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Lawful evil, or social injustice warriors...
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on Babel (RF. Kuang)
contender for one of my all-time favourite books
like ever
the storytelling is rich, the characters are believable, everyone is so very human in the worst ways
i adored the use of language and unfortunately i was not emotionally prepared for any of it as I first read the book in a 40 minute setting. sitting in the school library, on the ground
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A small clarification for the use of the word ‘sorry’ that I’ve discovered can be confusing for people with English as a second language: there are actually two meanings for the phrase “I’m sorry,” and the only way to tell the difference is context.
Meaning one: apology, the obvious one. “I’m sorry I dropped your groceries.” = “I apologize for dropping your groceries.”
Meaning two: sympathetic sadness. “Something bad has happened to you, I’m sorry.” = “Something bad has happened to you, I am sorrowed.”
Literally the only way to tell which meaning is being used is the context from the rest of the sentence, thinking about it I can see why it would be confusing. Anyway, this is why native English-speakers sometimes seem to apologize for things they didn’t do - we’re not feeling misplaced guilt, our language is just really weird.
Meaning three: Confusion. “I’m sorry?” = “I did not understand/hear what you said.”
Meaning Four, in an angry, offended tone. = “Well I’m sorry I didn’t do that!”
Meaning Five: There’s also when “sorry” is used to describe something/someone as pitiable or pathetic or full of regret.
“That’s a sorry excuse of a door.” It’s a door that probably doesn’t work well
“What a sorry man.” A man who is either regretful, or is seen as generally unliked/pathetic/useless
Meaning six: sarcasm, usually reserved for insults
“Well sorry you’re so bad at hockey we don’t make you play and only let you sit on the bench.”
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Jane Austen really said ‘I respect the “I can fix him” movement but that’s just not me. He’ll fix himself if knows what’s good for him’ and that’s why her works are still calling the shots today.
Meanwhile Emily Brönte just said “We can make each other worse.”
Mary Shelley said, "I can make him
Reblogged mr-house-s-courier
someone: prohibition in the united states was largely ineffective, cost millions, tried to force a religious belief on the entire country, only ever resulted in the increase in consumption of alcohol, as well as the increase in police violence, and ultimately failed
people: okay yeah that’s true
someone: the war on drugs is the exact same thing except this time because of the militarization of the police and private prison interests, is much, much more deadly and specifically exists to justify and widely reinstate slavery within the united states
people: what? but drugs are #bad, and we can’t let people use them. obviously this is the only way to deal with this situation
Reblogged mr-house-s-courier
GOD I just want to be CREATIVE but all my energy is being used to survive
this is one of those "you put it into words" kind of posts. right on.
Reblogged darkacademiaarchivist
people talking about “forced diversity” like characters being PoC or LGBT or disabled “for no reason” like
are people in real life PoC or LGBT or disabled for a reason
do these critics run up to people on the street like WHY ARE YOU BLACK
this post is nearly ten years old and unfortunately the government is now out here asking anyone with a halfway decent job WHY ARE YOU BLACK
“are you a man or Political? are you white or Political? are you straight or Political? are you cis or Political? are you able-bodied or Political?”
I forget where I read that, but it rings horribly true nowadays
I thought this was a lot older, but the main internet source appears to be a tweet about a video game
Reblogged cantosec
“Get a rat and put it in a cage and give it two water bottles. One is just water, and one is water laced with either heroin or cocaine. If you do that, the rat will almost always prefer the drugged water and almost always kill itself very quickly, right, within a couple of weeks. So there you go. It’s our theory of addiction. Bruce comes along in the ‘70s and said, “Well, hang on a minute. We’re putting the rat in an empty cage. It’s got nothing to do. Let’s try this a little bit differently.” So Bruce built Rat Park, and Rat Park is like heaven for rats. Everything your rat about town could want, it’s got in Rat Park. It’s got lovely food. It’s got sex. It’s got loads of other rats to be friends with. It’s got loads of colored balls. Everything your rat could want. And they’ve got both the water bottles. They’ve got the drugged water and the normal water. But here’s the fascinating thing. In Rat Park, they don’t like the drugged water. They hardly use any of it. None of them ever overdose. None of them ever use in a way that looks like compulsion or addiction. There’s a really interesting human example I’ll tell you about in a minute, but what Bruce says is that shows that both the right-wing and left-wing theories of addiction are wrong. So the right-wing theory is it’s a moral failing, you’re a hedonist, you party too hard. The left-wing theory is it takes you over, your brain is hijacked. Bruce says it’s not your morality, it’s not your brain; it’s your cage. Addiction is largely an adaptation to your environment. […] We’ve created a society where significant numbers of our fellow citizens cannot bear to be present in their lives without being drugged, right? We’ve created a hyperconsumerist, hyperindividualist, isolated world that is, for a lot of people, much more like that first cage than it is like the bonded, connected cages that we need. The opposite of addiction is not sobriety. The opposite of addiction is connection. And our whole society, the engine of our society, is geared towards making us connect with things. If you are not a good consumer capitalist citizen, if you’re spending your time bonding with the people around you and not buying stuff—in fact, we are trained from a very young age to focus our hopes and our dreams and our ambitions on things we can buy and consume. And drug addiction is really a subset of that.”
— Johann Hari, Does Capitalism Drive Drug Addiction?
Source: democracynow.org
Reblogged ourinsouciantworld
Michael A Davenport, 3,090 Degrees Fahrenheit (Oil on canvas, 2025)
30in x 48in
From the artist’s Inprnt:
“3,090 degrees Fahrenheit is the temperature at which sand becomes glass, in a process known as the Pilkington Process. This is not the temperature of burning; this is the temperature of becoming something.”
Reblogged gothiccharmschool
Okay I’m currently furious that migraines are often so blindly easy to treat and I had to find this out myself at the age of 26 when I’ve been to a neurologist since I was 11 lol so I’m about to teach you two neat and fast little tricks to deal with pain!
The first is the sternocleidomastoid muscle, or the SCM muscle.
This big red section is responsible for pain around the eye, cheekbone, and jaw, as well as some temple pain. Literally all you have to do is angle your head down a little, angle it away from the side that hurts, and then you can gently pinch and rub that muscle. I find it best to start at the bottom and travel upwards. The relief is so immediate! You can increase pressure as you feel comfortable doing so.
The second is a fast and easy stretch that soothes your vagus nerve, which is the nerve responsible for calming you down. The vagus nerve, for those unfamiliar, is stimulated by deep breathing such as yawning, sighing, singing, or taking a deep breath to calm your anger in a tense situation.
You can stretch this out by sitting up as straight as possible (this does not have to be perfect to work) and interlacing your fingers. Put your hands on the back of your head with your thumbs going down the sides of your neck and, while keeping your face forward, look all the way to one side with just your eyes. Hold that until you feel the urge to breathe deeply or yawn, or until you can tell there’s a change. Then do the same thing on the other side. When you put your arms down, you should clearly be able to turn your head farther in both directions. If the first session doesn’t get rid of your migraine, rest and repeat as many times as necessary. I even get a little fancy with it and roll my eyes up and down along the outer edge sometimes to stretch as much as I can.
If you need a visual here’s a good video on it. I know some of the language they use seems questionable but this is real and simple science and should not be discarded because it’s been adopted by the trendy wellness crowd!
I seriously cannot believe I didn’t hear a word of this from any doctor in my life. Additionally, if you get frequent recurring migraines, you may want to see a dietician. Migraines can be caused by foods containing histamines, lectin, etc. and can also be caused by high blood pressure in specific situations such as exercise, stress, and even sex.
If any of this information helps you I’d love to hear it btw! It’s so so fast and easy to do. Good luck!
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The Literary Canon, Our Obsession With It, and My Time at an Ivy League Studying Them
Third installment of The Scholar is out! This time a short critique of ppl who obsess with reading classics only—a pseudo-intellectual position I saw often as an undergrad at an Ivy League. If you’re down to have your thoughts provoked, consider reading it here:
