I Have An Ancient Box Camera From The Late 40s. Takes 120 Film. Absolutely Unfair Good Images Out Of

OMG. Lighting strike videos have always reminded me of something and I could never figure out what. Today I realized: it's slime molds!!

thinking about edvard munch's "The Sun" (1911)

like yeah thats how it feels. thats what it feels like to exist sometimes. he gets it

[Image description: text reading, #file under reasons I don't reblog activism posts with guilt trips attached /End image description.]

Not that anybody asked, but I think it's important to understand how shame and guilt actually work before you try to use it for good.

It's a necessary emotion. There are reasons we have it. It makes everything so. much. worse. when you use it wrong.

Shame and guilt are DE-motivators. They are meant to stop behavior, not promote it. You cannot, ever, in any meaningful way, guilt someone into doing good. You can only shame them into not doing bad.

Let's say you're a parent and your kid is having issues.

Swearing in class? Shame could work. You want them to stop it. Keep it in proportion*, and it might help. *(KEEP IT IN PROPORTION!!!)

Not doing their homework? NO! STOP! NO NOT DO THAT! EVER! EVER! EVER! You want them to start to do their homework. Shaming them will have to opposite effect! You have demotivated them! They will double down on NOT doing it. Not because they are being oppositional, but because that's what shame does!

You can't guilt people into building better habits, being more successful, or getting more involved. That requires encouragement. You need to motivate for that stuff!

If you want it in a simple phrase:

You can shame someone out of being a bad person, but you can't shame them into being a good person.

Jesse Zao (Chinese, 2000) - Untitled (2024)

Art by Minji Kim

I specifically love it when Eddie takes a figure of speech and turns it into something weirdly sexual. So "it's curtains for you" becomes "it's beef curtains for you," and "you're like a dog with a bone" becomes "you're like a dog with a boner." There are a bunch of them sprinkled throughout the series and I love MS's delivery, I love that it's not clear whether this is something Eddie's always doing on purpose or if once in a while some of it might be unintentional. I have spent so much time thinking about how Eddie talks and why, because sometimes they seem to be intentionally doing a bit, but other times ("colloborate," "Duleese") I don't think they are. I have a whole headcanon that they don't subvocalize so they don't automatically practice the sounds of words while reading/thinking, and also they have a mild auditory processing disorder. Those two things combined mean that sometimes their way of saying a word or a turn of phrase wanders off from consensus reality. I think they realized very young that they had some kind of struggle around this, and at some point as an older kid or a teenager they decided -- as with many things about themself -- to lean into it harder and make it weirder than it naturally was, to turn it into a gag so that people would just assume it was deliberate.

eddie + her colourful similes

So I'm watching The Moth Effect with Kate Box. Most of TME I can take or leave but there's this one sketch in S1E3. "St Machiavelli's Political Breeding Stable"

I don't want to give anything away but...I really did not expect her to commit to the bit as hard as she did

Kate Box you perv, you delightful fucking weirdo <3

Same energy

I think we need to appreciate this part of Brennan Lee Mulligan's WIRED interview a lot more:

"The evangelical right in this country needs to manufacture outrage to hold onto its voting block. [The satanic panic about DnD] was arbitrary, as the targets of their outrage always are. Fight the power."