Misanthropic Humanitarian

Just curious about this one, I’m Canadian and I call it a Freezie!

But all it reminds me of is the stick on earrings that I used to have as a kid in the 90's.

This is wonderful research and scientific testing. Which, I guess you should expect from an actual scientist, but still.

I always grew up thinking the Pyrex glass was indestructible and you could heat it to the temperature of the sun and it would barely flinch. It's a shame they changed the formula without telling folks.

I was going to say Ann is a national treasure, but she's from Australia so I guess she is a global treasure.

There are at least 300 million unique visitors worldwide on this site. Over 500 million blogs.

Listen. Tumblr is $30 million in debt. This is Super easy for us to solve.

If each user gifts one blog crabs, which costs slightly over $3, that would be roughly $600 million at least. Far more than enough to get Tumblr out of the red zone.

If we want tumblr to stay afloat and not change something as integral about their operating system, we need to show them they can be profitable without reducing themselves to common social media sites. What we have here is special. It is different. We are the social media site people run to when theirs collapses and for good reason.

On July 29th, gift as many crabs as you can without breaking the bank. Post crab memes if you cannot afford a crab.

I’m not super fandom savvy, having only ever been active in one of them in any meaningful way, but I am familiar with the online culture surrounding shipping fictional characters together. Something I’ve personally witnessed is that the thinking around platonic v.s. romantic is extremely binary; a relationship can be one or the other, and a platonic relationship is the failing outcome if you, as an audience member, preferred the latter. This reflects much broader societal thinking, so it makes sense that most people approach shipping this way.

However, when you’re aspec (anywhere on the aromantic and/or asexual spectrums), this idea doesn’t necessarily apply. Suddenly, platonic and romantic are not opposing ideas, they’re just two potential options on a very, very wide sliding scale / multi-dimensional graph wherein the significance of a relationship is completely disconnected from its label.

A huge part of shipping culture (again, just from what I’ve witnessed) is that Explicit Confessions and/or an onscreen mouth kiss are necessary to make a ship canon, and that not happening means Your Ship Isn’t Canon And Therefore Isn’t Important or Valuable (and gets used as a way of invalidating other people’s ships). However, for a lot of aspec folks (and others, of course), romance is not automatically more valuable than friendship, and an end goal for a particular character dynamic becomes a lot less about fulfilling A, B, and C to verify the couple as “real” in the eyes of the mainstream or even the fandom as a whole, and instead is more about wanting to see characters happily in one another’s presence. Specifics vary wildly case to case, so I’m gonna leave that fairly broad.

Ultimately, I have found myself shipping characters in the usual way less and less as I’ve learned more about my own aspec identity and experience. I care less if characters kiss; I care less if characters declare three little words…though I also am very familiar with the history of queer erasure and definitely root for explicitly romantic queer rep. And all this doesn’t mean I don’t have couples I root for - I very much do. But whether their relationship is specifically romantic matters very little to me, with rare exceptions. (In fact, I often find myself “shipping” characters platonically - seeing a couple that would make great best friends being forced along standard, probably heterosexual romantic beats.) Mostly, I want the characters I ship to be around each other, to support each other, and to love each other in whatever capacity is fulfilling to their arcs and to the narrative.

Or, to put this all in a more digestible meme format:

Allos: If the couple doesn’t kiss then the ship isn’t canon

I guess I would say that when I am interested in the relationship between 2 characters what I am hoping for from canon is a demonstration through the text that this relationship is important and how each character demonstrates that importance/how far they'll go to maintain that relationship. But I also just want to see those small interactions too, how they enjoy each other's company, the in-jokes, the small acts of kindness or comfort, how well they know and understand each other.

Most of these are actually ballads, not true shanties, but still:

The Senate - Space Shanty

Kristoph Klover - Fire in the Sky

Duane Elms - Dawson’s Christian

Catherine Faber - Providence Skies

Julia Ecklar - Ballad of a Spaceman

Leslie Fish & Ann Prather - Hanrahan’s Bar

Julia Ecklar & Ann Prather - Pushin’ the Speed of Light

Leslie Fish - Ship of Stone

Leslie Fish - Guardians

Leslie Fish - Sam Jones

Vic Tyler - Space Hero

Vic Tyler & Duane Elms - Spacer’s Home

Some of my favorite songs include:

Matty Groves, now with electric violin, about a lute that controls the dead.

Pump Me Boys, now a shanty about keeping the life support systems running on a dying ship.

Gently Johnny, now about sirens in a neo-noir sci-fi city lulling people into complacency.

T chirped “sea shanties!” and then added “not that you can’t compose a new one, but it’s not in conversation with other songs that are being published at the same time, it’s only in conversation with other songs that have been written long before.” It’s important to know, in this conversation, that Tay grew up around Stan Rogers’ family and therefore knows damn well that you can write a song in the modern era that everyone assumes is a hoary old traditional: Rogers wrote “Barrett’s Privateers” in 1976 because he wanted to sing lead in a sea shanty and there weren’t any in existence that had a baritone singing lead.

No, seriously. And now there are lots and lots of people, less than fifty years later, who think that Barrett’s Privateers is a couple hundred years old and has Always Been Here.

So I started thinking about dead genres, and it occurs to me to ask: why is the sea shanty largely dead? Or rather, actually, why is the work song, which is the larger category of music that sea shanties are a subset of, largely dead? Why don’t we sing work songs anymore when we’re working? Stan Rogers wrote the “White Collar Holler,” of course, and the premise of that song is indeed the notion of making a work song for office work, but I can’t imagine anyone actually signing it at the office as they go about their work. For one thing, I code quite a bit at my day job, and the speed at which I code doesn’t depend at all on what the people around me are doing; indeed, trying to match my speed to theirs would probably make us all less efficient.

Tay’s theory is that industrialization killed the work song in the West (they pointed out to me very explicitly that the idea isn’t actually dead world-wide), especially as work became more cognitive for many people and less reliant on keeping time with the people you’re working alongside. After all, work songs are most popular when the most efficient way to work is to keep pace with everyone at the same time, so you’re neither too fast nor too slow, and you’re all working at parts of the same tasks that rely on other people’s tasks to keep going without building up too much of a deadlock at any one part of the process. So much of work for so many people today is more like piecework than making things on an assembly line, and like piecework, it’s so much easier for our employers to encourage us to take the work home and keep making as many pieces as we can before we fall over and collapse… or else it’s service work, and you can’t be singing at service work, you won’t be free to quickly respond to clients and adjust your tasks to their needs.

I suspect that’s not entirely it, though, because assembly line manufacturing work isn’t actually dead in the West, not even close, and the work song is still gone from our halls. Tay pointed out that OSHA and hearing protection make it more difficult in many of those jobs to be connected to other workers and keep time on the song, and I think there’s definitely an element of truth to that, too.

But I think the death of the work songs go even deeper than that. See, work songs didn’t completely vanish as work became less dependent on keeping time together. They just turned into songs about the condition of working, and from there they turned into songs about unionization, workers’ rights songs, like the ones the Wobblies used to great effect in the 20s. And that happened in response to managers and bosses who see singing and talking and responded by trying to control workers and make that shit stop. Some of that is about controlling unionization but some of it is about control, full stop: pretending to oneself that workers only really exist while you pay them as cogs that produce labor, and anything else they do is a distraction from the labor you pay for.

Why is it that we don’t have modern work songs for Amazon workers? There are enough of them, after all, their very boring and physically demanding jobs depend on keeping time together, and everyone’s working together in a relatively quiet environment. I’ll tell you: it’s because Amazon views interactions among its workers as a threat and bans workers from talking to one another or listening to music while they execute their shifts.

We lost the work song, I think, because we gained bosses that see the work song as a threat instead of an intrinsic part of keeping the work force from getting bored and stale and tired and making mistakes. In a real way, killing the work song is a decision you make if you don’t understand the value of the work song to the workers themselves: it makes the work less boring, so you stall out less, and it reminds you you’re all doing this together, and it keeps you all in time. The action of singing is valuable. But if you’ve never sung while you worked collectively on a project, you might not know that, and if you think in terms of zero-sum losses, the song becomes a waste of good breath you’re paying for at best and a threat of insurrection at worst.

a) didn’t reblog this for it’s own merits because music recs and very very good commentary

b) I definitely really wonder if the work song could be perceived as a threat also because they promote the sense of comraderie and closeness that union busting corps actively discourage (along with the genetics they share with working condition protest songs described above). (Though I also wonder if some of the die-out here is related to how comparatively devoid of public, casual singing/music north american culture is, outside of specific subcultures of course… like singing/music is treated a lot as something that professionals or studied amateurs do, and otherwise it’s relegated to the privacy of your own home or very specific venues such as karaoke)

and b) also add the Longest John’s cover of We All Lift Together (thank you @dungeonmastersconsortium for introducing me to it) because it’s VERY VERY GOOD (and I may have listened to it on repeat more than a few times over the last while):