#stupid thoughts

[onelittleornotthing]

I'm finally participating in an art fight :) (I'm still trying to figure out the site)

if someone need it

[silverbridge-harbor]

its always funny in sillydelphia

[honeycreammilkshake]

were you ever just so rabid for a ship that you like... want to dedicate your whole life to thinking about them kissing sloppy-style and writing in-depth meta on why they should have because it would have solved everything?

[thesilenceshh]

AH

Visual Headcanons once more

[ekebolou]

I get that people have complicated relationships with higher education, and that's 100% reasonable, but there's something I want to point out.

when you hear a popular podcast or youtuber or history show or see a popular history book or article say it's 'revealing' or 'uncovering' or 'bringing to light' or 'reevaluating' some story of the past, it's usually doing so off of academic history work done by people in academia.

Journalists and your average YouTuber are generally the worst about not crediting this work,* but it's there in the background, nonetheless.

That work - academic research, particularly of this kind, and the articles, books, and other information it produces - doesn't get done without institutional support. That is, like with everything, sure some enthusiasts will keep at their particular interests hell or high water, and rich folks can peruse to their hearts' content - that's what fueled the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries' ever-increasing investigative output.

And that should be concerning, not comforting.

Not because all of that output was wrong or terrible or misguided - a lot was, but much of it is still essential, foundational, exceedingly rigorous and useful - but because much of modern history work, twentieth century on, has been a century-long battle to correct some of deeply culturally embedded beliefs an almost wholly dilettante pursuit of the past generated. It's kind of a joke in English-language scholarship that the Victorians ruined everything, but like, for real, y'all, the Victorians left us some BURDENS, from fake relics created for ~the aesthetic~ to defaced and destroyed historical documents.

Academic research in itself is not some kind of panacea. we're not shitting on dilettantes (I am very much a dilettante, in my way) and so-called 'amateurs', who are vital and excellent contributors to knowledge. We're also not saying institutions are always perfect and good and don't need to change. I'm saying that robust, diverse, in-depth, careful, broadly reaching, and most of all interesting and new scholarship requires something on the scale of institutional support.

This is not just because that's where your historians live, but because in a very practical sense, that's where your archives live. You do actually need a big building stuffed with Things Of The Past well-maintained and with a core of well-trained and extremely cool (like librarians, all archivists are extremely cool in my books, even if they're kind of assholes, as long as they are good archivists).

Archivists are currently doing a lot with very little support - like a lot of academics and librarians, really - because that's what people do. When they care about doing something, they get along, they scrape by, they suck it up. But they need buildings, they need climate control, they need continuing training and new people coming into the field - if the idea is that we have so many documents from the past extant today because archives DON'T need institutional-level support, then you are severely misinformed about how much of the past has survived to the present day. And if the idea is that we'll preserve the IMPORTANT bits of the past regardless then you're also sadly misinformed about how good we are at determining what's important, and how frequently (and with growing frequency) disasters of various kinds wipe places out (Lisbon 1755, for example), and how robust any of our documentation (often ESPECIALLY the 'important' stuff) is in terms of long-term survival.

There's a theory going around that THIS period - like the 2000s through today and into the future - will produce a 'dark age' for future historians because the digital infrastructure which not only underpins almost all of our day-to-day lives but is how we've decided to 'save space' - by preserving things digitally rather than in hard copy - is so unspeakably vulnerable and weak. Everyday folks have already, for the most part, lost access to things like CDs, which have a lifespan of something like 100 years at the most. Proprietary softwares, black box devices with irreplaceable parts, flimsy modern materials with difficult to preserve features mean a whole of information that drives our lives today will simply become inaccessible in, actually, a very short time.

Archives - vast storehouses under careful supervision full of well-organized stuff that might potentially be important one day - need institutional support, but also, on their own, are kind of... well, let's just say, Historians will also say shit like they 'uncovered' a 'hidden history' in a previously 'lost, unknown' document that some archivist put in a special box on a special shelf and carefully catalogued for prime findability. It's a symbiotic relationship that doesn't always get its due. An archive on its own can be very useful to a local community, an individual business, a specific family, all kinds of things - but to get History out of it, you need some Historians or suitably rabid individuals of other castes. You need both, or you end up with the pseudo-histories of nineteenth-century rich folk that then get to determine what we believe is possible for the future by what we are told of the past. It's a bad scene.

Again, there are further steps to take - not over here defending institutions as they stand. We were, at one point, on our way to accessible higher education, meaning everyone had a chance to go to pursue their interests, before we started seeing Universities not as a social good and social resource but as job training and profit centers and cut social funding as demanded by business ghouls. Higher education and academia as it functions now has done a lot of damage to people's lives.

But institutions are much harder to build than to change, and change is hard enough. Once an archive is defunded, its collections distributed or destroyed, you typically don't get it back. Like certain species of sea creatures with long gestational periods, once you destroy the mid-range of the population - the bit that raises up the next generation - your population collapses and its very hard to get things back on track (historians and other academics who require lots of investment and training and time and experience are like the sea creatures, you see).

You can, of course, start new. We've done that a lot, as a species. It's always possible. But it's a bit like running out of a fire empty-handed instead of grabbing your wallet as you go. Sometimes you just gotta go, and that's always safest - sometimes you just can't think or there's no time to think and you couldn't get to anything useful if you wanted to - but if it's matter of looking at the wallet in your pants pocket and dipping down to grab it (and maybe pants!) while you bolt then yeah, ought to try. Maybe the pants catch fire and you've got to abandon them anyway to save your life. That's reasonable. (This is just an analogy - fire safety generally says to get ye gone with your life and health intact ASAP, just for the record - don't stop for shit and don't go back in).

The point of this is that next time you're enjoying some popular history content (please save me from this word) or learn some cool fact about the past, think about the fact that none of that get down to you without a big chain of people all joined together doing different things. And that big chain needs nice big social supports to exist. The social supports are hard to change, but the chain is easy to lose without them. It's a group effort all the way, even that little fucker who didn't credit the work they used to make fun videos is important.

That content doesn't happen without the structure to support it - or even worse, that content lies to you. Makes stuff up. The stuff it makes up isn't going to be fantasies of freedom and equality, at least going by what's been made up before.

Hate the academy, want it to change, act to reform it - all very good, go for it, no desire to stop you (except maybe the hating part, try to hate more specifically, like individual actions or aspects of the academy, if you're going to hate on stuff, but, like, hate can be unhealthy, get some peace in your life if you can). Things are bad enough without also feeling like you have to take on a crusade to save archives or other institutions - though honestly just participating in your local history scene, giving them time and attention, is really valuable help - so that's not really the call to action here. The call is just asking you to notice the big structures that enable these small joys.

Don't let yourself be convinced that they somehow happen in a vacuum, that they'll just persist somehow like getting Deliveroo at your off-grid mountain cabin. A lot people helped make that stupid podcast about Marie Antoinette's toenail fungus happen - and there's way more than that waiting! If we can just keep letting people make archives, study stuff, fuck off on fruitless searches for things that were never there and instead find stuff we never KNEW was there. There's so much of that to be done! The more the merrier on who should be doing it! But if we want that, we got to figure out how to support it, to keep what we've got, build more of it, or it'll be the same shit about Marie Antoinette over and over and over and over and over because that'll all we'll have to build from.

Anyway, if you've never done it, take a ghost tour. Visit a museum nearby. Pop into an archive and just ask them some stuff. Get on these web pages that do things like recreate Angkor Wat as a virtual tour, go watch a Youtuber do a frothing-at-the-mouth defense of Charles Lightoller, or even better, read this reddit thread about whether Dua Lipa would have survived the Titanic sinking based on her music video. And just think - holy shit, isn't it cool that we have a society, a whole social structure, that could produce such a thing? And it's right here, at my fingertips, ready to disappear.

*there are reasons for this, some related to format and legibility/accessibility that still shouldn't eliminate the need to credit others' work and others cowardly excuses for parasitism

[kenandeliza]

3 Ways The Marvel Family fights when They can't say their Magic words

Just some silly thoughts, mainly thinking about their Golden Age counterpart.

Billy: *Feral street kid instinct activates and Bites Opponent*

Mary:*Judo THrows* [or any martial arts really, she's rich, she's bound to take many lessons, probably even took fencing]

Freddy: *Crutch Shotgun*

It's either that, or hitting them with a Marvellium-plated crutch like a baseball bat.

[mowatrawa]

Anakin as a university assistant during his bad boy phase.

Everyone frowns at him and grumbles about how inappropriate he looks, but he is the best student and aeronautics assistant Plo has ever had in his long life. And Plo will fight with fists with anyone who looks at him wrong. Yes Kenobi, this applies to you too! (Kenobi can't take his eyes off the boy, GOD, THE LAST TIME THEY MET FACE TO FACE HE WAS 10 YEARS OLD AND HAD A POT HAIR HAIRCUT! Now Obi-Wan could eat him with a spoon. Good thing Anakin will let this old man eat him with or without a spoon).

[realbigpodcastslut]

Anyways, now that pt 52 is finally released to the public, I wanna point out in kayne's orchestra that the horns only play late into the 7th minute, and it's just really funny to imagine those poor Arthurs trying to keep time when kayne is not conducting. All I can imagine is them counting in their heads like "255, 2, 3, 4. 256, 2, 3, 4. 257, 2, 3, 4" and praying they didn't fuck up.

[sourkreem]

which do yall think is the stinkiest of all the bat boys

[gem-plush]

Saw Trap Dorian from Date Everything on TikTok and

Oohhh.....

Having very un Christian thoughts rn!

[princessimotep]

Incorrect Red Dead Quotes #2

Dutch: Now… I got this plan…

Arthur: Here we go…

Dutch: It involves robbery. Gunsmoke. And a distraction.

Arthur: What’s the distra-

John, walks in wearing cat ears: …

Arthur: You gotta be kidding me-

Dutch: Have some goddamn FAITH.

[onelittleornotthing]

Fake peppino's nose looks like a mosquito's proboscis in your artstyle hehe, it's really funny, and beautiful !

Haha<3 thanks

It flows down like dough.

[silverbridge-harbor]

Velociraptors are scary but really they aren't that scary because they can't change speed. They always move at exactly the same rate, so they're predictable and you can avoid them. The real one to look out for is the acceleraptor

[lexinkle]

How fairy snatcher should have gone

[thesilenceshh]

So beasts with normal-ish cookies based on being similar are kinda neat

We have Shadow Milk and Royal Margarine, both lie and act more confident and strong then they are (Seen people pair him with Prune Juice but I just don't see it as much)

Burning Spice and Capsaicin, spice cookies and done some destruction (one feeling guilty for it tho)

Eternal Sugar and Aurora Candy, literally made a whole two things based on that not that long ago (Seen her more with Kouign-Amann, same as SM and PJ but literally don't see unlike them, feels like a stretch for the other two above tbh)

Silent Salt and Pastry, connected to the Order's Sacred Fork and relating to silence/keeping silence (yes I believe SS is connected to that)

Tho I haven't seen Mystic Flour paired any other similar cookie. I guess Longan Dragon, seen people pair them a little and I don't have much knowledge of LD, but I much prefer a pairing with not a all powerful dragon. Another thing added to the underrated MF chart sadly, being right beside BS. Is there a cookie in Ovenbreak too perhaps? Or in any of the other games, still up or not? It would be interesting to see into it personally

[daemonmage]

I need Bruce doing things he believes is completely out of character for Batman just to scare people. Like full on just putting Brucie into Batman as revenge against the annoyances he’s received.

Hal walks into the meeting room early for once and sees Batman kicking his feet a doodling in his lead lined notebook with a sparkly gel pen.

Hal: “uhhh”

Batman: “Hi GL~”

Hal: flees

By the time the meeting comes around Batman is once again the stoic scary man he always is. Hal is half convinced that it was a hallucination of some kind, maybe lack of sleep or that bagel that Barry dared him to eat.

The meeting ends and everyone is just hanging out. Hal goes over to talk to Barry when he swears he hears Batman’s voice say “no one will ever believe you” in his ear. Hal doesn’t sleep well for a week.

(Batman is very smug about it, that’s what he deserves for eating his bagel. Alfred made the spread for it.)