#Learning during lockdown

[fereldanbroth]

this wil be the first time I get to actually experience a dragon age game reveal & release, so excited

[psymachine]

i feel like i never fully comprehended until now that the show claims both mac and dennis can play guitar in canon

[just-your-average-tangerine]

Why do people assume that kids can't be passionate about things?

Every time I see a video on instagram of a kid being passionate about something or good at something, the comments are full of people going "😢how sad, just let the kid be a kid😢"

Like, that kid is having the time of their life or is a fucking Oscar worthy actor.

Kids can have hobbies, kids can be good at things, and kids can care about things. And the fact that you don't think so tells me you don't know many kids.

And like, the conversation around kids on social media and the exploitation of kids on social media is a valid discussion to have, but it doesn't mean every kid with a passion is being forced into it.

[quatregats]

I was tagged by @petxina to do this picrew and talk about my interests and hobbies, perdona per haver trigat tant :')

As for hobbies and interests, I think anyone who follows this blog knows I have too many of those...I obviously really like languages, which is what I first got Tumblr to post about, basically anything from more technical linguistics to language learning to larger societal processes of language use! I love the IPA I love historical linguistics I love morphology I love discourse analysis I love anthropological linguistics etc etc. Aside from that, I also love music, I listen to it all the time and I love to sing (especially folk songs/group sings/singing with friends in a wholly amateur way), and I play piano and violin sometimes. I'm also into worldbuilding, I've had the brainworms for the last several years and love to invent weird worlds to dissociate from reality yay! And I love tiny stuff, I have a whole world of tiny animal figurines in my room that I've had since I was a kid and I'm hoping to build it into a tiny city someday. That's more than enough interests so we'll pause there, but I am incapable of being normal so know that there are many more things I could list alas :')

I'll tag @mycological-mariner @marazt @sailorpants @chiropteracupola @neonblixtar @hey-scully-itsme @zsofiarosebud and anyone else who wants to!

[venomgaia]

i also have been testing pngtuber+ vs veadotubemini and heres rhe fruit of a 49 layer model

[melancholyfleurs]

once my hair goes past my tits i genuinely feel so much more overstimulated especially in the summer. just took a shower and cut my hair and i feel so much better 🧘‍♀️.

[wittywallflower]

What’s the oldest post saved in your Drafts?

I saved @thebibliosphere ‘s bread recipe on this very day in 2019.

Five years later I never actually made that bread…

[finrays]

No, I can’t tell you who my ancestor from the Essex is; they’re pretty far out on one of the branches of my family tree from my line of direct descent (“distant uncle” seemed like the best way to describe it), but we still share a surname, and that’s more information than I want strangers on the internet to have.

[quinnhayden]

long time listener first time caller but I would love to hear how the trio handled COVID after living through the outcome of the last pandemic in the 20s.

The Spanish Flu hit hard in 1918 and 1919. It lingered a little bit in 1920, but my research says it wasn't much of an impact. So, Bucky was born in March 1917, Steve in July 1918, and Quinn in November 1920. (I did find out that there was a serious problem with pregnant women catching this Influenza variant and their children were born with a lot of health issues so who has a new headcanon that Sarah Rogers was a survivor of the flu!)

With that said, the trio's parents all remember. This was around the time that Quinn's pa, Benny, was just getting to Kentucky and he remembers the chaos. Gravediggers were getting sick and dying so fast that the military had to bury bodies. Cars and horse-drawn carts were just heaped with bodies. That's only in Kentucky. There's no imagining what New York was like during this time.

That said, you best believe that Quinn (a doctor) and Steve (a chronically ill man who lived during a time when people were hot for eugenics) were put under house arrest by Bucky because they wanted to have "words" with anti-vaxxers and anti-maskers.

[cloudsentapollo]

MAG 161 and MAG 162 are making me insane

[elytrafemme]

THERAPY ACHIEVED!

[trinitycove]

Back to cute/pretty posting ✨️💅

[justafoxhound]

Bf and I booked some time off and been living like retired people for a week and it's lovely. Idk how I will get back to work next week.

[mishkakagehishka]

The more technology progresses, the more i get to thinking we were too harsh on luddites

[no0dlru]

Just bought 37 makeup brushes for £7.07 (19p/brush) on ebay. Literally all the brushes I could need, for the price of a couple pints in a pub. So chuffed. Drugstore prices could never.

[secretmellowblog]

People who try to analyze what happened on Tumblr on November 5th, 2020, often really overstate how much it was actually “about” Supernatural. As someone who has never been in the supernatural fandom ever but dID join in on the hysterical destielposting—it was really more about the stress of the pandemic and the 2020 presidential election.

The two biggest Youtubers I’ve seen try to dissect “what happened that November 5th” in video essays both weren’t American—- and I think that explains why they both tried to explain the hysteria primarily via analyzing the Supernatural fandom/the original show, rather than through the lens of the election. And while those videos are cool, valid, informational, and make lots of really well-considered interesting points— I can tell you that me and almost all my mutuals had literally no knowledge or interest in the fact that “oh supernatural had made nods at the ship in the past but the creators were adamant that I wouldn’t be canon” or etc etc etc etc. the first time I learned about any of that context was way later, watching videos where people claimed that fandom history context (that I did not know anything about) was the actual reason for the hysteria.

But the reality is that people latched on to the Destiel stuff because it was a piece of big useless inane zero-stakes fandom news in a time when we were desperately waiting for serious high stakes election news. We were latching onto a “positive “ piece of inane stupid fandom news in a time of great stress, with all the desperation of a drowning man who latches onto whatever piece of wood will keep him afloat.

The core of the hysteria was that Americans (who make up a huge chunk of tumblr’s userbase) were currently glued to their laptops watching the live presidential election vote counts come in. These vote counts were taking an extended amount of time due to the pandemic causing high numbers of mail-in ballots, resulting in a constant state of Election Day Stress for multiple days straight.

This was also during the height of the Pandemic. People had predicted Trump’s presidency would be bad; no one had predicted it would be this apocalyptically bad. No one had predicted pandemics and lockdowns and hospitals overflowing with bodybags. remember Trump spreading Covid lies and conspiracies?? There were so many Qanon conspiracies about democrats being Satanic child traffickers who had to be put to death, and coup threats were mounting from the right wing side. It seemed like this election was a choice between ‘centrist democrat’ and “apocalyptic right wing conspiracy theory authoritarianism,” in the midst of pandemic conditions that people feared would never ever improve— and it seemed like a close election.

Another major point was that Trump voters were more likely to be antimaskers/Covid deniers, while Biden voters were more likely to take the pandemic seriously— so Biden voters were more likely to send in mail-in ballots instead of risking the in-person voting crowds, which meant their ballots would take much longer to count. And so, in many state electoral vote counts, it would initially seem like Trump was very far in the lead— only for Biden to slooooowly build up an agonizingly small lead as the mail in ballots came in, and then defeat Trump at the very end.

So you’re just watching these news sites giving live election updates, refreshing the page every 2 minutes to see if you’re going to live under a spineless centrist democrat or a literal Qanon Dictatorship. And then you go on tumblr to distract yourself, and there’s more election posting, and more agonizing over the votes, and more stress and despair—-

And then it’s been days and we’re right at the crucial tipping point where it’s anyone’s game and the next few hours will determine whether Trump will win, so you need to keep your eye on the vote count, because the next hours will determine the future of the pandemic and your country and your plans for your entire life—

And then stupid Destiel becomes canon! And it becomes canon in the silliest way possible!

If Destiel had become canon at any other time, it would have been a big goofy tumblr celebration? But we wouldn’t have gotten the insane explosion of hysterical interaction.

The entire core of it was the contrast between the inane meaningless stupidity of fandom news vs the actual stressful election news you wanted to hear! It really is best conveyed in that meme where Castiel says “I love you” and Dean indifferently responds with a piece of important election news.

It’s about the contrast between the low-stakes inanity of fandom and the massive life-destroying stakes of a terrifying election. There really was no reason it had be Supernatural specifically, except that Supernatural was a thing everyone knew basic things about from dashboard osmosis— it could’ve been any other equally huge silly fandom ship news about a ship everyone *knew of* but might not necessarily be invested in (ex. Stucky becoming canon, Johnlock becoming canon, Kirk/Spock becoming more canon somehow, etc etc etc.)

I think it’s true that people who weren’t paying agonizingly close attention to the American election news got swept up in it, and that non American Supernatural fans also were extremely excited for purely fandom reasons — but the entire reason it blew up to an unprecedented degree was because of that core of stressed out terrified Americans glued to their computers watching election results and suddenly receiving stupid fandom news instead, and deciding to just hysterically parodically hyper-celebrate this absurd useless zero-stakes news.

I think it was also all elevated by the fact that, as I said before, this happened at the crucial “tipping point” of the election where the next few hours would determine the winner. The fact that Biden began to slowly develop a lead in the hours after made it feel, hysterically, as if the hours after Destiel became canon was somehow the turning point where he began to win; so celebrating Destiel felt like celebrating that slow turn towards victory.

The tl,dr is that it’s so important to Remember the Fifth of November …..in preparation the inevitable hysteria that will happen in the presidential election on November 5th of next year. XD. Personally I’m rooting for Johnlock or Frodo/Sam to somehow become canon in the eleventh hour right before the democrats win