#reinforcing

[postcard-from-the-past]

Coal miners reinforcing the walls, Artois region of France

French vintage postcard, mailed to Paris

[lessmouse]

day 17 / apocalypse never

[hinamie]

spins him around trying to understand the pink mop he calls hair

[blueboyluca]

“When I first heard it, from a dog trainer who knew her behavioral science, it was a stunning moment. I remember where I was standing, what block of Brooklyn’s streets. It was like holding a piece of polished obsidian in the hand, feeling its weight and irreducibility. And its fathomless blackness. Punishment is reinforcing to the punisher. Of course. It fit the science, and it also fit the hidden memories stored in a deeply buried, rusty lockbox inside me. The people who walked down the street arbitrarily compressing their dogs’ tracheas, to which the poor beasts could only submit in uncomprehending misery; the parents who slapped their crying toddlers for the crime of being tired or hungry: These were not aberrantly malevolent villains. They were not doing what they did because they thought it was right, or even because it worked very well. They were simply caught in the same feedback loop in which all behavior is made. Their spasms of delivering small torments relieved their frustration and gave the impression of momentum toward a solution. Most potently, it immediately stopped the behavior. No matter that the effect probably won’t last: the reinforcer—the silence or the cessation of the annoyance—was exquisitely timed. Now. Boy does that feel good.”

— Melissa Holbrook Pierson, The Secret History of Kindness (2015)

[pangur-and-grim]

I entered a poetry contest and made the long list!

[chloesimaginationthings]

FNAF Abby and Gregory discover Michael is an artist too

[soup-mother]

why stop at just hating pop psychology?

[sansculottides]

pisses me off to no end when people on reddit or whatever complain that the show wouldve been better off without the tuunbaq.....did we watch the same show? the tuunbaq is everything, it held everything together. the tuunbaq is the main transformative element of the terror. the tuunbaq elevates the text beyond mere historical fact and lets it say something about the expedition's broader context of imperialism. it hunted the british men who were trampling on its home as a mere stopover, a side casualty, to finding the northwest passage (for, you know, "trade with china" after britain beat china into submission after the imperialist opium war). silna couldnt complete a proper ritual with it because of the british men - just as british colonizers have historically intruded and disrupted the practice of indigenous culture. and in the end the tuunbaq dies, after all the injuries it's taken from the british over the course of 10 episodes and finally chokes to death on the worst of them. because there's no escaping the reality of colonial history, and there is especially no fantastical escape for the colonizer. there's no proper way for us to move forward otherwise.

good historical fiction doesnt have to limit itself to accuracy - it needs empathy to draw out meanings in history using literary craft. thats what the tuunbaq means to me.... if you wanted a straight depiction of historical record, just go watch a documentary.. TUUNBAQ DENIERS DNI

[ceaselessims]

thinking about how elias admits to martin that he's been trying to figure out a way to shatter martin's "precious image" of jon but hadn't found how yet so he has to go with the weaker option of bringing up martin's mommy issues (which fails)

martin truly too gay for the narrative he's fucking up everyone's plans

[oh-dear-so-queer]

In fact, ideas about human and animal homosexuality tend to be mutually reinforcing.

"Biological Exuberance: Animal Homosexuality and Natural Diversity" - Bruce Bagemihl

[xxplastic-cubexx]

personal happiness or what the fuck ever

bonus:

[i-gwarth]

btw we do *get* that the worldbuilding of DE parallels the character's arc right? We understand that, right? That Our Guy commits all but a sliver of himself to the oblivion of amnesia in a moment where the only alternative he could see was suicide. And at the other end of that tragic attempt at self-annihilation he gets the chance to reinvent himself and overcome the longstanding, persistent habits that brought him to the cliff's edge to begin with. And that the world itself is presented as approaching an equally definitive precipice, with one of the richest characters in the cast even remarking that Capital is dead, and everything else being 20-odd years away from being swallowed by the pale

And we understand that the pale is forgetting, right? Right? It's informational entropy applied to the world, facts and events and places and memories being destructured and obliderated, reduced to an indistinct soup of whispers, past present and future. That it emerges from humanity's collective inability to imagine a future beyond moralist capitalism, and that this inability to see the horizon inevitably metastazises into Mesque's accelerationist nihilism that ultimately destroys the world. [starts shaking you] WE UNDERSTAND THAT RIGHT??

That the game's splash screen is a view from the bay of Revachol, from the deserter's island. And we know what it shows, right? Revachol, in the distance. And beyond that what? A horizon? No! It shows Pale. Because that's his perspective. Because he has abandoned all hope, lost all sight of the future and has committed to self-annihilation. For him the entroponetic collapse is imminent. We see that, don't we?

That the game is a thesis on hope. That the world has the chance to reinvent itself from the precipice of oblivion just like Harry does, and that the only thing that can do that is imagining the future. A future. Any future, and making it. Piece by piece, day by day, committing to it, and refusing to give in to despair and nihilism. We understand, don't we, that there must be no truce with the f-

you know what, nevermind...

[heynhay]

playing dirty

[harrypotterfuryroad]

a horde of teens-early 20s women saying “it wasn’t assault, he was just an irresponsible dom” is what grooming actually looks like btw

[slyandthefamilybook]

I think if there's one thing to take away from Kanye's latest... confession... it's just how central antisemitism is to Naziism

like

Kanye is a Black man. Given the opportunity, white Nazis would shoot him with the same bullets they aim at Jews. He is not in good company. But he's willing to align himself with people who hate him because he just hates Jews that goddamn much