#Articles that I read tag

[throesofincreasingwonder]

"A story doesn't need a theme in order to be good" I'm only saying this once but a theme isn't some secret coded message an author weaves into a piece so that your English teacher can talk about Death or Family. A theme is a summary of an idea in the work. If the story is "Susan went grocery shopping and saw a weird bird" then it might have themes like 'birds don't belong in grocery stores' or 'nature is interesting and worth paying attention to' or 'small things can be worth hearing about.' Those could be the themes of the work. It doesn't matter if the author intended them or not, because reading is collaborative and the text gets its meaning from the reader (this is what "death of the author" means).

Every work has themes in it, and not just the ones your teachers made you read in high school. Stories that are bad or clearly not intended to have deep messages still have themes. It is inherent in being a story. All stories have themes, even if those themes are shallow, because stories are sentences connected together for the purpose of expressing ideas, and ideas are all that themes are.

[salad-juice-enjoyer]

https://www.palestinechronicle.com/un-to-hold-emergency-session-after-egypt-mauritania-invoke-resolution-377/

BREAKING: egypt and mauritania have invoked UN resolution 377 - calling for an emergency meeting to demand a ceasefire after US vetoed. we will not be bullied into silence! meeting is tuesday Dec 12 at 3:30pm at UN headquarters in NY

[why-the-heck-not]

me, a responsible being, working on the coding project as I should vs. me, a dysfunctional shithead, getting distracted by reading about brains (once aGAIN damnit (it's my favorite "I need to study my field but bc I should do that it's an impossible unthinkable feat now, so I'm reading about something else to fool my brain I'm still being productive"-topic))

[cockyhorror]

[nonbinary-vents]

This has been an absolutely horrible couple weeks for the Jewish and Israeli community, so I want to throw in at least a tiny bit of hope in here. Amina Hassouna, the Bedouin girl who was severely hurt in Iran’s missile attacks, has been recovering well and seems to be in good condition! She is described as being ‘fully conscious’ and ‘communicating and smiling’. Two bomb shelters have been placed in Al-Fura, the town that she and her family are from, as well.

[ink-the-artist]

Paleolithic humans

Been meaning to make art of early humans for a while and these in particular were greatly inspired by this article:

[dnf171]

nico hischier, family & home

the athletic / guess how much I love you - sam mcbratney / the ny times / the players tribune / the hockey news / giovanni’s room - james baldwin / markerzone / regrets - hether / electra - euripides

[tiny-huts]

"I missed eating beef wellingtons so I went to go eat ground beef out of the dumpster"

[ohgollythatsuh]

My fellow fandom frequenters!!!!!!

This feels kind of weird to do because I literally use this blog to talk about gay people and reblog pretty fan art but ya gotta do what ya gotta do:

I am a student journalist and I'm writing an article for class about the way that fandom spaces have changed over the years (especially over the pandemic) and the effects of the popularization of fandoms. I'm looking for people who are willing to talk about their experiences in fandoms, the communities and relationships that they've built, how they feel about the shift in fandom culture (or if they've even noticed a shift), etc!

Some things to note: this is not going anywhere besides to my professor (unless all participants actively want me to share it on Tumblr or something, in case anyone is interested in reading it -- it's really up to everyone's comfortability levels). The mode of interview is, once again, up to comfortability: we can do zoom calls, conversations over DMs, in-person meetups (this is obviously going to depend on where we live) -- once again, this is up to your comfortability!!!

My DMS are open and I would reallllyyy really appreciate any and all participants! Your voices are CENTRAL to this story because fandom is based solely off of the real conversations between community members!!! I'm really passionate about fandoms because it's been like. My whole life since childhood. So I'm really dedicated to making a beautifully authentic story out of this!!

Feel free to DM with any questions :) Or if you know someone who'd be interested, or have some suggestions on things you'd like me to write about or have any leads that I could research, look at, etc. -- just dm or even comment or reblog this and put it in the tags!!!

Reblogs are appreciated! I'll be tagging some popular fandoms in order to get some more traction

Edit: so many people dm’d thank you guys for helping a poor undergrad get a good mark on their paper :’) sorry if it takes a second for me to respond to your dm I’ll get to you I promise!! My dms are still open so if someone is reading this, you can still participate!

[doverstar]

was today years old when discovering that the eleventh doctor wears leather trousers. his trousers are made of black leather. Black leather with the ends rolled up and I. have no idea what to think-

[sickfreaksirkay]

Sir Kay, Seneschal of King Arthur's Court, Harold J. Herman / Illustration from the Mabinogion / The Quest for Olwen, trans. Gwyn Thomas and Kevin Crossley-Holland / The Story of Merlin, trans. Rupert T. Pickens / Illustration from The Quest for Olwen, Margaret Jones / Wace's Roman de Brut, trans. Eugene Mason / The Mabinogion, trans. Lady Charlotte Guest

a collection of sir kay and sir bedivere: companions/lovers/worse, for @queer-ragnelle's may day parade

[shalom-iamcominghome]

I'm kind of obsessed with the wikivoyage page for israel like... just read it

[reasonsforhope]

Btw, if anyone cares to know, my position on Biden and the 2024 election is this:

Starting September* 1, 2024, I will be doing whatever I can to make sure that Trump does not get a second term as president

Until that day, I'm going to be doing whatever I can to push for an end to the genocide in Gaza and an immediate ceasefire, and that includes criticizing, protesting, and lambasting Biden for funding and providing weapons for Israel's genocide

ETA: I will still be posting about significant good things the Biden administration has done, though, because some of it is a really big deal that people deserve to know about

ETA: But I will not be defending Biden from any criticism around Palestine/Israel/war crimes

*This originally said October 1st but someone pointed out to me that there are a few states where early voting starts in late September, including a couple swing states, so I changed it because that's a very good point

I don't plan to tell anyone not to vote for Biden in the meantime, myself, because shitty two party system and I'm really serious about Trump not getting reelected

But I'm also not going to do anything to discourage people who are seriously rallying against Biden, because he is, you know, literally bypassing Congress to make sure he can fund crimes against humanity

I never want to diminish that reality.

And more than that: If we want genocide to actually be a dealbreaker for politicians and presidents... then we need to start acting like it could be.

--

Details/related thoughts:

I will still be posting about good things Biden and his administration are doing, because they are the ones running the US government and Congress is super deadlocked, so a lot of the national-level good news in the US has been done by his administration, and I'm not going to stop posting about that good news

Shout-out to the anon who accused me of being a US government propagandist with a whole PR team bc I posted about Biden a few days in a row. I promise you I'm blogging from my bed in my pjs and do not have a PR team lol

Also, for people who don't think we should be spreading serious criticism about Biden, for fear of Trump winning in 2024: I hear you--that's an incredibly valid fear. I've struggled with that myself, in the process of coming to this(/these) decision(s). But consider this: it's better that we really pile on the criticism and pressure now, because a) people are dying, and b) Biden's chances will be much worse if Israel is still bombing/decimating Gaza on election day

Relatedly, for anyone who's tempted to think Trump would be better when it comes to the Gaza genocide, again, it's really understandable to want to put your hope in any viable alternative. However, I promise you that is not going to happen. Joe Biden at least conditionally gives a couple shits about human life. Trump doesn't. Remember Trump's Muslim ban? In all likelihood, Trump would just tell Israel to bomb Gaza harder and ban Palestinian refugees from entering the US

Last thing on Trump: maybe this is naive of me, but for a lot of reasons, I'm not actually particularly worried about Trump winning in 2024. If I was, I might have made some different calls here. I have a few asks about this in my inbox and will probably make a post at some point about the reasons why, but yeah, Democrats have mostly been wanting to run against Trump instead of DeSantis or Haley or whoever for some very real reasons

You're welcome to disagree with me/this post in any direction, btw

Seriously, I'm just a random person who doesn't speak for anyone besides myself and my own blog. I'm not saying these are categorically the right answers, or that any of this is what everyone should be doing. This is simply the system I have settled on (right now) for how I personally want to handle all of this

You're welcome to disagree with me but please don't send me any angry asks about any of it. Not that I in any way get a lot of those, thankfully! But yeah, this isn't something I'm interested in debating, this is mostly for notification/explanation purposes

[not-the-coffee-machine4]

Me: *tries to see what the Queen fans on TikTok have to say*

*Jim hate*

*”facts” that may or not be actually true*

*”Freddie Mercury was bisexual-“*

*Using Barbara Valentin as evidence*

*thinking things that happened in the movie actually happened irl*

*general misinformation about everyone and everything*

Me: aaaaand back to Tumblr I go

(open tags at your own risk, there’s a whole essay in there)