.”
Anna May Wong, a Chinese-American actress, lost out on a leading role in the film “The Good Earth,” due to the Code’s explicit ban on interracial relationships. The leading man had already been cast with a white man wearing yellowface, meaning that Wong was unable to be cast as the leading lady and love interest, even though the characters were supposed to both be Chinese. The role instead went to a German-American actress wearing yellowface, who went on to win an Oscar for the role.
Censorship doesn’t help anyone. Censorship does not protect anyone. Censorship does not prevent bigotry, and in fact only serves to reinforce it.
Anyone who read this far and learned something: being an independent media censorship researcher doesn’t exactly pay the bills, so check out my Ko-Fi or Patreon if you learned something and feel generous.
My main sources for this post are:
Pre-Code Hollywood: Sex, Immorality, and Insurrection in American Cinema, 1930-1934, by Thomas Doherty
The Dame in the Kimono: Hollywood, Censorship, and the Production Code, by Leonard J. Leff and Jerold L. Simmons
The Encyclopedia of Censorship, by Jonathon Green & Nicholas J. Karolides
Morality and Entertainment: The Origins of the Motion Picture Production Code - Stephen Vaughn
Sin in Soft Focus: Pre-Code Hollywood, by Mark A. Vieira
Forbidden Hollywood: The Pre-Code Era (1930-1934), When Sin Ruled the Movies, by Mark A. Vieira
Hollywood’s Censor: Joseph I. Breen & the Production Code Administration, by Thomas Doherty
And since you made me talk about Birth of a fucking Nation, here are some additional resources for people who are actually interested in Black media history:
Birth of an Industry: Blackface Minstrelsy and the Rise of American Animation, by Nicholas Sammond
Archival Rediscovery and the Production of History: Solving the Mystery of Something Good - Negro Kiss (1898), by Allyson Nadia Field
Humor and Ethnic Stereotypes in Vaudeville and Burlesque, by Lawrence E. Mintz
The Original Blues: The Emergence of the blues in African American Vaudeville, by Lynn Abbott and Doug Seroff
Waltzing in the Dark: African American Vaudeville and Race Politics in the Swing Era, by Brenda Dixon Gottschild
Darkest America: Black Minstrelsy from Slavery to Hip-Hop, by Yuval Taylor and Jake Austen
Love & Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class, by Eric Lott
The Prettiest Girl on Stage is a Man: Race and Gender Benders in American Vaudeville, by Prof. Kathleen B. Casey
Dancing Down the Barricades: Sammy Davis, Jr. And the Long Civil Rights Era, by Matthew Frye Jacobson
Blackface, Whiteface, Insult and Imitation in American Popular Culture, by John Strausbaugh
A Change in the Weather: Modernist Imagination, African American Imaginary, by Geoffrey Jacques
Hollywood Black: The Stars, The Films, The Filmmakers by Donald Bogle
The Blackface Minstrel Show in Mass Media: 20th Century Performances on Radio, Records, Film, and Television, by Tim Brooks
Oscar Micheaux and His Circle: African-American Filmmaking and Race Cinema of the Silent Era, by Pearl Bowser, Jane Gaines, and Charles Musser
America on Film: Representing Race, Class, Gender and Sexuality at the Movies, by Harry M. Benshoff and Sean Griffin
White: Essays on Race and culture, by Richard Dyer
Black American Cinema, edited by Manthia Diawara
Colorization: One Hundred Years of Black Films in a White World, by Wil Haygood
Framing Blackness: The African American Image in Film, by Ed Guerrero
Toms, Coons, Mulattoes, Mammies, & Bucks: An Interpretive History of Blacks in American Films, by Donald Bogle
White Screens, Black Images: Hollywood From the Dark Side, by James Snead
Reel Inequality: Hollywood Actors and Racism, by Nancy Wang Yuen
The Hollywood Jim Crow: the Racial Politics of the Movie Industry, by Maryann Erigha
in recent events of that zoo losing the clouded leopard, it reminded me of the time i went to a large petting zoo and there was a free roaming little black sheep. cutest little guy i ever saw, soi went to the zookeeper nearby and said ‘i think its really cute how you have a sheep thats allowed to just walk around. ‘ then the zookeepers eyes widened and he grabbed his walky talky and ran
ive just laughed for 5 minutes because ive just to put “vegan” in a list of character cons (no, im not being mean to vegans, its a con because they wont be able to use any foods that contain meat or animal products as a healing item, they’ll have to refuse it)
every time i ask people if they do any new years resolutions its all ooooo i dont like making them bc i fail or ohhhhh no i couldnt keep up wiht that and then when they ask me and i tell them about Pasta Quest (i am eating as many different pasta shapes as possible in the space of a year) or when i did Fruit Adventures (every time i saw a fruit i had never eaten before id get one and eat it and read the wikipedia article about it) theyre like hang on i forgot you can make Fun Ones i want a fun one
ALT
