thecurioustale

[thecurioustale]

I mean these days even the most official, expensive TV shows only give you like 10 episodes per season. And most of them only last one or two seasons. So, really, Jennyffer is already a TV show! =D

All it's missing to make it "official" is obnoxious advertisement breaks, a dumbing down and censorship of the material to appeal to a wider audience, and one of those obnoxious promo posters with all characters standing in the same shot together but spaced completely apart, staring sanctimoniously into the camera as they strike melodramatic poses. And $70 million to pay a bunch of producers.

i wish jennyffer was a full tv show so i could hear an extended version of the opening remix so bad

[thecurioustale]

Omg, that's so ridiculous! :3

Two weeks VERY well spent. 😎 Little projects like these are the best.

This contraption reminds me a little bit of Johnny 5 from Short Circuit.

it is done, my mos recent creation. very proud of it.

the biggest challenge in this project was having to prototype every single step of the way because i could never be sure if the assembly technique or the materials i was working with were going to work as expected. this is the third time im working with a cardboard original project and by now im familiar with how fragile and feckless that material can be. so i was exra paranoid this time around trying to triple and double enforce everything i was constructing.

none the less, cardboard continues to be a huge challenge, and compounded with the cheap ass tools im working with, and the huge margins of error i was operating under, that made it so that every measurement i took was under suspicion. i had to calculate diameters and circumpherences a lot of times during construction and the ammount of times the results would end up being wrong made me start doubting math alltogether.

finally, surprisingly enough, a LOT of the work was spent on polish, on finishing touches, on small quality of life additions and touch ups that i woul put here and there either to reinforce or give better functionality or comfort to the thing.

incredibly engaging and satisfying to work with, i became an expert of carving circles out of cardboard with a razor. lots of fun.

[thecurioustale]

This is very true!

I have a maxim: "Friends of mine are not necessarily friends of one another." In my case this has held powerfully true over the years, as my friendships tend to span geography, demographics, and culture, and it is not common for friends of mine to become friends of one another even when I introduce them. But, myself aside, I think to some extent this idea also holds true more generally.

I suspect that the trope of the self-contained friends group so often seen in fiction is more so an instance of cultural grandfathering than of narrative expedience (although the latter is definitely a factor). These kinds of friendship groups arise more naturally in highly-localized cultural circumstances where: 1) the same people see each other often; 2) there aren't all that many people around; and 3) long-distance communication and travel are rare (think pre-Internet, or even pre-phone, to say nothing of pre-postal).

Also consider that people like you and I are outsiders to normality; given that most people are highly social and not very highly individual, there is some extra momentum for them to lump together in self-contained friendship groups.

Also also consider that work and school are major players in most people's social lives, but today the former is much more broken up over a person's life while both the former and the latter are intruded upon by smartphones, broken up by geography due to longer commutes, and were situationally disrupted even further by the pandemic. It is harder to make friends in person now through work and school, for everyone, and therefore harder for friend groups to be highly self-contained.

In a few decades, I fully expect that the trope of highly-self-contained friends groups will have declined in storytelling.

another of the ways in which fiction absolutely lied to me and not prepared me at all for real life is friend groups.

Every story always has the one specific well defined friend group where everyone knows everyone else and is equally close to each other and dont hang out with anyone else outside of the friend group. Did you ever notice how absurdly pervasive that is in fiction?

im real life friend groups are this amorphous thing where not everyone knows each other and have different relations with each other and you will usually have multiple friend groups completly isolated from each other who in turn are conected to other groups totally divorces from yours and sometimes you will also have some one on one friendshios with some people who are not part of any group, and some times you will spend your time with people who are not "friends" but friends of friends or coworkers or what have you and its so incredibly messy and complicated and i dont know if any piece of fiction was ever able to truly capture that in its full complexity

[thecurioustale]

I think @iswearbyalltheflowers is right, at least in some instances. One thing I have noticed about leftist Jew-haters is the pains they often take to reject the legitimacy of Jewish culture and folkways. Jewish food isn't Jewish; it's stolen and bastardized from some other land. Jewish music isn't Jewish; it's stolen and bastardized from some other land. And so forth. In this way, Israel and any Jews who support the existence of a Jewish state and specifically of that Jewish state (which the vast majority of us do) can be conceptually cut off from any of the protections usually afforded to ethnicities and cultural groups under the auspices of social justice. You can directly see the cognitive dissonance in these bigots turning the wheel of their thoughts.

But this also necessitates the correctness of what @cantotallyeven says, because, given the legitimacy of the Jewish ethnicity and of Jewish culture, this attempt at delegitimization is dehumanizing by definition and reveals much about the mindset of the perpetrators. It's just straight-up bigotry, and it suggests that the people espousing these views are operating on the same tribalistic slaughter impulse that we give so much grief to the fascists for. Such people should be automatically shunned from leftist spaces on the grounds that these attitudes and behaviors are antithetical to the principles of of social justice, but the world is upside-down these days.

I don't think this accounts for all Jew-haters, though, and maybe not even the majority of them:

Many of the softer bigots are just following the direction the wind is blowing in, repeating what they're told by trusted authorities in the media and on social media, and reacting non-critically to the charged (and usually deceptive) imagery and storytelling of Islamist and/or anti-Western propaganda, e.g. wounded children in Gaza and so on. These offenders are not necessarily intentionally dehumanizing Israelis and Jews so much as surrendering their own individuality and critical faculties to the social convulsions of the current moment by adopting the views of others as their own—which is by no means unique to leftist anti-Semites in the Israeli–Palestinian Conflict and in fact is one of humanity's biggest and most ancient problems.

Alternatively, many of the harder bigots aren't interested in delegitimizing Jewish identity per se at all; rather they are driven more directly by the drive to destroy Jews outright, and their beliefs follow from that basis. They don't care about things like "legitimacy"; they are at war with Jews and don't operate on the principles of social justice whatsoever.

(And, besides the two aforementioned groups, there is also a cynical niche group of Jew-haters who know that there is nothing wrong with Jews, but fan the flames of hatred anyway for sociopolitical or economic gain; their bigotry is not anti-Semitic but generally misanthropic, showing a deep cynicism and disregard for all life. Some days it feels like most of these people are paid contributors who serve as talking heads in the media.)

Whatever debates are to be had about the ethics and effectiveness of Israeli foreign policy, they do not require invalidating the Jewish state outright. So any attempt to do so is a dead giveaway of bad faith. Even if one were to take the view that the Netanyahu government is so bad that it deserves to be forcibly overthrown (which I do not, to be clear), that would not equate to justification for eliminating the nation-state that exists specifically to be a haven for Jews in the world.

Maybe it’s just that my experiences are not universal and people really are isolated from immigrant and refugee populations, but part of what feels so crazy about leftist antisemitism is that my ‘social Justice 101’ included a lot of “don’t project a governments actions onto people” “don’t judge people by the most radical far right members of their ethnicity / religion” “it’s normal for people to miss and feel affection for a country they have ties to, they are talking about people/place/culture, not the government”

Because people seem so unaware of these really basic ideas, at least when it comes to Jews and Israelis

[thecurioustale]

:3

I can tell if a bug has a troubled past

[thecurioustale]

CONSTABLE: Magistrate, these Victorian paint parties are getting positively out of hand.

MAGISTRATE: Yes, I should say most of them are out of hands. [ruffles moustache with a disgruntled murmur]

"the room has a large painting on the walls of it"

[thecurioustale]

That crab got so angry, lol!

[thecurioustale]

Outstanding! Boullée was more than a century ahead of his time, and that's only so far. <3

For me these are wondrous drawings that inspire great imagination. Their scale and sheer otherworldly dominance are a bombardment, upon space, of inscrutable and inexorable purpose. Together with art and architectural styles that would mainly come over a century later, most notably Art Deco and Expressionism, I find them to belong among the most evocative architectural forms in history—even though, and perhaps inevitably, Boullée's most ambitious concepts never made it past the paper.

In Galaxy Federal, these drawings are reminiscent to me of the aspirations of the "Geodesial" Era, a period of history much removed in the past from Cherry's own time, during which humanity achieved what we would consider godlike powers over life and mind. This era plays a small but thematically important role in the background of the story of the inaugural novel.

Thanks for thinking of me, @mortified-muskrat! I haven't looked at these pictures in a long time, and certainly not with eyes of the present.

I think a lot about the architecture ideas drawn by Étienne-Louis Boullée

They're sketches from the 1780s and they look like the end of the fucking universe

[thecurioustale]

Vladimir's Tower

I dreamed that my children's books were barely selling, so I spoke to a consultant from my publisher. She told me that it was because they were in the "literature" segment of the industry so there was virtually no demand, but the one ray of light, to paraphrase her, was "Sick children in hospitals are using them as coloring books." I thumbed through one of my own books and somehow they were indeed coloring books now, with horribly bastardized versions of the Guard of Galavar because of coloring book purposes (like, they looked like growling cartoon bulldogs and ancient Chinese demons). I asked her whether my word counts in said coloring books were too high, which is a question that only makes sense in dreams, and she said they were right on the upper limits, despite how much effort I had put into condensing them.

I tried to ask her more questions, but she said my publishing package only paid for an initial consultation, and we were done here. So I walked away, dejected, in the rain, and began to climb a palatial tower with Vladimir Putin and his entourage. He was disquietingly polite and courteous, and the tower was well-appointed, and so I began to think he might not be such a bad guy. But I did notice that everyone was on pins and needles around him, including me. His tower was broken in some parts; like, the fourth floor was just a narrow crawlspace that the KGB would use to disappear people it didn't like; and the escalator from the seventh floor to the eighth floor had a gap in it (i.e., you would plummet to the ground if you took the escalator).

When I got to the top of the tower Putin was gone and I was in a rainy public market or downtown place, with lots of colorful shops and cafes, and Greg and a couple of my other friends from high school were there to pay me a surprise visit. They were eating nice food, and knew I was poor, so they bought me pastries. I remember choosing the pastries very carefully so as to get maximal value out of them, rather than necessarily picking out the ones I would have liked the most in that moment, which is a common thing for me to do in real life.

I woke up desiring lemon and strawberry danishes. (Separate, not "lemon-and-strawberry.")

[thecurioustale]

Agree with the sentiment, but, to hijack the thread:

This is not the first time I've seen Tumblr users who are more familiar with this site than me claim that Tumblr doesn't have an algorithm and that feeds are strictly chronological. I've noticed this to be true for visiting individual people's blogs, but not for the main default feed, which is definitely not chronological and by all appearances to me displays posts algorithmically quite obviously.

Am I missing something here, or what? What do people mean when they say Tumblr has no algorithm?

...is what I would be asking if, before posting this, I hadn't decided to go look at my Tumblr Settings to see if this is some kind of switch.

It turns out there is, called "Best Stuff First," and that mine was either on by default or I turned it on a long time ago and forgot. So I turned it off to see if this would make my feed chronological, and it does. This is a completely different experience! I don't actually follow a ton of people on here, so my feed is a lot emptier now, but is, in fact, entirely chronological. With "Best Stuff First" I had taught the algorithm what to show me (with only about 30% intentionality, and the algorithm is extremely sensitive so all I have to do is bias my engagement and I've learned that I'll get noticeable results the same day). Without "Best Stuff First," I'm seeing posts from creators whose posts virtually never get shown to me but whom I actually do follow.

This explains a lot, including why several people were confused when I explained that posting multiple posts in a short span of time makes my posts less visible and kills engagement with them, which caused some folks to scratch their heads and be like "What?" Apparently most people do have "Best Stuff First" switched on, and thus are affected by the algorithmic penalizations to high-frequency posting. But many others don't have it switched on and perhaps, like me, do not realize that the option even exists. (?)

I'm really glad that Tumblr gives us a "Best Stuff First" switch that we can freely toggle ourselves. This is the way it should be! I'm perfectly happy to have an algorithmically curated feed, but I'd like to be able to turn it off sometimes and see things chronologically (indeed, I'd like that by default). Social networks like Facebook decided long ago that we don't get to have such basic control, but hooray for Tumblr for respecting us enough to do it in the year 2025.

Also, because of your post Fip I have now learned that Tumblr has a "For You" tab, and indeed has tabs at all. Who knew!

People put a lot of stock on tumblrs lack of algorithm as one of the features that makes it superior to other social networks. The whole idea that you get your dash with perfectly chronological post as they are being posted exclusively from the people you follow. With no curation or suggestion or input from the website itself (unless you include the for you tab but who even uses that)

But i think there also something to be said about the varied diet that tumblr offers in terms of posts. You will get paragraph long effort posts and videos and fanart and comic pages and short shitpost and screencaps and many other different formats side by side in a ways that i genuenly think no other website achieves with the same level of unpredictable variance.

[thecurioustale]

One nice thing about the confluence of heavy rain in DC, assassinations in Minnesota, the No Kings protests nationwide, and Israel's ongoing attack on Iranian nuclear capabilities is that nobody noticed Trump's stupid parade. I had to double-check that it even happened (albeit mainly because I don't check the news much these days).

I don't usually bother paying attention to the trivial, cosmetic stuff like this, but I do try to take a moment to appreciate symbolic karmic victories when we get them.

[thecurioustale]

For what it's worth, most of these Jew-hater contingents who show up waving Palestinian flags and shouting Hamas slogans at unrelated protests are not representative of the American left. They are agitators operating with the express intention of infiltrating and overtaking movements and organizations. It is a decades-old strategy that has worked extremely well for Islamist forces attempting to legitimize and assert themselves in Western leftist spaces.

The mainstream left in the US (and the rest of the West) sadly has already been brainwashed into Jew-hating political views, if not into the actual hatred itself by and large. But many will listen to a reasoned counterpoint when given the opportunity, and can be deprogrammed fairly easily. It isn't even necessary to try and bring them into a pro-Israel position; that's not the point and in any case it's no one's decision to make but theirs. But they can be made to see how the anti-Israeli position is built largely on lies and hatred.

That's important to remember, because otherwise the impression prevails that the left as a whole has turned against Jews, and that isn't true. I wish there were more people with the means and courage to attend these rallies and provide a visible Jewish presence and do the hard work of canvassing protestors and spreading information. I wish I could do more myself, but with my health conditions and given how much this Jew-hate stuff gets me worked up I just can't. But I hope others can, because the left is the natural home of the pursuit of a better world, and it deserves to be contested.

Me looking at all the no kings protests that have militant Antizionist contingents publicly planning on attending and no plans to protect Jewish protestors like :/

[thecurioustale]

I appreciate the amount of time and effort it takes to verify the number of discrete tables in this image.

I also appreciate that it isn't actually verifiable. You have to make guesses not only about which tables are connected and which aren't, but also about which of these surfaces are actually "tables" as opposed to other horizontal surfaces like bars, shelves, and counters.

"the drawing shows three tables with chairs in front of them"

[thecurioustale]

Centaur Watching Fish by Arnold Böcklin (1878).

I love love love Böcklin’s mythical pieces, they have this sense of realism, and often even sensitivity.

[thecurioustale]

there’s been a really bizarre trend in the past couple years of TERFS/radfems getting pissed off about biology posts. posts about the bilateral gyandromorph cardinal (one half male, one half female), posts about older hens beginning to crow and act like roosters, posts about animals being animals. and it’s hilarious because they interpret these posts as some kind of agenda. no! these are animals not choosing any gender identity or sexuality but being born into bodies they have no control over. weird how that happens in nature huh

[thecurioustale]

It's so interesting to me how you can sometimes see the actual fault line between the two conceptual frameworks in a person's mind.

Wearing a mask yourself in public without context has become politicized in America. It is interpreted by many people as a declaration of what they call "wokeism." But wearing a mask for the benefit of a family member is interpreted by many (if not most) people as part of the framework of biomedical esoterica. It hasn't been politicized yet, for the most part, and probably won't be.

And it's not just masks this applies to. (Also, I am only realizing just now as I type this that the OP was referring to "masking" as in "wearing a mask," not as in "concealing some real aspect of oneself"; I understood that they were talking about wearing a face mask, but I had thought their usage of the word masking itself was a way of characterizing their behavior of self-defensive socially ingratiating deceitfulness. That usage actually works, which is why I didn't catch the actual intended meaning till now, lol!) It could apply to all kinds of things. Interestingly, medical deceits are a very rich vein. You can explain a lot of nonconformity by resorting to medical contextualizations, because most people tend to understand medical conditions as being out of one's control.

Interestingly, of course, this isn't what the OP is talking about at all. They're operating on the next level of meta, pointing out that projecting medicalisms onto oneself as an explanatory framework isn't nearly as effective as projecting them onto a family member. That's because medical conditions are a powerful form of othering, and it triggers a lot of people's bigotry when they believe they are speaking with a "sick" or "deformed" person, etc. But familial piety is a bedrock of the American cultural ethos. It is very broadly accepted that "normal" people will often do "weird things" for the sake of caring for a "sick" loved one.

Oftentimes this doesn't work. If you're the one who's bald or hyperfat or has rashes or facial deformities or a missing limb or whatever, you can't project that onto some absent family member. But, when the option is available, it can potentially be a powerful mode indeed of social ingratiation and acceptance.

Human socialization is so weird sometimes. Even so, you often don't have to squint too hard to see the evolutionary logic at work. It's a shame, really, for exactly the reasons alluded to by the OP. Life is so much easier, and better, when you don't have to avoid being rejected as an "other" in the first place due to traits or conditions that don't say anything meaningful about who you are.

it’s crazy how different you get treated in a mask but what really gets me is that when people ask why I’m masking, I’ve stopped saying I’m immunodeficient and started saying I have an immunodeficient family member at home. I am not exaggerating when I tell you this has 100% improved every single encounter I’ve had with anti-maskers. i’m not exaggerating in the slightest.

i used to tell people i’m immunodeficient and they’d ask invasive questions about my diagnosis, whether my parents kept my childhood overly sterile, whether I was vaccinated as a child (with the implication that it would have been bad if I were).

Now that I say I have an immunodeficient family member at home, people smile knowingly and say, “oh, well you do what you have to do,” and “my mom went through chemo. I remember how hard it was to do all the precautions” and “that’s so kind of you.”

if i tell someone i mask because i’m disabled, i’m assumed to be the weak link in our society, a burden to my family.

if i tell someone i mask to protect a disabled family member, i become the burdened, compassionate caretaker deserving of sympathy. how sad that i must limit myself to protect someone i love. how heroic that i choose to do so.

[thecurioustale]

Learning and doing!

First lemon from my lemon tree! (penny for scale)