WARNING: Other than the tags linked to the left (plus a few others), I do not tag my posts. There probably is a whole slew of nsfw or triggering things on here that's not properly tagged.
many sharks are at least moderately social, and if a specific species of shark has the ability to breathe without actually swimming and tends to have a lot of sharks in a fairly small area, well.
they are just going to Pile. and there is simply nothing you can do about it.
also, fun fact! whitetip reef sharks in particular are SO damn cuddly with each other that they’ll actively seek out a buddy or ten when they get sleepy!
it’s pretty much slumber party or nothing for these guys. you won’t find a whitetip sleeping alone except in the most dire and tragic of shark circumstances.
(Sorry, I’m not alt-texting this shit. If someone else wants to, that would be great.)
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Prominent asshole, Proud Boys boot-swabber, and mobile milkshake platform Andy Ngô told a shitton of lies about trans journalist Alejandra Caraballo. She covers things he’d rather not see talked about, like the tweet he quoted, and these:
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So Andy decided to complain to Elon, who of course has never met an alt-right bully he didn’t want to suckle the toes of, and so he immediately went about trying to make the site deliberately more dangerous for marginalized people reporting on the shitty things that bullies do:
Of course…
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I mean, he CAN, but his app will become unable to be downloaded from both app stores and will probably just straight-up stop working on iPhones if he does.
I get variations on this comment on my post about history misinformation all the time: “why does it matter?” Why does it matter that people believe falsehoods about history? Why does it matter if people spread history misinformation? Why does it matter if people on tumblr believe that those bronze dodecahedra were used for knitting, or that Persephone had a daughter named Mespyrian? It’s not the kind of misinformation that actually hurts people, like anti-vaxx propaganda or climate change denial. It doesn’t hurt anyone to believe something false about the past.
Which, one, thanks for letting me know on my post that you think my job doesn’t matter and what I do is pointless, if it doesn’t really matter if we know the truth or make up lies about history because lies don’t hurt anyone. But two, there are lots of reasons that it matters.
It encourages us to distrust historians when they talk about other aspects of history. You might think it’s harmless to believe that Pharaoh Hatshepsut was trans. It’s less harmless when you’re espousing that the Holocaust wasn’t really about Jews because the Nazis “came for trans people first.” You might think it’s harmless to believe that the French royalty of Versailles pooped and urinated on the floor of the palace all the time, because they were asshole rich people anyway, who cares, we hate the rich here; it’s rather less harmless when you decide that the USSR was the communist ideal and Good, Actually, and that reports of its genocidal oppression are actually lies.
It encourages anti-intellectualism in other areas of scholarship. Deciding based on your own gut that the experts don’t know what they’re talking about and are either too stupid to realize the truth, or maliciously hiding the truth, is how you get to anti-vaxxers and climate change denial. It is also how you come to discount housing-first solutions for homelessness or the idea that long-term sustained weight loss is both biologically unlikely and health-wise unnecessaryfor the majority of fat people - because they conflict with what you feel should be true. Believing what you want to be true about history, because you want to believe it, and discounting fact-based corrections because you don’t want them to be true, can then bleed over into how you approach other sociological and scientific topics.
How we think about history informs how we think about the present. A lot of people want certain things to be true - this famous person from history was gay or trans, this sexist story was actually feminist in its origin - because we want proof that gay people, trans people, and women deserve to be respected, and this gives evidence to prove we once were and deserve to be. But let me tell you a different story: on Thanksgiving of 2016, I was at a family friend’s house and listening to their drunk conservative relative rant, and he told me, confidently, that the Roman Empire fell because they instituted universal healthcare, which was proof that Obama was destroying America. Of course that’s nonsense. But projecting what we think is true about the world back onto history, and then using that as recursive proof that that is how the world is… is shoddy scholarship, and gets used for topics you don’t agree with just as much as the ones you do. We should not be encouraging this, because our politics should be informed by the truth and material reality, not how we wish the past proved us right.
It frequently reinforces “Good vs. Bad” dichotomies that are at best unhelpful and at worst victim-blaming. A very common thread of historical misinformation on tumblr is about the innocence or benevolence of oppressed groups, slandered by oppressors who were far worse. This very frequently has truth to it - but makes the lies hard to separate out. It often simplifies the narrative, and implies that the reason that colonialism and oppression were bad was because the victims were Good and didn’t deserve it… not because colonialism and oppression are bad. You see this sometimes with radical feminist mother goddess Neolithic feminist utopia stuff, but you also see it a lot regarding Native American and African history. I have seen people earnestly argue that Aztecs did not practice human sacrifice, that that was a lie made up by the Spanish to slander them. That is not true. Human sacrifice was part of Aztec, Maya, and many Central American war/religious practices. They are significantly more complex than often presented, and came from a captive-based system of warfare that significantly reduced the number of people who got killed in war compared to European styles of war that primarily killed people on the battlefield rather than taking them captive for sacrifice… but the human sacrifice was real and did happen. This can often come off with the implications of a ‘noble savage’ or an 'innocent victim’ that implies that the bad things the Spanish conquistadors did were bad because the victims were innocent or good. This is a very easy trap to fall into; if the victims were good, they didn’t deserve it. Right? This logic is dangerous when you are presented with a person or group who did something bad… you’re caught in a bind. Did they deserve their injustice or oppression because they did something bad? This kind of logic drives a lot of transphobia, homophobia, racism, and defenses of Kyle Rittenhouse today. The answer to a colonialist logic of “The Aztecs deserved to be conquered because they did human sacrifice and that’s bad” is not “The Aztecs didn’t do human sacrifice actually, that’s just Spanish propaganda” (which is a lie) it should be “We Americans do human sacrifice all the god damn time with our forever wars in the Middle East, we just don’t call it that. We use bullets and bombs rather than obsidian knives but we kill way, way more people in the name of our country. What does that make us? Maybe genocide is not okay regardless of if you think the people are weird and scary.” It becomes hard to square your ethics of the Innocent Victim and Lying Perpetrator when you see real, complicated, individual-level and group-level interactions, where no group is made up of members who are all completely pure and good, and they don’t deserve to be oppressed anyway.
It makes you an unwitting tool of the oppressor. The favorite, favorite allegation transphobes level at trans people, and conservatives at queer people, is that we’re lying to push the Gay Agenda. We’re liars or deluded fools. If you say something about queer or trans history that’s easy to debunk as false, you have permanently hurt your credibility - and the cause of queer history. It makes you easy to write off as a liar or a deluded fool who needs misinformation to make your case. If you say Louisa May Alcott was trans, that’s easy to counter with “there is literally no evidence of that, and lots of evidence that she was fine being a woman,” and instantly tanks your credibility going forward, so when you then say James Barry was trans and push back against a novel or biopic that treats James Barry as a woman, you get “you don’t know what you’re talking about, didn’t you say Louisa May Alcott was trans too?” TERFs love to call trans people liars - do not hand them ammunition, not even a single bullet. Make sure you can back up what you say with facts and evidence. This is true of homophobes, of racists, of sexists. Be confident of your facts, and have facts to give to the hopeful and questioning learners who you are relating this story to, or the bigots who you are telling off, because misinformation can only hurt you and your cause.
It makes the queer, female, POC, or other marginalized listeners hurt, sad, and betrayed when something they thought was a reflection of their own experiences turns out not to be real.This is a good response to a performance art piece purporting to tell a real story of gay WWI soldiers, until the author revealed it as fiction. Why would you want to set yourself up for disappointment like that? Why would you want to risk inflicting that disappointment and betrayal on anyone else?
It makes it harder to learn the actual truth.
Historical misinformation has consequences, and those consequences are best avoided - by checking your facts, citing your sources, and taking the time and effort to make sure you are actually telling the truth.
A very good point about historical misinformation.
(not the point, I know, but I would counter that there’s not NO evidence that LMA might consider herself trans given a modern gender framework- she definitely expressed affinity for masculinity at times. but the evidence is not remotely sufficient to say “She was definitely 100% a trans man, and if you disagree you’re doing Trans Erasure!!!!” she used only she/her pronouns in life, and only ever lived as a woman at a time when some AFAB people DID transition- see above re: James Barry. what I usually say is “she had experiences that now resonate with some trans men and queer women)
(but this post is excellent and a must-read!)
may I also add a point?
It leads us to believe that we live at the pinnacle of progress in all ways. We talk a lot about learning from the mistakes of the past, whtich is important. But it’s equally crucial to learn from their successes (eg. the tax rate on the wealthy being MUCH higher in the 1920s US than it is now, far more/cheaper public transit existing in this country even up to the 1970s, more institutionalized textile/food/paper waste reuse in the 19th century, clothing that is not made of plastic, etc.). If we believe that the past was an inferior hellhole in every respect, we’ll be less likely to realize that some of the problems we face today don’t have to be this way, and in fact have solutions we’ve known about for centuries.
I’ll make one more addition, because I’ve had people tell me, when I was correcting misinformation, “I don’t care/no one cares/it’s not important”:
Just because you might or might not care, it doesn’t mean that other people shouldn’t have access to the most accurate information possible. Anyone who teaches history knows that about 80% of the people you are lecturing to are either not going to care or are going to forget about what you told them the second they’re out the door. It happens. And there’s a lot of history I don’t, personally care about, as well as a lot of history classes that I took in my undergrad and have more or less forgotten. (RIP to my History of Flight class, I vaguely recall you being entertaining.) That also happens. But for that 20% of people who do care? They deserve accurate, nuanced information. And even if you, personally, don’t particularly care, you deserve it as well so you can decide what to do with it.
if you like to add a quick little scattering/holo effect/extra sauce to your rendering, posterization has been such a good go-to for me, I cannot recommend it enough. you can use it from fabric to skin to anything and it makes blending so much more easy and fun!
If you live in the US and you have a phone you need to keep secret for any reason, make sure that it is turned off at this time.
Yes, I’m doing this months in advance, and yes, my blog has very little reach, but I figure better to post about it more than less.
Please reblog and add better tags than mine, I’m bad at tags.
OCTOBER 4, 2023
TURN OFF YOUR OTHER PHONE AND DO NOT TURN IT ON AGAIN UNTIL YOU ARE ALONE AND SAFE BECAUSE THE ALARM WILL COME THROUGH AS SOON AS THAT PHONE IS POWERED ON.
AGAIN I REPEAT:
OCTOBER 4, 2023
THE ALARM WILL COME THROUGH AS SOON AS THAT PHONE IS POWERED BACK ON.
SO ONLY POWER IT BACK ON WHEN IT IS SAFE TO DO SO.
OCTOBER 4, 2023
If this doesn’t make sense, then good news it’s not for or about you but still reblog it because you never know who may need to know this.
Reblog and add more tags.
There’s just a whole lot of reasons someone may need to be aware of/prepared for this, so boosting
One of my favorite things is taking someone to the Great Lakes for the first time - or describing how you can fly over them and see only hundreds of miles of glittering blue water and no coasts at all; how they have their own Coast Guard (the only lakes to do so); that the Earth’s rotation steers their currents; that they’re studied using ocean models; that they have wrecked more than 6000 ships - and watch them realize that the word “lake” is misleading and that they had no idea of the size and majesty of them at all.
Some fun facts about her majesty, Lake Superior:
It has a surface area of 31,700 sq. miles, roughly the size of South Carolina or Austria.
It’s incredibly deep and has enough water to cover all of North and South America to a depth of 12 inches.
Waves over 30 feet have been recorded.
Its deepest point is 1,333 feet, which is the third lowest point in North America
Its average temperature is around 36 degrees Fahrenheit (2 Celsius), which inhibits bacterial growth in bodies, diminishing bloating and gas, and frequently shipwreck and drowning victims to sink to the bottom and never be recovered.
Distinctly remembering @kedreeva describing a bachelorette party where they watched the sun rise over one great lake and drove to see it set over the other and @nencheese said “why didn’t you just go to the other side of the lake” and Ked had to explain that the other side of the lake requires a passport
We watched it rise from the Michigan shore of Lake Eerie, and then drove across the state to watch it set from the Michigan shore of Lake Michigan!
The thing keeping them from being called inland seas is that they’re freshwater. They’re plenty big enough to be called seas otherwise.
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