postsforposting - Tumblr blog

[postsforposting]

It's because people were taught that drugs are "bad" because they "ruin your brain" and they "ruin your brain" because they "rewire your pleasure centers". That's not false, but it's not really why they're bad. Antidepressants do the same thing and come with the risk of permanent disabilities plus making your condition worse.

But all people actually learned was "drugs bad" because XYZ. So now, if you add "because xyz" onto anything, people will happily bleat along "yes, XYZ!". It's what they were taught to do. Memorize, regurgitate, never question. Questions lead to punishment and overthrowing of tradition, we can't be having actual thought and logic in our actions. That would endanger our eternal souls moral fiber social order! It's been the same song and dance throughout history: "you will be corrupted because of this, and then we'll have to kill you".

The way twitter and tiktok talk about dopamine responses you would think everyone was posting from a convent

You can make anything you hate in a "pathology" by writing about how it triggers a dopamine response: food, sex, social media, pop music, whatever.

And because you use big words, people will take it seriously when you speak, even if what you are saying is "doing something enjoyable is bad because it weakens your moral fiber." Because you didn't say those words, you said "this behavior rewirses your brain by triggering a dopamine response."

When quite literally any form of pleasure triggers a dopamine response! When I beat someone online at chess, it makes me happy. Does that mean chess is "the same as any addictive drug."

I joke, but the funny thing is, people did used to say this about pleasures we now see as enriching or classy. Reading novels was supposed to rot your brain, and Beethoven was too stimulating and could ruin your morals.

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saw this when it first aired. as a kid. who was taught that the way nasty sitcoms worked was how real life should work, aka being foul to people was funny and cool and normal behavior.

completely different experience seeing this knowing better.

Malcolm in The Middle was such a good show

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Possessed by what is the relevant question

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love shakespeare. did a hamlet run tonight, looked someone dead in the eye to say “am i a coward?” during a speech and the fucker shrugged and nodded

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to my knowledge, the eu and especially germany often have regulations for supplements akin to medical regulations. you can't just buy bulk in most things. melatonin is actually considered a drug, because it IS a hormone. the usa used to have regulations, but some senator who owned stock deregulated the whole industry and now we have the situation where the thing often doesn't even have the ingredient it claims to have on the package, let alone whether it has toxic levels of anything else in it or is deliberately adulterated.

so my throat hurts like a motherfucker (i wonder if i got sick from the dude i kissed at berghain. i mean. it could also just be from general dense city existence. oh man or the hostel. 8 hours breathing the air of like 20 travelers. no wonder i got sick) so i tried to find some like. ricola type cough drops. and they have a product whose name allegedly translates to cough drops but i cant seem to find an active ingredient. whatever, i buy some, only 2 euro. these shits do not do anything. its just honey candy! theres no menthol, but theres not even any emulcents. it LITERALLY just honey, sugar, and caramel. fucking germans. i asked the lady working there and they didnt seem to have anything better

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no, listen, you don't get it, it's a horror because he doesn't consider them people. if you work alone and they're not people, what you're running is a torture theme park

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and then they'll act shocked and outraged when you think literally everything revolves around you. not in a greedy egotistical way like they do, but in a literal way. because that's literally how they taught you to think in order to survive.

it's called darvo, known colloquially as projecting

abusers will go 'it makes me feel sooo upset when you live your life the way you want to and do the things you want to do, actually what you're doing is victimizing me by not existing only as a support and validation to me you are so abusive and selfish and you should think more about how your sense of freedom and boundaries is negatively effecting me'

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I really feel like the shift only happened because so many other people came out about what happened to them, because she was so public about hers. She wasn't the first, but she still did a lot of work to pave the way forward, deliberate or not. She didn't have the right at the time, but she knew she should have.

We can tell from people coming forward today that this "shift" still only applies in retrospect, long after people have had time to sit on things and see how many others come out. If there's only ever one, well, they're still treated like she was.

i'm sorry but this is the only submission to this trend that i'll consider giving any thought to

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but do you think bruce lined the batcave or sex dungeon with lead so that it was a surprise for clark?

do you think bruce constantly has renovations going so he can add more secret passages to the sex dungeon? put some art in there? just to mess with staff?

Realistically, a household the size of Wayne Manor needs more than just a butler, and while Bruce might imagine he can keep his proclivities secret from his own domestic staff, Alfred certainly harbours no such illusions. I've gotta wonder what the orientation lecture he's worked out looks like. Like, of course they're going to be extensively vetted before they ever set foot on the premises, but at some point during the onboarding process the subject of the Batcave has gotta come up – I just wanna know how Alfred broaches that.

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Using your slut skills to move up ranks is just logical. Having lots of people who will indulge your pon farr without needing to reveal that's what it is, is logical.

I think they should’ve made mirrorverse Spock sluttier

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My guess was that it didn't already exist and so could not possibly be coded into an algorithm. I think it actually came from making fun of the censorship though. Can't say kill so we'll say literally the same thing and that will hilariously be acceptable.

i know that "unalive" is part of larger worrying trend of self censorship but if you really are in a situtation where you have to avoid the words "die" or "kill" the english language already has centuries worth of much better euphemisms. the iconic and perennial "six feet under"? the lovely imagery of "pushing up daisies"? "shuffle off this mortal coil"????? literally anything from the monty python dead parrot bit???? you have so many options. please try to be more creative at least

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I feel like the idea that self awareness comes last rises from humanity thinking they're special. There's all these claims that only humans are capable of this or that, because up until recently we couldn't conceive of anything else mattering as much as we do. If they were like us then surely... They'd be like us. We couldn't fathom it would be different.

That cool bee book I was talking about a while ago mostly refrains from philosophical digressions (which I think is a strength, I appreciated how the author had total confidence that just clearly presenting the facts about his subject would be enough to make a fascinating book without the need for any "...and here's why that should blow your mind" editorializing, and he's totally right), but there was one towards the end I've found myself thinking about a lot, which is: he wants people to stop using "self-consciousness" (i.e. the concept exemplified by the mirror test but used implicitly or explicitly in tons of other contexts) as a criterion for which animals can be considered sentient/morally relevant/having significant inner lives/however you want to describe it. Not, as you might expect, because he thinks it's an unreasonably high bar to meet, but because it's such a low bar that it produces no distinctions: he argues that basically any animal with any kind of developed central nervous system has to have some kind of self-consciousness almost by definition.

The example I remember best is: imagine you can see an object in your visual field getting closer to you. No matter the specifics, it's obviously always going to make a huge difference to how you evaluate this situation whether the cause of the object getting closer is a] the object is moving towards you, or b] you are moving towards the object. If a, then something might be pursuing you or falling on you or a thousand other things that are just not even worth considering in the case of b. But visually the two cases are indistinguishable; if you're going to be able to track the difference, your brain has to be putting at least some work into keeping tabs on what your own intentions are and what choices you're making as you move through the world, predicting the expected consequences of those choices, and maintaining a fairly tidy mental separation between stuff in the world that you're making happen and stuff in the world that's just happening of its own volition. Otherwise, every time you walk towards a rock you'll freak out and think the rock is rolling into you, or vice versa.

And it's not hard to see how this applies to your entire sensory world right, it applies to sounds and tactile sensations and even feelings internal to your body to some extent, if you're going to both perceive the world and take actions in the world then it's mandatory to mentally separate yourself and the world before that's going to yield even an ounce of helpful information, you just can't function successfully on the most basic level if you're processing stuff that you're doing on the same level as stuff that's happening, if you're in that state then you simply don't have a usable model of the world at all, you just have chaos.

So you can very easily eliminate a certain seductive narrative about the evolution of consciousness, which starts with very primitive animals who are mentally processing nothing but basic sensory inputs, then as you rise up the chain more complex animals are forming concepts of objects and building up a more nuanced understanding of the world, until finally you approach humans and the mind becomes so subtle and sophisticated that it gains access to this special advanced meta-level of thought where it can even understand itself! No, the self is precisely the one idea that has to be in place from the very beginning, before any of it has even the most rudimentary practical value. Self-consciousness isn't the pinnacle of the mind's evolution, it's one of the lowest, most basic foundations that everything else builds off of.

I think this is really cool stuff! I don't know enough about the relevant academic philosophy of mind debates to say how far all this does or doesn't speak to that, maybe someone will tell me the "self-consciousness" concept being attacked here is a strawman somehow, I don't know. But it's definitely impacted the way I (just a dumb guy who likes creatures) think about our small small cousins and what their lives might be like and I think it's super interesting. If you think it's interesting too then maybe you wanna buy The Mind of a Bee by Lars Chittka and read it. It's mostly not about this stuff, as I say it's light on philosophy and heavy on bee-life immersion, but if you actually read this whole post then you're probably in the market for that I feel like.

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Actually possible. Baptism is performed with holy water, and you can invalidate holy water by desecrating it. God believes thought crime counts as sin, so if you think mean things about him or just swear up a silent storm, you really can defend against a baptism. No one will ever know but you, the devil and god.

To nullify a previously performed baptism, you need only tempt the person to sin, which is incredibly easy. They don't need to actually sin, just have it cross their mind.

Hmm. Whatever *deactivates your baptism with my mind*

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If it's a grappling hook, then logically that's not just an erection but also an ejaculation. Do you think the JL would ever live down being saved by the batawang? Do you think Batman would sing "Every Sperm is Sacred" while shooting his shot?

Anyway...

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Saw a TikTok the other day where a blind guy went to the Louvre. The museum had specific exhibits made so that blind people could touch them, because that's the only way they'd know what they look like. Imagine if they did that for everything, let people touch a replica of things like the Mona Lisa or the David. You wouldn't need to have the original because that's not the point, you're there to learn about a specific thing. We don't have Jupiter or the dodo in science museums either, that doesn't stop them from having planetariums and extinct animal exhibits.

There's also lots of podcasts that teach these kinds of things made by art history people.

I think the difference between art and other kinds of exhibits is probably because art has always been hoity toity high class, so that's the kind of approach museums take. You're not there to learn, it's more like being in some rich guy's house. Because that's where art collections originally started. The idea of the fashion and science museum weren't built on that model, and they're far more recent than the ancient history of art collection.

I would be very interested in hearing the museum design rant

by popular demand: Guy That Took One (1) Museum Studies Class Focused On Science Museums Rants About Art Museums. thank u for coming please have a seat

so. background. the concept of the "science museum" grew out of 1) the wunderkammer (cabinet of curiosities), also known as "hey check out all this weird cool shit i have", and 2) academic collections of natural history specimens (usually taxidermied) -- pre-photography these were super important for biological research (see also). early science museums usually grew out of university collections or bequests of some guy's Weird Shit Collection or both, and were focused on utility to researchers rather than educational value to the layperson (picture a room just, full of taxidermy birds with little labels on them and not a lot of curation outside that). eventually i guess they figured they could make more on admission by aiming for a mass audience? or maybe it was the cultural influence of all the world's fairs and shit (many of which also caused science museums to exist), which were aimed at a mass audience. or maybe it was because the research function became much more divorced from the museum function over time. i dunno. ANYWAY, science and technology museums nowadays have basically zero research function; the exhibits are designed more or less solely for educating the layperson (and very frequently the layperson is assumed to be a child, which does honestly irritate me, as an adult who likes to go to science museums). the collections are still there in case someone does need some DNA from one of the preserved bird skins, but items from the collections that are exhibited typically exist in service of the exhibit's conceptual message, rather than the other way around.

meanwhile at art museums they kind of haven't moved on from the "here is my pile of weird shit" paradigm, except it's "here is my pile of Fine Art". as far as i can tell, the thing that curators (and donors!) care about above all is The Collection. what artists are represented in The Collection? rich fucks derive personal prestige from donating their shit to The Collection. in big art museums usually something like 3-5% of the collection is ever on exhibit -- and sometimes they rotate stuff from the vault in and out, but let's be real, only a fraction of an art museum's square footage is temporary exhibits. they're not going to take the scream off display when it's like the only reason anyone who's not a giant nerd ever visits the norwegian national museum of art. most of the stuff in the vault just sits in the vault forever. like -- art museum curators, my dudes, do you think the general public gives a SINGLE FUCK what's in The Collection that isn't on display? no!! but i guarantee you it will never occur, ever, to an art museum curator that they could print-to-scale high-res images of artworks that are NOT in The Collection in order to contextualize the art in an exhibit, because items that are not in The Collection functionally do not exist to them. (and of course there's the deaccessioning discourse -- tumblr collectively has some level of awareness that repatriation is A Whole Kettle of Worms but even just garden-variety selling off parts of The Collection is a huge hairy fucking deal. check out deaccessioning and its discontents; it's a banger read if you're into This Kind Of Thing.)

with the contents of The Collection foregrounded like this, what you wind up with is art museum exhibits where the exhibit's message is kind of downstream of what shit you've got in the collection. often the message is just "here is some art from [century] [location]", or, if someone felt like doing a little exhibit design one fine morning, "here is some art from [century] [location] which is interesting for [reason]". the displays are SOOOOO bad by science museum standards -- if you're lucky you get a little explanatory placard in tiny font relating the art to an art movement or to its historical context or to the artist's career. if you're unlucky you get artist name, date, and medium. fucker most of the people who visit your museum know Jack Shit about art history why are you doing them dirty like this

(if you don't get it you're just not Cultured enough. fuck you, we're the art museum!)

i think i've talked about this before on this blog but the best-exhibited art exhibit i've ever been to was actually at the boston museum of science, in this traveling leonardo da vinci exhibit where they'd done a bunch of historical reconstructions of inventions out of his notebooks, and that was the main Thing, but also they had a whole little exhibit devoted to the mona lisa. obviously they didn't even have the real fucking mona lisa, but they went into a lot of detail on like -- here's some X-ray and UV photos of it, and here's how art experts interpret them. here's a (photo of a) contemporary study of the finished painting, which we've cleaned the yellowed varnish off of, so you can see what the colors looked like before the varnish yellowed. here's why we can't clean the varnish off the actual painting (da vinci used multiple varnish layers and thinned paints to translucency with varnish to create the illusion of depth, which means we now can't remove the yellowed varnish without stripping paint).

even if you don't go into that level of depth about every painting (and how could you? there absolutely wouldn't be space), you could at least talk a little about, like, pigment availability -- pigment availability is an INCREDIBLY useful lens for looking at historical paintings and, unbelievably, never once have i seen an art museum exhibit discuss it (and i've been to a lot of art museums). you know how medieval european religious paintings often have funky skin tones? THEY HADN'T INVENTED CADMIUM PIGMENTS YET. for red pigments you had like... red ochre (a muted earth-based pigment, like all ochres and umbers), vermilion (ESPENSIVE), alizarin crimson (aka madder -- this is one of my favorite reds, but it's cool-toned and NOT good for mixing most skintones), carmine/cochineal (ALSO ESPENSIVE, and purple-ish so you wouldn't want to use it for skintones anyway), red lead/minium (cheaper than vermilion), indian red/various other iron oxide reds, and apparently fucking realgar? sure. whatever. what the hell was i talking about.

oh yeah -- anyway, i'd kill for an art exhibit that's just, like, one or two oil paintings from each century for six centuries, with sample palettes of the pigments they used. but no! if an art museum curator has to put in any level of effort beyond writing up a little placard and maybe a room-level text block, they'll literally keel over and die. dude, every piece of art was made in a material context for a social purpose! it's completely deranged to divorce it from its material context and only mention the social purpose insofar as it matters to art history the field. for god's sake half the time the placard doesn't even tell you if the thing was a commission or not. there's a lot to be said about edo period woodblock prints and mass culture driven by the growing merchant class! the met has a fuckton of edo period prints; they could get a hell of an exhibit out of that!

or, tying back to an earlier thread -- the detroit institute of arts has got a solid like eight picasso paintings. when i went, they were kind of just... hanging out in a room. fuck it, let's make this an exhibit! picasso's an artist who pretty famously had Periods, right? why don't you group the paintings by period, and if you've only got one or two (or even zero!) from a particular period, pad it out with some decent life-size prints so i can compare them and get a better sense for the overarching similarities? and then arrange them all in a timeline, with little summaries of what each Period was ~about~? that'd teach me a hell of a lot more about picasso -- but you'd have to admit you don't have Every Cool Painting Ever in The Collection, which is illegalé.

also thinking about the mit museum temporary exhibit i saw briefly (sorry, i was only there for like 10 minutes because i arrived early for a meeting and didn't get a chance to go through it super thoroughly) of a bunch of ship technical drawings from the Hart nautical collection. if you handed this shit to an art museum curator they'd just stick it on the wall and tell you to stand around and look at it until you Understood. so anyway the mit museum had this enormous room-sized diorama of various hull shapes and how they sat in the water and their benefits and drawbacks, placed below the relevant technical drawings.

tbh i think the main problem is that art museum people and science museum people are completely different sets of people, trained in completely different curatorial traditions. it would not occur to an art museum curator to do anything like this because they're probably from the ~art world~ -- maybe they have experience working at an art gallery, or working as an art buyer for a rich collector, neither of which is in any way pedagogical. nobody thinks an exhibit of historical clothing should work like a clothing store but it's fine when it's art, i guess?

also the experience of going to an art museum is pretty user-hostile, i have to say. there's never enough benches, and if you want a backrest, fuck you. fuck you if going up stairs is painful; use our shitty elevator in the corner that we begrudgingly have for wheelchair accessibility, if you can find it. fuck you if you can't see very well, and need to be closer to the art. fuck you if you need to hydrate or eat food regularly; go to our stupid little overpriced cafeteria, and fuck you if we don't actually sell any food you can eat. (obviously you don't want someone accidentally spilling a smoothie on the art, but there's no reason you couldn't provide little Safe For Eating Rooms where people could just duck in and monch a protein bar, except that then you couldn't sell them a $30 salad at the cafe.) fuck you if you're overwhelmed by noise in echoing rooms with hard surfaces and a lot of people in them. fuck you if you are TOO SHORT and so our overhead illumination generates BRIGHT REFLECTIONS ON THE SHINY VARNISH. we're the art museum! we don't give a shit!!!

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i need this panel now

arthur would play it with a straight face and merlin would know he's pulling his leg. arthur would wink to crowley behind merlin's back. aziraphale would be confused.

If Crowley made him understand modern English..

Does that include slang?

Just imagining him overhearing someone say "Yass Queen!!"

And he just bows, "Mi'lady, I did not know I was in the presence of royalty, forgive me."

Just had the mental image of Arthur hitting someone with his sword and going YEET

"Did I use that correctly, Merlin?"

"..."

(He totally misues slang on purpose after finding out Merlin gets super annoyed)