#and yet i am told this is 'normal'

[treeprince]

i am the picture of good health [eating saltines at 11 pm by the light of the stove after debilitating migraine lasting more than a day]

[lucradiss]

Thinking about how Aziraphale invented lying.

Because Crowley did not lie when he tempted Eve— he told her exactly what would happen, if she took a bite of the fruit of knowledge. She would know the difference between good and evil. He did not lie about that.

But Aziraphale gave away the sword appointed to him by God Herself, and then spun the very first lie to protect himself from her wrath.

Regardless of whether it was a small lie, it was a lie all the same, and a lie directly to God. He, an angel, told the very first lie, thereby inventing the act of lying.

Wouldn’t it be funny if I did the good thing and you did the bad one?

[skitskatdacat63]

I don't think I can ever emotionally recover from these

[roitaminnah]

oh but I hope on my wishing stars

that I could be your love -

I’ve been waiting oh so long

to be your lover

(explodes) I just think about them a lot I think they’re neat. (song is ‘to be your lover’ by the burkharts,, one of the last ones on my ppkm playlist <3)

[cowboyskeletons]

and sparrow's son loves the world so much and loves everyone around him and how can sparrow tell him that the world is cruel? how can he tell him that love will be punished and that cruelty is the only way to survive? normal's love scares him, he loves his son so much but that love scares him. he would do and has done anything for his son but he knows that it has led to his own ruin. and he loves his son but too much love has only ever harmed him and maybe he can take a model from his own dad and multitask.

maybe he can love his son but he hates him too, hates that normal can love and hates that normal can be loved and hates that normal can be so oblivious to the cruelty around him in a way that he himself lost when the world ended. he wants his son to have everything but loathes that fact that normal'll never try. that he just accepts life as it is. the way his dad did, when sparrow saluted henry and went along with the world's end and turned a blind eye to his wife's infidelity.

he sees himself in normal, maybe. maybe he hates that. because he lost himself, that day he lost his father's care and his mother's respect, and he can't bear to see himself lost again. normal needs to be cruel because otherwise he will be crushed and sparrow can't do that again. can't let himself be crushed again.

[girderednerve]

okay i am an old man at heart & am quickly tired out by videos but i am also a total sucker for participating in the cultural moment when it seems that there is one, so i have now watched about three hours of the hb*mberguy video about plagiarism. it's very annoying, actually, probably because i am an old man & none of the discussion of it i have seen shares my preoccupations & concerns

the problem i am having, & i acknowledge that this is perhaps resolved in the last hour of this four-hour-long youtube extravaganza, is that our intrepid investigator (he's very good at videos! not meant dismissively) declines to like, actually define plagiarism or look into what citation norms are or how they differ in different contexts. the proposed referents are journalists & academics, which is really funny to me because there are regular vicious arguments in both of these communities about what proper credit looks like & what it's meant to do, and both of these fields have been around as pretty established things for a few hundred years now (you could argue this point, especially regarding when precisely academia or journalism became recognizably modern). there have been a reasonable number of pretty high-profile arguments about what constitutes citation malpractice in both fields over the last few years, & there aren't necessarily neat conclusions (not referring to e.g. maura dykstra situation of obvious & widely agreed upon malpractice; i mean, people arguing about what the politics of citation are & what our responsibilities are—for example, academics regularly complain that journalists will consult them or read their work for a piece & then not cite them in it, journalists complain that academics will brush past their work when compiling bibliographies, academics across disciplines have several long-simmering differences of opinion about what kinds of politics one expresses with one's citations, journalists argue about credit & republication; i am not an academic or a journalist, so i am missing a lot!).

anyway setting these problems aside, there's the bigger issue that youtube videos as a rule are, i realize this is controversial, not academia and also not journalism. i don't think they are documentary filmmaking either, although our hbomb man is not particularly interested in the information culture of documentarians either. internet video is its own thing with its own information culture! but instead this is a video about how some people i have never heard of before on youtube did unethical stealing from other people i have mostly not heard of before, which i agree is not great but it does not seem to me like a four-hour emergency, probably because i am an old man who doesn't understand youtube. like, okay, we spent several lengthy minutes on what's going on with this illuminaughty person copying documentaries, but that argument felt to me weirdly both belabored & underdeveloped: yes, yes, we get it, the whole thing was lazily cribbed, i agree, that's really obnoxious, sure, okay, but like, do we have some articulation of what the line is? of what the norms are? because it seems to me like we kind of don't have a clear way that we handle citation in that space, by which i mean not just like 'APA format' or whatever but the substantive idea of referring to & building upon other people's intellectual work

please note here that i did not say 'intellectual property', because to me this is of course the elephant by the floral wallpaper. maybe it's in the last hour & i simply lack staying power! well-documented personal flaw! but in my experience, functional definitions of 'plagiarism' & theft of intellectual property arise only from disciplinary processes, either academic proceedings or legal ones, & each case is decided individually. more importantly as others have pointed out, when we make someone's ideas into legally codified property, they become alienable from their creator; intellectual property is a kind of enclosure of the commons. there's a reason i think that hguy's last video was about the ownership of a sound effect, & that he spent a lot of time being angry that someone else claimed the credit along with the legal ownership of/right to profit from the sound effect; the frustration with youtubers appropriating other people's work & the frustration with some bozo video game composer lying about how the "oof" got made are the same thing, but the thing is not "credit" or "rudeness" or "theft," it is the entire institution, i think, of intellectual property. not that there have never been reasonable claims made using intellectual property law, but come on almost none of this is the māori suit against lego, it's mostly corporate C&Ds and NDA'd artists stuck with non-competes. it's bleak! but we know how it happens, & it's not that some people are uncreative & moneygrubbing, so they look down on creatives (??), which has so far seemed to be the argument of this four-hour-long cultural moment

also i am still thinking about what kind of ideas & assumptions go into citation pratices, because i am a professional librarian (a bad one!), so i am professionally obliged to care about the set of skills referred to as 'information literacy' (the skills are real but i have like, mixed feelings about the framing, that's why scare quotes). if you are an academic librarian they will ask you to do 'information literacy,' and a lot of what they mean by that is 'tell students how to find sources for things & cite them properly,' which is, i think, kind of an interesting sleight of hand, in which a broad & powerful set of interpretive & analytical skills become [what is for many students] the dullest part of essay writing? but that's a problem with all of undergraduate education, basically. anyway if you talk to most students about citations they think they're onerous nonsense, and that plagiarism/'academic honesty' policies are arbitrary (& scary); they're not usually encouraged in any particular way to think about how citations are meant to function or what they're meant to do. i don't mean to disparage my colleagues in academic libraries; i am painting with a broad brush & anyway librarians usually have almost no input into course design or assignments.

it's disappointing how these information literacy discussions tend to go, though, because citations are interesting! they're also recent, in the grand scheme; the idea of telling us where you got some idea or other is very old, but the specifics of how & in what circumstances you're meant to do it aren't & they vary wildly by context. i often will tell people where i picked up whatever little factoid i am drolly recounting (sorry everyone) but that isn't particularly common in casual conversation. youtube videos are closer to a conversational register than they are to a documentary or a news article, much less an academic paper; i don't really know what to make of it, & i suspect this is part of why it is so easy to be a youtube personality who steals other people's work—it isn't really that youtube audiences are uniquely credulous & lazy, but that their expectations aren't the same. i guess i should note here that i do think you should cite things in a clear & easily followable manner, be honest about what is your own invention & what is borrowed from the work others, and avoid like. being a huge asshole. but to some degree i am bored by hearing about Some Guy Who Lies On Youtube, because my baseline assumption for most youtube videos is that they are not reliable & are probably trying to lie to me! i am not trying to be superior here that is an honest account of how i engage with anyone who appears to have a specialty lighting rig

i think continually & with affection of the late antique proliferation of the pseudo-somebody, and it seems to me now that the common modern practice of online (kindly) under-citation is a near-perfect inverse of the medieval approach, in which it was generally difficult to look things up and writers enhanced their authoritativeness by making referential claims to well-known authors. now it's usually easy to look things up & everybody wants to be an original thinker & an artist, so they don't cite. not me, though, i am just giving you here the garbled mash of things i've seen in posts & remember from my undergrad lectures eight years ago. i'm an idiot! but at least nobody here is making any money :)

[dilfsuzanneyk]

am i just insane and paranoid or is it horrible that so many websites need you to sign up to use their stuff now? especially with so many websites asking for not just your email but phone number too?? some get even more personal than that?? i don't want to give that information to random websites just to use something, but for some reason this is just normal now and everyone treats it like an okay thing to do.

[pleasedontcareaboutme]

I don't care when people don't include me in stuff, I'm used to it but-----

my own family going on a trip w/o even asking me kinda felt

shit 🫠

[the-way-astray]

i must be the only (kind of) unironic aldella shipper in this entire fandom.

(ranting in the tags)

[rainbowsans]

ur valid to dislike what u dislike but lumping selfcest in w like... incest and underaged content is just kinda insulting to anybody who has been thru those things. couldn't imagine being an incest survivor and getting told ur selfcest ship (harmless, cannot be replicated irl in any way, is not incest) is equally as bad as, ykno, an irl traumatic experience u had. like if u think selfcest is problematic enough to be put in the same category as incest and the sexual exploitation of children, u need to consider how u express that and also maybe log off of tumblr for a while. say it makes u uncomfy n u avoid it, super fair, but the way u treat it is downright insulting to ppl who have gone thru actual real tangible trauma. selfcest isn't real- I can tell u have a stance on it by ur language but maybe reconsider, there's a reason the stance is unpopular

I was sexually assaulted when I was in elementary, I was molested by my cousins, twice. groped by my own uncles, when I was a CHILD.

insulting to people who’d gone through those things?

IVE BEEN THROUGH THOSE THINGS. HOW FUCKING DARE YOU.

also, also; here’s the thing.

that rule I have with Selfcest? is for MY personal boundary. I don’t LIKE it, I want people to be aware when they ask ME or come to ME that I prefer to stay away from it. people don’t read my rules so I have to remind them in the “nicest” way possible.

I’m not “insulting” anyone by having that rule, it makes me uncomfortable so I want to avoid it the best I can and I want people to be aware of it, in case they think about wanting to send me stuff involving it:

If people are “insulted” with me gently reminding people when I GET ASKED that “hey, I don’t like this thing so please remember that I won’t draw or do anything with it!” then that’s THEIR problem, not mine.

I am setting my damn boundaries and I won’t be told, again, that I’m the one that’s being MEAN or INSULTING for it.

This is my blog, my art, and I get to set down my rules and boundaries, that’s all.

I put it next to those things because it’s so normalized in the fandom, and whatever, I just want others to know that if they are expecting that stuff in my blog? it’s not there, nor is it welcomed. Period.

and guess what? IVE SAID COUNTLESS TIMES THAT I AM UNCOMFORTABLE WITH IT AND AVOUD IT, BLACKLIST IT, and guess what? I STILL have people keep pressuring and demanding that shit to the point where I see it constantly in my inbox.

I HAVE TO GUIDE THEM TO MY RULES, I’m not going to be a damn pushover, I’m not gonna feel like my rules are “mean”, they are there for ME to set boundaries and have a comfortable experience here or ANYONE who feels the same way.

GOD.

[robbed-ghost]

“Damian isn’t ooc what are you talking aboutttt he’s only 14 and wants to trust his dad so badlyyyy guyssss don’t get upsettt” have you never read a comic with Damian in it in your life

[our-lady-of-mcr]

everytime i think im done ranting i remember something else LMFAO this one is extra long i hit tag limit god mf damn

[icharchivist]

yknow this one post that's like

the embarrassing thing about me is that this is me but it only works when i'm super mentally ill about ff7 because every time i'm obsessed with ff7 it's the only time i manage to motivate myself to do exercises and trying to take better care of myself FULLY because "Zack would want me to take care of myself", i'm doing some exercises despite hating every second of it because "Zack would want me to be able to pull some squats and i can't do that in my current shape so now i have to make it better" like, ok, cringelord. DoItForHimCollage.jpg about Zack Fair i guess. I have a deodorant smell i associate so strongly to Zack that putting it on makes me actually motivated to take care of myself. fucking mortifying.

*sends a kiss to the sky* for Zack Fair. I guess.

[autisticlee]

having some sort of chronic pain and tiredness issue and joint problems and whatnot but not knowing exactly what the problem is is really good at leading you feeling like you're faking it or making a big deal out of nothing or making it up. especially if there's a good day where it's not as bad and you can walk straight without limping for the first time in a year. but then you can wake up the next day and can barely walk and wonder why you can't just walk normal. it's hard to not guilt trip yourself into dealing with pain by trying to ignore it and force yourself to walk "normal" all the time

[strwbrymlkshake]

I am trying so hard but it still isn't ENOUGH FOR YOU? DON'T YOU SEE HOW HARD I'VE BEEN TRYING?

[rubenesque-as-fuck]

Well damn, today did not go how I expected