#and evaluate your sources

[ell-arts]

In the Episode "Rip Van Packle", Pac-Man started flashing a dark green and realizes that he might be fading away as he starts feeling weak, realizing that it's because he doesn't belong in that time period. while in "Pac to the Future", neither of the main characters do the same. Although the events of Rip Van Packle were a dream, we can also assume the same thing could apply to real life time travel; could it not? (Across the Spider-Verse has something similar)

Interesting theory... it's hard to say how much of this could be canon because it all happened in a dream.

I've always thought that the moment Pac turned green for that second was either because he was slowly waking up from the dream, or he was just feeling ill from not eating in so long. I don't think it's because he realised that he doesn't belong in that time period, as that's a detail that is a bit too specific for a phenomenon that didn't get any verbal confirmation. Pac did say that he felt "a little light-headed," so my first thought was that he was just hungry.

Either way, time travel in "Pac to the Future" showed that it's possible for them to time travel without feeling weak or in danger of fading away. Since these events weren't a dream, they are more "trustworthy" of a source compared to the events of "Rip van Packle."

We can of course make up our own theories stemming from that moment as fanons.

[declanisms]

all from this article from the CNN.

the evidence is right in front of you. do not believe the IDF. they are responsible for the hospital bombing and the deaths caused and they will be responsible for any and all deaths caused by lack of humanitarian aid.

[mybrainproblems]

the supreme irony of being a dabbfan is that i'm probably more equipped to critique his work than the majority of dabb haters

[marzipanandminutiae]

at a work training seminar yesterday, one of my coworkers suggested using ChatGPT for strategies to get out of uncomfortable conversations (ie a guest is taking things in an inappropriately political direction, asking about your personal views in a way you're not comfortable with, etc.)

and I was like. orrrrr you could look up strategies that a therapist or other actual human who interacts with other humans complied? maybe?

what is HAPPENING

[mercy-mercie-mercymorn]

hi i'm sober now. the portrayal of academics as oblivious and stuffy queerphobes who hate cooperation and love ignoring the obvious is just another symptom of the anti-intellectual bullshit going around.

this is about "historians will say they were very good friends" rhetoric. i know most of it is a joke, but some of y'all are annoying and i'm fucking tired of it as a queer history/archaeo girlie

[carpe-mamilia]

AI often confidently hallucinates references that are inaccurate or completely made up.

(via the author, at the Ex Bird place)

[intelisync]

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[gaza-giving-tree]

Imagine risking your life just to gather food for your family—only for shells to rain down on you as you wait in line.

Images: (Top) A recent photo Hossam sent us of him and his infant daughter Habiba, assuring us the family is still alive. (Bottom) The messages Hossam was able to send to us, detailing a recent attack on civilians that he survived.

@diana-family

Written by @rumiandroses

This is the horrifying reality Hossam Al-Qazzaz faced this week.

Already displaced from their home, Hossam, his wife Hanan, and their four children—Bashar (9), Hani (8), Diana (4), and 9-month-old Habiba—are struggling to survive in a battered tent on the coast after being evacuated once again from the ruins of their home in Khan Younis.

To feed his starving family, Hossam often walks over 14 kilometers to reach aid distribution points; an incredibly dangerous journey, where many are shot or trampled in the ensuing chaos of the actual distribution.

Just days ago, while at one such aid distribution site, tragedy struck:

Shells were fired into the crowd.

Hossam was there with his brother-in-law, Mohammed Zanad (who we've previously written about HERE), and Mohammed's son, Abdul Rahman, when the violence broke out. Hossam suffered minor injuries to his face, but his brother-in-law and nephew were badly injured; Mohammed was badly injured by shrapnel across his entire body, while Abdul Rahman suffered a severe injury to his right hand. As of this writing, he remains in a British field hospital awaiting evaluation; the little boy’s hand may require amputation.

After days without contact due to the internet outages in Gaza, Hossam messaged us this morning, frustrated and exhausted:

“We were together, the three of us, at the aid distribution site, and a missile fell on us and those present. Now we can only pray for them. He is a poor little boy. I hope God heals his hand. Please pray for him...”

Like so many in Gaza, the Al-Qazzaz family is trapped in an endless cycle of terror, injury, and loss. They are battling hunger, constant bombardment, and the inability to flee because of closer borders and war-induced financial hardship. Skyrocketing food prices and destroyed infrastructure make basic survival nearly impossible, forcing Hossam and others like him to go to these dangerous aid sites to simply not starve.

Please consider donating to the Al-Qazzaz family's fundraiser. Every dollar we send the Al-Qazzaz family helps Hossam and feed his wife, four young children, and elderly parents without having to risk death to do it; buy formula for the youngest child, baby Habiba; help support the family financially as they are continually forced to relocate and start over with every attack that claims their belongings; and cover any necessary medical care or other essentials for the family.

The trauma this family is enduring is unimaginable, and they need help urgently.

If you are able, we implore you: please share the Al-Qazzaz family's story far and wide, and donate, of you're able. Their campaign has stalled, and they haven't received any donations in days. If we all contribute even a little, we can help this precious family survive—and give them a chance to escape this nightmare.

You can donate to the Al-Qazzaz family's GoFundMe campaign here:

This campaign has been vetted by @gazavetters, and is (#287) on their list of verified campaigns.

Sources (independently verified across multiple international outlets):

1. Reuters — Israeli tank shelling kills 45 people awaiting aid trucks in Gaza, ministry says — June 17, 2025 https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/israeli-tank-shelling-kills-45-people-awaiting-aid-trucks-gaza-ministry-says-2025-06-17

2. Associated Press — At least 51 Palestinians killed while waiting for aid trucks in Gaza, health officials say — June 17, 2025

https://apnews.com/article/israel-palestinians-hamas-war-news-gaza-aid-06-17-2025-7af5503ea7d2176674fba26d34f6ef74 3. The Guardian — Dozens more people killed or injured seeking desperately needed aid in Gaza — June 19, 2025 https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/jun/19/dozens-more-people-killed-or-injured-seeking-desperately-needed-aid-in-gaza 4. Washington Post — At least 51 Palestinians killed while waiting for aid trucks in Gaza, health officials say — June 17, 2025 https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2025/06/17/israel-palestinians-hamas-war-news-gaza-aid-06-17-2025/da07a62e-4b4d-11f0-8fff-262d6ec54ab9_story.html 5. Financial Times — How Gaza’s food queues turned into kill zones (analysis of the June aid-queue attacks) — June 2025 https://www.ft.com/content/8cbea8ef-fdfe-4e75-916e-59b0820242ed

[nethermax1]

so it turns out the reason you sound like a boomer, o underwater dingbat, is because you ARE a boomer, gobbling down sources with the veracity of margarine because they reinforce your preconceived biases. Also that's just. Not how brains work. Unless it's some sort of toxic chemical or physical damage, you aren't going to lose brain cells. In a word, SHUT.

It's cool how this is a 60k note post when almost every word of it is untrue

[becomingthatgirl111]

be aware of what you consume:

the energy of others: surround yourself with positive people and avoid those who drain you.

the videos you watch: select content that inspires, educates or entertains you in a healthy way.

what you read: look for reliable sources and material that enriches you intellectually.

who you follow: follow people who inspire and challenge you to grow.

what you scroll through on social media: avoid negative content and look for something that motivates you or makes you feel good.

the news: look for objective sources of information and avoid information overload.

highlights of others: compare less and celebrate more the achievements of others.

the advice you listen to: evaluate advice according to your criteria and needs.

source: @zamirasaba

[ao3org]

Changes to Character Tags in Video Blogging RPF: Usernames Incoming!

Hello! In the near future, the Video Blogging RPF wrangling team will change the way we format character tags. We’re happy to announce that all canonical character tags will include content creators’ usernames by default, similar to what has been done for character tags in SMP fandoms for some time.

For example, the following tags will be updated:

Sean McLoughlin will be renamed to Sean McLoughlin | Jacksepticeye

Jeremy Harrington will be renamed to Jeremy | Jerma985

Rachell "Rae" Hofstetter will be renamed to Rachell "Rae" Hofstetter | Valkyrae

Apollo Willems will be renamed to Apollo Willems | DumbDog

These changes are already underway for smaller-use character tags, and we ask for your patience as we roll out changes across all relevant Video Blogging RPF character tags. We hope this change makes it easier for you to find and tag your works. We’ve included more granular details below for anyone curious about the specifics :)

Why are you making this change?

As we’re an RPF subfandom, we adhere to standard policy for RPF tag formatting, which means including a legal name where appropriate. We source legal names from web pages that are publicly accessible at the time of canonization, which creators would have endorsed themselves (such as their social media or interview articles). However, when character tags only contain a legal name, they’re often unrecognizable for both users and wranglers. 

If a content creator primarily promotes themselves under a username, many users likely won’t know who the canonical character tag is referring to. Similarly, tag wranglers have struggled with accidentally duplicating character tags: we have trouble finding the canonical tags too!

To improve things for everyone, we’re changing our canonical tags to include usernames alongside legal names where appropriate. This ensures we’re compatible with other RPF fandoms—which we often have overlap with—while keeping tags usable and recognizable. 

Will this affect anyone whose character tag is only a username? Will you add legal names to tags that don’t have them already? 

We don’t plan to edit any existing canonical character tags that only contain a username. For example, TommyInnit (Video Blogging RPF) will remain canonical, even though the creator has since also made content under the legal name Tom Simons. 

In rare cases, a username may be ambiguous within Video Blogging RPF, and we will add another name or more information to a character tag to differentiate it. However, this is generally quite rare. When we conducted our audit of all character tags in Video Blogging RPF, the vast majority of username-only tags did not require additional disambiguation and will not be changed. 

In other cases, such as a content creator not wanting to be associated with a username anymore, we will remove the relevant information from the tag and replace it with a more appropriate name. This is similar to how we handle content creators who do not go by old legal names anymore. If a content creator changes their name—legal name or username—and does not want to be associated with their old name, we have and always will update the character tag as appropriate. 

What if a legal name on a character tag is incorrect? Will you be fixing those?

During our audit, we also ran into a few cases where a character tag’s legal name is incorrect, outdated, or there are conflicting sources. We will be updating such tags with more up-to-date information as we come across them or will remove names from a tag entirely if there are conflicting sources. For example, as mentioned above, Jeremy Harrington will be renamed to Jeremy | Jerma985 due to conflicting unofficial sources regarding the creator's legal last name. 

We want to thank our volunteers for their hard work, both for evaluating the 6000+ character tags in Video Blogging RPF and for preparing to rename all relevant tags as quickly and smoothly as possible. Given the large number of tags that will be changed, these changes will take some time to complete. We ask for your patience as we work to rename all relevant tags. If you have any follow-up questions, or concerns about specific tags, you can always contact AO3 Support.

(From time to time, ao3org posts announcements of recent or upcoming wrangling changes on behalf of the Tag Wrangling Committee.)

[rafeslvbug]

when nfl!rafe gets injured…

he’s hurt his leg over something minor, nonetheless he’s on bed rest, not allowed to move without help as per the doctor’s orders.

he feels useless, lazy, like his muscles are deflating in the few hours he’s spent in the bed. his eyes are shut, like he’d rather fall asleep than stare at the ceiling or watch tv.

arm under his head, he hears the faint creak of the door, followed by light and clumsy footsteps that he can’t see the source of, and you behind, arms bundled with toys. grunting, he lifts his head off the pillow, smiling when he sees his daughter hurrying to his side of the bed, wearing a little doctor’s gown and plastic stethoscope around her neck.

“momma said to come take care of you dada,” she babbled, while you laid her toys down on the ground and lifted her so that she could sit on the bed beside rafe. he chuckles, glancing at you as you shrug your shoulders and join him on the other side of the bed.

his hand rests on your thigh as he turns his head to his daughter, whose begun to collect random plastic tools. “she did, did she? how you gonna take care of me?” he asks, as she presses the stethoscope to his chest, listening intently at the fake heartbeat that he drums into the mattress for her.

“i’m gonna…check your leg,” she mumbles, having not quite discovered the different parts of the body in detail, but knowing that you told her rafe hurt his leg. rafe lets out a laugh, grinning as he looks at you, who helps her to get access to rafe’s leg.

she’s got her pink reflex hammer in her hand, looking up at you with big doe eyes for reassurance, before she lightly taps his knee with it. rafe lets out a feigned sound of pain, prompting her to giggle and carry on. but when she taps the spot of his injury, the groan that escapes his lips is very real, as is the laughter that erupts from you.

“that’s very good baby, but why don’t we check daddy’s other leg?” you can’t get the sentence out without giggling, shifting to lift her up and over so that she’s sitting on the same side of rafe as you.

he’s still got his eyes squeezed shut, and your daughter’s got a small pout on her face. “dada, you okay?” she tilts her head to the side, kneeling up as high as she can to spot his face. rafe gives her a silent thumbs up, and she continues her medical evaluation, while rafe pulls you closer, holding onto you as a way to ease the pain coursing through him. “you’re evil,” he wheezes, because he can still hear you trying to suppress your laughter.

[teaandcrowns]

Hey so here is the original post with a reblogged addendum by the original poster, who was screenshot. You can tell the poster who created this particular version of it did not include everything the screenshotted poster said because it is cut off mid-sentence. 

Considering that the original, screenshotted poster is also on tumblr, still has an active and very searchable blog (I found this post in about 15 seconds of typing in their blog name then going to their archive and looking only at text posts), and the post itself is still rebloggable, I encourage everyone interacting with this post and incomplete screenshot of the original post to think about why someone might choose to: 1) screenshot instead of reblog, 2) not include a screenshot of the entire post, and 3) add accusatory rhetoric about an incomplete quote. It is quite easy to see, with a cursory glance through reblogs of the original that the OP reblogged themselves to continue the conversation, that they were not saying or implying what this secondary re-poster is accusing them of implying.

Seeing a screenshot of an active tumblr where the post could be reblogged (and where the blog who reposted does not acknowledge and give reason why they left out the fuller context) should immediately raise questions, and I implore everyone to take a moment to do a little digging in those instances, especially with controversial topics (or information some might gain to misrepresent).

I know tumblr isn't academics, but it has its own citation conventions—reblogging, which allows people to trace back to previous posters (for a given iteration of a post), and adding in hyperlinks. Just like in academics, and any other well-researched genre of writing, this is so readers can go back to one's sources and do things like: choose to read more on their own or see the original context of the information or quote used and hold other writers accountable for any misrepresentations.

Liberals are already telling everyone all the things they can't have in the future, which I'm sure will generate winning levels of enthusiasm

[literaryvein-reblogs]

Some Words to Describe Eyes

Ablaze - radiant with light or emotion

Alert - watchful and prompt to meet danger or emergency

Angelic - resembling, or suggestive of, an angel (as in purity, holiness, innocence, or beauty)

Beady - small, round, and shiny with interest or greed

Beguiling - agreeably or charmingly attractive or pleasing

Bewitching - powerfully or seductively attractive or charming

Blazing - of outstanding power, speed, heat, or intensity

Bloodshot - inflamed to redness

Calm - still; free from agitation, excitement, or disturbance

Captivating - charmingly or irresistibly appealing

Cold - marked by a lack of the warmth of normal human emotion, friendliness, or compassion

Critical - exercising or involving careful judgment or judicious evaluation

Curious - marked by desire to investigate and learn

Doe-eyed - having large innocent-looking eyes

Dry eye - a condition associated with inadequate tear production and marked by redness, itching, and burning of the eye

Eagle eye - one that sees or observes keenly

Eye roll - an upward turning of the eyes especially as an expression of annoyance, exasperation, disbelief, etc.

Feline - sleekly graceful

Flecked - marked with streaks or spots

Gleaming - glinting; to give off reflection in brilliant flashes

Glistening - shining with reflected light

Good eye - a special ability to recognize a particular thing or quality

Gloomy - having a frowning or scowling appearance

Guileless - innocent, naive

Hypnotic - readily holding the attention

Inviting - attractive, tempting

Iridescent - having or exhibiting a lustrous or attractive quality or effect

Irresistible - impossible to resist (i.e., to exert force in opposition)

Keen/sharp eye - a special ability to notice or recognize a particular thing or quality

Lovestruck - powerfully affected by feelings of romantic love for someone

Magnetic - possessing an extraordinary power or ability to attract

Moon-eyed - having the eyes wide open

Mysterious - exciting wonder, curiosity, or surprise while baffling efforts to comprehend or identify; mystifying

Narrowed - to lessen in width or extent

Opalescent - reflecting an iridescent light

Penetrating - having the power of entering, piercing, or pervading

Piercing - perceptive

Puffy - swollen in size; bloated

Radiant - vividly bright and shining; marked by or expressive of love, confidence, or happiness

Rheumy - having a watery discharge from the mucous membranes

Riveting - having the power to fix the attention; engrossing, fascinating

Scrunched - to cause (something, such as one's features) to draw together—usually used with up

Sheep's eye - a shy longing usually amorous glance—usually used in plural

Soulful - full of or expressing feeling or emotion

Striking - attracting attention or notice through unusual or conspicuous qualities

Sultry - hot with passion or anger

Tantalizing - possessing a quality that arouses or stimulates desire or interest

Tearful - flowing with or accompanied by tears

Tired - drained of strength and energy

Vapid - lacking flavor, zest, interest, animation, or spirit; flat, dull

Wandering eye - a tendency to look at and have sexual thoughts about other people while already in a romantic relationship

Watchful - carefully observant or attentive

Weary - exhausted in strength, endurance, vigor, or freshness

Weather eye - constant and shrewd watchfulness and alertness

Worshipful - giving or expressing worship or veneration

Sources: 1 2 ⚜ Word Lists ⚜ Writing Resources PDFs ⚜ Describing Eyes

It's alright (I have too many sideblogs for my own good at this point)! You can find more words to describe eyes in the sources linked above. Hope this helps with your writing.

[bimboficationblues]

so the thing about "read theory" as a mantra: in the social media sphere there is a consistent downplaying of what that kind of commitment actually entails, plus a consistent obfuscation of what exactly the commitment is necessary for.

let's say that you're interested in learning more about specifically "Marxist theory." This, I think, also raises a bunch of questions about what we mean by theory - works of political philosophy, texts on revolutionary and military strategy, political speeches, journalistic or sociological analysis, historiography - these varying things with very different discursive norms and standards of evidence or logic often get rolled into one singular object called "theory." but let's set that aside for now.

you want to learn this for maybe an assortment of reasons, here's a few (non-exhaustive) good ones:

Marxism has been a substantial historical force that has probably had a notable impact on the world around you in some way.

Learning about Marx/ism might offer some level of insight into your current social world that other things are unable to offer.

Many texts - Capital, The Wretched of the Earth, The Second Sex, The State and Revolution - are also world-historical forms of political literature, which is interesting.

Follow-up to 2 - maybe having some level of familiarity with these things will give you the ability to better articulate yourself and participate in social and political movements around you.

generally speaking the Social Media Marxist approach is to tell you to go read off a list of texts of whatever writers the author personally agrees with or whatever works she happens to have read. so you decide to start with the big guy Marx, who is at the top of the list. totally reasonable decision.

however, there are a few contextual questions that might reasonably come up when doing so.

first, it will be clear that Marx did not pop out of an intellectual vacuum; Lenin has a rather popular identification of the "three sources of Marxism" - post-Hegelian German philosophy, French socialism, and English political economy. from my perspective, these are more like three of his main objects of ire (and so in some sense are both influences and also breakages - but not strictly speaking a synthesis), but I digress. so, frequently, in order to grasp what Marx is talking about or responding to, you are going to need some level of familiarity with a lot of additional people: Smith, Ricardo, Malthus, Hegel, Bauer, Feuerbach, Hobbes, Spinoza, Rousseau, Mill, Sismondi. suddenly you are not just learning about the works of one guy, but his attitude towards all the people he relies on for support or aims his criticisms at. and each of those different intellectual relationships is going to be different. sometimes at different times!

second, and relatedly, Marx is not always the most charitable to the people he's criticizing, who were often rival socialists (so there were pretty notable political and personal stakes at work in proving them wrong or diminishing their influence over the movement). the introductory materials to the new translation of Capital also observe that Marx's approach to scholarship is, shall we say, haphazard; often he makes quotes or citations that are not actually representative of what he's citing. finally, many of the people he's criticizing have sort of been rendered obsolete historically *in no small part* due to the success of Marxism as a political orientation in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. so to determine whether Marx is being fair to the people he is basing his critique on, we will have to do some level of intellectual work to check. so now we're not just evaluating Marx's relationship to different thinkers but also the substantial content of each of those thinkers themselves.

third, Marx did not pop out of a social vacuum. all of these different writers didn't just crop up from nowhere but wrote within particular sociohistorical contexts, some of which were rather divorced from the European revolutionary wave, first worldwide financial crisis, and the shifting character of the United States in the wake of the Civil War and the formal abolition of slavery - some of the historical events that Marx was more explicitly engaging with. and the radical liberals, republicans, and socialists Marx criticized all also had their own intellectual and social histories. so now we're getting a little far afield from the initial notion, which was just to read some guy, and getting into the realm of social history, and trying to understand the relationship between world history and the ideas produced within it.

fourth, you are a subject in the world, which is to say YOU did not pop out of a social or intellectual vacuum. you likely bring predispositions, assumptions, biases, and cognitive distortions to what you read; we all do. working through those and trying to note where they're happening - where they might be fine and where they might be problematic - will require a certain willingness to reflect, to write, to take notes, to analyze and self-scrutinize, and to be critical of both yourself as a reader and of the text you are reading. (a nested problem is that we have a truly staggering amount of material from Marx and Engels, and you might have to make certain determinations as to which material is important or worthwhile or more useful, and identify the standards by which you think that - all of which requires a certain reflection on your status as a political thinker).

okay, so consider all that. we started with "I wanna read this one guy," we end with "to really grasp the work of this one guy it's also important to know both preceding and contemporaneous world history, his intellectual influences, and the gaps or silences or errors in his work.” now consider that, if you really want to be able to speak on them with some level of confidence and intellectual honesty, you have to apply approximately the same level of rigor to every other writer on the Social Media Marxist approved list - Lenin, Fanon, Che, Kollontai, Cabral, Mao, Luxemburg, whoever. not to mention their critics, both direct and indirect!

Marx developed his work through an incredibly sustained engagement with enormous volumes of different material; we have entire notebooks of him poring over Max Stirner, or Spinoza, or the political economists, or the empirical observations of English factory inspectors. I'm not saying that you have to do that, or even that one strictly *has* to go down any or all of the first three rabbitholes I identified. Marx was in the somewhat unique position of sustaining himself through the support of Engels and his journalistic work, as a product of being in perpetual exile. that's not the kind of position that most of us are typically in.

the point is not "commit yourself to being a perfect monastic scholar in order to reach perfect truth" - such a thing is probably a fantasy, even if we wish otherwise. the point is that if you think "theory" is worth taking seriously, well, you have to actually take it seriously. if you don’t think it has stakes or utility, that’s fine; different people find different things useful. I think “theory” is not a set of dead letters by canonical authors but produced through social life. but if “reading theory” is a way to clarify and assert yourself as a political subject and agent, to claim some intellectual autonomy and acquire some understanding that you can put into practice in your life, then that’s demanding. it’s not impossible, but it does take real effort and a commitment to study and a certain level of resistance to being dogmatic. otherwise you are just letting yourself be rhetorically persuaded by whatever is in front of you or whatever affirms your biases.

as Marx says in the preface to Capital, Volume I, "I am of course assuming that my readers will want to learn something new, and so are ready to think for themselves."

[queenlua]

it's fun trying to consult the vast, exciting field of "medicine" for stuff to the effect of "wait, so is salt good for you or bad for you, did we ever come to a consensus on that"

b/c the median doctor is just going to parrot back whatever the party line was when they went to med school 20 years ago

and then you may stumble onto some rando on the internet who's making a convincing *contrarian* argument to the effect of "actually the party line is {completely wrong, vastly overstated, vastly more complicated than your doctors are telling you}, etc"

but also 80% of convincing contrarian randos on the internet are cranks, so you sigh and go look through their sources yourself, and thank god for sci-hub, but now you've read like eighteen different studies and you don't *really* have the background to evaluate them, but you're developing the strong hunch that the only obviously correct conclusion is "dear god why do all these studies suck ass"

and at that point your options are either "develop a weirdly intense relationship with a naturopath/nutritionist/opinionated-guy-at-the-gym and become Really Into Blood Test Metrics As A Hobby" or "shrug and assume shit is probably fine." and if the latter, well, damn, you coulda just skipped to the end and saved yourself some trouble!