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I HAVE A PROPER REFERENCE SHEET NOW!!! i commissioned @centaur-fanart for this, and they were an absolute joy to work with, and im so glad because i look absolutely beautiful
if the text looks weird its because i put that on there after the fact, dont blame them for that
this is the definitive me! after 9+ years, ive finally, fully, figured myself out, and im so glad
seriously go and commission them, their art is amazing
So...I just came across a video on YouTube that was going through "horror hot takes"...just watched it to pass the time and one of them was "I don't like the classics, I think they're boring"...and the host said that was a common take and showed a multitude of comments with the same sentiment. One of which was basically "nothing from the 20th century".
And I just....it just makes me sad.
That people are so unwilling to try these older films. And not that's not even limited to horror...so many people comment about how the older films are boring, or they don't age well or they're dumb and it just hurts my heart.
And to get back to horror...the movies that are being released nowadays would not exist without these older movies.
Love The Others? Or The Woman in Black? Or Mike Flanagan's first two horror series?
Those would not exist without The Haunting, The Innocents or Diaboliques.
Joy Ride would not exist without Duel.
The Exorcism of Emily Rose would not exist without The Exorcist.
Longlegs would not exist without Se7en or Silence of the Lambs.
Any movie where a killer is chasing someone with a knife would not exist without Psycho or Halloween.
What Lies Beneath is basically a love letter to Hitchcock films combined with a ghost story.
And Robert Egger's Nosferatu would 100% not exist without the 1922 silent film.
Granted, some people at least acknowledge the historical significance of these movies, but just say they aren't fans...but it seems like so many people just don't want to give the older movies a chance. They automatically assume that they're going to be bored by them. And I get it. It took a lot of convincing from my parents to watch Wait Until Dark, and now it's one of my favorites.
But also...to limit yourself to just the past 25 years when it comes to media (or honestly, anything) ...you are missing out on so much. It doesn't mean you have to watch movies from the 30's...but you could at least try something from the 80's or the 90's.
Thanks for reading my ramblings.
I'm going to go watch a movie from the 20th century.
monsterfuckery isnโt always about weird creature sex. sometimes itโs about laying in bed lonely and thereโs a chittering sound in the dark and something warm and scaly slides up your body and flicks its tongue on your ear and sharp claws grab your hips and she purrs behind you. and you smile because your wife is home from work
sometimes itโs also about waking up to your creaturewife preening your hair with her hooked beak to get you up, and her big serpentine form is all coiled around you for the warmth from your cute little breakable mammalian body, and sheโs holding your hand with her own - twice as big as yours - and all six of her eyes are blinking sleepily and sheโs still purring because sheโs in bed with her humanwife
I guess itโs just screaming into the void day for me, but one other thing I really wish people would get through their skulls is that critical thinking and literary criticism are not โcriticalโ in the way that your mom is โcriticalโ of your outfit. Critical analysis of media is a lot more involved than thinking up half-baked ideas for why said media is shit, actually.
Thinking critically about a text requires that long before you think in terms of good and bad, you consider intents and outcomes, you understand both the immediate and wider context of what youโre looking at, and you acknowledge that fiction is subjective. Itโs about thoughtful examination of all aspects of the work.
What function does this element serve in the work? Why might the author have included it? How was it incorporated, and how does it interact with other elements? Setting aside possible intents, but looking closely at context and execution, what impact does this element have on the work as a whole? On different possible audiences? How does all of this play into or deviate from greater patterns across media?
And for the love of god please stop forgetting:
What lens or framework am I using to examine this text? What are the limitations or problems with that framework? What are my biases? (<-Americans do this challenge) If I choose to examine this through a different lens, how does that change what I see?
โฆThatโs barely a start, but the point is, if your idea of โthinking critically about the media you consumeโ starts and ends with picking any number of random things you heard are bad and seeing if they show up or not in said media, youโve done the critical thinking equivalent of tripping at the starting line and really have no place telling other people to follow your lead whilst you are, quite obviously, face-down in the dirt.
God, yes.ย โCritical thinking,โ despite its name, does not meanย โjudging.โ It means withholding judgment for the purpose of understanding. You learn nothing about life or the world if all you do is sort shit into two columns all day long.
Yep. Critical thinking is, like, โJesus fuck I think Roald Dahl was a creep, but im pretty sure that WHY he wrote about such horrific things happening to innocent children is because he was trying to say that 1) itโs Not Okay and also that 2) even abusive adults can get eaten by bigger dragons. Both of which are not inherently evil or dangerous things to point out, so you just go ahead and read that book while I um, sit over there. Likeโฆ way over there. If you want to commiserate about triggering prose just poke me on the shoulder, and then we can jabber.โ
(Picking Dahl because heโs too old to be a Discourse Magnet, except once when someone wrote an article saying yeah he could be a little uncomfy, which I felt personally validated to seeโฆ โฆbut also glad no one was calling for banning him or anything stupid like that.)
Not to go "if you have ADHD just go for a run" or anything, but I am so serious if you have ADHD you should regularly go outside, no headphones no phone no nothing and just stand and observe for a while until you've had enough. Not until you get bored, until you've had enough. Drink your coffee without watching tiktok. Have a bath without music. Turn down the volume in your headphones. I cannot overstate how much learning to be bored is cruicial with ADHD. Life is not just about pleasure, no matter what your dysregulated dopamine system thinks, and when you teach your brain to be okay with being bored, then boring tasks stop feeling like torture. By letting yourself be bored you are yoinking your system out of the high/low binary and allow for the highs to feel like actual highs and not just anything that isn't low. I am so serious go literally touch grass. Listen to the sounds in your flat. Stimulate your body the way it was designed. It lowers anxiety and makes you feel like you're real and best of all it's completely free
I really wish more ADHD mental health care told you WHY things like this matter to our quality of life.
The Hyperactivity in Attention-Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder is NOT about being physically hyperactive, it's about having a "hyperactive central nervous system" because it's a form of inheritable dysautonomia. The problem with disautonomia, especially the ADHD kind, is that it makes boredom flag to your nervous system as a THREAT, triggering hyperactive and maladaptive central nervous system processes like fight or flight.
But dysautonomia kills you that way. Literally, part of the reason our average life spand increase on stimulents is that it helps manage risk-taking impulsivity that can get us killed by accident, but the other part is that stimulents can regulate a hyperactive CNS such that it is functionally (while impacted by the stimulent) NOT dysregulated anymore. And PHYSIOLOGICALLY that is essential because the physical outcomes of dysautonomia can reduce your life span by YEARS if not decades through self-perpetuating hypervigelence, endocrine disruption, and adrenal fatigue.
So when the ADHD brain goes stimulation-seeking and a doctor tells you to practice mindfulness, it feels like being told "hey go stand in a functioning boiler until you can stop thinking" rather than WHAT IT IS which is the process of re-teaching your body what is and isn't safe.
Standing outside making mindful, non-interpretive/moralized observation of the world helps your brain and body re-acclimate to the idea that absence of that frantic "busy" feeling isn't a threat or a risk to your safety, and gradually reduces the level of distress that just hanging out somewhere triggers for you.
Learning WHY this stuff was being suggested and understanding what it was actually supposed to do went a long way towards changing my relationship with my ADHD. I am FAR more functional now, far less prone to shame spirals and rejection sensitivity, hell, I can **sit physically still for near on an hour at a time** now without feeling like I'm going to crawl out of my skin.
So yeah. Go outside. Let the world narrow around you and take deep breaths until it stops feeling claustrophobic or like you need to climb walls. Learn how to let little sensations become big ones like the way the heat of the sun on your skin starts as a gentle warming and be omes a unique collection of sensory moments depending on how it lands on you. Listen for sounds under sounds and let them fade in and out as you move your focus from one sound to the next. Enjoy. Move on. Rinse and repeat.
When you no longer feel like the world is actively killing you, it's a lot easier to navigate it.
I'm finished with art for the semester soooo here's what I've been workin on! All assets are my own. I used a DSLR camera along with Photoshop and Clip Studio Paint
Feel free to send asks about the unaltered photos/photo locations, cause some of the original signs were pretty interesting tbh
Hot takes many hate to learn: ethical hunters are primary data sources for a large portion of ecological population studies and play huge roles in environmental stewardship projects well beyond what many PhD students or scholarly sources usually claim.
Y'all hate a number of them for genuinely feeding their family while exploring a passion for nature, and thus treating them all like the much smaller, albeit louder, subgroup of pro-gun fooligans that just want to kill stuff.
That's a person, perception, and permission problem - not a hunting problem. A hunting problem, in my eyes, are those that ethical hunters would face in their experience of the hunt; not a problem that pro-gun fooligans run into trying to kill stuff.
I don't mean to argue the use of guns in hunting either - I mean to say an ethical hunter knows the limitations of practicality for what equipment is used for each prey species - anything above that is useless and below would just be cruelty to animals when you injure, but fail to kill
Ethical hunters are very aware of this already - many decide to not shoot a gun even because they find it against the spirit of the hunt/the intentions of their hunting trip, or because they prefer a real challenge
Regardless of means; hunters contribute so much to the environmental community, ecological research conservation, and revitalizing areas of habitat far more often than any papers I find credit then with:
- hunters go where others won't, they remain a hella distance from wild animals (if they're good) and maintain a safety caution in those herds/flocks to remain scared of people, gunshots, and other human disturbances - which is really needed to deter ill intentioned folks from luring them closer to people, taking them through habitual exposure, or stealing them straight up from a human-made area the prey is known to frequent
- hunters advocate for what they kill; they don't want poisoned meat, they don't want damaged hides and pelts, they don't want to have to question the health of their own food supply - that's a large reason many turn to hunting - and a large reason why many advocate against the use of lead in wildlife interactions, against poisons used in different areas, against developments that endanger habitats their prey rely on
- hunters want to see more animals and plants return to the land than most city environmental activists; many of them already deal with nature conditions as is on their hunting trips, many embrace this and see it as a vital element to learning to hunt - becoming in tune with, and understanding the environment of your prey - the only thing deteriorating that environment further does is drive away their prey and lower population numbers - hunters know this lowers bag limits, yearly tags, and catch counts so many work explicitly in the business of advocating for better land and forest management to ensure future flocks and stocks of animals
- hunters care for more than just the animals they hunt; a healthy wolf population keeps deer populations in check = more can be harvested safely as opposed to when they over flood deer yards, destroy a whole area too soon, and leave to find resources outside of normal migration routes - healthy bears catch fish out of waterways leaving harder to catch fish to replenish stocks and grow healthier populations next season - healthy predatory birds maintain various agricultural, urban, rural, and wild ecosystems by operating as pest management, things that normally parasitize hunted prey populations devastatingly quickly
- hunters want to know more about animals which drives scientific research; anecdotes and hunt trip photos are key demographic info cards from every trip captured, it provides historical records that allow future researchers to pull their own data and conclusions from without having to assume various details
- a hunters drive to know more about their prey is a key driver in getting people to care about that species, it's needs, the important habitats it has, and special requirements the species need to thrive in order for folks to both help and hunt the best possible prey in the healthiest conditions possible for them
- hunters supply the samples for testing: chronic wasting disease(CWD) is largely on deer hunters to report by submitting necessary samples every year - they don't wanna eat bad meat either, and they don't wanna spread it - COVID is massive in white tailed deer populations because they act as wild reservoirs waiting to infect others, we only discover these herds when a hunter submits samples - winter tick is a deadly moose parasite and unless reported in photography, anecdotes, or from pelt samples; scientist would never be able to identify wild infected herds - internal parasites are often reported by those who leave gut piles after their hunt as many will photograph unusual/concerning organs for their own peace of mind when consuming the meat too
Bottled Wataur
