I really need to do more studying and write an essay on how Americanism is a genuine folk religion which reveres capital and the vague concept of “the free market” as a god of providence to be pleased in order to lead a prosperous life, also that the founding fathers are prophetic, perhaps even messianic figures who basically gave birth to this god through the revolutionary war, and that the vast majority of conservative Christians in America revere capital more than the god they claim to serve in an ironic sort of golden calf situation.
There is a trend amongst depictions of the founding fathers to show them as literal christ figures, a trend that started very early in the nation’s life.
I’d also like to point out Washington & Lincoln Apotheosis, artist unknown, about 1865, the same year as lincoln’s assasination
The personification of America in the form of Columbia, a goddess of both the land and the concepts that America tends to inhabit. A pre-anime Hetalia. She was often used in depictions of Manifest Destiny, a religions ideal that stated that America, by God’s will, must go from coast to coast.
American Progress by, John Gast, 1872. Note the indigenous people cast in literal darkness, away from the light. The religions deification of America relies upon colonialism and white supremacy
Like, there are actual studies on this stuff. Look up “American civil religion” if you’re struggling for search terms. Or “American founder worship.”
Massive fuck you to everyone who is talking about Palestinians as if we’re already all dead and sharing more solidarity with our corpses than us living. “We will never forget the beautiful Palestinian people-“ how about you stop “making peace” with Palestinian extermination. My people are not going to be forgotten because we are going to live. Palestinians have already survived one genocide and have been surviving one ever since.
Do not ever let the idea that all Palestinians are going to die exist in your mind. Mourn the dead, fight like hell for the living.
Check out “Barry Lyndon”, a film whose period interiors were famously shot by period lamp-and-candle lighting (director Stanley Kubrick had to source special lenses with which to do it).
More recently, some scenes in “Wolf Hall” were also shot with period live-flame lighting
and IIRC until they got used to it, actors had to be careful how they moved across the sets. However, it’s very atmospheric: there’s one scene where Cromwell is sitting by the fire, brooding about his association with Henry VIII while the candles in the room are put out around him. The effect is more than just visual.
As someone (I think it was Terry Pratchett) once said: “You always need enough light to see how dark it is.”
A demonstration of getting that out of balance happened in later seasons of “Game of Thrones”, most infamously in the complaint-heavy “Battle of Winterfell” episode, whose cinematographer claimed the poor visibility was because “a lot of people don’t know how to tune their TVs properly”.
So it was nothing to do with him at all, oh dear me no. Wottapillock. Needing to retune a TV to watch one programme but not others shows where the fault lies, and it’s not in the TV.
*****
We live in rural West Wicklow, Ireland, and it’s 80% certain that when we have a storm,
a branch or even an entire tree will fall onto a power line and our lights will go out.
Usually the engineers have things fixed in an hour or two, but that can be a long dark time in the evenings or nights of October through February, so we always know where the candles and matches are and the oil lamp is always full.
We also know from experience how much reading can be done by candle-light, and it’s more than you’d think, once there’s a candle right behind you with its light falling on the pages.
You get more light than you’d expect from both candles and lamps, because for one thing, eyes adapt to dim light. @dduane says she can sometimes hear my irises dilating. Yeah, sure…
For another thing lamps can have accessories. Here’s an example: reflectors to direct light out from the wall into the room. I’ve tried this with a shiny foil pie-dish behind our own Very Modern Swedish Design oil lamp, and it works.
Smooth or parabolic reflectors concentrate their light (for a given value of concentrate, which is a pretty low value at that) while flatter fluted ones like these scatter the light over a wider area, though it’s less bright as a result:
This candle-holder has both a reflector and a magnifying lens, almost certainly to illuminate close or even medical work of some sort rather than light a room.
And then there’s this, which a lot of people saw and didn’t recognise, because it’s often described in tones of librarian horror as a beverage in the rare documents collection.
There IS a beverage, that’s in the beaker, but the spherical bottle is a light magnifier, and Gandalf would arrange a candle behind it for close study.
Here’s one being used - with a lightbulb - by a woodblock carver.
And here’s the effect it produces.
Here’s a four-sphere version used with a candle (all the fittings can be screwed up and down to get the candle and magnifiers properly lined up) and another one in use by a lacemaker.
Finally, here’s something I tried last night in our own kitchen, using a water-filled decanter. It’s not perfectly spherical so didn’t create the full effect, but it certainly impressed me, especially since I’d locked the camera so its automatic settings didn’t change to match light levels.
This is the effect with candles placed “normally”.
But when one candle is behind the sphere, this happens.
It also threw a long teardrop of concentrated light across the worktop; the photos of the woodcarver show that much better.
Poor-people lighting involved things like rushlights or tallow dips. They were awkward things, because they didn’t last long, needed constant adjustment, didn’t give much light and were smelly. But they were cheap, and that’s what mattered most.
They’re often mentioned in historical and fantasy fiction but seldom explained: a rushlight is a length of spongy pith from inside a rush plant, dried then dipped in tallow (or lard, or mutton-fat), hence both its names.
I think Tumblr in general would appreciate the newest back-of-bus advertising campaign in Wellington, Aotearoa New Zealand
In 1980, the Wellington City Council Transport Committee refused to allow The Lesbian Centre to advertise the group’s contact details on local buses. When lesbian communities protested this decision with slogans such as “it’s our city too” and “lesbians are everywhere”, Wellington mayor Michael Fowler would not budge, stating it would “encourage deviations from the norm”.
Neneh Browne and Shannon Novak worked with Wellington City Council to acknowledge this history and highlight how far Wellington has come by sending a bus around the city displaying the slogan “lesbians are everywhere”.
(image of a printed poem in red text, all caps, with kiss marks from bright pink and brick red lipstick)
Text ID:
Blessed are the sissies Blessed are the boi dykes Blessed are the people of color my beloved kith and kin Blessed are the trans Blessed are the high femmes Blessed are the sex workers Blessed are the authentic Blessed are the dis-identifiers Blessed are the gender illusionists Blessed are the non-normative Blesses are the genderqueers Blessed are the kinksters Blessed are the disabled Blessed are the hot fat girls Blessed are the weirdo-queers Blessed is the spectrum Blessed is consent Blessed is respect Blessed are the beloved who I didn’t describe, I couldn’t describe, will learn to describe and respect and love Amen
-Mark Aguhar, “Litanies to my heavenly brown body”
I feel like in the rush of “throw out etiquette who cares what fork you use or who gets introduced first” we actually lost a lot of social scripts that the younger generations are floundering without.
A lot of tough situations where we now feel like we “don’t know what to do or say” had social scripts just a couple of generations ago and they might have been canned phrases or robotic actions but they could still be meant sincerely and unfortunately we haven’t replaced them with any more sincere or easier new script.
a lot of people are giving examples in the notes of things they just find annoying like not using headphones in public, but OP is talking about actual literal scripts of things to say in awkward situations
if you have a date or two with someone and you don’t see a relationship developing? most millennials / gen Zers just end up ghosting. but a social script that might have been taught and rehearsed in the past could be:
“I really appreciated getting dinner with you the other night and I enjoyed your company, but I’m afraid I didn’t feel a spark. I wish you the best, and hope you find that special someone!”
like it sounds kind of trite but it was at least something to say and it can still be meant with kind sincerity. it also communicates in 2 sentences that you don’t want to see them romantically again, but there aren’t any hard feelings about that. that’s it!!! that’s all it takes!!!
Another example is that at parties a lot of people talk about how awkward it is to mingle or talk to people they dont know. But at old timey parties that was traditionally the HOST’S job, and there was a specific scripted way of doing it that eased the process! The host would bring you in, introduce you and maybe even a little bit about you like what you did for a living, and then guide you to a group you could talk to. They didn’t just let you in the door and then ditch you to fend for yourself in a sea of strangers. That would be unthinkable and no one would be surprised if a get-together like that wound up being awkward.
A really good host would actually provide a topic of conversation based on things you and the person they were introducing you to had in common.
At networking events I’ve gone to, where there’s no host who knows everybody, good networkers pick up the slack. They go around the room once making just enough small talk to learn some useful info about a good portion of of the people in the room, and then circle back around and go, “Oh hey I was just talking to X over there and he’s looking for someone who does Y for his next project; you should go talk to him.” You can do something similar at parties, referring people to other people you made smalltalk with you have the same hobbies or like the same kind of movies.
To take a few steps back up the thread to the part about turning down future dates, the same goes for turning down shitty job offers.
“[Thank you for your interest]/[Thank you for thinking of me for this role], however I’m afraid [I have prior commitments]/[I’m not a good fit] at this time. I wish you the best of luck [finding the right fit for your company]/[with your startup endeavor]”
Delete or substitute more relevant lines as appropriate, but it’s a polite way of saying “no” without feeling like you need to overexplain.
Increasingly, people – millennials and younger, rarely anyone older – will not get the hint about this and get pushy, fishing for extra information to let them work around the Polite No, which in previous generations would have been incredibly rude. It’s still incredibly rude, at which point the polite response is, “Thank you, but I gave you my final answer. Best of luck!” no matter how many times they come back. Become a broken record until they go away.
More depressingly, but no less usefully, we used to have common scripts for things like grief and mourning: what to say when it feels like there is nothing that could possibly be said.
Like– just because it’s a script doesn’t mean it isn’t sincere. And it’s often a damn sight better than saying nothing at all.
For the grief and mouring, I generally offer my condolences. That is literally saying that you are expressing empathy with someone who is going through it without saying “I’m sorry that such and thing happened.”
I know when my grandma died, when I kept being told “I’m sorry she’s gone,” after a bit my thought was “you didn’t freaking killer her. Cancer did. Stop saying you’re sorry!” I never said it, but damn did I think it. So now, it’s aww that’s the worst, sucks, stincks etc., my condolences you’re going through it
“My condolences” is best. When my mom died I literally developed the habit of saying “please don’t say you’re sorry, if I hear it again I’ll scream” every time I had to tell someone she was gone. Out of pain/in a better place are also to be avoided at all costs.
Incidentally, if you’re talking to a Jewish person, the correct thing to say is “may his/her/their memory be for a blessing.” If you’re confident in your ability to pronounce Hebrew you can also use “baruch dayan emet” (blessed is the true judge) upon first hearing of a death.
I swore to the Gods I'd never get one of these. GDI.
In other news, I'm Morag. Writer, roleplayer, crisis management advisor, and that disabled friend that you guys have. Fucking around on the tumblrnets because I have no life, and apparently as a public service. Hi, everyone who has me bookmarked! <3
