Sun Tzu is so fucking funny to me because for his time he was legitimately a brilliant tactician but a bunch of his insight is shit like "if you think you might lose, avoid doing that", "being outnumbered is bad generally", and "consider lying."

My personal favourite is his lengthy lecture on the subject of Supplies Being Very Important I Cannot Stress Enough The Importance Of Protecting Your Supply Lines But Also Supply Lines Are Expensive As Shit So Steal The Enemy’s Supplies At Every Opportunity. 

via- @elidyce

One of the more important things to consider about any historical work is the audience it was published for. The Art Of War was aimed at fancy nobles high on philosophy with little practical military experience who were nonetheless leading armies.

Sun Tzu, after desperatly trying to explain extremely basic logic to a bunch of upper-class twits, basically sat down and wrote the most elaborate "As per my last email" ever

I was trying to explain The Art of War to my mother recently, and I referenced The Prince, in that Machiavelli wrote The Prince both as a genuine guide on good governance* (as he saw it) but in its historical context it may also be understood as an acerbic political commentary on the issues he saw both with Italy in general and the Medicis who had exiled him specifically.

Some of Machiavelli's advice also seems blindingly obvious - "don't use mercenaries if you can avoid it, and if you can't avoid it, most certainly don't refuse to pay them," "maintaining a balanced budget is a good idea," "if you make alliances, honour them" etc. etc. - but if you look at what was going on at the time he was alive, you can see why he might feel it necessary to plainly state these things.

If stuff in a very famous book seems weird or obvious it's probably indicating that you should consider the historical context in which such a seemingly obvious thing needed to be said.

the most elaborate "As per my last email" ever

[id: screenshot of tags: #DO NOT FORGET TO FEED YOUR TROOPS #this was a genuinely important tip but also the way he explained it was hilarious #you could HEAR this poor general trying desperately to dumb the idea down far enough #for some rich idiot who has never fed a horse in his life and doesn't know how much they eat #to understand that there is a Fundamental Limit To How Far You Can Transport A Horse Before It Needs More Food Than It Can Transport #Yes Even In A Wagon #And soldiers are the same only more so #because they also have to carry weapons and so on #and aren't very good at pulling wagons #please for the love of Gods And Physics try to grasp this concept I am begging you #FORAGING DOES NOT WORK ON THIS KIND OF SCALE #NO IT DOESN'T I PROMISE

i need pepple to understand that in the first place leather has always been made from the byproducts of butchering animals for meat, otherwise the skin is just tossed and unused. there were some companies farming for leather for a while, particuarly alligator leather, but those were not the norm. peta did so much harm in their campaigns against leather as a concept (its not unethical. yoi get the skin when an animal dies. thats why most leather clothes in the usa are cow leather, bc thats the biggest meat animal here) that its almost impossible to buy anything "leather" that isnt made of plastic that it so fragile and shitty that the very Thread Holding It Together rips the fibers apart. it will last for maybe a year two if youre lucky, and wont biodegrade and was made out of something that isnt naturally occurring in the first place and is one of the biggest causes of pollution globally

i do not care if you personally think nobody should slaughter or eat animals, it is Going to happen anyway. you cannot be so obtuse thst you think making more plastic that causes pollution endless damage to the animals you claim to care about so much is better than omnivorous human beings eating other animals and using their bodies completely.

April Fools day here is always funny because my dash is full of “here’s a Rick roll but it’s actually a different song” “here’s ‘do you love the color of the sky’ just kidding! It’s not the full long post!” “Here’s a drawing I made of a kitty! Just kidding! It’s two kitties and they’re best friends” and we do this unironically and completely ignoring the blood lust we all experience every year just two weeks prior

i have understood so many things about online leftist culture by the fact that when i said "your local community has people you will morally and politically disagree with but you cannot lock them out of accessing any tangible service you’re organising" one of the tags responding said "this isn’t about proshippers in here you’re not welcome" like. folks. focus with me. some of us are homeless here.

There's a disconnect happening here because the primary function of social media for most casual users is to form a circle of friends around the usual things that friendships are built on: shared interests and lifestyles and ideas of what is important and what is unacceptable. When people are mainly doing leftism on social media, this encourages thinking of leftism as centered around establishing high-minded social clubs.

For anyone who still isn't getting it from someone who helps people IRL: There's a difference between whom you're helping to feed at the mealshare and whom you're choosing to hang out with for fun after the mealshare. You don't have to invite a hungry person with opinions you don't like to play board games with you, but you do have to help keep them from starving if you're serious about leftist organizing.

oh your pronouns are he/they?

well that’s mathematically incorrect becuase you can still simplify the fraction since both sides have “he”

making your pronouns technically 1/ty

>:)

[image id: text that reads “even better, 1/ty implies the inverse of thank you. pronouns: ungrateful. end id.]

I am never going to the middle of the country. Not because it's bad or anything, but because I don't think I could stand that sky.

The World Of Becca Blake

Art by Dan Schkade

oops shared without amendment: don’t use milk to rinse eyes just plain water

Rebecca Blake could also put temporary tattoos on any part of her skin that IS exposed. That way, if ever the police tried to identify her through photographs or footage, she would be able to point to the tattoo in the image and say "well that can't possibly be me; that person has angel wings tattooed on the back of their neck, but MY neck is un-tattooed."

I'm not opposed to this, but don't temp tattoos take like a week or two to fade? Can you remove them faster?

rubbing alcohol, iirc

or just ordinary soap, scrub and rinse repeatedly, though in my experience that just means the area is visibly irritated after

I was not nearly that creative when I was at the age where essay-writing was a major part of my life.

They De-Tumblrized Ms. Frizzle

@transfagsculine​

#how do yall whitewash a white woman 

why would you leave this in the tags lmao

Allow me to explain:

Everyone dropping this pic

And talking about how the new frizz her is her niece, allow me to do a direct side by side instead

These are STILL not the same woman. Where is the icon fashion, the earrings (the chameleon, which might be in the new show idk I haven't watched it), the prominent hooked nose, the broader shoulders, the volume to her hair, the LIFE IN HER EYES

This frizzle looks like she's been called into the school board for inappropriate behavior and dress one too many times and has been broken.

Also others have said it before me but I couldn't find it in the scroll backs but they whitewashed all the kids too. They same face syndromed everyone to either be easier to draw or be more ambiguous so as not to offend or both or something, and it just makes me sad

Fuck it I did the digging cause I'm still mad

And that’s not even to mention what they did to the bus itself.

The old bus had a personality and life and fun and now it’s just… a bus.

HOW DO Y’ALL WHITEWASH A BUS?!

It's gives "anti abortion Jehova's Witness cartoon" now

Vector puppet animation and a shocking drop off in investment in kidvid is largely at fault, but international marketing is also to blame.

What's important to remember is that the whitewashy approach to character design in kidvid is a backslide.

Representation in cartoons had generally been on an upswing since the 1980s, even though efforts were often minimal, clumsy, or badly executed. Diversity helped sell action figures in the lucrative US/Canadian market and it was recognized as a prosocial value on the production side.

"Prosocial messages" are a major part of kidvid TV pitches and development, nearly every show has specific prosocial lessons the narrative themes are intended to work around, even if its an action-figure ad. These range from sincere expressions of the creator's intent (Gargoyles, OG Magic Schoolbus, OG He-Man (no, for real)) to the entertainment equivalent of carbon credits.

Slight aside. Actual ink-and-paint animation tended to lock characters down into more distinct tones because there were only so many standard paint colors. Which is why Kwame from Captain Planet, Roadblock from GI-Joe, and Tim from OG magic schoolbus all use essentially the same pantone.

Ralphie gets skinny because not only fatphobia, but I suspect because he would need slightly different rigging and would add just a teensy bit to the budget adjusting his animations when they could just copy-paste from one of the other identically built kids. If they need to put them all in spacesuits or diving suits or whatever, they just make the one body and slap the heads on, eazy-pezy.

Decals on the schoolbus mean they have to be tracked, they have to use different versions of the bus in flipped shots, same with Mrs. Frizzle's clothing patterns. Wouldn't want to spend time flipping Ralphie's "R' around.

And with the marketing for everything now being global, there's an impulse to average everything down to appeal to all markets to a general degree. Making stories oversimple makes them easy to translate. Humor varies culture to culture, keep it slapstick or quick quips that can be localized easily. Everything that makes the Chinese censor boards happy also makes US reactionaries less likely to kick up a protest, the incentive is to keep everything:

ALSO: These characters have the same face. They probably use the same eye and mouth parts for character animations.

It's all to do it as cheap and broadly appealing as possible, as determined by business weirdos who know nothing about art and care nothing about kids, and they're more than willing to leverage racism (or just ignore that its happening) for the promise of a tenth of a percent more profit.

And what's galling is that this kind of animation software doesn't have to make crap. It can be used to make amazing stuff and still be vastly cheaper than traditional hand-drawn, but the same quality at 60% of the cost is never going to beat 1/2 the quality at 5% of the cost for the money-men.

The path of least resistance rolls over a lot of people.

Reblogging for "the path of least resistance rolls over a lot of people"

fuck this remake, it's shit and not a single person likes it. I will fight to the death on this hill

It was a mistake to make it a remake and not a sequel. Like, it still would have been terrible, but I do think people would have responded better if it had used a new set of kids to go with the new teacher.

If you are a Christian that wants to host a Passover seder this year:

1) Don’t. It’s appropriative and gross.

2) Still don’t.

3) Jesus never participated in the type of seder that Jews have today. He lived (if he existed as described in your Christian holy books) during the Second Temple Era of Judaism, when worship was Temple-focused and ritual sacrifice was a key facet of the holiday. The modern seder takes most of its traditions from rabbinic Judaism, which was not the Judaism of Jesus.

4) Don’t do it. Don’t. No, there is no good reason for you to do it.

5) Given the Christian antisemitic violence traditionally inflicted on the Jews during this time of year (the lead up to Easter), it is EXTRA awful for Christians to try and appropriate our traditions related to Passover.

6) Don’t. Pesach is our holiday, and our religion is a semi-closed practice. Don’t appropriate our stuff. Don’t make our stuff about Jesus.

7) There are no exceptions to the rule that Christians should not host Passover seders.

Hope this helps.

Looks like it’s time to pull this out again.

Also don’t try to make our stuff about niche political movements or supporting antiemetic terrorist groups.

If a see a “liberation sedar” hosted by a someone “with Jewish ancestry” that is just as bad as a Jews for Jesus sedar.

“Magneto’s backstory should be changed, it’s unrealistic that he’d still be alive after all this time!” Have you forgotten what franchise he’s from?

You can suspend your disbelief for the man transformed into sentient rocks by space radiation, the interdimensional bird, and the flaming biker skeletons, but one guy being a little old is where you draw the line?

It's the ~antisemitism~

#its also worth noting that marvel *DID* change magneto's backstory#he was originally presented as someone who had survived the shoah as an adult#and marvel retconned it to him surviving it as a child#iirc his original debut backstory involved him losing a wife and two kids??

Well, no, not really. When Magneto was made to be a Holocaust survivor, he was a survivor from childhood, though by the end of the Holocaust he was in his teens. His daughter Anya was killed by an antisemitic mob after the Holocaust, at some point in the 1950s.

It's also an attempt to pretend that the Shoah is ancient history, when it's really not.

"It's unrealistic for a Holocaust survivor to still be alive."

Assholes, there are Holocaust survivors still alive in the real world.

They're really telling on themselves because Wolverine is like 170 years old.

wolverine being a hundred and fucking seventy: normal

magneto being the same age as currently alive holocaust survivors: impossible

Miles and Julian both going through the trauma of suffering in prison but returning to DS9 to find the others hadn't thought them "absent", but neither of them ever bringing that up with each other...

Julian: "37 days is nothing compared to 20 years and I'm not actively suicidal so I can't compare what I went through with Miles', they're so totally different (and mine's kind of trivial...)."

Miles: "Aw, heck - he knows I implicitly understand this situation, right? I don't have to actually say I get it, do I?"

As a former librarian I'm actually required to remind you that many libraries that subscribe to Libby are opted into a program that lets you subscribe and access magazines for free with no wait

And that this is actually a really fun, low cost way to not only access news and larger cultural magazines, but also to get free patterns for many different crafts that you can screenshot if need be and that lower the financial barriers to entry for trying new things

From my experience working in both academic and public libraries, many libraries are use it or lose it funding-- I have to say this because a lot of patrons feel guilty for how much they use the library and how often they're using it funny enough, but the worst thing you can do for libraries is not try out new features and not use what's already given to you as much as possible.

The numbers that come as a result of your patronage are how most libraries justify their continued existence in times of financial hardship, which sucks but, go check out some magazines on Libby!

Use your library! Go to their website, look at everything they offer that you didn't even know about (power tools? Wifi hotspots? free music downloads?), use Hoopla and Kanopy and Libby and EVERYTHING!! And, if you can, send them a donation, most of them have a charitable foundation that helps to buy more books!

Miss Fisher's Murder Mysteries is on Hoopla. I'm just saying, if you want a legal way to watch lighthearted murder mysteries...

yknow ever since people realized tumblr isnt dead and have decided to flock here from twitter and tiktok ive seen a huge influx of people in fandom spaces who dont reblog anything. at all.

like, i used to have an art blog with 340 followers. not a ton but not a small amount either given how this website works with creators. and in my experience back then even the ones who only left likes still reblogged other things or at least posted their own stuff. literally the only empty blogs were clearly bots.

but on this New art blog, i've had so many people with fandom-specific headers and icons with actual usernames as urls and some kind of title or description, but have. Nothing. no posts. all they do is like things. and it's always public, too. their following list and their likes list.

and honestly all it makes me think is that these people are New and also don't know how tumblr works. how likes don't give exposure. not even in a "oh, i know it doesn't give exposure, but i'm still going to reblog anyways" way, but in a genuine honest to god straight up doesn't realize tumblr likes don't work like twitter's.

PLEASE please if you're from tiktok or twitter or whatever please reblog people's art both fandom and original if you like it!! and maybe actually pad out your blog's content in some way so people won't potentially see you as a bot and block you.

REBLOG ARTIST'S WORK. THIS IS THE ONLY WAY THEY GET ANY ATTENTION ON THIS WEBSITE OH MY GOD. PLEASE. I BEG of you

OKAY AS SOMEONE WHO'S BEEN HERE JUST THREE WEEKS, ADMITTEDLY NOT FROM TWITTER/INSTAGRAM BUT FROM PINTEREST, I NEEDED TO KNOW THIS.

Also, type stuff. Make comments. Add to the reblog chain.

(I mean anything besides "ha ha" or an emoji.)

If you have something to contribute to a thread, go for it. If somebody doesn't like your addition they can reblog the chain from the post ahead of your addition... it's entirely low risk.

Also I've seen a LOT of superb observations & devastatingly funny commentary in the tags, when it really deserves to be here, as text.

Somewhere along the way it became taboo to actually say stuff out loud instead of whispering it in the tags. When did that start?

I mean, I'm hesitant to say things in the text because it's often opening oneself up to people being dicks about it. (Yes, yes, liberal use of the block button, but that doesn't mean it's fun to be on the receiving end of.)

Back when the netflix Daredevil first came out, I remember someone in the same online discussion (forum?) exasperatedly trying to explain orientalism to people and ending up at 'It's always the Japanese mob that's secretly occult ninjas with a nefarious, centuries-long scheme. Why can't they just be the dumb assholes and then the Russians are secretly on the run from Koschei the Deathless or escaped the Old Country after Baba Yaga ate their father or something'?

And totally missing the point, but ever since I've always kind of thought that 'urban fantasy where Koschei the Deathless is a mob boss' is kind of a kickass idea.

2 decades ago going, “Yee Haw!” excitedly was enough to kill Howard Dean’s presidential campaign and like this was reasonable to people.

Today, we have a President suggesting for months that he may go to war to conquer Greenland and who is once again reiterating that he is considering running for a third term in office. On top of having felony convictions and a civil judgment for sexual violence.

I remember, as soon as Obama was elected, people declaring the end of racism because how could we be racist after electing a Black man as President. And yet, over the span of his presidency, our country went from a place where the Republican presidential nominee told off someone at a campaign stop when they suggested Obama wasn’t a real American or was a Muslim, saying it’s unAmerican to act that way, to being a place where a man could start his presidential campaign by saying “The illegals are all Mexican rapists you need to be terrified of!” and who explicitly led the charge for the claim Obama was born in Africa, being elected President (if only by the EC). And within 8 more years, a place where that man would win a plurality (though not majority) of the popular vote, against a Black woman, despite him fomenting an insurrection to stop the peaceful transfer of power when he lost the 2020 election.

Things have become much worse, and they did it very quickly. I do not see how anyone can avoid noticing that such a significant transition arose at the exact time a Black perdón was President. And I think that’s an indicator that voting actually does matter. Because voting did put Obama in office, and his power in that office terrified the forces of White supremacy and hegemony. So much, in fact, that Donald Trump has taken power on two separate occasions.

Also can't help but observe that all the political opponents who have lost an election to him are women.

As it is Passover again, it is time for the annual debate as to whether the frog plague, which thanks to a quirk in the Hebrew, is written as a plague of frog, singular, rather than the plural, plague of frogs, was in fact, as generally imagined, a plague of many frogs, or instead a singular giant Kaiju frog. This is an ancient and venerable argument that actually goes back to the Talmud because this is what the Jewish people are. If we can't argue for fun about this sort of thing, what are we even doing.

In that spirit, I would like to submit a third possibility, which is that in fact it was one perfectly normal sized frog, who was absolutely acing Untitled Frog Game: Ancient Egypt Edition. One particularly obnoxious frog, who through sheer hard work, managed to plague all of Egypt.