One time I saw a fake headline about the Vatican announcing the virgin Mary’s new nemesis, la puta Waría, and ever since that day I’ve quoted it like anybody else knows what I’m talking about
i couldn’t stop thinking about her so i made a scrapbook layout
a lot of you really need to internalize that acting avoidant isn’t cute at all and that it will cost you experiences and life outcomes if you don’t change course
but have you ever even heard of the fynbos biome ?!!?!?!?!
a biome so unique in south africa that it’s earned an entirely new biome classification for itself. so many plants are endemic to this area, and ofc it’s under threat of extinction.
It’s a wonderful place! I had the privilege of visiting the fynbos last year and it was as amazing as these photos show and more!
sometimes “but you don’t look disabled” is not even about the visibility of your disability. sometimes it’s about “you look like an actual person and i picture disabled people as some weird creatures that i can never ever meet and now my reality is crashed by the fact that i see an actual disabled person and they look like a person.”
TL;DR: A pot made by Dave The Potter, who was an enslaved artisan who was unique for signing his name and putting words and poems on the pots he made, has been returned to his descendants, even though the pot was bought and sold to begin with.
It officially belongs to the family, but will remain stewarded by the MFA for the next two years. This is a really interesting way forward for conflicted items in museums, being that the family owns it but it will remain with the museum. At least for two years.
The pot is obviously a tremendous piece of history, illustrating the class of highly skilled artisan slaves who existed but often get forgotten in the field slave/ house slave narrative that gets pushed. For real there’s sooooo much to learn from this pot, I’m glad that it gets some kind of public visibility while the family gets control of it.
also, they returned another pot which the family immediately sold back to the museum, so they will get to keep one- with the important caveats that:
the descendants got the right to DECIDE what happened to it, and
the descendants got paid fair market value for the piece, with their express agreement to the sale
I think it’s critical that non-museum people understand that this, too, is what repatriation can look like. sometimes the museum keeps the piece, temporarily or permanently! it’s not necessarily always a case of “the proper owners take it back and keep it!”
what matters is that they are given the CHOICE. they have the final say in what happens to these objects, regardless of whether they stay in the museum or leave it
Here’s an exhibition held by The Met on Dave’s works as well as others from Edgefield. That link also has a video tour of the exhibition and some other content related to the pottery.
The exhibition also includes a lot of these “face jugs” that were done by enslaved potters, in their own time, for their own use, and potentially connected to West African cultural/spiritual traditions. Apparently, the clay present to this area in South Carolina (kaolin clay) was also present in West Central African and was used for spiritual purposes there.
Dave the Potter also has a Wikipedia page, which is where I learned that he was also disabled as he had a leg amputated at some point for unknown reasons. This is just really, really incredible history and I hope a lot more people learn about this.
tumblr users’ obsession with self-reporting (especially as a weird form of penance) needs to be studied
you don’t need to tell the world you still like Harry Potter because it’s your comfort movie or because your dad read it to you when you were little or something like that in response to a post about the harm continued monetary support of Harry Potter causes. you don’t need to tell tumblr all the myriad of reasons you don’t like rap under a post about how rap is often misrepresented as ultra-violent or overtly sexual and misogynistic because of racism. No one on tumblr has to know anything about you. no one has to know you still read your old Harry Potter books or that the only rap artist you like is Eminem. No one is going to say “oh of course you’re the One True Good Person with a Good Reason!” when you say that rap is difficult to listen to because of your auditory processing disorder or you’re only a part of the Marauders fandom. Just keep your shit to yourself and don’t embarrass yourself under other peoples’ posts.
funniest possible reply and its not even on purpose
ALT
-charlotte zhang art installation at the alice gallery
is it a hot take to say that i think you need to understand why something is bad, not just that it simply is?
ALT
this is a part of the problem
you need to be able to explain why you shouldnt use ai rather than “oh well its obviously bad and you shouldnt use it or else youre a bad person” because that isn’t logic. “ai generates child porn based off of real children and whether or not it does is entirely up to how it is built and if pedophiles are able to find ways around those safeguards, because ai cannot in itself discern right from wrong” is a genuine criticism. “amazon tried to build a data center the size of tuson outside of tuson just to power their ai that would’ve increased the inability to stay alive outside in parts of arizona” is a genuine criticism. even “using generative ai teaches you not to learn how to do things yourself even when they’re difficult, devaluing necessary skills out of practice” is a genuine criticism when you look at the amount of people who think they are able of doing a difficult major when they couldnt write their own papers in high school.
but “ai is just bad because it’s bad” will convince no one and is a morally lazy position to take. about anything!
you need to know why reading someone’s diary is wrong if you want to learn about privacy and respect. you need to know why child sexual assault is wrong if you want to be able to help children form healthy age appropriate relationships. you need to know why capitalism is bad if you want to replace it with something else. you need actual concrete ideas and ideologies rather than “you should agree with me because i have the right vibe”
there r some characters that u really love that u do not want to see any opinion or discussion about online ever. u agree with like 2 ppl on earth total about. maybe 3. their haters lovers glazers fuckers shitters pissers whatever pissing u off to equal degrees. just a beautiful kind of torture chamber to find urself in
Another thing about light pollution and adjacent things is. They threatened my area with rolling blackouts last winter. Now this was of course largely because the AI datacenters are hogging all the electricity, but in the notifications about it they always specified that that residential areas would be the blacked out areas. Not offices. Not businesses. If you’re at home and freezing, well, you can just go loiter in a McDonald’s I guess. Never mind that this is extremely difficult for disabled people and often not allowed for pets.
Well, as winter turned into spring, I started biking home from work. A long, circuitous route that took me through residential areas, and past offices and businesses. Offices and businesses that were closed for the day. And yet their signs were still lit up. The lights were still on inside. There were TVs playing in empty breakrooms. All the computers in the school district offices stayed on, their monitors not even going to sleep, all night. Paused to take a break in an empty strip mall once and when I leaned against the glass of a restaurant I could hear the music still playing inside.
Like. There’s something deeply rotten about the priorities here. These places that are so flagrantly wasting electricity will never be subject to the rolling blackouts that could freeze you out of your home. Not even at night, when no one is there, when they don’t need their lights on. Their waste is prioritized over normal people’s life.
ALT
ALT
