eldritchboop

[eldritchboop]

Not to be nuanced on tumblr but I think it’s possible to believe that there are severe human rights abuses happening in Palestine right now and also believe that it’s wrong to try and rectify this by instilling fear in Jewish communities via violence.

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Stop just asking "is it normal?" and start asking "is it harming anyone?" Lots of harmful things are normalized in this society and lots of things considered weird or rare are completely harmless. Whether something is considered normal or common shouldn't be the deciding factor in whether it's okay

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Boss, about a project I’ve just been given because the current manager is two months behind:

Will you really be getting eight reports out this week?

Me: Hold my coffee.

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“I want you to do this with me for one month. One month. Write 10 observations a week and by the end of four weeks, you will have an answer. Because when someone writes about the rustic gutter and the water pouring through it onto the muddy grass, the real pours into the room. And it’s thrilling. We’re all enlivened by it. We don’t have to find more than the rustic gutter and the muddy grass and the pouring cold water.”

— Marie Howe, Boston University’s 2016 Theopoetics Conference  (via mothersofmyheart)

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We don’t talk enough about the importance of having a personality that is so rooted in yourself that the exterior world is unable to change you. It’s so easy to allow ourselves to get influenced and carried away by what everyone else is doing that we forget to take a step back and think if how we’re acting is actually in alignment with our core self. Going back to basics and being yourself to the fullest without feeling the pressure to conform and be just like everyone else is one of the most freeing experiences one can have.

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Okay, so I'm going to argue that it's actually BETTER to call modern zombies by a different name, because what we call a zombie is so fully inverted from traditional zombies that it's a mockery of the concept. I'm going to call traditional zombies by an earlier spelling (zombi) for ease of discussion

The idea of zombis comes from the Voudou religion, where a person was resurrected with magic or killed with drugs in a way that left them as an undead slave to the sorcerer. There is no eating of humans and no "turning" others. This was really common fear during colonial slavery. You can imagine why! The zombi is a perfect slave - never eats, never gets tired, never slows down, doesn't care about weather or pain, has no opinions or desires. Knowing that is what people want from you is horror. Knowing that the people around you would be happier if your humanity was stripped away is horror. Even worse, death isn't an escape from forced labor - you can never truly be free.

I would argue that both represent the horror of capitalism in some ways. The zombi is the knowledge that you will never be free from labor. That you are replaceable, expendable, and anonymous. You are the victim of slavery and therefore capitalism. Conversely, the modern zombie is about the horror of the other - the mindless horde that wants to swallow you up, turn you to their side, and all you do as a zombie is consume, consume, consume. It is a fear of conforming to the masses, not a fear of your position of powerlessness in a heartless system. One is about the horror of consuming, one is about the horror of being consumed.

Both are about the loss of individuality, but in different ways. The original zombie horror movie (Night of the Living Dead) didn't even call them zombies. I'd argue that there's a good reason to keep the two concepts separate and calling them by other names.

(If anyone is a Voudou practitioner or has more cultural experience here and wants to chime in, I'd love more nuance! I have a superficial understanding of zombis but enough to have some thoughts.)

can u imagine if other pieces of media were as scared of calling their monsters what they are as zombie media is about calling zombies zombies

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This is also the secret of project management.

the secret to organising any kind of trip with your friends is to become the benevolent dictator. do NOT wait for everyone to provide a consensus on things before you book anything. do it and then ask for feedback after. do not ask people what they would like to do just tell them what is happening and let them all nod along like the sheep they are. this is the ONLY way to coordinate a group of adults in their 20s/30s

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My boss is a gem. I’m dropping back to 32 hours a week to teach this fall class, so I’m just going it three weeks early. Gives people time to adjust to my new schedule and gives me two afternoons a week to get prepped for the fall class. That should get me at least two weeks ahead so I don’t drown.

Much.

I’ve committed to teaching a brand new online summer class. Starting in two weeks.

I have to write my fall class this summer too. While working 40 hour weeks and volunteering weekends at least through June.

I’m insane.

[eldritchboop]

Shop , Patreon , Books and Cards , Mailing List

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It's Juneteenth yall. And I'm not letting this day go unmarked.

Black people fight for everybody. We stand in solidarity with women, lgbt people, poor people all over the world of every skin color and background. Every religion and nationality.

Today, stand with us. Be with us. Tell a black person you love them. Hug a black person (with consent). Ask that hot black girl out today. Make a black person smile. Black lives matter to everybody and you matter to us.

Stand with us on Juneteenth like we stand with you all year round, and I hope a happy Pride month continues for all of us

💝

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Everyone will not just

If your solution to some problem relies on “If everyone would just…” then you do not have a solution. Everyone is not going to just. At not time in the history of the universe has everyone just, and they’re not going to start now.

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Somehow got the first week's lectures up despite volunteering half of Sunday. I have 42 students (gulp).

Got week two's lectures up tonight and started planning week 3. Somehow I've got to start working on the fall class, too, because I'll be working Saturdays all fall and have half the time to get stuff done.

I’ve committed to teaching a brand new online summer class. Starting in two weeks.

I have to write my fall class this summer too. While working 40 hour weeks and volunteering weekends at least through June.

I’m insane.

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Got a new haircut and realized I’m channeling Katherine Janeway.

No regrets.

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About Girl on Girl

“Searing… rigorously researched but never stuffy… Gilbert has compiled perhaps the first comprehensive examination of turn-of-the-millennium mainstream, cool-kid trends and ephemera, and how they were largely molded by those in power to sell a generation of girls and young women reality-warping lies.” —The New York Times “So clear-eyed that it’s startling.” —The Washington Post “Entertaining and even energizing, transforming a dismal history into something like a rallying cry.” —The Boston Globe From Atlantic critic and Pulitzer Prize finalist Sophie Gilbert, a blazing critique of early aughts pop culture What happened to feminism in the twenty-first century? This question feels increasingly urgent in a moment of cultural and legislative backlash, when widespread uncertainty about the movement’s power, focus, and currency threatens decades of progress. Sophie Gilbert identifies an inflection point in the late 1990s and early 2000s, when the energy of third-wave and “riot grrrl” feminism collapsed into a regressive period of hyper-objectification, sexualization, and infantilization. Mining the darker side of nostalgia, Gilbert trains her keen analytic eye on the most revealing cultural objects of the era, across music, film, television, fashion, tabloid journalism, and more. What she recounts is harrowing, from the leering gaze of the paparazzi to the gleeful cruelty of early reality TV and a burgeoning internet culture vicious toward women in the spotlight and damaging for those who weren’t. Gilbert tracks many of the period’s dominant themes back to the rise of internet porn, which gained widespread influence as it began to pervade our collective consciousness. The result is a devastating portrait of a time when a distinctly American blend of excess, materialism, and power worship collided with the culture’s reactionary, puritanical, and chauvinistic currents. Amid a collective reconsideration of the way women are treated in public, Girl on Girl is a blistering indictment of the matrix of misogyny that undergirded the cultural production of the early twenty-first century, and continues to shape our world today.

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Having experienced a lot of it in my 20s, I think some of the worst, pettiest, most straight up this-is-just-bullying-you're-passing-off-as-praxis incidences of Queer Infighting endemic to young people can be best understood as attempts to exercise power by people with very little power.

Like you're 22, you're queer, you've just become a Marxist, the scope of World Suck is overwhelming and you have $30 in your bank account. What can you do to feel like you have any power? Well, you can try to get your frenemy cancelled for cosplaying a character from a problematic show. You can write a public callout post over someone's obviously friendly use of a slur you don't think they technically have the right to reclaim. Doing this stuff can make you feel like you have power and your actions have an impact. Unfortunately the impact in question is a negative impact on other marginalized people. But that often takes some maturity and self-reflection to notice.

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Genuinely I think repeatedly making "I'm so brave for (doing mildly uncomfortable thing)" jokes is actually really building my resilience, because when I accomplish an actually difficult task I'm then suddenly euphoric and then chasing the high of accomplishing more tasks.

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"these researchers published a paper on something that literally any of us could have told you 🙄" ok well my supervisors wont let me write something in my thesis unless I can back it up with a citation so maybe it's a good thing that they're amplifying your voice to the scientific community in a way that prevents people from writing off your experiences as annecdotal evidence