Visual representation on how we let technology ruin social interactions and pleasant experiences.
Me: *hates this*
why do baby boomers love to produce this “technology is bad fire is scary and thomas edison was a witch” garbage?
fuck THIS
I never see a cashier with an empty queue. Self-serve checkout machines make life GREAT for people with social anxiety or self conscious people. I get nervous that everyone is judging my weight. So when I do my monthly ice-cream, chocolate, and menstrual products run, I will do it with a fucking self-serve machine.
I’m happy seeing my friends take photos of their food. I like taking photos of my food. Because there is a chef in the back of the kitchen who works hard to plate things beautifully and in any other situation, people dive in immediately and ruin that image. We take photos to preserve that image and who the fuck knows, if I was the chef I would be digging through instagram hoping to see my plate on there. We’re celebrating someones hard work, work that is generally temporary.
And I don’t know what kind of friends you have, but if someone is taking a photo of their food, I’m not gonna bother talking to them until they’re done. Why would you try to have a conversation when someone is busy?? And it takes a few minutes, you can wait for someone who wants to perform a small act of creativity.
It’s nice to get likes on instagram. If you’re monogamous and on tinder, it’s not technology’s fault you’re contemplating cheating. What is SO BAD about having food delivered to your home? And is there anything wrong with having movies streaming instantly? No - but if you complain that Netflix takes up your life than be an adult and step back. It’s not technology’s fault that you have no self control.
Selfies are fun. Selfies are great. Your friend is a jerk if they don’t even take a minute to take of photo of you as well. Why do you care if people use technology around you on the subway? That makes me feel less self-conscious that people are staring or judging me. They can play their games, read, etc. Someone is occupied, why is that so wrong?
Your phone has a zoom option so you can record/photograph a concert? FUCKING good for you!
And again. If your phone keeps you up, be an adult, get some self control and step back.
Technology isn’t bad. You’re just upset with yourselves for having a lack of self-control. You hate that people connect through technology. And maybe, you just don’t like seeing people love themselves, enjoy life, and feel joy. That’s your problem, not technology’s.
i swear to god if someone ever said this shit to me they’d be done. gone. adios. aufwiedersehen motherfucker.
The other day a really nice store manager let me skip a hella long line, because I was just exchanging sizes of one item. This woman RAN from the middle of the line, and starts screaming, “WHY DO YOU GET TO CUT? BECAUSE YOU USE A CANE? YOU’RE STANDING JUST FINE YOU DON’T GET TO CUT JUST BECAUSE YOU’RE TOO FAT AND LAZY TO WALK ON YOUR OWN!”.
I have a neuro condition, and just walking, with my cane, from the entrance to the counter- through displays and people moving around me- was a major accomplishment.
Ok, so story time. I have never experienced a point in time where this was as powerful and as obvious as my freshman opening week back in college. They group everyone off and make you talk, people introduce themselves right and left, everyone talks about hobbies, and to me there was just this really cool vibe of, “Yeah, it’s easy to make friends, everyone is cool, yay!”
This quickly went away when I began to notice a disturbing pattern. I’d spend a while talking to someone only to mention something about my boyfriend (who by the way is now my husband) who also was starting at the same university with me. Usually along the lines of, “Yeah, me and my boyfriend both do this medieval fighting reenactment thing, it’s super fun. We’re hoping to start a club here,” because that’s pretty much all I could talk about at that point in my life. Almost immediately the face of the guy I was talking to would go from smiling and friendly to openly hostile, and he’d be like, “You have a boyfriend?” And after I gave any sort of affirmation, the person would instantly walk away and never speak to me again.
I was on a campus where the guy to girl ratio was 5 to 1, so as you might imagine, this happened to me way too fucking much in the span of a week. I was so fucking upset over it I remember sitting in my dorm alone in the evenings trying not to cry, feeling like an idiot and wondering why I wasn’t good enough for people to want to be friends with. A majority of my friends in high school had been guys, so the fact that these guys were solely interested in getting laid rather than making friendships really hurt (not to mention made me question a lot of the friendships with guys I already had). I had never made friends with girls easily (still don’t), and I was originally pretty pumped with the guy to girl ratio just because I much prefer to hang around men, so realizing that none of them would want anything to do with me unless it was for sexual reasons made me incredibly pessimistic about what my friendships would look like for the next four years.
However, there was ONE GUY the whole week who stuck around and stayed my friend. He ended up being good friends with both me and my boyfriend. We hung out all the time, joined the same clubs, went to parties together, etc. At the end of sophomore year, he actually came to visit our hometown (my boyfriend and I grew up in the same town but had attended different schools) and even stayed at my family’s house in the guest room. I was super pumped, because I saw him as a really good friend to both me AND my boyfriend. We were going to have like five whole days to hang out and show him the town, right? Come to find out, the only reason he’d been friends with me the entire time was because he was waiting for me to break up with my boyfriend so he could date me, and when that hadn’t happened after two years he actually gotmad at me while I was letting him stay in my fucking house. He spent the rest of his stay telling me what a horrible person I was, how terrible my boyfriend was for me, and making me feel physically uncomfortable in my own home— literally telling me I owed him something for the two years he “put up with me.” To make a long story short, we haven’t spoken now in five years, and I don’t regret that at all.
Like I get it, the friendzone sucks, no one likes rejection. But holy fuck, I would much rather be rejected sexually than be rejected as an entire human being.
Susanna and the Elders, Restored with X-ray (Right)
Kathleen Gilje, 1998
wow
Oooh my gosh this is rad. This is so rad.
For those who don’t know about this painting, the artist was the Baroque artist Artemisia Gentileschi.
Gentileschi was a female painter in a time when it was very largely unheard of for a woman to be an artist. She managed to get the opportunity for training and eventual employment because her father, Orazio, was already a well established master painter who was very adamant that she get artistic training. He apparently saw a high degree of skill in some artwork she did as a hobby in childhood. He was very supportive of her and encouraged her to resist the “traditional attitude and psychological submission to brainwashing and the jealousy of her obvious talents.”
Gentileschi became extremely well known in her time for painting female figures from the Bible and their suffering. For example, the one seen above depicts the story from the Book of Daniel. Susanna is bathing in her garden when two elders began to spy on her in the nude. As she finishes they stop her and tell her that they will tell everyone that they saw her have an affair with a young man (she’s married so this is an offense punishable by death) unless she has sex with them. She refuses, they tell their tale, and she is going to be put to death when the protagonist of the book (Daniel) stops them.
So that painting above? That was her first major painting. She was SEVENTEEN-YEARS-OLD. For context, here is a painting of the same story by Alessandro Allori made just four years earlier in 1606:
Wowwwww. That does not look like a woman being threatened with a choice between death or rape. So imagine 17 year old Artemisia trying to approach painting the scene of a woman being assaulted. And she paints what is seen in the x-ray above. A woman in horrifying, grotesque anguish with what appears to be a knife poised in her clenched hand. Damn that shit is real. Who wants to guess that she was advised by, perhaps her father or others, to tone it down. Women can’t look that grotesque. Sexual assault can’t be depicted as that horrifying. And women definitely can’t be seen as having the potential to fight back. Certainly not in artwork. Women need to be soft. They need to wilt from their captors but still look pretty and be a damsel in distress. So she changed it.
What’s interesting to note is that she eventually painted and stuck with some of her own, less traditional depictions of women. However, that is more interesting with some context.
(Warning for reference to rape, torture, and images of paintings which show violence and blood.)
So, Gentileschi’s story continues in the very next year, 1611, when her father hires Agostino Tassi, an artist, to privately tutor her. It was in this time when Tassi raped her. He then proceeded to promise that he would marry her. He pointed out that if it got out that she had lost her virginity to a man she wasn’t going to marry then it would ruin her. Using this, he emotionally manipulated her into continuing a sexual relationship with him. However, he then proceeded to marry someone else. Horrified at this turn of events she went to her father. Orazio was having none of this shit and took Tassi to court. At that time, rape wasn’t technically an offense to warrant a trial, but the fact that he had taken her virginity (and therefore technically “damaged Orazio’s property”. ugh.) meant that the trial went along. It lasted for 7 months. During this time, to prove the truth of her words, Artemisia was given invasive gynecological examinations and was even questioned while being subjected to torture via thumb screws. It was also discovered during the trial that Tassi was planning to kill his current wife, have an affair with her sister, and steal a number of Orazio’s paintings. Tassi was found guilty and was given a prison sentence of…. ONE. YEAR……. Which he never even served because the verdict was annulled.
During this time and a bit after (1611-1612), Artemisia painted her most famous work of Judith Slaying Holofernes. This bible story involved Holofernes, an Assyrian general, leading troops to invade and destroy Bethulia, the home of Judith. Judith decides to deal with this issue by coming to him, flirting with him to get his guard down, and then plying him with food and lots of wine. When he passed out, Judith and her handmaiden took his sword and cut his head off. Issue averted. The subject was a very popular one for art at the time. Here is a version of the scene painted in 1598-99 by Carivaggio, whom was a great stylistic influence on Artemisia:
This depiction is a pretty good example of how this scene was typically depicted. Artists usually went out of their way to show Judith committing the act (or having committed it) while trying to detach her from the actual violence of it. In this way, they could avoid her losing the morality of her character and also avoid showing a woman committing such aggression. So here we see a young, rather delicate looking Judith in a pure white dress. She is daintily holding down this massive man and looks rather disgusted and upset at having to do this. Now, here is Artemisia’s:
Damn. Thats a whole different scene. Here Holofernes looks less like he’s simply surprised by the goings ons and more like a man choking on his own blood and struggling fruitlessly against his captors. The blood here is less of a bright red than in Carrivaggio’s but is somehow more sickening. It feels more real, and gushes in a much less stylized way than Carrivaggio’s. Not to mention, Judith here is far from removed from the violence. She is putting her physical weight into this act. Her hands (much stronger looking than most depictions of women’s hands in early artwork) are working hard. Her face, as well, is completely different. She doesn’t look upset, necessarily, but more determined.
It’s also worth note that the handmaiden is now involved in the action. It’s worth note because, during her rape trial, Artemisia stated that she had cried for help during the initial rape. Specifically she had called for Tassi’s female tenant in the building, Tuzia. Tuzia not only ignored her cries for help, but she also denied the whole happening. Tuzia had been a friend of Artemisia’s and in fact was one of her only female friends. Artemisia felt extremely betrayed, but rather than turning her against her own gender, this event instilled in her the deep importance of female relationships and solidarity among women. This can be seen in some of her artwork, and I believe in the one above, as well, with the inclusion of the handmaiden in the act.
So, I just added a million words worth of information dump on a post when no one asked me, but there we go. I could talk for ages about Artemisia as a person and her depictions of women (even beyond what I wrote above. Don’t get me started on her depictions of female nudes in comparison to how male artists painted nude women at the time.)
To sum up: Artemisia Gentileschi is rad as hell. This x-ray is also rad as hell and makes her even radder.
I love art history.
I’m reblogging this again to add something that I also think is important to know about Artemisia Gentileschi. Back in her time and through even to TODAY, there are people who argue that her artworks were greatly aided by her father…. As in he either helped her paint them or just straight up painted them himself. Hell, there are a number of works only recently (past several years or so) that have been officially attributed to Artemisia because people originally saw the signature with “Gentileschi” in it and automatically attributed it to Orazio. So, not only was Artemisia Gentileschi an amazing artist and amazing historical figure, but I don’t want it to be ignored that there are people over 400 years later who still won’t give her the credit she deserves, just because she’s a woman and obviously women can’t paint like she did.
I made this tutorial for a co worker today, so I figured i might share it with the internet in hopes it helps any one that might struggle with painting electricity. This is the method I use, it may not be scientifically accurate but I am pretty happy with the results. More step by steps to come soon!
These pumps, crafted by Mexican designer Lucita Abarca, caused quite a stir at a recent Sixth Borough fashion show. These crystalline high-heels were grown by Wyrm’s Pass artisans, deep below the Rocky Mountains, using a mixture of firebird ash, waters from the springs at Paradiso, and a variety of secret ingredients, rumored to include Australian fire opals and powdered moonstone. The result of using the firebird ash become immediately recognizable when the heel of the shoe is dragged backward across any dry surface, as it creates an impressive streak of magical fire which can be accurately aimed with a little effot. Ms. Abarca said she wanted a shoe that made a statement, and that statement was “Any bastardo brujo catcalling me on La Plaza de Sangre better be ready to dose his huevos, you know?”
*strums guitar* stop portraying trans men binding their chests with ace bandages *strum* it’s an extremely harmful method and portraying it may influence young trans men to do the same *strum* just portray them using binders or sports bras its not that fucking hard *smashes guitar on floor*
"[T]he stereotype that African Americans are excessively fond of watermelon emerged for a specific historical reason and served a specific political purpose. The trope came into full force when slaves won their emancipation during the Civil War. Free black people grew, ate, and sold watermelons, and in doing so made the fruit a symbol of their freedom. Southern whites, threatened by blacks’ newfound freedom, responded by making the fruit a symbol of black people’s perceived uncleanliness, laziness, childishness, and unwanted public presence. This racist trope then exploded in American popular culture, becoming so pervasive that its historical origin became obscure. Few Americans in 1900 would’ve guessed the stereotype was less than half a century old."
yall realize the average lifespan for a trans woman is 30-32 years.. and that is largely because of hate crimes resulting in murder.. ALL feminists need to support trans women and not just because they want to because they need to
