So I had the strangest dream this weekend and nobody understands me so I need to share it with you because you might. Press J to skip this post if you can’t deal, I will accept this.
In my dream I was standing on the back deck of a rural cabin that overlooked a beautiful Vermont/Scottish Highlands landscape of unspoiled wilderness. It was a crisp, perfect autumn morning. I held a cup of cooling coffee in my hands as I leaned against the railing and scanned the perfect rolling hills in the midground, behind which the great patterned mountains with their snowcaps marched on until they blended with the horizon: #aesthetic
As I gazed at a distant meadow clearing in the trees, a pair of brightly coloured humanoid creatures emerged from the woods and began to dance for each other. It was an esoteric, beautiful mating dance, a strange combination of instinct and choreography. I felt awe washing over me. I marvelled. I felt a deep sense of wonder and peace as I observed this vanishingly rare encounter that I had never thought to observe in person. These animals were instantly recognisable but had never been studied in the wild. I felt incredibly humbled and privileged to witness this behaviour – I knew that I was the first human witness to observe this behaviour – and I reached for my phone, wondering if I should film it, so it could join the scholarly record, where it NEEDED to be. This could change everything. But then I held back – something told me “no,” to let the creatures have their privacy.
Ok, I can’t go any further without telling you that they were Teletubbies.
A red one and a yellow one. I know. I know. Stay with me here.
The cryptids melted back into the woods. My subconscious drew a discreet veil over the rest of their mating ritual, but I knew instinctively that this had been a dance of courtship. I was busy pondering the implications, because they were critical. You see, although the creatures were instantly recognisable as Teletubbies, as I had studied them, even at a distance, I had an incredible realisation.
They were adult Teletubbies.
This realisation dawned on me and in my dream I understood it fully. The ones that we know of – the captive ones that we have seen on television – are juveniles. In fact, they are the equivalent of toddlers. When you see the adults this becomes obvious. The garbled speech and silly movements of the four captive Teletubbies we know are the babbles of babyhood, a private primal toddler-language brewed up between sentient beings who have never encountered an adult of their own kind.
The adult Teletubbies have more branching, complex antlers and shaggy coats. They are less brightly coloured. They are terrifyingly large. Their strangely human faces, emerging from the thick fur, are unquestionably adult; remote, serene, reproachful. Their television screens are glitchy, esoteric and unknowable. They are cryptids whose public exploitation has undermined their rarity and their strange, alien dignity.
In my dream my feelings of awe and peace turned to great sadness at the fate of the captive toddler Teletubbies. I realised that I had to be the scientist who brought this discovery to the world and raised awareness of their plight. And I also questioned: are Teletubbies like axolotls? Do they exhibit neoteny? (Axolotls, the cute aquarium pets with flaring gills, are actually juveniles of an amphibious species – if given the right conditions they’ll grow up into land-dwelling black newts. But they can breed in their aquatic juvenile form, and most spend their whole lives in this form. Deprived of their wild potential, will the Teletubbies ever mature? Or are they merely experiencing a long childhood, natural for a species that is unimaginably long-lived?)
So in my dream my husband came out onto the back deck and I began to share these discoveries with him and before I could even bring up the axolotls he just said “what the fucking fuck” and went away again.
I woke up disgruntled and unable to capture the feeling of peace and sadness. I then tried to explain this to my husband in the waking world, and he said “what the fucking fuck” and walked away before I even got to the explanation of the Teletubbies being toddlers, which just goes to show that you never know someone as well as you think you do.
Anyway I’m sure you guys will join me in this knowledge. And also I’ve googled it and apparently the Teletubbies reboot features infant Teletubbies, so clearly they are getting more from somewhere and the time to question this is NOW
I have a personal theory that how a dream makes you feel is more meaningful than the content.
What I got from your dream was a sense of wonder and privilege (the good kind), followed by the need to bear witness and advocate for the cryptids. Topped off with a disturbingly accurate example of the attitudes you’d face.
(staring nobly into the distance) yes. yes, you understand. you understand.
I’m so sorry but this is what came to mind and so this is what I drew
Holy
Thank you so much for sharing that dream, it was EXACTLY what I needed to stop feeling like shit. Now I, too, am honored by the knowledge of adult teletubbies.
I sincerely apologize for spamming you all with the Hamilton fanfic controversy, but it’s really giving me so much strength. It’s been a while since we’ve had the kind of scandal that only Tumblr can provide (like the person who robbed graves; the person who mailed their toe to another person so they could make a necklace of it; etc). This scandal is just so fucking good, you know? White American college girl pretends to be a nonbinary Chinese-Pakistani Muslim human-trafficking survivor AND their American WOC wife and they live in India??? And they suffered a miscarriage? And they both have HIV? All so she can scam people out of money and amass kudos on Archive of Our Own for her Hamilton HIV fanfic? And she does this for YEARS? And the person who uncovered it is doing it for revenge because the fake-HIV-fanfic writer made them delete a fanfic about Lin-Manuel Miranda and Thomas Jefferson as cannibal mermaids performing oral sex and unironically accused them of gentrifying cannibalism??? I mean, this shit is fucking gold.
I can’t tell if this is serious or not, because it’s plausible yet absurd.
I’m utterly serious.
On the subject of Dril’s identity, wikipedia says:
Jacob Bakkila, one of the writers behind the similarly absurd and popular Horse_ebooks Twitter account, claimed to have been hired for a project by the person behind dril.[5] According to Bakkila, dril’s author is a graphic designer who lives somewhere in the New York metropolitan tri-state area.[5] John Herrman and Katie Notopoulos at BuzzFeed speculated that dril may be a collaborative project or that Bakkila himself was behind dril.[5] Bakkila denied the rumor that he was dril, but said dril was “a friend” and that dril had contributed to the Horse_ebooks sequel, Bear Stearns Bravo.[6]
At some point, people apparently made a connection between Dril and somebody called Paul Dochney, at least partially due to a linkedin page which shows Dochney’s contributions to Bear Stearns Bravo. Apparently there were further connections as well, to do with old accounts and comparisons of artwork, etc. I’m not up to scratch on the precise details of that, but an old tumblr reblog from 2014 from somebody claiming to know Dril also lists his name as being “Paul”. Why is this relevant to Hiveswap, you ask? Here’s part of the Hiveswap credits:
In addition to this, it’s worth noting that one of the 205 twitter accounts that @dril follows is Cohen Edenfield, the lead writer of Hiveswap.
Also, I spoke to somebody who did audio effects work for Hiveswap shortly after the Act 1 release, and while they seemed to not be entirely privy to the details they also brought up a connection. Now that we know that Dril is working with Hussie for certain and is a contributor to the new SBaHJ book, I think it’s pretty much confirmed to be legit at this point.
I am writing this on February 20th, 2013. I do not
know when, or if, I will ever post it. But since you’re reading it now, it can
only mean one thing: the MSPA Prophet is dead, and it is now safe for me to
tell the world how I knew when updates were coming.
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.
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
Anyone got suggestions for creepy documentaries im in the mood
here you go
not scary scary but its unsettling
What the fuck
Im watching this immediately this looks freaky as shit thank you
I saw this documentary at Sundance when I was working the festival, and every single screening of this film had heightened security, as well as bag and pocket checks before entering the theatre.
Why? Because earlier on in the festival, one of the people from Jane O’Brien Media (the company behind the “tickle cells”) was in the audience disrupting the screening.
At other festivals people from Jane O’Brien Media were kicked out for bringing recording devices into screenings with coffee cups and for continuously attempting to sabotage festival screenings. They hijacked the Q&A at a screening in Los Angeles, where they spent the Q&A portion threatening legal action against the filmmakers.
Not only a great “the truth is stranger than fiction” doc, but an absolutely crucial film to watch in an age where digital media has the power to be used for coercion. There’s a reason why those profiled didn’t want this doc getting out.
There’s a post going around that advocates giving clowns only real helium balloons. I’m not going to link to that post, because I don’t want the OP getting any hate. The balloon misconception is SUCH a common one I don’t think any one of us can say we didn’t fall prey to it at one point or another. But, the fact of the matter is, helium balloons are not good enrichment for clowns.
Firstly, they’re not sustainable. Helium is a rapidly depleting resource. Secondly, clowns like balloons because they mistake them for their eggs. A clown bouncing a balloon around on a string is taking care of its ‘baby.’ Clown eggs are brightly colored spheres that float around at shoulder-height, if healthy, and are transported by the parent by means of a filament. Balloons mimic these incredibly well. That is why clowns find balloons on the ground so distressing – a downed egg contains a sick embryo. The despair they experience when one floats away is that of child loss, and I’m sure you can imagine why they’re so distressed when one pops. That’s why malevolent breeds are predisposed to the act! All balloons “die”. They cannot hatch. Every experience a clown has with a balloon, however happy at the outset, ends in tragedy. They are not good enrichment items, no matter how busy they keep a clown.
So what are some alternatives? If you have two or more clowns of any social breed, then toys like custard pies, water squirters, and air horns make excellent entertainment. Note: Most common breeds are social. If you are keeping a social breed singularly, you MUST play with it for several hours a day at the bare minimum. While these breeds tend to adore balloons the most, the repeat psychological trauma they suffer because of them is not worth the easy out. If you keep a breed that prefers a solitary existence, they will get the most out of things like juggling supplies and balance balls. Make sure they have a safe space to play with these in when you aren’t home to supervise. All breeds need human interaction. A few times a week you need to show your clown you appreciate it – that’s the best enrichment of all. Remember that some methods of training result in ‘unusual’ reactions to the four quadrants – most commonly, +P will become “rewarding” – and some performance breeds innately make that connection, so research the right way to reward your clown.
On a final note, DO NOT GIVE MIMES BALLOONS. Look on any mime forum and you’ll see countless threads with titles like “Help! My mime won’t play with toys!” Yeah, dipshit, THEY DON’T UNDERSTAND TOYS. All members of the mime group are highly specialized working breeds geared towards imagination play. They are very intelligent, deeply driven to perform their unique rituals, and not much else. They need to do their original job to be happy. They need to put on shows. If you cannot provide the stimulation of a fully public performance at least once a week for your mime, and cannot provide regular training sessions, either, do not get a mime. Consider a fool instead. A lot of people brush off fools as beginner breeds, too rambunctious and talkative, but there’s a reason they were preferred by royalty for centuries. They’re actually very versatile and eager to please! They do love tumbling and have a knack for mimicking human speech, but will happily learn the same tricks as a mime. They’re also content to live singularly and enjoy practicing in private quite a lot, making them rather compatible with modern life. Their larger cousins, the jesters, can also learn mime routines, but keep in mind that they are more willful! The sinister jester is a near dupe for the creepy mime, a popular breed, but they’re not a great choice for a total novice. Remember, they contributed heavily to the makeup of the scary clowns. (o: Both fools and jesters will prefer to have physical props to play with in their off-time even if they’re trained to perform without them.
just moving along like everyone else 