Don't quit before the miracle happens!

pacific rim fucks severely for a lot of reasons but my favorite is that it opens with "the lizard aliens are unionizing so we built robots running on the power of love to fight them you got all that right" and before you have time to really process that concept bam gunshot body on the floor and the movie goes "now consider the vast power of grief in this setup" it never really stops considering

Functionally, there's very little difference between watching a movie on poob and watching a movie on basic cable. Yet, for some reason, the advertisements on poob offend me far more

ad breaks on poob always interrupt important scenes or make really jarring cuts.

when it's on cable, they've timed the commercial breaks in a way that generally isn't as disruptive. someone took the time to "reformat" the movie for tv.

ads on poob always KNOW that they're on poob and want me to interact with them or click them. the number of QR codes or ads-in-separate-ad-framing/window are infuriating and jarring.

cable commercials are just stupid little skits i can mute to go use the bathroom.

ads on poob are less than 2 minutes--not enough time to do anything, but enough time to piss me off.

cable commercials are 2-5 minutes, which is enough time to go do something/bathroom or snack break, or talk to whoever you're watching with.

ads on poob are the same 3-4 commercials over and over and over and over again, often cutting to them immediately with no warning, and poob struggles to like, catch up to the fact that it's having to show a different progress bar, or a different timer.

cable commercials, esp during primetime, generally cycle through like 10-15 minimum, so you can go an ad break or two without seeing the same commercial. and they usually only pop up during quiet moments, at regular intervals, so you can see them coming--and there isn't a weird lag/loading time.

in both cases i am being accosted by advertisements and treated like a consumer to manipulate and exploit. the volume changes on cable and poob, the brightness level is eye-searing in both cases.

but poob doesn't respect that i'm here for the MOVIE. cable, thanks to preexisting, decades-old norms around broadcast television, still kind of does. kind of. it's easier to ignore those commercials than the ones on poob.

basically i think poob follows ad norms established on the internet--pop-ups, invasive flashing bullshit, creating lag, taking up time and attention--and cable follows established cable norms of, "time for a few minutes of ads that are just stupid little skits instead of spam machines, and then back to your otherwise uninterrupted movie."

Yeah honestly that all tracks.

#you are doing some goncharov shit to me

I mean i know what you're saying, but there's about a dozen free ad-supported streaming services and i respect none of them to use any of their names. Meanwhile, Poob has fully entered the tumblr lexicon as a shorthand for stupidly-named tech products, especially streaming services.

fishing trip

ref image under cut

i hate when the teacher’s like “write about a bad time in your life” like i ain’t tryna get a social worker up my ass, thanks tho fam

This ain’t no joke I had to write a essay about what your scared of so I did it (I was scared of growing up and where my life was going) it was great got a 100 but then I got sent to councilors office and was sent to therapy cause they thought I was suicidal and on the verge of breaking…Apparently they ment like spiders or some shit…

Also like, not everyone finds that at all useful or cathartic.

“Write about some difficulty you’ve experienced personally.” “Aight fam let me just break down into tears and skip the rest of my classes.”

Yes! I had a psych professor ask us to discuss outloud the hardest thing that ever happened to us literally two days ago and I said “you realize the position you’re putting us in? I feel obligated to lie to not only save my peers the awkwardness but also because I will find no relief in answering honestly but rather anxiety. The hardest thing in my life is having people repeatedly tell me I should find some sort of catharsis in reliving my trauma so someone else can feel pity for me!”

The whole class backed me up because they didn’t want to either! Those kind of exercises are only helpful for people who don’t have any real past/current issues– which is no one btw.

On par with this are those fucking self-assessments where they want to to be optimistic and positive about the future. You’re sitting there drowning in college stress and anxiety so bad you can’t look another human in the eye, fighting depression so that you can eventually achieve a piece of paper that might get you a better job if the economy doesn’t tank itself (guess what, it did), and the most optimistic thing you can think of is that the class ends in 20 minutes.

OH! I KNOW THE ANSWER TO THIS!

There’s a WIRED article that explains the history behind this practice. 

Basically, this guy named Jeffrey Mitchell had a traumatic experience, then after months of PTSD, he told a confidant about the event that traumatized him. Retelling the event to a confidant was so cathartic for Mitchell that his PTSD went away after. He did a bunch of research to see if his personal experience of catharsis and relief could be replicated in other people suffering from PTSD. Years later he published a paper proposing a formalized psychiatric treatment revolving around this idea that expressing a traumatic experience helps relieve it. The paper was so influential that the whole psychiatric community adopted “critical incident stress debriefing” (CISD) as a standard treatment for PTSD.

Unfortunately … it’s bullshit.

Not only does the CISD treatment program Mitchell came up with not help the majority of patients who try it, but it actually makes PTSD worse in the majority of patients who try it.

The WIRED article explains why:

Basically, Mitchell waited until he had some emotional distance before trying to recall the memory, and he had full control of the situation. It was fully his decision. Nobody was pressuring him to talk about it. So he felt safe. Thinking about the memory from a place of safety allowed his brain to re-contextualize the memory as harmless.

Conversely, pressuring a patient to recall a traumatic memory, particularly when it’s still fresh in their minds, makes the patient feel very unsafe. Recalling a bad memory in this unsafe context only serves to re-traumatize the patient. 

[link to the whole article]

basically, there’s a big damn difference between choosing to confide in someone you trust and being pressured to make a public spectacle of your trauma

THIS JUST IN: Forced Public Recalling of Trauma Not As Helpful As Voluntarily Processing Trauma In A Safe Space

I keep seeing the leather/pleather vs denim jacket poll over and over again with all different sorts of discourse about how there is no plastic-free pleather and like, that's TRUE, there isn't, but honestly I DO think people who don't want to use animal products* also deserve to look cool

and so my suggestion is that y'all google "waxed cotton jacket" or "waxed canvas jacket" plus like, "motorcycle" or whatever style you think is cool, because there's a plastic free leather-look material that is strong and durable and waterproof and doesn't use animal products** AND is plastic free already out there and some of the clothes that you can get made out of it look sick as hell.

*ignoring the fact that most leather is meat by-product that would be going to waste anyway

**except beeswax but if you're going to object to that then honestly there's no helping you

waxed cotton looks so good and wears-in to a gorgeous patina and when it loses its finish you can re-wax it and that just makes it look even better and more patinaed instead of flaking off in horrible bits of microplastic leaving you with a ruined piece of clothing

was talking to my mom about how white people ignore the contributions of poc to academia and I found myself saying the words "I bet those idiots think Louis Pasteur was the first to discover germ theory"

which admittedly sounded pretentious as fuck but I'm just so angry that so few people know about the academic advancements during the golden age of Islam.

Islamic doctors were washing their hands and equipment when Europeans were still shoving dirty ass hands into bullet wounds. ancient Indians were describing tiny organisms worsening illness that could travel from person to person before Greece and Rome even started theorizing that some illnesses could be transmitted

also, not related to germ theory, but during the golden age of Islam, they developed an early version of surgery on the cornea. as in the fucking eye. and they were successful

and what have white people contributed exactly?

please go research the golden age of Islamic academia. so many of us wouldn't be alive today if not for their discoveries

people ask sometimes how I can be proud to be Muslim. this is just one of many reasons

some sources to get you started:

but keep in mind, it wasn't just science and medicine! we contributed to literature and philosophy and mathematics and political theory and more!

maybe show us some damn respect

I'd like to give a few examples.

🧪The man known as the father of chemistry (or alchemy, our teacher said both are used for him), Jabir ibn Hayyan. He wrote a book named Kitab al-Kimya, "kimya" means chemistry, and the word chemistry originated from that as well. He invented aqua regia, he had the first chemistry lab, discovered the methods of refining and crystallizing nitric acid, hydrogen chloride and sulfuric acid, and discovered diethyl ether, citric acid, acetic acid and tartaric acid. He developed the "retort" and literally introduced the concept of "base" to chemistry.

📐The father/ founder of algebra, Al-Khwarizmi. He wrote a book called Al-Jabr and the word "algebra" comes from "jabr". He presented the first systematic solution of linear and quadratic equations. One of his achievements in algebra was his demonstration of how to solve quadratic equations by completing the square, for which he provided geometric justifications. He introduced the methods of "reduction" and "balancing". The word "algorithm" literally comes from his name. He also produced the first table of tangents.

📐Biruni, who proposed that the radius be accepted as a unit in trigonometric functions and added secant, cosecant and cotangent functions to it. He made many contributions to astronomy that are too detailed for me to write here because this is long enough already, but for medicine, he managed to make a woman give birth by C section. He wrote Kitabu's Saydane which describes the benefits of around 3000 plants and how they are used.

🩺The father of early polymeric medicine, Ibn Sina. His books, The Law of Medicine and The Book of Healing were taught as the basic works in medical science in various European universities until the mid-17th century. He discovered that the eye was made up of six sections and that the retina was important for vision, performed cataract surgery. He performed kidney surgery, diagnosed diabetes by analyzing urine, identified tumors, and worked on diseases such as facial paralysis, ulcers, and jaundice. He used "anesthesia" in surgeries, invented instruments such as forceps and scalpels to remove catheters and tumors. He was the first physician in history to mention the existence of microbes, at a time when there was no microscope. He made contributions to so many fields: astronomy, physics, chemistry, psychology (he suggested treating patients with music).

🩺Al-Zahrawi wrote Kitab al-Tasrif, a thirty-volume encyclopedia of medical practices. The surgery chapter of this work became the standard textbook in Europe for the next five hundred years. He pioneered the use of catgut for internal stitches, and his surgical instruments are still used today to treat people. He did so much work in surgery that I can't write them all here. The first clinical description of an operative procedure for hydrocephalus was given by him, he clearly described the evacuation of superficial intracranial fluid in hydrocephalic children. He was also the first physician to identify the hereditary nature of haemophilia and describe an abdominal pregnancy, a subtype of ectopic pregnancy that in those days was a fatal affliction, and was first to discover the root cause of paralysis.

✈️Abbas ibn Firnas devised a means of manufacturing colorless glass, invented various planispheres, made corrective lenses, devised an apparatus consisting of a chain of objects that could be used to simulate the motions of the planets and stars, designed a water clock, and a prototype for a kind of metronome. He also attempted to FLY, and he did fly a respectable distance but forgot to add a tail to his wings and didn't stick the landing.

Women also became scholars in the Islamic society. An example would be Maryam al-Ijliyya, who was an astronomer and an astrolabe maker, who measured the altitude of celestial bodies with the astrolabes she made. Another example would be Fatima al-Fihri, who founded the oldest university in the world, the University of Qarawiyyin.

Baghdad was the dream place anyone in academia now would want to go, it was a peaceful place of inclusivity and research. So many scholars advanced so many fields of study. Ibn al-Haytham invented camera obscura (and pinhole camera), Ibn al-Nafis was the first to describe the pulmonary circulation of blood, father of robotics Ismail al-Jazari invented the elephant clock and his list of contributions to engineering are so long that I can't write them here...

These are just a few examples, of course. I hope this encourages people to do research on this topic more. I even added some emojis to make this more fun to read.💁🏻‍♀️

Vaccination in the form of inoculation was introduced to the anglosphere and from there into published scientific literature by an enslaved African man named Onesimus in the 1700s.

I wanted to find a source from someone who was a bit politically engaged with the topic, here’s a sort of starter (although they do assume you have heard of Onesimus.)

the comments on this banana bread recipe go crazy

for everyone in the notes asking for the recipe, i found it, it's this one:

my fav genre of fanfic is "ship i have not ever considered but the author is insane abt it in a way that intrigues me immensely"

i don’t know about you guys but the main reason i am still on tumblr in 2024 is BECAUSE it is the most cloutless least influential social media app out there and that is the experience i am after. absolutely none of this will ever translate into significant attention or real success in my life and that is so beautiful.

what in the

This is wild

the hilarity of the post being I will have no clout in the cloutless website being uploaded by a white girl seeking clout in the insufferable seeking clout app

the first time i saw this scene i thought hawkeye was sitting in this woman’s lap and i was fully willing to accept it

To reduce my screen time, I have weaponised my overactive and entirely impractical levels of empathy for inanimate objects. Wym you’re picking it up again? While it was sleeping? You complete and utter monster, let it rest!!

And it works. It works like a CHARM. Silly problems require silly solutions!

[ID: a phone tucked in very cozy in a perfectly fitting wooden doll-size canopy bed with floral motifs. it has a little dishtowel as a blanket /End ID]

sidney: y’know i can’t help but feel you don’t take these sessions seriously hawkeye: *takes off giant cowboy hat* what did i do

mr. trelawny