cats don’t know what words mean and i love that about them. i can say “you are a beautiful little angel child and i love you more than anything else in the entire world” but also “you wretched little clown bastard. you’ve created such a big mess and now i have to clean it because i have hands and you don’t. this is god’s cruelest joke.” and they don’t care they just say :3 and put their little paws on me
…is this supposed to be considered weird? I don’t get it.
I think it’s more that it was an unexpected feature. I’m glad it’s there.
Yeah I actually found it while prepping for brain surgery, and was incredibly relieved that it was a built-in feature and not something I’d have to leave convoluted instructions about or whatever. It’s a bit morbid, sure, but it’s a great feature.
…an unexpected but very appreciated feature.
This is a feature designed by women who’d been in fandom for decades, and who had faced the issue of, “X is dead, and we know she loved fandom, so… can we reprint her stories? Who can decide? Her family knows fuck-all about fandom. Who was her best friend? Do they know if she would’ve liked her story to be reprinted in the Best Of OTP Fic zine?”
Running across that once doesn’t make you think about a policy, but by the time it’s five to ten times, and then you’ve seen people vanish from the internet (might be dead; might just be not interested anymore) and nobody knows whether it’s okay to collect their fic in an archive or transfer it to a new one….
Yeah, the FNoK policy is one of the awesome things about AO3.
How to hack any hospital computer (L337 version for advanced security systems)
-Use the password taped to the back of the monitor
As a computer guy: This is what happens when you have too much security. It reaches a tipping point and then suddenly you have none.
Security at the cost of convenience comes at the cost of security.
This is true of so many things in healthcare. Example: our software is designed to automatically alert the doctor if a patient’s vital signs are critically out of range. If someone has a blood pressure of 200/130, the doc gets a pop-up box that they have to acknowledge before doing anything else. It makes sense, in our setting.
But then some mega-genius upstairs realized something: the system was only alerting for critical vital signs, but not for all vital signs that could possibly be bad. Like, yeah, 200/130 is potentially life-threatening, but 130/90 is above ideal and can have negative effects on health. Should the doctors be allowed to just ignore something that could negatively affect a patient’s health? Heavens no!
So now the system generates a pop-up for any vital signs that are even slightly abnormal. A pressure of 120/80 (once considered textbook normal, now considered slightly high) will create the pop-up. We have increased our vigilance!
Well, no, what we’ve actually done is train doctors to click through a constant bombardment of pop-ups without looking. We’ve destroyed their vigilance and made it much easier for them to accidentally skim past life-threatening vital signs.
But you can’t tell that to management, because you’d have to confess that you are a flawed human with limited attention resources. They’d tell you “well, all the other doctors take every abnormal vital sign seriously, it sounds like you’re being negligent.” And if you’re smart, you back down before you start telling the big boss all about your habit of ignoring critical safety alerts.
The end result is exactly the same as if we had no alerts at all, except with more annoying clicking.
What annoys the FUCK out of me about the ‘all historians are out there to erase queerness from history’ thing on Tumblr is that it’s just one of those many attitudes that flagrantly mischaracterises an entire academic field and has a complete amateur thinking they know more than people who’ve spent fucking years studying said field.
Like someone will offer a very obvious example of – say – two men writing each other passionate love letters, and then quip about how Historians will just try to say that affection was just different ‘back then’. Um…no. If one man writes to another about how he wants to give him 10 000 kisses and suck his cock, most historians – surprise surprise! – say it’s definitely romantic, sexual love. We aren’t Victorians anymore.
It also completely dismisses the fact of how many cases of possible queerness are much more ambiguous that two men writing to each other about banging merrily in a field. The boundaries of platonic affection are hugely variable depending on the time and place you’re looking at. What people mock us for saying is true. Nuance fucking exists in the world, unlike on this hellscape of a site.
It is a great discredit to the difficult work that historians do in interpreting the past to just assume we’re out there trying to straightwash the past. Queer historians exist. Open-minded allies exist.
I’m off to down a bottle of whisky and set something on fire.
It’s also vaguely problematic to ascribe our modern language
and ideas of sexuality to people living hundreds or even thousands of years
ago. Of course queer people existed then—don’t be fucking daft, literally any
researcher/historian/whatever worth their salt with acknowledge this. But as
noted above, there’s a lot of ambiguity as well—ESPECIALLY when dealing with a
translation of a translation of a copy of a damaged copy in some language that
isn’t spoken anymore. That being said, yes, queer erasure happens, and it
fucking sucks and hurts. I say that as a queer woman and a baby!researcher. But
this us (savvy internet historian) vs. them (dusty old actual historian)
mentality has got to stop.
You’re absolutely right.
I see the effect of applying modern labels to time periods when they didn’t have them come out in a bad way when people argue about whether some historical figure was transmasculine or a butch lesbian. There were some, of course, who were very obviously men and insisted on being treated as such, but with a lot of people…we just don’t know and we never will. The divide wasn’t so strong back in the late 19th century, for example. Heck, the word ‘transmasculine’ didn’t exist yet. There was a big ambiguous grey area about what AFAB people being masculine meant, identity-wise.
Some people today still have a foot in each camp. Identity is complicated, and that’s probably been the case since humans began to conceptualise sexuality and gender.
That’s why the word ‘queer’ is such a usefully broad and inclusive umbrella term for historians.
Also, one more thing and I will stop (sorry it’s just been so long since I’ve gotten to rant). Towards the beginning of last semester, I was translating “Wulf and Eadwacer” from Old English. This is a notoriously ambiguous poem, a p p a r e n t l y, and most of the other students and I were having a lot of trouble translating it because the nouns and their genders were all over the place (though this could be because my memory is slipping here) which made it hella difficult to figure out word order and syntax and (key) the fucking gender of everything. In class, though, my professor told us that the gender and identity of the speaker were actually the object of some debate in the Anglo-Saxonist community. For the most part, it was assumed that the principal speaker of the poem is a woman (there is one very clear female translation amongst all that ambiguity) mourning the exile of her lover/something along those lines. But there’s also some who say that she’s speaking of her child. And some people think the speaker of the poem is male and talking abut his lover. And finally, there’s some people who think that the speaker of the poem is a fucking BADGER, which is fucking wild and possibly my favorite interpretation in the history of interpretations.
TL;DR—If we can’t figure out beyond the shadow of a doubt whether the speaker is a human or a fucking badger, then we certainly can’t solidly say whether a speaker is queer or not. This isn’t narrowmindedness, this is fucking what-the-hell-is-this-language-and-culture (and also maybe most of the manuscripts are pretty fucked which further lessens knowledge and ergo certainty).
Also, if there’s nothing to debate, what’s even the fun in being an historian?
All of this.
I had a student once try to tell me that I was erasing queer history by claiming that a poem was ambiguous. I was trying to make the point that a poem was ambiguous and that for the time period we were working with, the identities of “queer” and “straight” weren’t so distinctive. Thus, it was possible that the poem was either about lovers or about friends because the language itself was in that grey area where the sentiment could be romantic or just an expression of affection that is different from how we display affection towards friends today.
And hoo boy. The student didn’t want to hear that.
It’s ok to admit ambiguity and nuance. Past sexualities aren’t the same as our modern ones, and our understanding of culture today can’t be transferred onto past cultures. It just doesn’t work. The past is essentially a foreign culture that doesn’t match up perfectly with current ones – even if we’re looking at familiar ones, like ancient or medieval Europe. That means our understanding of queerness also has to account for the passage of time. I think we need to ask “What did queerness look like in the past?” as opposed to “How did queerness as we understand it today exist in the past?” As long as we examine the past with an understanding that not all cultures thought same-sex romance/affection/sexual practice was sinful, we’re not being homophobic by admitting there can be nuance in a particular historical product.
I know a lot of very smart people who are working on queerness in medieval literature and history. And yes, there are traditions of scholars erasing queer history because they themselves are guided by their own ideologies. We all are. It’s impossible to be 100% objective about history and its interpretation. But that doesn’t mean there isn’t good work being done by current scholars, including work that corrects the bad methodologies of the past.
also yeah, the key thing that’s helped me as a student of history is learning that using language outside of modern labels shouldnt erase queerness, but should complicate it.
Jesus Christ all of this
i think a lot of kids of tumblr have this vague grudge against ‘straightwashing academics’ that they actually picked up from their highschool curriculum, which is kind of a completely different thing. like, it’s not ‘academics’ that’s the problem when it comes to american teenagers being fed an extremely white, straight, patriarchical version of history; it’s your fucking government.
I felt like I needed to clarify some things before we could continue any more conversations on this godforsaken website.
I’m very proud of the European Robin, I think I really captured it.
ALSO A DADDY LONG LEGS is different in the UK vs USA. I learned that by arguing with some Brits because they said there was a daddy long legs on the wall, i looked and only saw an insect, argued with them all for 45 minutes until we all looked it up and saw that we were both correct.
British badger: jovial fellow, eats toast and jam. Might invite you in for a cuppa with the Mrs. Agricultural nuisance.
American badger: pallas cat of a wolverine. Very defensive. Fuck immediately off.
Bonus African badger: Silverback gorilla of mustelids. Should be a cryptid. Bro, don’t even. You are nothing to him.
That’s where all the cute badger shit comes from! Thank you. I have never understood why anyone would depict them as cute little forest creatures because they will fuck you up. I didn’t know the UK had polite garden badgers.
I don’t know why, but I think some Americans don’t realise how big the UK is….
American Customer: you’re English right? Do you know the bookshop between Wales and Bristol that has lots of books in?
Me in my head: yeah mate, I know that one. Classic. Love to pop down there on a cheeky break between work. What a wanker…
the continuous 48 states are is almost 39x the size of the isle of great britan
that’s your answer
For reference:
That’s JUST Texas.
When will the UK learn that they are puny little ants in which to be crushed???
where’s that post where the british person was like “oh yeah i only get to see my dad 2-3 times a year because he lives so far away :/” and a person asked “oh no how far away is he?” and the british person said “75 minutes”
op it literally takes about 20 minutes to get to wales from bristol, op that’s a reasonable question do you understand geography
leave europe alone you fucking colonizers
It takes my mom an hour to drive to work. Sometimes more. Europeans are cowards.
“Leave Europe alone you fucking colonizers”
Should we tell them?
I drove 6 hours just to pick someone up and bring them home because it’s nbd
Sorry, I’m still stuck on “Leave Europe alone, you colonizers.”
do they know
I always think of that quote, can’t recall who said it, about the difference between the UK and the States is that Americans think 100 years is a long time, and the UK thinks 100 miles is a long way.
Lieutenant Blouse, leading the Monstrous Regiment into battle: let’s go lesbians let’s go LETS GO LESBIANS LETS GO here we go lesbians..ROUNDING THE CORNER WITH A BUNCH OF LESBIANS HERE WE ARE CAN YOU HANDLE IT?!
bold of you to presume that Lieutenant Blouse has any idea that his regiment comprises entirely of lesbians
DustAndFundamentalists 