i’ve mentioned this here before, but it will remain one of the most ideologically influential experiences of my life: when i was in fifth grade i did a report on post traumatic stress as manifested in veterans of the vietnam war, and my father did me the huge favor of connecting me w/ a vietnam vet friend of his who was diagnosed with PTSD, assuring him that while i was only ten i was bright and curious and he should be as honest with me about his experience as possible.
i remember entering his office with my tape recorder, sitting in a chair that was too big, and asking him questions about war, and his life after war, while swinging my legs over the edge of the chair. i remember being very, very quiet as he spoke of pulling the car over on the highway for fear of crashing when his hands would shake uncontrollably in response to song on the radio or a smell that he couldn’t be sure was real or sense-memory. and of ruined relationships and anger and american hypocrisy.
and i also remember that was the day i learned what “valor” meant. he used “valor” in a sentence and i didn’t know that word, and when i asked him to explain “valor” he became very quiet. and i can’t remember precisely what he said, if he ever offered me the dictionary definition or not, but i do remember him looking very sad, and saying something about our country’s idea of “valor”, and also something about a broken promise. and there was an edge to his words that i couldn’t parse at the time that i would later come to understand was bitterness, that he sounded bitter.
to this day i can’t hear or read the word “valor” without seeing sunlight coming through his office window at a slant, close-to-sunset light, and feeling the kind of quiet, confused, completely internalized panic a child feels when they sense that a grown up is trying very hard not to weep in their presence.
Image id, tags:
#tbh this is why its so important to be mature and honest w/kids #its ok for them to be uncomfortable sometimes #lifes not pure good all the time and they need to know how to handle that #and be treated with respect in the process #things like this shape them and help them be more well-rounded adults
The fun other side of this too is when you are afraid of making other people feel that way so you just let shit go 90% of the time even when it’s reasonable and valid to make a comment/critique/etc
Rejection sensitive dysphoria is wild. Someone will be like “hey just so you know the thing you did was a little bit loud/uncomfortable/insensitive but it’s ok I know you didn’t mean it” and my brain will instantly translate “you should be shot”
You know, that Mythbusters post legitimately changed my life. Before seeing it, I had exponentially more guilt and stress about not being able to sleep, which of course, further exacerbated my inability to sleep.
Now, every time I wake up about three am, knowing I have to get up at 6.45, instead of stressing and panicking about how my day is going to be sleep deprived and miserable, I just tell myself ‘Time to activate Mythbusters Protocol’ and lie there with my eyes closed safe in the knowledge that I am measurably reducing later feelings of exhaustion.
And when this happens, about 70% of the time the reduction of guilt and stress means I actually do fall back asleep, so all in all instead of getting only three or four hours sleep, I get five to six and a half.
Which y'know, major improvement in health and energy.
On a related note, that post also opened up the world of naps for me. I used to think that napping was mostly pointless for me, because I’m pretty much incapable of falling fully asleep in the middle of the day. But when I redefined naps to include “lying down with my eyes shut for an hour,” even if I just spent the whole time brainstorming fanfiction, that was often enough to get me from “exhausted and running on 4 hours of sleep” to energized and refreshed
we’ve gone beyond driving a dead horse into the ground we’re partaking in some kind of ritual meme sacrifice and i am all for it. mass-scale meme purge. the blood raining down on our faces and we’re dancing and laughing
alternatively this is the linguistic equivalent of “your face will stay stuck that way” and we’ll inadvertently find ourselves in 200 years barely registering that we’ve permanently shifted basic syntax like “i’m a writer” into “i do not beat the writing allegations”. this could be our Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra moment
so i have a mildly popular “reblog and put in in the tags” post going around and its. very clear how many people don’t know how to interact with a tumblr post
so, first of all, tumblr’s culture has changed a lot in the past couple years. there’s a genuine community effort to not start any drama, and ironically a lot of the current hostility is an effort to keep things calm. there’s also a change in how people interact with posts, so if you haven’t been here in a while please skip down to the tags/replies/reblog with text section.
for newcomers: you should be reblogging posts about as liberally as you would like somethingon twitter. if you only like stuff, people will think you are rude/a bot. you’ve probably heard people talk about “cultivating your dash,” and thats because this platform is 100% centered around your dashboard. trending matters less, unfollowing and blocking in order to shape your dash into it’s best form is widely accepted, the majority of the content you’ll find and interact with will be because of your dash, and the only way to put things on your dash is to reblog them. tumblr users are deeply distrustful of algorithms and have largely turned off the “see posts your friends have liked” function (i recommend you also turn of the various algorithms in settings → general settings → dashboard preferences).
so, once you’ve reblogged a post, there’s three ways to add content to it. the tags, replies, and reblogging with text. all of them have different connotations
the tags: an inside voice. originally they were meant for organizing your blog (and they’re still used for this), but they’ve also morphed into a way to share thoughts that aren’t funny/insightful enough for non-followers to be interested in. when in doubt, put your comment in the tags
replies: basically talking to your friends in class. your followers have no way of finding your replies (they don’t pop up on the dash, nobody gets notified except for the original poster) so chances are, only the person who made the post is gonna see your comment. it’s for quick one-offs that you’re okay with other people overhearing, but really is only made for one person. they’re like a public dm
reblog with text: an outside voice. you’re getting up on a stage in town square and entertaining people. make sure it’s funny or insightful— bottom line, add something new to the conversation. you should use this the least
general rules of thumb:
when in doubt, reblog. people will judge you if your blog is only personal posts and you only interact with other content by liking it.
the only things people will judge you for reblogging are personal vent posts. leave a like to give a little virtual hug
if a post is asking about your personality/opinions (i.e: tell me what’s the last tv show you watched, that kind of thing) put it in the tags
also if you see a nice edit, gifset, or art, reblog and say something nice in the tags! it’s that nice sweet spot of common enough that no one will notice but uncommon enough to make the artist’s day
Finally real advice for new users. This is a solid guide for how to make the transition from Twitter to Tumblr.
In particular, artists need you to reblog. A reblog helps them get seen. A like doesn’t help them at all.
And if you reblog just like it as well cuz why not
Exactly this, because it does also contributing to a person feeling a bit more welcome on this site, as though what they are doing is something that other peole actually appreciate what they are posting.
Can’t decide whether it’s funnier to say “my hungry ass could never work at a” and then say something that implies you’re eating something truly grotesque or something that just, makes no sense
“my hungry ass could never be a brain surgeon” awful. 10/10
“my hungry ass could never be a truck driver” ????? 10/10
It’s never felt more like a ‘Fuck western lefties’ time for Iranians than now! My people are struggling socially and economically under the rule of a fascist dictator terrorist regime, getting beaten, murdered and silenced by a corrupt government, that is vastly unpopular, day in day out. Now we’re at the brink of a costly war on top of everything. And western left wingers are CHEERING ON THE ISLAMIC REPUBLIC! Twitter and Instagram are full of dumb westerners acting like the IR is some kind of hero here. Fuckin hell. Two terrorist regimes are going at each other, the result is going to be more misery and civilian deaths. More destruction and casualties. There’s nothing to cheer for here.
I can just hope this won’t escalate into another humanitarian crisis. God knows the world doesn’t need more war and loss of innocent lives right now.
i love wikipedia and i think it is good and right to give them money but all their funding drive messages are “well… we’ll be killing ourselves tonight. we asked so little of you and yet it seems that simply nobody cares about lil ol wikipedia anymore….sad…”
i dont know if this has been posted before. i’m sure it has. but when i did a search for “jerma dick” and “dick jerma” and “ultraviolet dick jerma” i didnt get any results so i’m just gonna post it anyway
wait what?????????? There is absolutely no coding on that page for an advertisement there. That shouldn’t be possible. Neocities certainly doesn’t inject them?!
????????????????
GOOGLE I DID NOT EVER CONSENT TO THIS “NEW IMPROVED FEATURE”
WHILE WE’RE AT IT GOOGLE I DO NOT OWN A WEBSITE CALLED BOGOOGOU.COM. THAT DOES NOT EVEN APPEAR TO EXIST AT ALL
most important thing to remember about being a woman is if youre married you have to go under the covers with your husband and laugh cutely and play wrestle so when you die to progress the narrative he can remember it in slow motion montages
in this world we all have our roles
You MUST wear a sundress and a floppy hat while you do this
I got a laptop with Windows 11 for an IT course so I can get certified, and doing the first time device set-up for it made me want to commit unspeakable violence
Windows 11 should not exist, no one should use it for any reason, it puts ads in the file explorer and has made it so file searches are also web searches and this cannot be turned off except through registry editing. Whoever is responsible for those decisions should be killed, full stop.
Switch to linux, it’s free and it’s good.
u r absolutely right I have SO many complaints about Windows omg.
For anyone who’d like to follow along, I’m gonna share how to get around those things with group policies bc they’re more user friendly and descriptive than registry editor imo :3 I’ll also show how to get around needing a Microsoft account to get setup.
For the Device Setup
“OOBE” stands for Out Of Box Experience which is what that setup workflow is. But it also happens to be a folder with a little program in it that’ll let you skip connecting to the internet; this makes it so you don’t have to sign up with a Microsoft account and can just use a normal local one instead. And it already comes preinstalled! Here’s how you get to it:
Hold Shift+ F10, or Shift + Fn + F10 depending on your keyboard.
Click inside the window that pops up, type the following and press enter afterwards to run it: OOBE\BypassNRO
I believe it should restart your computer automatically, but if not then restart your computer or type: shutdown /r /t 0 /f
Now when you’re brought back to the setup workflow, the page where you connect to the internet will have a new button on it that lets you say you don’t have internet. Clicking that and proceeding through the rest of the setup lets you get around the Microsoft account thing.
Group Policies
You don’t have to know much about them, these are just a bunch of specific settings for what your computer can or can’t do that lets you decide how it works in different ways.
I’m gonna show you how to turn off the recommendations and internet stuff basically. For now bring up search and type gpedit, pick this
It’ll open up to Local Group Policy Editor and we can get started :3c
Start Recommendations
In the side menu, go to User Configuration > Administrative Templates > Start Menu and Taskbar. Click on Settings to sort them with all the “Turn off” ones bumped to the top.
Here’s what you should set:
Turn off user tracking: enabled
Turn off feature advertisement balloon notifications: enabled
Remove Recommended section from Start Menu: enabled
Remove Personalized Website Recommendations from the Recommended section in the Start Menu: enabled
Do not search Internet: enabled
Windows Spotlight
Back in the side menu, go down to Windows Components > Cloud Content
Turn off all Windows spotlight features: enabled
Do not use diagnostic data for tailored experiences: enabled
Cortana
In the side menu, this one’s back at the top under Computer Configuration. You’re gonna want to go to Computer Configuration > Administrative Templates > Windows Components > Search
Allow Cortana: disabled
Don’t search the web or display web results in Search: enabled
News and Interests
In the side menu go to Computer Configuration > Administrative Templates > Windows Components > News and interests.
Enable news and interests on the taskbar: disabled
Microsoft Account Login Nudges
When you don’t use a Microsoft account they’ll nudge you repeatedly to sign in so you can “get the most out of your experience” *gag*. The group policy for turning that off has a note that suggests it might not work with Windows 11 though (implicitly), so you can close the group policy editor window now and for this last one let’s just open up the regular settings.
Go to System > Notifications > Additional settings, then uncheck all the boxes. And there ya go! (✿◠‿◠)ﾉ u are done.
Group policies are kind of a rabbit hole so while there is a lot more you could change or read into, for your own sanity’s sake I would advise against it and say call it a day lol
This is all extremely good information, thank you very much for the addition!
I endorse this as an IT technician. I do this to every new Win11 device I set up.
As a bonus, run Chris Titus Tech’s debloat tool on it.
It allows you to add tools, remove/disable shitty parts of windows, and easily change some settings. My default is running the preset for a desktop/laptop and applying security update settings, but there are so many options to customize. I used it on my personal laptop.
“Use Linux instead” is never actionable advice for most people so thank you for this
I’ve seen people pass around the “hold up, I’m googlin’ something” image but it cropped out the part where he was googling “how many guys can one guy take”
this page, in isolation, is possibly the funniest thing i have seen in any manga
every sunday i tell my liberal father that i’m off to go get another sex change. he tells me “yass monarch slay”. but in reality i go to church to study the teachings of the lord. if my liberal father knew this i would be disowned. this is joe biden’s america
every sunday i tell my liberal father that i’m off to go get another sex change. he tells me “yass monarch slay”. but in reality i go to church to study the teachings of the lord. if my liberal father knew this i would be disowned. this is joe biden’s america
Born and credited in much of his early work as Stokely Carmichael, was a prominent civil rights campaigner, revolutionary socialist, and Pan-Africanist. Born in what was then the British colony of Trinidad and Tobago, Ture moved to Harlem at the age of 11, and became involved in political activism in high school, helping to boycott a local White Castle which refused to hire Black employees. In the 1960s, Ture became known as a prominent figure in the Civil Rights Movement, working with CORE in the Freedom Rides and organizing with SNCC. He grew dissatisfied with working with the Democratic Party through his experiences in the Civil Rights Movement, and turned to more radical politics. Influenced by the writings of Frantz Fanon and Malcom X, Ture came to embrace Black nationalism and Pan-Africanism as chairman of SNCC. Ture popularized the slogan “Black Power,” and moved SNCC away from nonviolence as a central organizing principle. His activism made him a target of the FBI, which spread false information about Ture to tarnish his reputation and prevent a merger of SNCC and the Black Panther Party. Ture became an internationally-recognized figure, and he moved to Guinea in the late 1960s, where he became a student of Kwame Nkrumah and advisor to Ahmed Sekou Toure, renaming himself after them. The final decades of Ture’s life were dedicated to organizing with the All-African People’s Revolutionary Party globally, and traveled frequently to speak in favor of Pan-Africanism and socialism. He died in 1998 of prostate cancer.
“The job of a revolutionary is, of course, to overthrow unjust systems and replace them with just systems because a revolutionary understands this can only be done by the masses of the people. So, the task of the revolutionary is to organize the masses of the people, given the conditions of the Africans around the world who are disorganized, consequently, all my efforts are going to organizing people.”
I like so fully mean this btw. “Evil” is just a way to placate ourselves and put imaginary distance between ourselves and our loved ones, and the ability to do harm
I am just as capable of harm as any other human. I am just as capable of committing rape as the people who have raped me. I am just as capable of abuse as those who have abused me. And so are you.
Those who have harmed me are just as human as I am. The harm I have experienced is the result of socio-material conditions, not some ontological bad-ness.
Evil is a convenient lie, but also one that is devoid of any hope. It’s convenient because it ‘others.’
If I am incapable of harming, I am released from the responsibility to avoid doing harm because I am incapable of harming, and because I’m incapable of harming, I am released from the responsibility of avoiding doing harm, ad infinitum. Any harm that i do perpetuate then becomes excusable and metaphysically segregated from the forms of harm we have deemed to be evil, all in the service of helping me sleep soundly. It’s a pacifier.
But with that convenient excuse comes existential anguish, and with that anguish comes complacency. If the ills of our world are caused by some fundamental, immutable force, well… What can be done? Nothing. Best just wait for God to get rid of it. Or if you don’t believe in God, best to just keep your nose down and look out for thee and thine till youre dirt. A belief in evil is a belief that our human lives are futile.
The reality is that we live in a purely physical universe. Metaphysical concepts (like evil) are a reaction to and conceptualization of the material world, not the other way around. The things we ascribe to be stemming from evil are, in reality, materially rooted, and thus able to be altered through material means–means that humanity has domain over. In this way, a lack of belief in evil is not only infinitely more hopeful than a belief in it, but infinitely more pragmatic as well.
I like so fully mean this btw. “Evil” is just a way to placate ourselves and put imaginary distance between ourselves and our loved ones, and the ability to do harm
I am just as capable of harm as any other human. I am just as capable of committing rape as the people who have raped me. I am just as capable of abuse as those who have abused me. And so are you.
Those who have harmed me are just as human as I am. The harm I have experienced is the result of socio-material conditions, not some ontological bad-ness.
Evil is a convenient lie, but also one that is devoid of any hope. It’s convenient because it ‘others.’
If I am incapable of harming, I am released from the responsibility to avoid doing harm because I am incapable of harming, and because I’m incapable of harming, I am released from the responsibility of avoiding doing harm, ad infinitum. Any harm that i do perpetuate then becomes excusable and metaphysically segregated from the forms of harm we have deemed to be evil, all in the service of helping me sleep soundly. It’s a pacifier.
But with that convenient excuse comes existential anguish, and with that anguish comes complacency. If the ills of our world are caused by some fundamental, immutable force, well… What can be done? Nothing. Best just wait for God to get rid of it. Or if you don’t believe in God, best to just keep your nose down and look out for thee and thine till youre dirt. A belief in evil is a belief that our human lives are futile.
The reality is that we live in a purely physical universe. Metaphysical concepts (like evil) are a reaction to and conceptualization of the material world, not the other way around. The things we ascribe to be stemming from evil are, in reality, materially rooted, and thus able to be altered through material means–means that humanity has domain over. In this way, a lack of belief in evil is not only infinitely more hopeful than a belief in it, but infinitely more pragmatic as well.
I like so fully mean this btw. “Evil” is just a way to placate ourselves and put imaginary distance between ourselves and our loved ones, and the ability to do harm
I am just as capable of harm as any other human. I am just as capable of committing rape as the people who have raped me. I am just as capable of abuse as those who have abused me. And so are you.
Those who have harmed me are just as human as I am. The harm I have experienced is the result of socio-material conditions, not some ontological bad-ness.
Evil is a convenient lie, but also one that is devoid of any hope. It’s convenient because it ‘others.’
If I am incapable of harming, I am released from the responsibility to avoid doing harm because I am incapable of harming, and because I’m incapable of harming, I am released from the responsibility of avoiding doing harm, ad infinitum. Any harm that i do perpetuate then becomes excusable and metaphysically segregated from the forms of harm we have deemed to be evil, all in the service of helping me sleep soundly. It’s a pacifier.
But with that convenient excuse comes existential anguish, and with that anguish comes complacency. If the ills of our world are caused by some fundamental, immutable force, well… What can be done? Nothing. Best just wait for God to get rid of it. Or if you don’t believe in God, best to just keep your nose down and look out for thee and thine till youre dirt. A belief in evil is a belief that our human lives are futile.
The reality is that we live in a purely physical universe. Metaphysical concepts (like evil) are a reaction to and conceptualization of the material world, not the other way around. The things we ascribe to be stemming from evil are, in reality, materially rooted, and thus able to be altered through material means–means that humanity has domain over. In this way, a lack of belief in evil is not only infinitely more hopeful than a belief in it, but infinitely more pragmatic as well.
I do not think that any of you can bear to live for seven months under successive bombing and genocide. Our children wake up every minute of their sleep to the sound of an explosion. Please help us evacuate Gaza by donating or sharing this post
I once signed up to participate in a study on how depression affects memory, forgot I was meant to go do it, and when I emailed to apologise to the PhD student running it she basically told me that a) she was very used to this happening and b) the weird irony of her theories’ correctness making it very difficult to arrange proving them had by now gone from infuriating to hysterical
I went to the Grand Canyon when I was depressed and I literally forgot the whole thing. Like, the only reason I even know I was there is that I have photographs of myself standing in front of the Grand Canyon with dead eyes but i have absolutely no memory of it
People talk about depression like it’s just being sad all the time but straight up your brain stops working and sadness is just one of the many, many consequences of that
