literally most things that people write off as just ‘textures’ to use in graphics are stolen & unsourced material created by artists or photographers NOT meant to be used as elements in projects without royalty payments. you can say ‘it’s just random tumblr posts they don’t care’ but you wouldn’t want someone to take your work and edit into their work so they can be praised for their beautiful style and creativity even if they just post it on social media w/o profit, would you?? so maybe if you browse pinterest or google images for pictures without finding the original source, you’re using images that you’re not allowed to use without realizing it.
you see it on here a lot especially in (i won’t link anything but i’m sure you know what i mean) those album track ‘aesthetics’ posts, au ‘aesthetic’ posts (you see these less in kpop, but where people use non-royalty free images to kinda craft a visual au), and even just rather typical graphics that have a lot of ‘texture’ elements. and texture packs too!! that’s often where the problem starts; people just collect images (often literal art), compile them in a folder w/o sources, then insist no one can repost those images w/o crediting the person who compiled them. what???
SO may i suggest some of my fave places you can get FREE, ROYALTY-FREE elements that are totally legal to use
I’m half-convinced that many Germans regard it as a point of national pride to have words for every conceivable emotion, and every time anyone anywhere asks “is there a word for [obscure emotional state]?”, the entire nation of Germany collectively invents one, edits their dictionaries so that it’s retroactively always existed, and says “yes, yes there is”.
1600s: most witch-hunts ended in this century. no witches were burned in North America; they were hanged or in one case pressed to death
1700s: the American Revolution. Marie Antoinette. the French Revolution. the crazy King George. most pirate movies
1800-1830: Jane Austen! Pride and Prejudice! those dresses where the waist is right under one’s boobs and men have a crapton of facial hair inside high collars
1830-1900: Victorian. Les Miserables is at the beginning, the Civil War is in the middle, and Dracula is at the end
1900-1920: Edwardian. Titanic, World War I, the Samantha books from American Girl, Art Nouveau
1920s: Great Gatsby. Jazz Age. Flappers and all that. most people get this right but IT IS NOT VICTORIAN. STUFF FROM THIS ERA IS NOT VICTORIAN. DO NOT CALL IT VICTORIAN OR LIST IT ON EBAY AS VICTORIAN. THAT HAPPENS SURPRISINGLY OFTEN GIVEN HOW STAGGERING THE VISUAL DIFFERENCE BETWEEN ERAS IS. also not 100 years ago yet, glamour.com “100 years of X” videos. you’re lazy, glamour.com. you’re lazy and I demand my late Edwardian styles
I just saw people referencing witch burning and Marie Antoinette on a post about something happening in 1878. 1878. when there were like trains and flush toilets and early plastic and stuff. if you guys learn nothing else about history, you should at least have vague mental images for each era
“Les Miserables is at the beginning, the Civil War is in the middle, and Dracula is at the end” sounds like the longest weirdest worst movie I’d pay to see in theatres five times.
Les Miserables but Jean Valjean is an immortal who survives the end, fights in the Civil War, and then murders Dracula when Dracula starts going after Marius and Cosette’s grandkids.
We don’t know yet if Mueller has the goods — documentary or testimonial proof of explicit collusion — or if he can get them, so we have no idea how this is ultimately going to play out.
But we are disturbingly close to the following scenario:
Say Mueller reveals hard proof that the Trump campaign knowingly colluded with Russia, strategically using leaked emails to hurt Clinton’s campaign. Say the president — backed by the Wall Street Journal editorial page, Fox News, Breitbart, most of the US Cabinet, half the panelists on CNN, most of the radio talk show hosts in the country, and an enormous network of Russian-paid hackers and volunteer shitposters working through social media — rejects the evidence.
They might say Mueller is compromised. It’s a Hillary/Deep State plot. There’s nothing wrong with colluding with Russia in this particular way. Dems did it first. All of the above. Whatever.
Say the entire right-wing media machine kicks to life and dismisses the whole thing as a scam — and conservatives believe them. The conservative base remains committed to Trump, politicians remain scared to cross the base, and US politics remains stuck in partisan paralysis, unable to act on what Mueller discovers.
In short, what if Mueller proves the case and it’s not enough? What if there is no longer any evidentiary standard that could overcome the influence of right-wing media?…
Epistemology is the branch of philosophy having to do with how we know things and what it means for something to be true or false, accurate or inaccurate. (Episteme, or ἐπιστήμη, is ancient Greek for knowledge/science/understanding.)
The US is experiencing a deep epistemic breach, a split not just in what we value or want, but in who we trust, how we come to know things, and what we believe we know — what we believe exists, is true, has happened and is happening.
The primary source of this breach, to make a long story short, is the US conservative movement’s rejection of the mainstream institutions devoted to gathering and disseminating knowledge (journalism, science, the academy) — the ones society has appointed as referees in matters of factual dispute.
In their place, the right has created its own parallel set of institutions, most notably its own media ecosystem.
But the right’s institutions are not of the same kind as the ones they seek to displace. Mainstream scientists and journalists see themselves as beholden to values and standards that transcend party or faction. They try to separate truth from tribal interests and have developed various guild rules and procedures to help do that. They see themselves as neutral arbiters, even if they do not always uphold that ideal in practice.
The pretense for the conservative revolution was that mainstream institutions had failed in their role as neutral arbiters — that they had been taken over by the left, become agents of the left in referee’s clothing, as it were.
But the right did not want better neutral arbiters. The institutions it built scarcely made any pretense of transcending faction; they are of and for the right. There is nominal separation of conservative media from conservative politicians, think tanks, and lobbyists, but in practice, they are all part of the conservative movement. They are prosecuting its interests; that is the ur-goal.
Indeed, the far right rejects the very idea of neutral, binding arbiters; there is only Us and Them, only a zero-sum contest for resources. That mindset leads to what I call “tribal epistemology” — the systematic conflation of what is true with what is good for the tribe.
There’s always been a conspiratorial and xenophobic fringe on the right, but it was (fitfully) held in place by gatekeepers through the early decades of America’s post-war prosperity. The explosion of right-wing media in the 1990s and 2000s swept those gatekeepers away, giving the loudest voice, the most exposure, and the most power to the most extreme elements on the right. The right-wing media ecosystem became a bubble from which fewer and fewer inhabitants ever ventured.
As the massive post-election study of online media from Harvard (which got far too little attention) showed, media is not symmetrical any more than broader polarization is. “Prominent media on the left are well distributed across the center, center-left, and left,” the researchers found. “On the right, prominent media are highly partisan.”
When mapping out sources of online news, researchers found that the two basic poles were the center-left and the far-right.
The center of gravity of the overall landscape is the center-left. Partisan media sources on the left are integrated into this landscape and are of lesser importance than the major media outlets of the center-left. The center of attention and influence for conservative media is on the far right. The center-right is of minor importance and is the least represented portion of the media spectrum.
In short, they conclude, “conservative media is more partisan and more insular than the left.”
That insular partisan far-right media is also full of nonsense like Pizzagate that leaves the base continuously pumped up — outraged, infuriated, terrified, and misled. At this point, as the stories above show, the conservative base will believe anything. And they are pissed about all of it.
As Brian Beutler wrote in a scathing piece recently, the mainstream media has never learned to deal with the right-wing bubble — it has not learned how not to take bad-faith lies seriously. And now we will all reap the consequences…
Say he pardons everyone. People will argue on cable TV about whether he should have. One side will say up, the other will say down. Trump may have done this, but what about when Obama did that? What about Hillary’s emails? Whatabout this, whatabout that, whatabout whatabout whatabout?
There is no longer any settling such arguments. The only way to settle any argument is for both sides to be committed, at least to some degree, to shared standards of evidence and accuracy, and to place a measure of shared trust in institutions meant to vouchsafe evidence and accuracy. Without that basic agreement, without common arbiters, there can be no end to dispute.
If one side rejects the epistemic authority of society’s core institutions and practices, there’s just nothing left to be done. Truth cannot speak for itself, like the voice of God from above. It can only speak through human institutions and practices.
The subject of climate change offers a crystalline example here. If climate science does its thing, checks and rechecks its work, and then the Republican Party simply refuses to accept it … what then?
That’s what US elites are truly afraid to confront: What if facts and persuasion just don’t matter anymore?
…I think we all know already that it’s going to go this way.
Once this tax-cut plan goes down in flames, which it looks like it will
currently(remember, they wanted to get this passed the first week of
Sept or some crazy thing like that, so it’s already been massively delayed and the opposition to it is huge), then it’s possible the Rs will
decide Donny’s a liability and cut him loose.
I find this less likely
than some do, though, given how committed the Rs have been to the Infallibility of Republican Presidents since Nixon.
It’s not just the chorus of “Nixon did nothing Wrong” they’ve been warbling, faux-emotional, since his resignation, either; the Republican party basically responded to an RPres being forced out of office for committing serious crimes that threatened our very democracy itself by… doubling down on presidential criminality. Every Republican president since Nixon, with the possible exception of Bush1(haven’t looked him up in awhile so I’m shakier on his term), has committed impeachable crimes. None of them faced any punishment at all for them; hardly anyone in their administrations did. There was never even any serious attempt by Congress or through the Courts to punish them. The Republicans really are the party of “Faction Before Country” and have been for decades now, so the possibility of them choosing to ignore further evidence of Donald’s criminality(there’s already plenty out there unrelated to Russia, campaign finance fraud, and providing aid and comfort to an enemy of the Union that they’re choosing to do nothing about) is very real.
I turned my laptop back on solely to reblog this fucking post because we just realized this and I am Livid. There is really no evidence that this is not possible. We know life powerups of some type at least can work on spirits and transition them into physical bodies bc of Aranea and the ring. This is entirely feasible. This is what happens when you introduce 20 ways to come back to life and then tpk your maincast. The Homestuck epilogue is Jane bringing the entire Game Over crew back to life and them dogpiling Aranea’s ghost.
today, friday 13th, i had two things scheduled to happen. 1 was taking my drivers test (not really relevant to the purgatory thing but i feel the need to include it on the basis of friday 13th fuckery), 2 was picking up my diploma. as it turns out, somewhere between home and the dmv a taillight went out, so the administrator wouldnt let me take the test, and rescheduled me to NOVEMBER. so thats how my 9am went.
with that under our hats, me and my mom went to find my diploma.
it started bad. google maps did not recognize the address as existing. it took us several tries to convince it there was a west school avenue in anywhere but california, and when we finally did, the street names didn’t match. some of them just didn’t match the physical signs, but others changed or disappeared in the map itself. and as we approached, we discovered that the facility we were looking for was not only off the road, but the only way to get to it was through a backwoods neighborhood, inhabited EXCLUSIVELY by hicks sitting on their porches and judging us for some unknown sin.
finally, google says we’ve arrived. surely not, we whisper. please no. jesus christ. we’re faced with what appears to be a small penitentiary, the front of which is plain white with massive blinded windows, and the only parking in sight is through a gigantic chain-link fence. there is no signage anywhere whatsoever to indicate whether we’re allowed in, but there’s nowhere else to stop without blocking the teeny little road, so we pull in. the energy of this place is absolutely befuckened. we’re talking deserted. the parking lot is jam-packed, but there’s not a human in sight. it’s not a closed building either, more like a campus, with dozens of doors opening onto little courtyard areas. the doors are all either unmarked or covered in seemingly arbitrary words and numbers. some of them have strangely large locks and no knobs. some of them have keypads.
well by now we’re both thoroughly fuckin spooked, so my mom calls my dad to explain we were gonna be a little uh late and i go to find. something. anything. civilization, perhaps. i find a little hallway to the front of the building, where i can now see a gigantic sign declaring the name of the facility. the letters are two feet tall, but the exact same color as the roofing behind them. they are not faded. they were painted that way. beneath them is an easily 4-meter-tall arched metal gate, which is the only opening on the entire front of the otherwise clean building, and, therefore, logically represents the main entrance.
directly inside and left of the gate is a door with a cartoonishly large keypad lock and a sign which reads ‘NOT AN ENTRANCE.’ there are no arrows and no directions.
i turn around and head the opposite direction, down a long hall. at the end of it is a set of double doors which are shrouded in darkness. i’m about 30 feet away when there’s a flicker of movement behind the doors. then, out of the shadows, steps an old hick. “you look lost.” he says. “y-eAh” i reply. he enquires what i’m there for, and i explain my diploma. he directs me to a door next to a blue car. there is no logical way for the car to be inside the buildings courtyard, but it is no less next to a door. as i turn to see where i’m being directed, a young woman seemingly materializes in the middle of the hallway perpendicular to us, walking briskly. without slowing she turns to me, says “she’s making a pb&j sandwich,” and carries on her way. when i turn around the man is gone. when i turn back, she’s gone too. i run for my mom.
ngl at this point im dead fucking sure she wont be where i left her and when i find her the car will be gone and we’ll be trapped in this hellhole if we don’t get out before sunset, but she’s there, and we go and enter the door. inside we can hear idle chatter from an adjacent office. after a few seconds a woman comes out. she does not ask who we are. she asks whose diploma we want. we tell her mine. she pulls it out of a stack of loose paper, hands it to us without another solitary word, and bids us farewell.
mom drove outta there about 70mph and tbh i wouldve done the same that was an evil place and i do not plan on returning
This is a good article, and the art is from the author’s book cover, but I have to say, this makes it look like the “ideal” queer happy ending is riding off into the sunset on some kind of dinosaur and I am absolutely 1000% behind this.
Give your queer characters dinosaurs 2017.
i haven’t even read the article yet but i’m already reblogging because this made me imagine seebs and me having a picnic on a brontosaur’s back as it meanders gently westward and i am still smiling
i can’t stop fucking thinking about my english prof talking about the queer historical significance of the word “sweet” as a deliberate indicator of homosexual love and how that relates to both edward ii and gaveston, as well as hamlet and horatio. so, because shakespeare was likely totally knowledgeable about codes that queer men were using (cos like duh obvs), the inclusion of “sweet prince” at the end of hamlet is in all likelihood a completely deliberate indication that hamlet and horatio were in love
i’m???? so gay for literature and history lmao
my good sweet honey lord????
I WROTE A WHOLE PAPER ON THIS SHIT IN DOCTOR FAUSTUS HIT ME UP LITERALLY ANY TIME YO.
just moving along like everyone else 