jefgodesky

[jefgodesky]

[jefgodesky]

from today (january 9, 2023) until january 30th you can stream for free about 60 works from indigenous filmmakers courtesy of the media city film festival. includes films from alanis obomsawin, macarthur recipient sky hopinka, and many more.

[jefgodesky]

the dubious philosophy of salmon

[jefgodesky]

gotta be honest and say it's a insane to me that a bunch of people 'misremembered' nelson mandela dying in prison in the 80s even though he lived to become the president of south africa in the 90s and instead of thinking 'wow, i really should learn a bit more about international politics outside of north america and europe because not knowing such a basic fact like this about one of the most influential political figures of all time is kind of embarrassing', they became convinced that this was proof that parallel realities exist and they were somehow having memories of an universe where mandela died in prison somehow. that's presumptuous on a level i can barely conceive of

[jefgodesky]

[jefgodesky]

The more I learn about plant sentience, the more I realize that what seems like a very niche and controversial concept is actually a basic foundation of the work of so many botanists and ecologists.

Plant sentience is only really controversial and ridiculous to people whose coworkers aren't plants. Even the most doubtful botanists are willing to at least consider that plants have some form of consciousness because it's so hard argue that these living things, which work so hard to stay alive, don't display any signs of consciousness.

[jefgodesky]

This button is on point🌱😊

[jefgodesky]

How to Respond to Criticism

Stop doing everything. Don’t say anything or be anything. Get as small as you possibly can without disappearing. Don’t exist. Or keep existing, but differently than before.

Remember: criticism is the same thing as wholesale condemnation and also murder, so react accordingly.

Apologize, but don’t really mean it, and plant a seed of secret resentment so deep in your own heart that years later you can’t even remember that you’re the one who nurtured it and made it grow, it seems that much like a native part of you.

Sink into a hole so deep that no one can ever find you.

No. No. No. No no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no no NO. NO.

JUST DIE. JUST GET SICK AND DIE AND THEN YOU’LL FEEL TERRIBLE YOU EVER SAID THOSE THINGS BECAUSE I’LL BE DEAD AND YOU’LL BE SO SO SO SORRY AND YOU’LL WISH YOU COULD BRING ME BACK BUT YOU CAN’T.

Give up on all of your goals immediately.

Tell everyone you know about the criticism, but in a way that makes it clear that you expect them to publicly find it ridiculous and assure you there’s not a shred of truth to it. Do this repeatedly, first while sober, then later after several glasses of wine on a Wednesday afternoon when no one else is really drinking except for you. “Can you believe it?” Ask them that repeatedly. “Can you believe that? About me?” Ask until no one will meet your eyes.

Remember that life is a rich tapestry.

Become so rich and strong and tall that you’re a giant made out of gold and nobody can hurt you and everything you do is perfect and you can use your laser diamond eyes to melt the lungs of your enemies.

Dwell on it.

You can either be perfect or the biggest piece of shit who ever existed but not both, so if the criticism is right, you are the biggest piece of shit who ever existed. If it is not right, you are perfect and everyone else is wrong.

Fall in love with whoever criticized you. Don’t walk away until you’ve ruined their marriage.

Whisper their criticism every night to yourself until you have it memorized, word for word. Remember it forever. Have the words stitched into the shroud that covers your body before you’re lowered into the tomb so you and your criticism can embrace one another for eternity.

Do not rise above it. Never rise above anything. The sky is no place for a human.

Be sure not to separate the tone of the criticism from the content. If it was said ungracefully, it cannot be true. If it was said reasonably, it cannot be false.

Send an email explaining why you don’t deserve to be criticized, then another six emails after that, each one explaining the last, like a set of Russian nesting dolls that don’t think it’s your fault.

Set fire to something that was once beautiful.

Run into a cave and break your ankle so that people have to come find you and they see you lying at the bottom of this beautiful cave and maybe there’s a waterfall and the light from the crystals makes you look really beautiful and they say “Are you okay?” and you say “I think so” and they say “oh my God have you been here alone this whole time with a broken ankle” and you say “it’s okay” and they say “you’re so brave” and you are brave and you look so beautiful surrounded by cave crystals and everyone stands over you and says “oh wow” and “you poor beautiful thing” and “I’m so sorry we let you run into the cave but I’m so glad we found you” and let them carry you home and promise to be your best friends forever and that everything’s their fault and also they named the cave after you and you’re prettier than all of your enemies and your enemies all died of jealousy while you were in the cave.

Remember that there are only two kinds of people in the world: fans and haters. No true fan would ever express a criticism of you or your work; conversely no hater could ever seek to engage in a good-faith debate about something you said or did they disagree with. Dismiss everything everyone has to say about you.

Move away.

If it’s a close friend, say “Thank you for being so honest with me,” and then never talk to them again.

Do something with your feelings right away. It doesn’t matter what. Lash out, make a sculpture, whatever.

Log into YouTube and call someone “living Hitler” and “a waste of skin” until you feel better about yourself.

Remember, if someone doesn’t like your work, that means they don’t like you, and they wish that you had never been born, so just lay down in the road and die.

Mallory Ortberg, The Toast

[jefgodesky]

[jefgodesky]

What does it mean to be a billionaire?

So there’s been a lot of discussion floating around regarding billionaires and society, and I’ve noticed that most people have no idea what a billion dollars is for practical purposes - people tend to think of it as a vague, nebulous concept of “a lot of money” rather than something concrete you can wrap your head around. This is understandable, considering 1) a billion of anything is really hard to visualize and 2) the average person has no real reference point for an amount of money that large. So I’m going to try to break it down for everyone:

Okay, so imagine you have a billion dollars. What can you actually buy with that?

This is a mega mansion that will have an Imax cinema, a bowling alley, and a spa when it’s fully complete. It costs around 4.6 million dollars.

Now let’s buy one of these in every country in Europe - that’s 50 mansions you now own. So how are you going to travel between all your many homes?

This is a Bugatti Veyron Super Sport, the fastest street-legal car in the world. It has a maximum speed of a face-melting 254 mph and can go from 0 to 60 mph in 2.5 seconds. It costs around 2.5 million dollars.

Let’s buy a dozen of them - you know, in case you total a few of them racing around the highway. But maybe a sports car is still to slow for you:

This is an Embraer Lineage 1000. It’s private jet that can seat up to 19 passengers, and we’re going to buy it for 53 million dollars.

How about a boat? The Tatoosh is a 303 ft private yacht, meaning it’s longer than a football field. We’ll take it for 369 million dollars.

Do you like art? Just for fun let’s buy Monet’s most expensive painting ($90 million) Van Gogh’s most expensive painting ($151 million), and this monstrosity, which is made with 8,601 diamonds and costs 65 million dollars.

Now that we’ve gone on our ludicrous and absurdly wasteful shopping spree, how much money do we have leftover? About 12 million dollars, which is almost an order of magnitude more than the average American with a bachelors degree or higher earns in a lifetime ($1.8 million). So if you for whatever reason decided to buy the 50 houses, 12 sports cars, plane, yacht, art pieces etc. and immediately set them all on fire, you would still have enough cash leftover so you never would have to work again if you so chose. This is what it means to be a billionaire.

But we’re not done yet.

The richest person in the world is Bill Gates, with a net worth of 86 billion dollars. If he liquidated his assets, what could he buy?

Well, for starters, the Burj Khalifa - the tallest man-made structure in the world at 2,722 feet tall, costing around 1.5 billion dollars.

The Large Hadron Collider, the world’s biggest and most advanced particle accelerator for 9 billion dollars.

The Hubble Space Telescope for 10 billion dollars (including 20 years of operating costs).

The Three Gorges Dam, the largest power station in the world, more than a mile wide.

And to top it all off, a fleet of five Nimitz-class aircraft carriers, the largest military vessels ever built for around 8.9 billion dollars each. If you look at the picture very closely you can see the people standing on it for reference.

If Bill Gates bought all of this, he would still have around 2.3 billion dollars leftover. That’s enough to go on the billionaire shopping spree I described above twice over (so 100 mansions, 24 sports cars etc.) and still have hundreds of millions of dollars in the bank when it’s all said and done.

But we’re not done yet.

Currently, it’s estimated that there are 2,043 billionaires alive today, with a combined net worth of around 7.67 trillion dollars.

This is Russia, the largest country in the world, extending more than six and a half million square miles, with a population of more than 144 million people. The United Kingdom could fit inside Russia 70 times.

In 2016 Russia’s gross domestic product was about 1.28 trillion dollars. This means that if the two thousand and some odd richest people in the world - less than half of 0.1% of 0.1% of the Earth’s population - liquidated and pooled their assets together, they could buy every single product and service made in Russia for almost 6 years.

So yeah, make of that what you will.

[jefgodesky]

Why is “economic freedom” always measured in how easy it is for rich assholes to own limitless property and exploit the working class by the thousands, and not in how easy it is for the average person to meet their basic necessities so they can live comfortably and happily in society?

Really makes you think. It’s almost like we live in a society where those same rich assholes control the media and dominant ideological institutions, thus constricting us to a very particular socially-constructed definition of “freedom” that benefits them materially. It’s almost like power seeks to reproduce itself or something.

[jefgodesky]

In light of the recent events in the United States, most recently the racist violence in Charlottesville, Virginia, the undersigned community of medievalists condemns the appropriation of any item or idea or material in the service of white supremacy. In addition, we condemn the abuse of colleagues, particularly colleagues of color, who have spoken publicly against this misuse of history.

As scholars of the medieval world we are disturbed by the use of a nostalgic but inaccurate myth of the Middle Ages by racist movements in the United States. By using imagined medieval symbols, or names drawn from medieval terminology, they create a fantasy of a pure, white Europe that bears no relationship to reality. This fantasy not only hurts people in the present, it also distorts the past. Medieval Europe was diverse religiously, culturally, and ethnically, and medieval Europe was not the entire medieval world. Scholars disagree about the motivations of the Crusades—or, indeed, whether the idea of “crusade” is a medieval one or came later—but it is clear that racial purity was not primary among them.

Contemporary white nationalists are not the first Americans to have turned nostalgic views of the medieval period to racist purposes. It is, in fact, deeply ironic that the Klan’s ideas of medieval knighthood were used to harass immigrants who practiced the forms of Christianity most directly connected with the medieval church. Institutions of scholarship must acknowledge their own participation in the creation of interpretations of the Middle Ages (and other periods) that served these narratives. Where we do find bigotry, intolerance, hate, and fear of “the other” in the past—and the Middle Ages certainly had their share—we must recognize it for what it is and read it in its context, rather than replicating it.

The medieval Christian culture of Europe is indeed a worthy object of study, in fact a necessary one. Medieval Studies must be broader than just Europe and just Christianity, however, because to limit our object of study in such a way gives an arbitrary and false picture of the past. We see a medieval world that was as varied as the modern one. It included horrific violence, some of it committed in the name of religion; it included feats of bravery, justice, harmony, and love, some of them also in the name of religion. It included movement of people, goods, and ideas over long distances and across geographical, linguistic, and religious boundaries. There is much to be learned from studying the period, whether we choose to focus on one community and text or on wider interactions. What we will not find is the origin of a pure and supreme white race.

Every generation of scholars creates its own interpretations of the past. Such interpretations must be judged by how well they explain the writings, art, and artifacts that have come down to us. As a field we are dedicated to scholarly inquiry. As the new semester approaches at many institutions, we invite those of you who have the opportunity to join us. Take a class or attend a public lecture on medieval history, literature, art, music. Learn about this vibrant and varied world, instead of simply being appalled by some racist caricature of it. See for yourself what lessons it holds for the modern world.

The Medieval Academy of America BABEL Working Group International Center for Medieval Art International Congress on Medieval Studies Sewanee Medieval Colloquium Society for the Study of Disability in the Middle Ages TEAMS: Teaching Association for Medieval Studies The Fellowship of Medievalists of Color The Gender and Medieval Studies Group The International Arthurian Society-North American Branch The International Association for Robin Hood Studies The International Piers Plowman Society The International Society of Anglo-Saxonists The International Society for the Study of Medievalism The John Gower Society The New Chaucer Society The Society for Medieval Feminist Scholarship

-The Medieval Academy Blog

[jefgodesky]

I know saying this is beating a dead horse but it really is fucking sick that our species clearly evolved to engage in intensive physical activity and social interaction during its adolescence, yet we’ve built half our society around forcing our children to sit still and quiet while they obey a long list arbitrary rules created solely to test their conformity in basically a softcore prison for most of every year of their lives, even dumping extra work on them to take home and stress over during the short window they could otherwise spend with their families or the things that make them at all happy. And then we wonder why virtually every single adult in this society is an ill-adjusted wreck to some degree or another and can barely even agree on the definitions of “true” and “false” let alone right from wrong.

[jefgodesky]

[jefgodesky]

TL;DR: Women tended to marry between 20 and 32.  Read why below!

aufanficfanatic said: Isn’t it like, 14 or something?  I dunno man, educate me. 

I’m so glad you asked @aufanficfanatic because I have so much to say!

In upper classes the children were considered the property of the family, so they married whenever the parents wanted them too.  There were children of the nobility who where married as infants and then never saw their spouse until said spouse’s funeral due to the ague or whatever.  Even the daughter of a simple gentleman might start feeling a bit alarmed if she hit 24 without any offers of marriage, but then her duty was to secure a suitable match.

The merchant, crafts, and agricultural classes were a bit different.  And by a bit different I mean they were entirely different.  A lot of this marry at first blink of puberty thing is part of the mythology that because the average age of death pre-1700 was about 35-40 that meant everyone died at forty.  What really happened was that most people lived to 70 and half of all children died.  Application of math tells us that if you add 70+0 and then divide by two the average death date is a bit misleading as a statistic.

The two most important things to people in a primarily agricultural culture is population numbers and food.  You need more population to grow more food and you need more food for your population.  There are other, more complicated factors such as the local nobility using the peasantry as cannon fodder, taxation, self-defense of the village, trying to avoid depopulation, but we’re going to skip that discussion.

Population is the big issue when it comes to marriage age, and let’s be honest.  When we pick a teenage marriage age the picture people have in their minds is a forty year old man and a sixteen year old girl.  This large age gap marriage mythology is a largely colonist era idea that means to depict sexual exploitation of children is natural and traditional for the purpose of corrupting men’s natural healthy instincts and discrediting cries of alarm from women.

But we’re not here to talk about politics, we’re here to talk about population.  For Western Europe marriage was for the purpose of creating a home, a social, emotional, and physical support system - children were an expected part of that.  However!  Even among women who chose not to get married, and there was at least one bastard born every year, they chose to have their children at an older age.

There are several issues about a woman’s body that could get in the way of a young marriage age.  First being that historically the first child a woman had usually died within a month, if the child was born alive at all due to a variety of issues like nutrition and stress on the woman’s body.  You know how everybody tells women not to carry things?  Well, European women didn’t always have that luxury.  The older a woman was, the more like she would be to be strong enough to lose less babies.

Second, poor nutrition can push back puberty, or at the very least menstruation.  This meant that many young ladies would only have superficial signs of puberty until they hit about sixteen, meaning that even if someone was going by some patriarchal conception of when a woman was marriageable, she’d only appear ‘on the market’ at sixteen, not be married by it.

Third, the woman’s body was insufficiently developed as a teenager, IE if she was sixteen or younger, her vagina would be smaller and her vaginal lining would be too thin  as the thickness therein is determined by the amount of estrogen in the system.  Usually the vaginal lining is not childbirth safe until the end of puberty, which depending on the female, is between 18-20.  People are good at picking up patterns.  They figured out pretty quick that women under eighteen tended to die during childbirth.  I won’t be graphic, suffice to say they bled to death.

Fourth, due to apprenticeships and occupations, many women were too busy to get married as teenagers.  Women had occupations other than some variation of mother or healer?!?  Yes, rhetorical question, they did!  If your last name was Baxter or Webster, not only do you descend from a woman who was a Master of her craft (baking or weaving respectively) but that one of your male ancestors took on her surname instead of the opposite.  Other female heavy professions were black smithing, silver smithing, accounting, leather working, agricultural labor (except wagonering and plowing - no innuendo intended - that was more of a man’s job since they would often have to travel), administratrix (more legal than a steward, more useful than a lawyer), ale wifing and brewing, knitting and lace working, and notary-ing.  Since having one or both of a couple having a craft occupation meant that their children would have a shoe in to a network of guilds it was of great benefit.  Additionally since many men traditionally worked the land or went to war, it meant that their family would be taken care of if something happened to his health.

So there you go!  Women generally started getting married after they finished their apprenticeships or when they reached about 20 and started having their own property and kept getting married until they were tired of it.

[jefgodesky]

Pittsburgh Gothic

You’re waiting for the 61D. A 61A goes past. A 61A goes past. A 61A goes past. A 61A goes past. 

The closer you get to the Squirrel Hill tunnel, the slower everything moves. Cars. People. Particles. It’s cold. Oh god, you’re so cold. 

It was raining this morning, now it’s sunny outside. You check the thermometer, and it reads sixty. Better salt your sidewalk, gonna snow tonight.

You dropped a rock in that pothole on Brookline, and waited to hear it hit the bottom. You’re still waiting.

The sidewalk is getting steeper and steeper. Now there’s stairs. You climb and climb and climb. Look, a mountain goat. 

Your GPS tells you to take a sharp right to stay on Forbes. Your GPS tells you to take a slight left to stay on Forbes. Your GPS tells you to hit the man in the suit to stay on Forbes. Hit the man. Hit him. 

No one goes to Carlow University.

Bleeding? Buildings don’t bleed, don’t be silly. That’s just the steel rusting.

An orange sign just ahead of you reads “End Road Work.” You laugh, and see another sign. “Please. Please, I have children. End it.”

They built a bridge under the bridge to keep the bridge from falling on the other bridge under that bridge. The trolls are confused. Where can they live?

Someone said that if you fall in the Mon, when you climb out, your skin will peel off. Ridiculous. No one escapes the Mon. 

You’re trying to get home, but every single street is a one way that takes your further and further away. Where is home? What is home? 

They say the steel mills poisoned the air and killed the sky. Is that why it weeps? Whenever thunder roars, you swear you can hear a sob. 

A man is stabbed with a bottle outside the bar, and ichor the color of tar drips from between his fingers, flecked with gleaming yellow. He bleeds black and gold. The gutters overflow with black and gold. Steelers going to the superbowl.

You woke up and found U P M C etched into your wrist. You went to UPMC physician, and he sent you to UPMC Shadyside. They checked you out and said it’s nothing serious. Good thing you have UPMC healthcare, could have been pricey otherwise. 

The guy at Phipps laughs when you ask him what they use for fertilizer and shows you big bins of mulch in the back. Pitt students keep disappearing. The bins are never empty for long. 

The treasure map reads “Turn left at the big church, then go straight till you see a PNC.” Thirty souls set out to find it, each took a different path. None returned. 

[jefgodesky]

From the ashes a fire shall be woken, A light from the shadows shall spring; Renewed shall be blade that was broken, The crownless again shall be king.

Photo by Andrew Kearton.