Something I need y’all youngins to understand growing up in the age of crypto and streaming is that digital ownership is not ownership. Digital ownership is renting.
If you have, say, House (2022) on Netflix. That new stop motion movie. You don’t own that movie. You pay to have access, to that movie, but you don’t physically own it. It isn’t yours to take with you or put in a blu ray player. You’re paying to maybe watch it.
The movie is something you can access so long as Netflix is active and you pay for access. If one of those things changes you no longer can see that movie. If the movie goes to a different streaming service it is gone. (You should buy any movie you want to see again or would be sad if it left streaming).
Same with digital video games. Silent Hills PT is a playable trailer that, because of the Kojima/Konami dispute, was pulled from PSN. You cannot download it anymore. A physical disc cannot be taken from you, it can always be put in your console and played. Having the physical game is owning it having the downloaded game is renting it.
You’re promised these things forever but you only have access to rented digital goods for as long as the site supports it. And eventually that will change. You can pop in a Mario 64 cartridge into your N64 anytime you want and play. You cannot download a digital copy of Halo 2 to an original xbox because that support has been shut down (and modern consoles don’t let you carry your entire library on your system storage). If you have a disc of Horizon Zero Dawn you can always play it. If you have a digital copy that will go away given enough time.
Same with digital card games. Magic the Gathering has had multiple online formats. When they close one to make another your entire collection is gone. They offer you the idea of collecting but it only means anything if the servers are active. Physical cards can always be used and can even be used in inventive ways like horde mode. That’s how commander/EDH got its start.
Spotify is great for music exploration but download music you like. Go to the library and check out cd’s to put on your computer or go to bandcamp and get albums DRM free. My family switched itunes email accounts in 2011 and its junked up 3 years of purchases requiring us to rebuy them.
As much as NFT bros want you to believe it digital ownership is NOT ownership. The concept of digital ownership relies on false scarcity (minting a limited number of NFT’s when more could have been made) and a few clever words to make you think the netflix library is YOUR movie library. Its really fucking convenient for big businesses who can squeeze every drop of money out of you without giving anything tangible in return.
a tweet by ethan hardy that says "You say it's fucked that gingerbread men live in gingerbread houses, but to a gingerbread person, gingerbread is as fundamental and inscrutable as carbon. The people and homes are no more like than humans are to diamonds. Only we, their gods and creators, can see the horror"
[ID: Screenshot of an article embedded in a tweet, saying: "Babies born during COVID-19 pandemic have lower IQs: Study says", accompanied by a picture of a very pregnant belly with a blue surgical mask strapped to it.
The tweet is followed by another one, this time by user Grosdoriane, saying: "Scientist doing an IQ test on a 3 month old baby: what the hell? This guy's an idiot." End ID. ]
pandora bracelets are why the earth will go cold. the pinnacle of empty wife empty life. the horrid little freakshow of our own incapability to speak to one another and connect and make meaning out of nothing instead of buying it and borrowing it from others from companies from social media from elsewhere outside of us and the other person. oh shes an adidas gal. hes a nike guy. theyre a merlot kinda person. here steps in pandora. a bracelet, on its own, makes sense. budget cartier. just a little hoop. its fine. its nice. but its main selling point is the charms. dozens of little trinkets you buy to build up on the present u got ur beloved mom wife sister cousin whoever on christmas. stupid fucking useless little ugly pendants that mean nothing. a shoe. a beach ball. a snowflake. a graduation cap. a key. like 70 dollar emojis you buy to make this cursed rosary heavier. capitalisms finest. easy way out. i pay for conveniences every day, why not pay for a way to express that im proud of you for graduating by buying a shitty little graduation cap for your bracelet. shameful ineptitude in living, buying that for someone. youre in love, leave the details to us, you useless clueless man, you sad little asshole that doesnt understand his partner like we do. fuck you. its ugly and petrifying and void of any meaning whatsoever and i fear God will leave us to handle this one on our own. i want to chew asphalt and spit it out as tar i want us all to die forever. happy holidays
No offense but the internet gives you the most wrong and fucked up idea of helping people because people get mad if you don't care about disasters happening in 72 countries, meanwhile the people in real life that are doing the most good picked one VERY SPECIFIC thing to care about and care about it REALLY HARD
Honestly the biggest disappointment I had researching ABC was that medieval authors did not, in fact, see the creatures they were describing and were trying their best to describe them with their limited knowledge while going “what the fuck… what the fuck…”
Instead all those creatures you know came about from transcription and translation errors from copying Greco-Roman sources (who themselves got them from travelers’ tales from Persia and India - rhino -> unicorn, tiger -> manticore, python -> dragon, and so on).
I always thought animals in medieval manuscripts looked like the result of having to draw say. A Tree Kangaroo, but your only source for what it looked like was your friend who heard it from a fellow who knows a man who swears he saw one once, whilst very drunk and lost, and I am SO PLEASED to find out this is, in fact, the case.
don’t forget that some of the legendary creatures they were describing were from other people’s mythos which were passed down in the oral tradition for gods know how long. You know what existed in Eurasia right around the time we were domesticating wolves into dogs?
these beasties. For a long time, science had them down as going extinct 200 thousand years ago, but then we found some bones from 36 thousand years ago. Which, y’know, is quite a difference. Since you can bet that any skeleton we find is not literally the last one of its kind to live, many creatures have date ranges unknowably far outside the evidence.
In South Asia there were cultures that described a man-beast/troll forrest giant who’s knuckles dragged the ground, and everybody from the west was sure it was superstitious mumbo jumbo, but you know what used to live there?
And did you know that some of the earliest white colonizers of the Americas heard accounts that there were natives still alive who had seen and hunted and eaten a great hairy beast, shaggy like the buffalo but much bigger, with a long thin nose like a snake and two giant fangs… so, like, mammoths, you know? but they were totally discounted because europeans of the time were like, elephants live in Africa and aren’t hairy, you can’t fool us, pranksters!
Anyway, the point is between the early writing game of telephone description thing talked about by OP, and the discounting of native cultural accuracy, I’m pretty sure most legendary creatures are in fact real animals one way or another
It can’t explain every single legendary creature, but yes, this is super important. Because History relies on written sources, it tends to sweep oral tradition under the rug, even if there’s a lot of interesting informations in it.
And it’s not just living animals that were badly described, or which descriptions got exaggerated over the course of centuries or through translation errors. Sometimes, people finding fossil bones of extinct animals might have also influenced some myths!
By now this is pretty well-known but it has been theorised that the Greek myth of the cyclops was started when people found Deinotherium skulls. Now you might say, uh, how is it possible to think a cousin of the elephant is a huge human dude with one eye?
Here’s a less well-known one; the griffin is a mythological hybrid with the body of a lion and the head and wings of an eagle. The earliest traces of this myth come from ancient Iranian and ancient Egyptian art, from more than 3000 BC. In Iranian mythology, it’s called
شیردال (shirdal, “lion eagle”). Now, it’s been the subject of some debate and it’s not confirmed, but there’s a theory that people might have seen some Protoceratops and Psittacosaurus fossils in Asia and might have interpreted it as “a lion with an eagle’s head”:
This is a pretty well accepted theory for why dragons (or animals we group as like dragons, eg wyverns and drakes) are seen in mythos almost worldwide - because people found dinosaur bones, looked at them, and went “oh fuck what’s that? some big…. lizardy thing?” and then created dragons.
It also explains why dragons can look so different in the myths of the various regions.
In asia, Dragons tend to look very long and snake like:
One of the most common dinosaurs that used to like in the asia region, so would have been the most common fossils found by people:
The Mamenchisaurus, this thing is just all neck and tail! You find just half a fossilised skeleton of this monster, you can easily end up thinking of a long snake-like beast.
South America also has legends snake-like dragons among some of its peoples:
What fossils from pre-historic south America could be found?
The Titanoboa, which can easily grow to be 40 feet long.
What fossils could have been found in that region:
Pterosaur, and Triceratops. Features of both sets of skeletons could have been merged into one legendary creature.
Then we get our European style dragon:
One of the most common fossils that could have been found was a
Cetiosaurus
which, despite being a herbivore, looked to have a mouth of sharp looking teeth, consistant with a dragons.
Dragons amongst the peoples of Africa are even more varied, but most revolve around some kind of giant snake-like creature. As a quick example, we’ll take Dan Ayido Hwedo commonly found in West African mythology.
Fossils in that area could have been included the Aegyptosaurus:
A quick google search tells me that most Sauropods: well known for being long necked and long tailed, are found in Africa.
If you found only a half complete skeleton of this thing; which is likely, because it’s rare to find a complete dinosaur skeleton, you could easily think of a giant snake monster.
IIRC, another possible explanation for long snake-like dragons/sea serpents in Africa could’ve been Basilosaurus, a whale from the Paleogene whose skeleton looked like this:
A lot of the most complete specimens have been found in Egypt.
You know what, I’m tired of getting notifications for this post and
not saying anything about it. I know that last time I complained about this
sort of thinking, I got called out by revretch, who called me a gatekeeper and
then blocked me. But I don’t have anything left to live for anymore so I’m
going to let my science and education background take over for a moment and
discuss this in depth.
Okay, not in depth, I’ll try to be brief.
Yes, I know tumblr likes to believe scientists are silly old fools for refusing to
accept the truth that is right in front of them. Fine. Believe in what you
want. But the problem is that a lot of the information in the above post is
either long discredited, not taken seriously by archaeologists/folklorists for
good reason, or
Animals have inspired a lot of mythical creatures. That is true.
Fossils have inspired a few mythical creatures. That is also true.
Fossils have not inspired the creatures in the above post. Not provably, at any rate, and certainly not enough for any self-respecting archaeologist to take them seriously.
Why not?
There’s a popular misconception about how fossils are formed. People tend to
think they look something like in Jurassic Park 3, where a Velociraptor is
being excavated in Montana (that already makes it impossible, but bear with me).
Look how nice that fossil is. It looks exactly like an animal. You can see
the head, the shape of the body, the arms and legs and tail. You easily picture
what it looked like alive.
This is NOT what fossils look like.
Real fossils tend to be disarticulated. Broken up. Spread over a large area.
Believe me, I know! I’m a paleontology washout who’s volunteered on at least 3
digs in 3 different countries! The only information an average person could get
out of most real fossils is “this was an animal”, and “this was a BIG animal”. Nobody would
have deduced frills and wings and stuff like that.
The griffon hypothesis up there? We owe it to Adrienne Mayor, and it’s
popular among paleontologists but not archaeologists. It makes sense on a very
superficial level – It Stands To Reason, after all – but once you start looking
at it in detail it breaks down. Even if, somehow, someone saw a Protoceratops skeleton in enough detail to see wings and beaks and stuff, why would they leave out the teeth? The stubby-toed feet? The ridiculous tail? Mark Witton, a person actually connected to paleontology, has done a great article on the
subject.
Griffons were inspired by a number of things, including Mesopotamian royal art, and there’s at least one real animal behind the griffon (and it’s not a fossil). But that’s another story.
What about elephant-skull cyclopes? Again, it sounds like it makes sense!
Certainly more so than the griffon-Protoceratops. But here we run into another
problem… complete lack of proof. It sounds reasonable, but it can’t be proven.
And “one-eyed giant” isn’t exactly a colossal feat of imagination - giants are one of the standard baddies in legend, and making them one-eyed makes them just more monstrous. You can just as easily argue that cyclopes originated in solar wheel imagery
associated with the gods, which is why their name means “wheel-eye” and not “one-eye”, and that also ties nicely into their association with metallurgy. Again, Mark Witton has more on that.
Creatures LEGITIMATELY based on fossils typically look nothing like their
progenitors, and tend to incorporate features based on their fossil location.
Mammoth remains, for instance! Those are found sticking out of eroded riverbanks,
so there must have been a big animal underground! In China they are the yin
shu, an enormous mouse or mole that digs underground but dies as soon as the
sun touches it. (My interpretation below. Note that I couldn’t resist making it mammothy anyway)
In Siberia the witkes is a horned lake monster that demands offerings of the
people who cross its water. Note that the “tusks” are seen as horns, and
because the fossils are found near water, it becomes a water animal. See how
the facts of the fossils become part of the legend? (Again, my interpretation below, and same comment as before)
The lindwurm of Klagenfurt was based on the discovery of a cave rhinoceros
skull. Again, you can see how little the creature has to do with the fossil!
People already have dragons on the brain, so finding a skull reinforces that,
instead of altering it. You’ve got crocodile skulls in castles in Hungary displayed as dragon remains. Same story. Everything’s a dragon if you want it to be.
Brontotheres (thunder beasts) are named so because of the legends of the Great Plains people! Their remains were seen as the casualties of great battles, and the name honors that legend. Again, they aren’t described as being big rhino-like horned animals, just as… big animals that are now dead.
As for the others, again, those are incredible speculations that require,
once again, to dismiss far more obvious things that would have inspired them. And there’s a whole lot of cultural evolution that goes on that isn’t taken into account.
The unicorn in particular. There’s no reason to think that it was anything other than the one-horned Indian rhinoceros. Elasmotherium tends to get dragged into the discussion, but all the original unicorn stories tell of a one-horned Indian monster. Not something that lives underground.
The Piasa? The above post compares it to pterosaurs, but the original did not have wings! It was a version of the “underwater panther”, a mythical underwater lynx of the Northeast Woodlands and Great Lakes regions. There’s a long story behind that but that’s, again, beyond the scope of what I wanted to say.
Of course, if you want to consider the underwater panther a dinosaur as well, be my guest.
Regarding the sauropods (and
Titanoboa, and whales) inspiring giant snakes thing.
If only there was some terrifyingly large, reptilian, legless, snake-like creature in South America…
Or Africa…
Or Asia to fire people’s imagination and cause them to think of giant
snakes?
And it’s not like rainbows aren’t associated worldwide with snakes because
of their, well, long and thin and curvy nature.
Now if you think I’m a big horrible gatekeeping meanie for saying all this, that’s fine! There’s still a lot we don’t know, and there’s still a lot of things that could very well be based on fossils, so you can keep your hopes up!
Like the ketos of Troy, for instance!
That… looks awfully like it could be a skull! Adrienne Mayor thinks it’s a fossil Samotherium, which sounds like a stretch. It looks more like a pterosaur to me. But still, that’s something that could indeed be a fossil!
The other thing about all this is the “scientists didn’t listen to native people who told them about monsters they’d encountered”. And yes, this is true and a noble thing to believe in. But also consider that one of the reasons dinosaurs were believed to exist in “darkest Africa” (all the scare quotes) is that it was held that native people couldn’t possibly be creative enough to imagine them. Europeans talk about giant reptiles? Myths, legends, folklore. Non-Europeans talk about giant reptiles? OMG LIVING DINOSAURS. It goes both ways, sadly.
Mythical creatures are the product of culture, literature, and biology. Reducing their creation to “sees weird fossil => invents monster” is, to me, just sad, and cuts out a lot of the process and wonder and translation errors and sheer mistakes that intervene.
Stop buying Apple products. I know you’ve used them for most of your life, and I know it’s inconvenient to move to a new brand because in most cases, you cannot take your contacts with you on various chat apps.
I know this is inconvenient. I truly do.
But Apple is not the company it was before. There is now no difference between an Apple computer and a Windows computer in terms of graphic design. I know this for a fact. I had to use both in college 20 years ago, and non-apple computers are now generally better for design work than Apple computers.
Most non-apple companies encourage self-repair of your own devices, while Apple refuses it. I also know this for a fact, as I watched Apple computers become slowly less reparable through the late 90s and early 2000s. Where I was once able to do the repairs on our office computers, we had to start sending out our Apple devices because they started gluing things down on their logic boards. Notably the glue they used was not heat-resistant and led to device damage should the heat sink system fail. But they did this because they wanted to dig more money out of their customers.
Apple software is also designed to fail. I cannot believe people are still buying new devices after the scandal where Apple was slowing their phones in order to force people to purchase new versions.
Apple hardware is designed to become obsolete. Motherboards and logic boards are designed to hold exactly what comes attached to them and will fail if upgrade attempts are made.
Apple refuses to work with software developers despite promises of cross-compatibility. One of the very first coding problems I discovered was to discover a gigantic hole in a software program that made a plotter (giant printer) compatible with iOS. This caused a memory leak, leading to necessary resets of the computer after every 2 feet of printing.
I know that it’s not possible for most of you to just throw your devices away and buy a new one. I wouldn’t be able to do that, either. But eventually there will come a time when you have to upgrade, and I encourage you to take the plunge and purchase a non-apple device. I don’t even have a recommendation for you because literally anything is better than Apple. A rock that you write on is better than an Apple phone.
Unfortunately I expect to be shadow-banned on Apple devices because of this, and I’ll try to report on decreased activity as much as I can.
It’s time to stop trying to beg Apple to change. They won’t. It’s time now to just stop supporting Apple.
I have a perfectly working iPhone 6. I got it because the iphone 7 no longer has a headphone jack and requires you to buy Apple’s shitty bluetooth headphones. Last month Apple decided they will not be updating the iphone 6 to the new iOS… for no real reason. They wil still release bug fixes but are not releasing version 13 for iphone 6.
ALL apps in the istore now require you to be on version 13 of the iOS to download the app. HOWEVER apps I’ve already installed and downloaded work perfectly.
There is literally no reason for this other to encourage consumerism and to put my perfectly working phone into a landfill.
I’m upgrading to Android as soon as I have the money.
I’ve already switched from mac to windows after Apple wanted to charge me $2000 for a macbook with only 100gigs of RAM. That’s less than a fucking PS3.
Apple Products are inherently awful, and there is literally no benefit to buying them whatsoever. Other than to look like a complete tool.
"Where has all the genuine self-expression gone? Now what used to be authentic subculture is turned into a performance of Aesthetic!" so many posts exclaim, usually concluding that the problem is Capitalism.
I don't disagree entirely, but. The problem is that y'all are so deathly fucking afraid of things Cringe, Weird, and Uncool that anything unmarketable, subversive, or oddball enough to be "genuine subculture" is gross and unacceptable to you.
People wish to see "genuine self expression" that is not a performance or a commodity.
Very well then. I assume you're appreciating and celebrating the dress, style and behavior of somewhat shabby, weird outcasts who firmly refuse to make themselves palatable to you?
I think some of you are forgetting what "subculture" means. If it makes everybody around you think you are cool and look nice, that's missing the point a little bit. That's just...culture!
When people express themselves in a way that is not a performance to appeal to others...
...it is actually very likely that they will...not appeal to you.
"Why can't people be unapologetically themselves, in a way that is of course never "cringy" or too weird or too ugly or uncool? Why can't we have self-expression without performance, in a way that is not boring to me and that doesn't weird me out?"
I see how people talk about non-binary youths with hair dyed in funny colors. But there is such a young person of indeterminate gender I see sometimes on my college campus with "Trans Liberation Now!" and a bunch of other symbols and slogans hand-painted on their jacket, and they are a million times more "Punk" than anyone with simply piercings and spiky chokers
I was thinking about the incredibly cruel phenomenon of taking photos of strangers without consent and uploading them to websites so others can mock them, in the vein of "People of Walmart" and other such things, and when looking it up, I was disturbed to see how many of them are just 1) a fat person is in public (wow!) or 2) a (perceived) man is being obviously gender non-conforming 
they are just existing. probably at a more advanced level than you.
"There is no escape. You can't be a vagabond and an artist and still be a solid citizen, a wholesome, upstanding man. You want to get drunk, so you have to accept the hangover. You say yes to the sunlight and pure fantasies, so you have to say yes to the filth and the nausea. Everything is within you, gold and mud, happiness and pain, the laughter of childhood and the apprehension of death. Say yes to everything, shirk nothing. Don't try to lie to yourself. You are not a solid citizen. You are not a Greek. You are not harmonious, or the master of yourself. You are a bird in the storm. Let it storm! Let it drive you! How much have you lied! A thousand times, even in your poems and books, you have played the harmonious man, the wise man, the happy, the enlightened man. In the same way, men attacking in war have played heroes, while their bowels twitched. My God, what a poor ape, what a fencer in the mirror man is- particularly the artist- particularly myself!"
