#and so economical

[poorly-drawn-mdzs]

Sublime Equine.

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[elbiotipo]

It's fascinating to me that for our modern (at least on European-influenced societies) thinking, the classical Roman way of life is so familiar. When you read about it, the rethoric of the speeches feels modern, a society based on contracts and laws and litigation, with public works, a state bureucracy and standing army and trade economy and even spectator sports, a concept of philosophy separated from religious dogma and tradition, with even a limited understanding of a government by 'the people' and 'citizenship', even the names all sound familiar even if in completely different contexts, and no wonder since they inspired our current politics.

This all in contrast to medieval feudalism, which is completely alien to me. A society created upon family connections and oaths of fealty and serfdom with no such thing as an overarching state, not even kingdoms were any more real than a title one person holds, and all held together completely, utterly, to an extent I cannot emphasize enough, by the institution of the Church and the Christian faith. In a way we just aren't used today in our secular world. I simply cannot overstate how everything, every single thing, was permeated by faith in the Medieval worldview and the Church which took its power from it, we have an understanding of it but I think people just don't realize it.

[linderosse]

✨tea party between worlds✨

Happy 10th Anniversary to one of my favorite Zelda games, LoZ: LBW!

Featuring Fable as Alice, Ravio as the March Hare, Hilda as the visiting Queen of Hearts, and Legend as both the Mad Hatter and the Dormouse >:).

Also gonna use this (relevant, I promise!) artwork to announce that Chapter 4 of The Secrets We Keep has been released! It’s an LU fic of mysteries and misconceptions that takes place in the same universe as Wielders of Wisdom. If you like that sort of thing, go check it out!

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Masterpost

[ettawritesnstudies]

The tumblr meme trend of reblogging a post and adding "Investing on this when it's still at low notes" has reworked the popularity economy of the site by reminding people that leaving their mark on any given post - specifically in the form of reblogs to spread it to their followers and inflict more notes upon the hapless OP - is the only mechanism to spread information, art, or shitposts throughout the site. While it's currently only catching on for jokes and taunting dares of apollo's dodgeball of prophecy, if this behavior could carry over to original content, it could reverse the disheartening trend of enthusiastic creators sharing their work, only to receive quiet approval in the forms of likes and for the post to go dead within a few hours. Here's why we should start "investing" in small creators for tumblr clout. In this essay I will...

[communistkenobi]

one thing that has been stuck in my brain since I heard it is that marx is the most responded-to western social theorist of modernity. It’s not literally true in the sense that there are scholars who have more raw citations than he does but he became permanently unavoidable in all social scientific discussion after he came onto the scene. and even when he is intentionally avoided he’s still present. his absence is itself a presence in the text. a spectre haunting the academy one might say

[anghraine]

I finally read a good article about Austen and eighteenth-century socioeconomics that gives rough approximations of eighteenth-century prices/incomes in modern (I think c. 2014) currency, but is appropriately emphatic about just how rough those approximations must always be given drastic differences in the economic worlds we live in. It's actually much more about the economics than Austen, and particularly about how much descriptions of "middling" incomes and what was affordable to people who had those incomes is still a conversation about a tiny, tiny elite in terms of the overall population at the time.

Austen-wise, though, the author also found room for a tangent in which he goes off on a scathing condemnation of Mr Bennet in socioeconomic terms, which I do love to see. Most baronets generally had land and incomes far closer to Mr Bennet's than Darcy's and yet Mr Bennet can't be bothered to even slightly provide for his children's futures beyond what was legally required by his marriage settlement (even the girls' meagre inheritances mostly come from Mrs Bennet's money rather than his). The author acknowledges the passage about Mr Bennet saving to counteract Mrs Bennet's extravagance and also how this is an indictment of Mr Bennet as well as Mrs Bennet, something that criticisms of him often skate past, and even points out how enthusiastic Mr Bennet is about the convenience of Darcy paying for it all in a way that can be read as funny and endearing, but also as distastefully shameless.

Anyway, it was nice to enjoy an academic text again, lol.

[theshadowrealmitself]

I think a lot of Vulcans are like the “you’ve come to me with a problem, first instinct is to fix it” type to a more extreme, especially if the problem involves emotions

So when I imagine scenarios of like. a Vulcan going to the restroom during a fancy party and seeing an attractive Human crying in it, and it turns out they don’t see themselves as attractive because their date keeps complimenting everyone else a ton but only told them “nice outfit” and it got to them

And the Vulcan is just like “I have to fix this” and they start thinking of the problem like ‘Human thinks they’re unattractive > they aren’t so nothing can be done to their appearance to make them feel better > they feel unattractive because of their date > they need a better date’ and they just tell the Human “I am your date now, I will tell you how attractive you are without excessively complimenting others so that you feel inferior, so you will no longer have to experience this emotional turbulence”

And they just walk back to their table with a cute Human on their arm who looks like they were crying but is now beaming, getting together speedrun

[liesmyth]

My Coronabeth Dominant Twin manifesto is simple and it's as follows: there's no way the twins could have planned for Canaan House.

John requesting new Lyctors wasn't something anyone in the Houses would've expected to happen in their lifetimes with any meaningful probability. This means that when the Tridentarii started the double necromancer ruse, they expected to carry on for life. It was an arrangement that benefited Corona vastly more than Ianthe.

What Ianthe got out of it, as far as we know: Corona would rule Ida, which she isn't keen on (as per NtN). But it also meant that Ianthe signed up for a life in her sister's shadow, with everyone regarding Corona as the perfect heir and Ianthe as the lame spare. Worse, for Ianthe, everyone believed Corona was the better flesh magician (as per As Yet Unsent). There's a lot more in for Corona in this arrangement and a lifetime of mild humiliation for Ianthe. As we see during the reveal in GtN, she was just dying to tell anyone that SHE is the necromantic genius of the pair, actually.

On their relationship with Babs: in GtN, Gideon notices that Babs obeys Ianthe's orders over Corona's. She also notices that Corona looks shocked about this — to me, this means that it's NOT something Coronabeth is used to. Pre-Canaan House, they are equals in their ruse. At Canaan House, it becomes obvious that if Ianthe ascends she'll leave Corona in the dust, and their relationship has to change. I don't think the way they act around each other from Canaan House onwards is at all representative of their relationship back on the Third, and I don't think Babs deferring to Ianthe over Corona is something that has happened often before, if at all.

There's the bit where Corona routinely threatened suicide to get her way since they were teenagers. In NtN she's doing it to save Camilla's life, but she reminisces fondly about it like it was something she did often to get her way, like it was a fun mind game they played with each other.

You've also got Ianthe calling Corona a bimbo and insulting her and whatever, and me arguing that Corona pulled the few strings doesn't make Ianthe good but as things stand I'm much more inclined to believe that, before Ianthe attained Lyctorhood, Corona was the one in charge — and I’m also firmly convinced that she’s using BoE for her own ends, and we’ll see her Fuck Shit Up in AtN.

[togglesbloggle]

Why do you think tumblr will die in only a few years?

Answer with jargon: a strong correlation between recent economic shifts and chaotic choices by major tech companies is most easily explained if the 'traditional' social media platforms of 2005-2020 are mostly a zero-interest rate phenomenon.

Longer answer, with less jargon: Even though Musk's takeover is making all the headlines recently, the last year has in fact seen major shakeups at many social media platforms, so Twitter is actually part of a trend. Almost inevitably, these are cases of social media companies trying to find a way to squeeze more money out of their userbase (Reddit), cut costs dramatically (Twitter), or both. This marks a sudden departure from a much more relaxed attitude towards revenue in the Pictures Of Cats industry, where the focus was historically more on expanding the userbase to a global scale and then counting on world domination to sort of <????> and then the company would become profitable eventually.

We joke, correctly, that Tumblr has never been profitable. But the entire structure of ad-supported content curation between human users is deeply suspect as a business model; IIRC Twitter was never profitable either, and Facebook has been juicing its numbers in very shenanigany ways. Discord was actually making money on net last I checked, at least a bit, so they're not all completely in the hole. But even if you take the accounting figures at face value, none of these companies has anything like the amount of money that their cultural prominence would suggest. Instead, they're heavily fueled by investment dollars, money given by super-rich people and institutions in the expectation that fueling the growth of the company now will pay off with interest later.

So what changed?

I'm not an expert here, but I'll do my best to muddle through. The American Federal Reserve has one mandate that dominates all others (sometimes called the 'dual mandate'), and one primary tool that it uses to enforce that mandate. The goal is to maintain low (but nonzero) rates of inflation and unemployment, which in their models are deeply interlinked phenomena. The tool is 'rate hikes', or more specifically, tweaking the mandatory rate of interest that banks charge one another when making loans.

As a particular consequence of this, hiking the rate also means that bonds start paying out much better. When the rate hike goes through, that affects people who let the government borrow their personal cash- that is, people who buy bonds- as well as institutions like banks that lend to one another. A rate hike means that you, personally, can make a little extra money by letting the government borrow it for a while. The federal government of the US is a rock-solid low-risk choice for this kind of moneymaking scheme, so the federal interest rate sort of defines the 'number to beat'; to attract investors, a company has to give those investors money at a better percentage than whatever the feds are offering. Particularly since a company is a lot more likely to go out of business than the state!

To wrap this back around to the Pictures Of Cats industry: the higher the rate hike, the better your company needs to be doing (or the less risky it needs to be as an option) to attract big investment dollars. Very high rates make it very hard to convince people to invest in business activity rather than the government itself, and very low rates put moonshots and big dreams on the table, investment-wise, in a way that wouldn't otherwise be possible. Social media companies were one of these big dreams.

In the great financial crisis of 2008, the Fed took the dramatic step of reducing their rate to zero, trying to juice the economy back to life. And ever since then, they've kept it there. This has produced an unprecedented amount of funding for very crazy stuff; it's part of what has allowed so many weird new tech companies (Uber, streaming services, etc.) to get so much money, so quickly, and use that to grow to massive size without a clear model of how they're ever going to make money. This state of affairs kept going for quite a while, with no clear stopping point; that zero-interest environment has been one of the shadowy forces in the background that shaped fundamental contours and limits in how our Very Online World has grown and developed. Until COVID.

Or rather, the bounce back from COVID: we suddenly saw a massive spike in inflation and an incredibly strong labor market, as employees quit in record numbers, negotiated higher salaries, and found better work, and at the same time supply chain issues and other economy stuff caused prices to climb dramatically. Recall the Fed's 'dual mandate', to control the employment rate and inflation. This was, basically, kicking them right in the jooblies. They responded in kind, finally finally raising their rates for the first time in 15 years. For some of the people reading this, it'll be the first significant shift in their entire adult lives.

The goal, as I understand it, is to fight inflation by reducing the amount of outside investment into private companies, forcing them to hire fewer people and pay smaller salaries, ultimately drawing money out of the working economy and driving prices back down by lowering demand for everything. You get paid less, so you eat out less, and buy at cheaper restaurants when you do, so restaurants have to compete harder by lowering their prices; seems pretty dodgy to me as a theory, but it's the theory. And the first part will almost certainly work- companies are going to see less investment.

For social media companies that are still paying most of their salaries with investor dollars instead of revenues, this is especially catastrophic. Without outside investment, they're just a massive pile of expenses waiting to happen, huge yearly costs in developer salaries and server fees. This is why, all of a sudden, every social media company is suddenly making bonkers decisions. They're noticing that nobody wants to give them any more money! So they're trying to figure out how to live a lot more cheaply, to actually somehow for reals turn their giant userbases in to some kind of actual revenue stream, or both.

Tumblr is kind of the ur-example of this kind of thing, supporting a very large userbase with no coherent plan whatsoever to start paying its staff with our dollars instead of investors' dollars. When interest rates were low and Scrooge McDuck had nowhere else to hide his pile of gold coins, a crazy kid with a dream was the best alternative available to him. But now, unless something changes, he's going to notice he can just buy bonds instead, and that crazy kid can go take a hike.

That's why I think Tumblr is living on borrowed time, though I don't know how much. Like all cartoons, the economy doesn't really fall off a cliff until somebody looks down and notices they've been standing on thin air this whole time. But they always fall eventually; that's the gag.

[000-pawz]

thinking about how jaehyun is the type to argue in passive aggressive corporate language when you guys are going through a disagreement to avoid big fights like he's so unserious

"as per my previous text, i notified you of the fact that i will be out late tonight as i have important business to tend to at the company. i apologize if my message got lost in translation. following this event, i will be assured to apprise you of any changes in my schedule beforehand. best regards, your boo bear myungjae."

"good evening, my love. i was informed of the fact that you are bringing food after the commencement of your work day, but i have already placed an order from a separate location. if it is in your scope, do you mind donating the food to the upper dorm upon arrival, or shall we assess other ways to go about this miscommunication?"

"regarding the events that took place earlier this afternoon, i can assure you that i did not look at that woman with any malicious intent. in relation to this, i observed that you are dismayed with my actions and are giving me the "silent treatment". if you are set in your views, i completely understand and am willing to set up a time where we can discuss this further. i love you baby im sorry plz call me back"

[scarletfasinera]

Literally. Be vigilant I love you. Something beautiful is going to happen. True love is possible only in the next world—for new people. Tomorrow is just a whisper away. We refuse to accept that the world has to remain like this. It's the world and you're made of it, you can't be unmade now. This is somewhere to be, this is all you have but it's still something. Things can't go on like this forever; something will give, it always does. Comrades, the forsaken, the wretched, who tried to rise against the horrors of the world. She would die to return to it. One day I will return to your side. They're beautiful and true—and they will win. The future can be better than the past, if we're willing to work and fight and die for it. In dark times, should the stars also go out? I exist. I exist too.

[aronarchy]

Why we don’t like it when children hit us back

To all the children who have ever been told to “respect” someone that hated them.

March 21, 2023

Even those of us that are disturbed by the thought of how widespread corporal punishment still is in all ranks of society are uncomfortable at the idea of a child defending themself using violence against their oppressors and abusers. A child who hits back proves that the adults “were right all along,” that their violence was justified. Even as they would cheer an adult victim for defending themself fiercely.

Even those “child rights advocates” imagine the right child victim as one who takes it without ever stopping to love “its” owners. Tear-stained and afraid, the child is too innocent to be hit in a guilt-free manner. No one likes to imagine the Brat as Victim—the child who does, according to adultist logic, deserve being hit, because they follow their desires, because they walk the world with their head high, because they talk back, because they are loud, because they are unapologetically here, and resistant to being cast in the role of guest of a world that is just not made for them.

If we are against corporal punishment, the brat is our gotcha, the proof that it is actually not that much of an injustice. The brat unsettles us, so much that the “bad seed” is a stock character in horror, a genre that is much permeated by the adult gaze (defined as “the way children are viewed, represented and portrayed by adults; and finally society’s conception of children and the way this is perpetuated within institutions, and inherent in all interactions with children”), where the adult fear for the subversion of the structures that keep children under control is very much represented.

It might be very well true that the Brat has something unnatural and sinister about them in this world, as they are at constant war with everything that has ever been created, since everything that has been created has been built with the purpose of subjugating them. This is why it feels unnatural to watch a child hitting back instead of cowering. We feel like it’s not right. We feel like history is staring back at us, and all the horror we felt at any rebel and wayward child who has ever lived, we are feeling right now for that reject of the construct of “childhood innocence.” The child who hits back is at such clash with our construction of childhood because we defined violence in all of its forms as the province of the adult, especially the adult in authority.

The adult has an explicit sanction by the state to do violence to the child, while the child has both a social and legal prohibition to even think of defending themself with their fists. Legislation such as “parent-child tort immunity” makes this clear. The adult’s designed place is as the one who hits, and has a right and even an encouragement to do so, the one who acts, as the person. The child’s designed place is as the one who gets hit, and has an obligation to accept that, as the one who suffers acts, as the object. When a child forcibly breaks out of their place, they are reversing the supposed “natural order” in a radical way.

This is why, for the youth liberationist, there should be nothing more beautiful to witness that the child who snaps. We have an unique horror for parricide, and a terrible indifference at the 450 children murdered every year by their parents in just the USA, without even mentioning all the indirect suicides caused by parental abuse. As a Psychology Today article about so-called “parricide” puts it:

Unlike adults who kill their parents, teenagers become parricide offenders when conditions in the home are intolerable but their alternatives are limited. Unlike adults, kids cannot simply leave. The law has made it a crime for young people to run away. Juveniles who commit parricide usually do consider running away, but many do not know any place where they can seek refuge. Those who do run are generally picked up and returned home, or go back on their own: Surviving on the streets is hardly a realistic alternative for youths with meager financial resources, limited education, and few skills.

By far, the severely abused child is the most frequently encountered type of offender. According to Paul Mones, a Los Angeles attorney who specializes in defending adolescent parricide offenders, more than 90 percent have been abused by their parents. In-depth portraits of such youths have frequently shown that they killed because they could no longer tolerate conditions at home. These children were psychologically abused by one or both parents and often suffered physical, sexual, and verbal abuse as well—and witnessed it given to others in the household. They did not typically have histories of severe mental illness or of serious and extensive delinquent behavior. They were not criminally sophisticated. For them, the killings represented an act of desperation—the only way out of a family situation they could no longer endure.

- Heide, Why Kids Kill Parents, 1992.

Despite these being the most frequent conditions of “parricide,” it still brings unique disgust to think about it for most people. The sympathy extended to murdering parents is never extended even to the most desperate child, who chose to kill to not be killed. They chose to stop enduring silently, and that was their greatest crime; that is the crime of the child who hits back. Hell, children aren’t even supposed to talk back. They are not supposed to be anything but grateful for the miserable pieces of space that adults carve out in a world hostile to children for them to live following adult rules. It isn’t rare for children to notice the adult monopoly on violence and force when they interact with figures like teachers, and the way they use words like “respect.” In fact, this social dynamic has been noticed quite often:

Sometimes people use “respect” to mean “treating someone like a person” and sometimes they use “respect” to mean “treating someone like an authority” and sometimes people who are used to being treated like an authority say “if you won’t respect me I won’t respect you” and they mean “if you won’t treat me like an authority I won’t treat you like a person” and they think they’re being fair but they aren’t, and it’s not okay.

(https://soycrates.tumblr.com/post/115633137923/stimmyabby-sometimes-people-use-respect-to-mean)

But it has received almost no condemnation in the public eye. No voices have raised to contrast the adult monopoly on violence towards child bodies and child minds. No voices have raised to praise the child who hits back. Because they do deserve praise. Because the child who sets their foot down and says this belongs to me, even when it’s something like their own body that they are claiming, is committing one of the most serious crimes against adult society, who wants them dispossessed.

Sources:

“The Adult Gaze: a tool of control and oppression,” https://livingwithoutschool.com/2021/07/29/the-adult-gaze-a-tool-of-control-and-oppression

“Filicide,” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Filicide

[sudaca-swag]

I just watched a TikTok and it made me wonder some things, in your opinion:

[txttletale]

the reason that thinking about communism too much in disco elysium makes you suicidal but organizing with other communists leads to a moment of singular wonder and provides hope that miracles can happen is because thats what being a communist is like in real life

[why-the-heck-not]

whiskey & writing this thesis bc the introduction chapter is taking more linguistical creativity than what I have with just caffeine (idk what to write in this without it sounding like a 3rd grader’s essay yikes)

[sulemio-week-official]

I know people have a lot of reasons to vote for sulemio but I really do hope you give the show a chance. It has an incredible soundtrack and all the episodes are available sub/dub on YouTube and crunchyroll. There's a ton of cute merch and promotional side material plus a horde of amazing content creators and the gayest hand holding scene in existence, give it a shot 🍅