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Eklektikòs

@silencesandnights / silencesandnights.tumblr.com

Annalisa. 28. Italy. Psychologist in training. An avid reader with a fondness for tv shows too. I have another blog about my struggles with derma, feel free to drop by: withmysoulbare.tumblr.com
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eyelessfog

i need to be a little abnormal about hollow knight maybe. like. i dont know. does anyone remember playing it the first time. you talk to every character every single time. you dreamnail all your friends because you're curious. you learn that willow eats bugs and is considering eating you. quirrel disappears and you freak out. you find tiso dead. maybe cloth helped you fight traitor lord. maybe she didnt. how did you feel? it was either she died, right there, or she sat up in dirtmouth bored and waiting for something. what was more worth it? bretta loves you. bretta stops. maybe you fight zote [but weirdly buff] ten times and she thinks youre cool again. cornifer is a friendly face wherever you go and then you can't talk to him again.

i don't know. it was something to me how it was always better in the middle. it was the best when you got to have everyone and before they were all taken from you. and beyond the story left behind in the death of everything, i think that was its own little tragedy. that you just lose them by virtue of letting them continue on their journey.

how many of you played again and refused to talk to quirrel when he waited by the lake? how many didn't let tiso go to the coliseum? how many didn't save cloth until after fighting traitor lord - or just didn't bother to fight traitor lord at all?

like. you get it right. freezing them in time, to keep them all safe, kept forever immortal because you don't want them to die. do you get it

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I love when I’m studying outside and a bee is like “flower? r u a flower? I check! is laptop a flower? i check! No one here a flower… ciao!” and I wave goodbye saying thank you for visiting little bee!

Bees don’t think in English you fools. You imbeciles.

The bee said ‘ciao’ it’s obviously Italian

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Credit to @macrosbudt, who created the original post and gave permission to repost. I'm trying to blaze this. If it doesn't work, that means the moderators rejected it.

Edit: Yeah, they rejected it. This is at least the 3rd time they've decided to reject a post about women being oppressed.

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絨花 ronghua

👩🏻慕容意的手工

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ziseviolet

Making DIY Chinese ronghua/絨花 (velvet flower) hairpins for hanfu. More information on ronghua here and here.

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roach-works

do you ever behold a kind of craft you didn’t even know existed before now and experience a moment of pure unbridled lust

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vampmilf

i am begging you all to stop treating this site like instagram if you dont want it to be content free by next year

actually i’m reblogging this again with commentary, fuck it.

There’s people in the notes talking about “not basing your worth off numbers”, and like. that isn’t what this post is about. It’s not a threat, either, it’s a comment on how this site works, at a mechanical level.

Likes are worthless. Let me say that again.

Likes. Are. Worthless.

They don’t do anything. They’re a bookmark. They were never part of how tumblr works - in the early days we didn’t even have a like button, and the site still more or less acts as though we don’t. They’re personal bookmarks and the only people who “get” anything from them are you (you bookmark the post) and the OP (maybe a very slight serotonin boost), but they don’t keep the post in circulation, they don’t keep it alive.

Without reblogs, a post will be dead in the water within an hour. No matter how good it is, no matter how many hours of painstaking love and attention its creator put into it, it will be dead within an hour and never seen again. It gets pushed down the dashboard and nobody aside from the followers who were online when it was posted will see it. And there’s a huge difference in engagement on posts that get even one lucky reblog from someone with wider reach - that one reblog shows your post to five, ten, fifteen other people, and if one of those people also reblogs it, and so on and so forth, that’s how posts stay alive and in circulation. It’s like a contagion, but we’re sharing creativity instead of disease.

And that matters. That “lifespan” of the post matters, artists and writers give up on this site and go to sites where posts have longer lifespans because it sucks to spend hours of your life, maybe even days, to get two notes and some fucking pocket lint for your efforts. We create for ourselves, but we share because we want people to see it, because that engagement offers positive feedback and encouragement to continue. But more than that, if every post (whether art, fic, gifset, whatever) is dying within an hour or a day of being posted, that means it’s not making it onto your dashboard. And if it’s not on your dashboard, you won’t see it. This kills the site, after a while. You stop seeing the posts, because nobody is putting them on your dashboard, because this site doesn’t have an algorithm like twitter and insta’s and it shouldn’t, it’s the last bastion of chronological timelines.

Forgive my giant fucking rant I am so tired right now and full of the plague but like stop acting like artists and writers are just being whiny little babies, or “threatening” to withhold our fucking work (you’re not entitled to it! it’s ours! if we get nothing out of sharing it we’re well within our rights to keep it private!) when we say this site will dry up without reblogs. We’re just stating facts.

also I’ve seen some people in the tags say ‘oh there have always been more likes on posts’ no there haven’t ???? 

these are posts from 2013, look at the ratio

not to sound like a nursing home resident but back then people know that the point of this site was to reblog things and share them, not to bury them away among your other 23k liked posts

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deadmomjokes

Y’all, I’m over here DYING cuz Google suggested me this article about the crisis of backyard chicken keepers– which is that they love having chickens so much that they keep getting more, and then don’t know what to do with all the eggs.

Which I can see how this would be a problem, but it’s just so funny to me because they had interviewed this one guy who started off with 3 chickens, and then kept adding more and more, and eventually started donating the eggs to a local food bank, and at the end of the year when they wrote him a tax receipt, he discovered he’d donated over 400 dozen eggs.

Seriously, it was a whole article talking very seriously about how people are so into chickens that they just keep collecting them like pokemon and then have to “scramble” (their words not mine) to get rid of the eggs, because they weren’t even thinking of egg production, they just loved having chickens.

And while I may be over here laughing a bit too hard, honestly? Big Mood.

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bonecouch

“but without the profit motive people won’t work”

Dinosaur Anti-Capitalism

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Computer wiring tunnel inside an abandoned coal power plant, photo by Bryan Buckley [1280x854]

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Sorry but the "a woman just died and her family is mourning" speech doesn't really apply for the woman who's responsible for almost half the world's colonisation and the death of millions of people everyday for like 70 years

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solitics

I hate the monarchy but.... She is not "responsible for half the world's colonisation". Do you think colonialism happened in the last 100 years? Do you know anything?

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goomymegpoid

"Do you know anything?" Really now. Did you even look into it before defending this bitch

Um, no. They're not "defending" her by pointing out the original statement is inaccurate—that's just correcting misinformation. I mean, I am extremely vocal on this blog about my anti-monarchy views, especially in regard to my distaste for British imperialism as somebody of South Asian descent. But the OP is misleading at best, and just flat out wrong at worst, and I honestly find it kind of offensive that people would disregard the actual, real-life violent history of British imperialism in favour of some half-cocked statement that lets so many responsible parties off the hook for their crimes.

Like, firstly, if you're really dead set on solely laying the blame for expansion of the British Empire on one single member of the royal family, then that person, without a doubt, should be Queen Victoria. To quote this article, she was the "matriarch of the British Empire," as well as a major propopent of its expansion. Between 1814 (just 23 years before Victoria ascended the throne) and the heyday of her reign in 1881, the population of the British Empire literally QUINTUPLED in size. By the time she died in 1901, Victoria was ruling over roughly 400 million "subjects," in British-ruled territory that covered approximately 25% of the globe. It hit its peak in 1919 (7 years before Elizabeth II's birth) under the reign of George V, after Britain acquired a bunch of German territories under Treaty of Versailles at the end of WWI. By contrast, when Elizabeth took the throne in 1952—about five years after India & Pakistan kicked off a major wave of decolonisation efforts—Britain's global territory had shrunk by approximately 68%. By 1970, it had decreased even further:

Now, there's absolutely no disputing that Queen Victoria's imperialism is part of Queen Elizabeth's family legacy. That's true both from a historical and financial perspective, and something about which I am extremely salty! Victoria fucking ransacked India, and today's royals still have the spoils. If you want to join Desi people in hating Liz & Co. for never giving us our fucking stolen diamond back, be my guest. In fact, we will make you cups of chai and feed you rotis while you bitch about it with us. But saying that Elizabeth II was directly responsible for colonising half 1/4 of the globe is not only factually incorrect, but factually incorrect in a way that either outright erases the most devastating periods of British imperialism (if you're only including events from 1952-present), or effectively absolves the people who actually engineered the violence (if you're mentally replacing Liz for Vicky). Now, I admittedly have more beef with Queen Victoria, because my grandfather and great-aunties on the Indian side were literally born under her reign (yes, really, I'm old), but even so, it seems weird to just... rewrite the whole thing. And speaking of absolving people, like... yes, the monarchy is a ridiculous fucking institution built on ill-gotten wealth and oppression of the working classes, no argument from me there. But they are not solely responsible for colonialism, and I don't like the implication that it was masterminded single-handedly by one figurehead with a crown whose political role is largely ceremonial. Like, first of all, look up the fucking East India Company, an evil-from-the-depths-of-hell-level corporation built on greed and human suffering. They were acting as agents of British imperialism across swathes of Africa and Asia, eons before Queen Victoria was even born. The British government only got dominion over India after they intervened to stop the East India Company from exerting too much political and commercial control. Like, read up on Robert Clive and the Battle of Plassey sometime, and then imagine Jeff Bezos or Elon Musk buying the French army to invade the Indian subcontinent. While we're talking about ye olden colonising CEOs, ever heard of Cecil Rhodes? Of course, he had a lot of help in fucking over South Africa from the PM, Lord Salisbury. It was actually Disraeli's idea to confer the title of 'Empress of India' on Queen Victoria. It's estimated that around 3.8 million people died during the 1943 Bengal famine, which was basically the result of a Winston Churchill policy failure. And it was not any monarch, but Secretary of State for the Colonies Joseph Chamberlain, who said "I believe that the British race is the greatest of the governing races that the world has ever seen… It is not enough to occupy great spaces of the world's surface unless you can make the best of them. It is the duty of a landlord to develop his estate." Like, yeah fuck the monarchy for the role they played, but don't act like one single hand-waving, ribbon-cutting inbred royal was the British Empire's master architect, when this was very much one of history's worst fucking group projects.

Finally, a smaller correction, but that above "List of sovereign states headed by Elizabeth II" is mostly comprised of former colonies/Commonwealth countries. Now, is the Commonwealth a vestige of Britain's bygone colonialism? Absolutely, no doubt. But nonetheless, that's still a list of independent nations with their own governments who—at some point between 1952-present—chose to have the monarch as a state figurehead (albeit not a choice I understand). Also, if you actually look at the chart, it's presently only a total of 15 countries who still have the monarch as a ceremonial figurehead (including the UK itself, Canada, and Australia). You'll also note that more than half of these countries have severed ties already, including Barbados, who just became a republic last year (way to go, Barbados!), and I'm hoping that Charles's relative unpopularity will see more nations follow suit. Still, the point stands: It doesn't really make sense to post that as "evidence" of the fact that Elizabeth herself was personally responsible for "half the world's colonisation," when 1) It only dates back to 1952, well after the peak of the empire 2) None of the nations listed are current British Overseas Territories 3) The linked chart actually shows a decline in independent states using the monarch as a figurehead since the late 1980s. It's quite literally making the opposite point as intended.

Anyway, as somebody who doesn't like the monarchy, and thinks a lot about the irrevocable damage wrought by British colonialism, I am begging you guys not to downplay or rewrite its actual history for the sake of a pithy sound-byte on Tumblr dot com. "Queen Elizabeth spent a lifetime benefiting from the spoils of her family's imperialist endeavours, and may have recently used some of that tainted wealth to help her son pay out a settlement to the woman who publicly accused him of sex trafficking" is a perfectly accurate, and scathingly damning statement; you do not need to rewrite British history to make it sound like the woman personally conquered India with an army of bloodthirsty corgis just to make your point.

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