“I’m getting tired of your deliberately innocent-looking manipulative behaviour. You say you aren’t undermining me but I know that’s not true. Do you realize-“
We work at a mall, man. Have you ever taken a minute to think about that? Rome is burning. Rome is burning and we work at a mall. A hundred thousand years ago you and I would have sat side by side and scraped animal skins with a shard of deer rib together. A hundred years from now both of us will be buried and forgotten. Today we are three feet away from an Auntie Anne’s Pretzel stand and we work at a mall. Can you fucking believe it
The world is so vast and alien and wild. The human animal has grown and spread so rapidly. Mushrooms speak and trees have eyes and stars older than our species die and become benders of space and time and you are standing here before me in your limited flashbang moment of borrowed self-awareness to yell at me for not saying hello to you correctly. What the fuck are we even doing here. I am an ape in polyester pants trembling with the feral need to return to the sea. Who are we, Janice. Who are you. Do you know where you are. Do you know what we are, Janice. Do you Know
Someday I’m going to be sitting in a shabby back room office space in a room full of people in plastic clothes at a plastic table with a plastic tray of grocery store muffins to share and someone is going to turn on a projector to play a PowerPoint video about synergy and upholding company values and I’m going to stand from my seat with a mighty shriek rending my uniform asunder and leap naked from the nearest window to run barefoot and wild into the forest and it’s gonna be on the news and like three months later they’ll find my skeleton scattered across a square mile of woodland being consumed by moss and it will be frightening and tragic and inexplicable and it will be the most honest and true that I have ever been with myself
(zones out at work) Sorry I was having the hysterical urge to return my body to the soil again
Beautiful nihilism that frees us from expectation.
Embrace the inherent absurdity of our reality and experience existential bliss.
Be detached, unshackled from our time and place, become nothing in the face of the infinite and know freedom from the demands that we heap upon ourselves and each other.
I am not a Buddhist. But this is the closest thing to Nirvana that I can imagine.
whenever this comes up i like to remind people that harry going back to the abusive dursleys every year was treated by the narrative as something necessary and good because they’re his family after all, and percy jackson gave his mom medusa’s head so that she could turn her abusive husband to stone and sell his remains as a sculpture to pay for her degree and that was framed as a good decision without remorse. and that’s the difference between hp and pjo as stories i think
Rick Riordan received the Stonewall Book Award while rowling’s friends are nazis, if that helps
a good way to inspire yourself to do more is to see yourself as the wacky sitcom B plot character in your friends lives, “wouldnt it be funny to tell the friends in my phone about it.” has gotten me to do anything from going to a festival (excelent) to wild camping (it went badly) (coastguard called) to trying to get the train to stonehenge (stonehenge costs money so i ended up just getting lunch in sailsbury, it was okay.) i bought a bicycle today and 20% of my reasoning was “itd be funny to surprise my roommate by coming home with a whole bike.” . life is for living. and baby i live for the bit.
Artists make art and then either are paid for it by an employer, or sell the art themselves. Either way, they are selling their labor-power to support themselves. That, by definition, makes them working class. If you dismiss artists as “petit-bourgeois” because the self-employed ones own their own drawing supplies, either your argument is bad or petit-bourgeois is a fucking useless term that primarily serves to divide the working class, or both
being self aware is the worst thing ever. can’t even be pissed at my dad properly without having a disco elysium ass internal monologue about it
PISSY TEENAGER: GOD dad just does not FUCKING get us!! And he isn’t even trying to!!
AUTISM: Nay, we shall not complete this task, chosen arbitrarily and with nary a consideration towards our numerable other priorities. The harder he may push, the harder we shall rebel, for this is a waste of our time with no evident necessity for its immediate completion!
RATIONALE: As a nineteen year old woman still living at home and with a history of frustration with her father, it makes sense for this time of our life that we would conflict with him, in this and other ways. In all things we must seek calm.
AUTISM 2: Ough…. The Dharafter…
TUMBLR BRAIN: Wow, real original. Way to ignore the actual themes of Disco Elysium, not that you know since you haven’t even gotten around to playing it yet! Why not go look for your neighbor’s cat in the Alps while you’re at it?
This is fucking stupid
ZLOYXP???? FROM MY FUCKING MINECRAFT YOUTUBE??????
does anybody else have a discord server thats only yourself and nobody else exclusively used to send images from your mobile phone to your tablet or computer
I use whatsapp
And it’s mostly .zips of my ordinal explorer so I can upload them to GitHub after editing it on my school account
Telegrams 2GB per file limit makes it useful for that kind of stuff and that’s pretty much most of what I use it for
does anybody else have a discord server thats only yourself and nobody else exclusively used to send images from your mobile phone to your tablet or computer
I use whatsapp
And it’s mostly .zips of my ordinal explorer so I can upload them to GitHub after editing it on my school account
There is no ‘apolitical posting’ or 'apolitical opinion’ or 'apolitical blog’, all interaction with society is by definition political.
Sure, the politics may be minor and so in line with what’s considered normal within a group that no one notices them but they are still there.
The only way to be apolitical, truly apolitical, is to be the only one alive in the world. Just isolating yourself on an island isn’t enough, you need to be the only living sapient being on this planet.
Any white shirt you like will get vantablack pigments poured on it the first time you have it on outside but a white shirt you dont care about can be worn through fire and emerge whiter like a salamander skin cloak
Public speaking is actually really easy if you don’t respect a single soul in that room. I’ve had an incredibly easy time delivering speeches when I hated everybody I saw and they all thought I did amazing because my disdain was read as confidence. I don’t have any tips for you I’m just telling you a fact
This made me nearly bite a pencil in half in enraged memory.
@ THE REST OF MY ANCIENT HISTORY CLASS; Y’ALL ARE WELCOME FOR THAT FUCKIN A THE REST OF YOU DID NO GODDAMN WORK FOR
Oh man, so I know everyone hates group projects with ample good reason, but lemme just tell you something that happened to me in my final year of uni. My dad got real sick and was in and out of hospital numerous times, one time with a suspected heart attack. Which meant my mum ended up caring for my dad, and I wound up caring for my disabled brother, on top of working a part time job and going to university full time.
My grades slid dramatically. I was having to appeal nearly all my results with my professors, and was mercifully granted extensions by all but one of them. (Which, if you’re out there Ronald: stub your toe and step on lego for the rest of eternity.) And then our Revolutionary Cultures prof. assigned a group project, and paired us at random with our classmates. And I knew, I knew I was just going to be a dead weight so I went to my new buddy and told them we should go to the profs office and ask for her to be switched to someone else who wasn’t just going to drag them down. And my new best buddy for the rest of the semester looked at me, looked at our assigned project, and very gently started to cry as she told me “I was just about to say the same thing to you,” and then tearfully told me her mum was dying, and the only reason she hadn’t dropped out to take care of her was because her mum wanted to see her graduate. She’d been given six months and we graduated in five. Provided we finished this class. And we were both out of appeals and leniency time.
It’s probably one of my most vivid memories from the whole college experience, just sitting on the floor of the Renaissance Lit corridor hugging someone who until a moment ago had been a relative stranger known only in passing, and trying to tell them it would be okay, we’d get the paper done. And we did. We scraped a C- together between the two of us and we managed to coast over the passing mark for the class and were allowed to graduate with abysmal but passing marks.
And I still think about her all the time. Especially when I wind up in group projects for work, and it feels like no one else is shouldering any of the burden, I make a note to reach out and say “hey, you don’t seem to be engaging with this much, are you okay?”
And a lot of the time it shocks people. They’re not expecting earnest concern for their lack of interest, and you find out things like their kid is sick, their dog just died, they’ve got health issues going on, or sometimes they just don’t know where to begin with the project and didn’t want to tell you that because they were frightened of being judged or perceived as lazy when they’re just overwhelmed.
And I honestly wish things like this were taught in team building exercises, cause that’s what group projects in school are. They’re supposed to be teaching you how to work well with others and achieve a common goal, while at the same time totally skipping over the fundamentals of human interaction and how to engage socially with others, and it’s fucking bullshit.
I had something snarky to say, but that last comment is too important to distract from.
why is it that whenever I am disillusioned with the world I go back to the epic of Gilgamesh
“It is the story of their becoming human together.”
This is it. This is the oldest written literary work that we know of, and it’s a story of becoming human together.
This is a story about love, and it’s a story about death, and we told this story thousands of years ago, THOUSANDS of years. We have always, always, always been wrestling with this profoundly beautiful existence and with knowing one another, while knowing that we all will die and be forgotten.
We become human by loving, but we also become human by knowing death.
And I’m just sitting here touching other human beings, another human experience, from across millennia, feeling a bit more human too through it, and I am trying very hard not to cry.
Something that I get chills about is the fact that the oldest story told made by the oldest civilization opens with “In those days, in those distant days, in those ancient nights.”
This confirms that there is a civilization older than the Sumerians that we have yet to find
Some people get existential dread from this
Me? I think it’s fucking awesome it shows just how much of this world we have yet to discover and that is just fascinating
@makaeru peer review cos this made me check when the Sumerians happened and I forget how recent history is for every other continent. 7000 - 8000 years ago just isn’t that long when you’re in Australia, and the amount of detailed history we have access to here is wonderful and should be recognised more internationally
And a quote I picked out from a longer interview with an Aboriginal local elder about the area where he touched on the history
Source (the rest of the interview is really interesting and all transcribed, have a look if you’re curious)
This is part of my Ancient Civilizations class that I teach, which does a whole week about Australia and the Torres Strait Islands because I was sick of never seeing them represented in USAmerican history contexts. With the help of @micewithknives and @acearchaeologist I’ve learned so many incredible things about Australia’s past and it’s been incredibly rewarding to share them with students.
My favorite fact about Aboriginal oral history is the fact that we pretty recently discovered that the Aboriginal myth of the 7 Sisters, an origin story for the Pleiades star cluster, accurately reflects a point TEN THOUSAND YEARS AGO when two stars in the constellation got close enough together to no longer be distinguishable by the naked eye.
The story? 6 sisters running from something that took their 7th sister.
as a gilgar gunditj woman, i was not expecting to see my culture on my dash.
thank you for spreading our words and treating our culture with respect.
The hero’s secret identity is revealed. Surprisingly, their enemies have enough honor to not go after their loved ones or lord over their personal life.
