Retro Rambles About Things Nobody Else Cares About

They were us.

Like literally genetically they were US, just like. A while ago.

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Would you trust a TV caveman with a baby? Probably not

As long as homo sapiens have existed, we have had the same emotional and mental capacity as you and I do today. You nailed it. They were US. Even Neaderthals existed alongside and had offspring with Homo Sapiens for many thousands of years.

There's much evidence that cavemen would have had complex spoken language, culture (learned information passed down), symbolic interpretation, and I think they most certainly would have been able to handle holding a baby. In fact I have my suspicisions that an ancient homo sapiens mother may be a more present, attentive, and knowledgable mom than I could be today.

Do not let media trick you into believing we are the pinnacle of humanity. Unilinial evolution theory (google it quick I beg) is BUNK, GARBAGE, and the root of so much evil.

At the beginning of the next class, my teacher showed us a cave painting of a horse. And then he showed all of our horses, which he had scanned and put into the presentation.

He then pointed out all the ways that our horses looked similar to the prehistoric horse. Same features, drawn from the same angle, etc.

And then he asked us, "Isn't it cool that you draw horses the same way as someone who lived 20,000 years ago?"

Yeah. That stuck with me for a while.

Scientists are now pretty sure the scribbles were made by kids ages 3-6, more or less on their own. The adult cave artists were probably doing what any modern parent might do when they want to keep small children out of their hair for awhile: they gave the kids some drawing tools of their own and a small section of wall to work on, out of the way but still close enough to keep an eye on them, and let them have at it.

The team compared the ancient art with the developmental stages exhibited by modern children: the furiously scribbled circles and push-pull lines typical of 3-year-olds just learning to control their bodies, for example, or the wobbly, right-angled figures of slightly older kids beginning to master fine motor skills.

Both are apparent in the cave, superimposed on each other as though two or more kids were drawing at once. That’s a clue the Las Monedas marks were likely made by “siblings or a mixed-age play group within the sphere of safety around adults, but also within their own space,” says co-author Felix Riede, an Aarhus archaeologist.

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Apparently, from what I hear people say, in the new Tumblr update, if someone reblogs your post and adds a comment of their own, that reblog is counted as a new post and it belongs to the reblogger. Not you. You, as the OP, do not get the notifications if someone else later reblogs from the person who reblogged your post with their own comment. You can’t see what comments people leave on the reblogs of the post you originally made unless they reblogged directly from you.

If this is actually true, it will just open doors for harassment. And also it takes the credits away from the OPs. Tumblr’s etiquette has always been “reblog don’t repost”. So this new update, if true, contradicts the whole core values of Tumblr as a community.

Respectfully, we don’t want this @staff @support @tumblr @changes please listen to your users.

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I do like System of a Down

Sleep Token

Korn

Pink Floyd

you mean this pathetic creature?

so some nights you laid awake and cried and wished that magic and true love and fantastic adventures and portals to other worlds did happen so you could find a place where the kind of wrong and different that you ARE is exactly what they’ve been looking for, like you were somehow switched at birth and grew up in the wrong place, but finally for once you’d matter and belong and actually feel like you were special

but then over the years that followed you slowly learned to find a sense of peace and place and use, and while you still sometimes like to fantasize you don’t really cry about it anymore, until one day you’re talking with someone and you laugh and admit how badly you wished as a child that you could ride a dragon, and instead of saying something like “me too” they ask, “why didn’t you?”

And you think that it’s a joke but as you look around it dawns on you that everyone else got to have a superpower, or found a magic amulet, or a world inside their closet, and YOU were the wrong one, because YOU were told that things like that weren’t real, but now you’re all grown up and everyone else got to have their incredible childhood fantasy adventure with love and friendship and family and you didn’t, and now you’ve aged out of that genre, you’ve missed your window, there was a chance to sail away to somewhere incredible and you missed it because everyone told you that the boat wasn’t coming

And now you understand that everything you ever hoped and dreamed was right there all along, except that nobody was thinking about you, nobody loved you enough or wanted you around enough to notice that you weren’t there

And all of those sudden epiphanies and understandings and new realities and emotions pass through your mind in the fraction of a second, and the whole entire time you’re standing in line for a gas station bathroom and you have to act like you’re fine and normal and not about to puke 

*and sometimes you can pull it off and other times you kind of have to lock yourself in a dark closet and scream until it stops hurting

OKAY i'm fucking sick of people who can't read leaving these comments so here we go, we're gonna read Barthes together. hold my hand

Barthes' 1967 essay The Death of the Author (La mort de l'auteur) loosely takes the form of a literary history: he relates the changing attitudes of criticism towards the text and of literature towards criticism down to his day. He is interested in what writing is, and thus, what a book is: "a tissue of signs," which the critic claims to be able to interpret. But Barthes argues that once the necessity of connecting the author to the book is removed, the critic has no work to do: "Once the Author is gone, the claim to 'decipher' a text becomes quite useless." This is a rejection of both the supremacy of the critic and the intentions of the author.

When Barthes says "critic," he doesn't "anyone who has encountered the text," however. He differentiates the critic from the "reader":

the reader is the very space in which are inscribed, without any being lost, all the citations a writing consists of; the unity of a text is not in its origin, it is in its destination.

For Barthes, the reader's understanding of the text is supreme because it weaves together the "tissue of signs" into a coherent whole, producing a singular interpretation. He concludes by advocating for the overthrow of the critical establishment in favor of individual interpretation: "to restore to writing its future, we must reverse its myth: the birth of the reader must be ransomed by the death of the Author." In other words, in order for us to allow readers their own experiences, we must stop prioritizing the critic -- not the reader, but the critic -- and instead allow the reader to engage the text.

We're gonna un-Barthes Barthes now, okay? Stay with me. Here's the context:

Barthes was responding to a stifling and rigid environment in which criticism was the sole province of the academic expert. As part of the deconstructionist wave, he wanted to upend the traditional hierarchy that dictated how a text should be understood and what it was for, instead prioritizing language and reaction.

He got his wish. We live in a world of reaction.

Gone is the tyranny of the formal critic; gone even is the formal literary education of the reader. Our "tissue of signs" is no longer the text, but an infinite mirrored hall of reactions to reactions to reactions in which the text diminishes into a vanishing point, as the Author once did on Barthes' literary stage.

We do not need to resist the tyranny of the academy. The academy has been destroyed. Adjunctification, the widespread corporatization of universities, the resulting devaluation of college degrees, the devastation of humanities departments in widespread shutdowns, and now the revocation of billions of dollars of government funding have left the academy on its knees. Public trust in academic expertise has declined so sharply that people on this very hellsite will tell you that if someone has an advanced degree in a specific field, that actually makes them less trustworthy.

And in Ozymandias' place, we have the reader.

The reader consumes a variety of "content" and regurgitates its reactions in a variety of "posts." It transmutes text into more text which further readers wriggle eagerly through, refining what might have had meaning into a rarefied fertilizer of emotion and echo. What it leaves behind becomes the literary history for new strata of reactions, nostalgia, and imitation.

This is the audience: an ouroboros of interpretation, a rat king of readership. It has no end but itself. Ultimately, it needs no text to function. In this world, the truly radical act is to disentangle yourself from the other worms and rebuild the edifice of meaning. This may require you to do such tasks as "read the actual book," but because we no longer have the support -- however oppressive -- of literary criticism to inform our reading, we must also learn how to read, explore the historical context on our own, and recover both the facts and the symbols from which the text is woven.

That is what death of the audience means: not a rejection of the critic in favor of language, but a rejection of endless language and infinite readers in favor of fact, history, and skill.

It's a pun, by the way: "La mort de l'auteur," spoken aloud, recalls Le Morte d'Arthur, a 15th-century collection of Arthurian legend which marked the turn away from the Middle Ages and into a nostalgic Early Modern period which valorized them. The Author becomes the mythic King; as myth, he can be severed from fact and dismissed.

Fact has now itself become the myth.

And I remember people laughing at me, cause we’d be in like. Buildings and ruins that were THOUSANDS of years old, so of course here’s this uncultured little millennial idiot taking photos of CATS of all things.

But some of them actually asked me WHY, and to them, I’d explain:

Look. This place has been here thousands of years. People more skilled than me have taken photos and drawn pictures from every conceivable angle for generations, and if the place itself doesn't outlive me, then those have no hope either.

But this stray cat, napping on a statue? This kitten staying cool on the old box fan? They’re only here for a blink. They may not even be here in six months, never mind millennia.

And sure, I could take photos for ME, but holy sites feel wrong for me to snap selfies in in a way I don’t really know how to describe as an agnostic. Like cracking jokes at á funeral.

Structures don’t have feelings. They’re important, but nothing I do here has anything to do with ME.

But me and this cat? This wormy little stray that’ll probably give me ticks if I pet it bare-skinned? She and I are the same here. We’re both short-lived, and fleeting, and capable of both love and comfort. And we’re both just kind of HERE, through no choice of our own.

So I do that at every important historical place I go now. Because other people are doing plenty to preserve THAT, but me? This little guy? The grifters selling tickets and overpriced chachkis outside? We existed too. And what’s preserving us?

Who’s going to remember THEM?

And if I can remember them like this, if I can pass their memory on forwards, then maybe that act of remembrance will keep me going, too. Because once upon a time, a nameless, faceless person lost to history believed a worthless and common cat was worth treasuring, even in the shadow of humanity’s greatest feats.

And I hope that people will continue this, long into the future. I hope as long as the earth exists, people work to remember the little creatures.

Because more than art, or lineage, or history of rule, I want people of the future to know that compassion, love, and pure childish whimsy are our connecting constants.