Twitter users are defending their right to assume Picasso was a renaissance artist. Tiktok users think watching any film made outside the US makes you a snob. “Replace classic lit with YA and fan fiction” discourse is flourishing. I think we’re just living in anti intellectual times.
it’s not anti-intellectualism it’s anti-snobbery
Let me ask you this: how many “snobs” have you actually met? Because I have met many people who take interest in art history, watch vintage film or films from films from outside the US (which by the way are not all “arthouse” films), or read and cherish historically and culturally significant literature. But I have never met anyone who will treat me like I’m a bad person for watching Mama Mia or just wanting to be entertained once in a while. I have, however, met people who think art history is stupid and pointless and that those who study it deserve to live in poverty, who are xenophobic and dismissive toward any art made outside the US (or western Europe for that matter), or roll their eyes at people who read literature they consider boring because they’ve never given it a try. In fact, most of the people I know who you would consider “snobs” out of projected insecurity are cautious to bring up their interests because they think they’ll be made fun of. Is anti intellectualism “anti elitist?” At times, but it’s the sort of pseudo populism that fits comfortably within contemporary right wing discourse. Have you paid any attention to politics the last decade or so? If you are allergic to culture and new information, fine. Just don’t claim the moral high ground for it.
you could have just asked for her wig instead of snatching it like that
(blinking) …No notes.
A favourite quote from Isaac Asimov (who wrote decidedly “unsnobby” science fiction) fits well here:
“There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there always has been. Anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that ’my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge’.” (circa 1980)
Just a reminder that on the web version of Tumblr you can turn off infinite scrolling in your dashboard settings.
And you should.
(also turn off “Best Stuff First” if you’re sensible)
Inifinite scroll uses the same idea as gambling- variable reward. You’re on the hunt for the perfect post that gives you that dopamine hit but the idea that that perfect post might be the next one keeps you scrolling to infinity
Tiktok does this EXTREMELY well which is why I had to uninstall it. It’s so easy to get caught in that feedback loop ESPECIALLY with an algorithm involved
Seeing more and more blogs without a [username].tumblr.com site which means you can only view their blogs in tumblr.com/[username] mode, and I realized just the other day that nowadays you have to manually go to your blog settings and toggle the “enable custom theme” switch to have a browser site activated.
I REALLY recommend activating this! Especially if you’re an artist or if you have a themed blog, like if you reblog fanart for a specific fandom or ship. First and foremostly you can change the whole theme if you want to, you can really just go wild with building your personal aesthetic for your page.
But what I think is even more important, is that you NEED to “enable custom theme” to enable access to your archive! The link [username].tumblr.com/archive doesn’t work if you don’t have this enabled!
If you post art or archive fanart or fandom content of any kind, letting people access your archive makes it so much easier for people (and yourself) to find older art on your blog or to look for something you drew a while ago that they remember loving and want to look at again.
We talk lots about how on Tumblr old art gets to circulate, and the archive is part of how that works. It’s a really useful tool in finding good content that isn’t brand new. And especially if you are good at tagging, it’s very easy to filter the archive to find ship content or meta or fics, whatever you want to find.
what. why? someone pls explain to me pls i wasnt born yet in 1999 why turn computer off before midnight? what happen if u dont?
y2k lol everyone was like “the supervirus is gonna take over the world and ruin everything and end the world!!!”
This is the oldest I’ve ever felt. Right now.
WHAT THE FUCK DO YOU MEAN YOU WEREN’T BORN YET IN 1999.
Ahh the Millenium bug.
It wasn’t a virus, it was an issue with how some old computers at the time were programmed to deal with dates. Basically some computers with older operating systems didn’t have anything in place to deal with the year reaching 99 and looping around to 00. It was believed that this inability to sync with the correct date would cause issues, and even crash entire systems the moment the date changed.
People flipped out about it, convinced that the date discrepancy between netwoked systems would bring down computers everywhere and shut down the internet and so all systems relying on computers, including plane navigation etc. would go down causing worldwide chaos. It was genuinely believed that people should all switch off computers to avoid this. One or two smart people spoke up and said “um hey, this actually will only effect a few very outdated computers and they’ll just display the wrong date, so it probably won’t be harmful” but were largely ignored because people selling books about the end of the world were talking louder.
In the end, absolutely nothing happened.
Oh gosh.
I’ve been a programmer working for various government agencies since the early 1990s and I can say with some confidence:
NOTHING HAPPENED BECAUSE WE WORKED VERY HARD FIXING SHIT THAT MOST DEFINITELY WOULD HAVE BROKEN ON 1-JAN-2000.
One example I personally worked on: vaccination databases.
My contract was with the CDC to coordinate immunization registries — you know, kids’ vaccine histories. What they got, when they got it, and (most importantly) which vaccines they were due to get next and when. These were state-wide registries, containing millions of records each.
Most of these systems were designed in the 1970s and 1980s, and stored the child’s DOB year as only two digits. This means that — had we not fixed it — just about every child in all the databases I worked on would have SUDDENLY AGED OUT OF THE PROGRAM 1-JAN-2000.
In other words: these kids would suddenly be “too old” to receive critical vaccines.
Okay, so that’s not a nuke plant exploding or airplanes dropping from the sky. In fact, nothing obvious would have occurred come Jan 1st.
BUT
Without the software advising doctors when to give vaccinations, an entire generation’s immunity to things like measles, mumps, smallpox (etc) would have been compromised. And nobody would even know there was a problem for months — possibly years — after.
You think the fun & games caused by a few anti-vaxers is bad?
Imagine whole populations going unvaccinated by accident… one case of measles and the death toll might be measured in millions.
This is one example I KNOW to be true, because I was there.
I also know that in the years leading up to 2000 there were ad-hoc discussion groups (particularly alt.risk) of amazed programmers and project managers that uncovered year-2000 traps… and fixed them.
Quietly, without fanfare.
In many cases because admitting there was a problem would have resulted in a lawsuit by angry customers. But mostly because it was our job to fix those design flaws before anyone was inconvenienced or hurt.
So, yeah… all that Y2K hysteria was for nothing, because programmers worked their asses off to make sure it was for nothing.
Bolding mine.
Absolutely true. My Mom worked like crazy all throughout 1998 and 1999 on dozens of systems to avoid Y2K crashes. Nothing major happened because people worked to made sure it didn’t.
Now if we could just harness that concept for some of the other major issues facing us today.
this meme came so far since i saw it this morning. god i love tumblr teaching tumblr about history.
As a young Sys Admin during Y2K, I can confirm that it was SRS BZNS. I worked for a major pharmaceutical company at the time. They spent millions of dollars on consultant and programmer hours, not to mention their own employees’ time, to fix all their in-house software as well as replace it with new systems. Sys Admins like myself were continually deploying patches, updating firmware, and deploying new systems in the months leading up to Y2K. Once that was done, though, the programmers went home and cashed their checks.
When the FATEFUL HOUR came along, it wasn’t just one hour. For a global company with offices in dozens of countries, it was 24 hours of being alert and on-call. I imagine that other large organizations had similar setups with entire IT departments working in shifts to monitor everything. Everyone was on a hair trigger, too, so the slightest problem caused ALL HANDS ON DECK pages to go out.
Yes, we had pagers.
For hard numbers IDC’s 2006 calculation put the total US cost of remediation, before and after, at $147 billion - that’s in 1999 dollars. That paid for an army of programmers, including calling up retired grandparents from the senior center because COBOL and FORTRAN apps from the ‘60s needed fixing.
Reblogging because this is a side to the story I had never heard.
Yes, but also there are people who weren’t born yet in 1999 and they’re old enough to be on the internet.
Everything about this is just….wow.
My dad, who was a reporter for Business Day at the New York Times, started covering Y2K in the late 1980s.
That’s how early people started figuring out there was going to be a problem and working on a massive effort to fix all their systems, a huge undertaking that brought them right up through January 1, 2000.
And that’s why nothing happened. Although no one knew for sure nothing would happen until it didn’t - they just had to wait and hope.
This is called the preparedness paradox where by preparing effectively to mitigate a disaster so it causes less harm, the danger avoided seems less serious and all the preparation seems unnecessary from the outside.
“Historical perspective can also contribute to the preparedness paradox. From the point of view of historians after the Year 2000 problem, the preventative action taken has been described as an “overreaction”, instead of a successful effort to prepare for an upcoming problem. For disaster management professionals, this is an example of a no-win situation.“
[Photo ID: a photo of a sticker on a black computer (the sticker is really the only thing seen) that says “REMEMBER” in big yellow letters with a black background on top followed by “your computer off before midnight on” in black on a yellow back ground and “12/31/99” in yellow text in a black rectangle that takes up half the bottom of the sticker. On the right side is the Best Buy logo (the word BEST BUY in black text on a yellow price tag). End ID]
oh my god! I worked in the tiniest of capacities on this as a temp in 1999 (I typoed 1000 and that’s roughly how long ago it feels). I understand intellectually that it’s a distant memory or no memory at all for a lot of people, but I also remember how stressed every IT person I knew was over it. Wow.
I just got my audible report for the audiobooks and I want to scream and not in a good way.
… how bad? :/
Out of a total of $1,162.73 in sales, I earned $290.68 after Amazon took its cut. That’s before tax.
And it will actually be a lot less than that because out of the 80 sales I made, 26 Amazon credits were returned within 7 days.
I want to say they were returned in good faith because the persons realized the book just wasn’t for them, but a sizeable chunk probably just wanted their credit back to use on something else after they were done listening to it.
And like… yeah, thank you for everyone who did buy it on Audible that’s still $290 I wouldn’t have. But considering Audible made $872.05 in profit from my book and I’ll be the one paying for the refunds I am… yeah.
Yeah.
Anyway, here’s my Payhip and a list of alternatives to Audible.
Also, please use library lending services instead of abusing Amazon’s return policy. I am outright begging at this point. I made negative money on ebook sales for the last month due to that TikTok “hack.”
I hate it here. And by here I mean “this timeline in general.”
>amazon
sorry, but i don’t feel bad if you make a deal with the devil
Lol, thanks buddy. Your understanding of how the publishing industry and surviving late stage capitalism is really contributing to the situation.
Romanticizing your own loneliness and turning it into a cool girl thing only works for like a few months and then it just becomes a throbbing black hole i think. Not that ive ever experienced anything like that
love is attained through embarrassing yourself by asking for it instead
Jeff Bezos and Amazon are a fucking blight upon the working class. He got rich by treating rank and file employees like hot garbage toiling under dehumanizing, backbreaking conditions for shitty pay. When there are this many random strangers across various sectors/departments of a single company sharing similar horror stories, that can’t be dismissed as just a few disgruntled ex-employees. Grievances like these are why I quit using Amazon. They made my life easier at the expense of thousands of hardworking people being mistreated and disrespected behind closed doors. (thread)
what’s important to note and missing from the “headline” tweet is that they simultaneously constructed additional good public transit to the public transit already in the city (bus rapid transit, train stations). Just removing highway alone isn’t going to make traffic better, the bigger part of the story is that they improved public transportation. And the current mayor wants to do more - cyclist lanes and reinstate a tram system
I track my spending on a spreadsheet. And I definitely saw a significant rise in groceries, etc. over the last few months.
The first higher bill/receipt I was like ‘hmmm, maybe I got some out of season produce and maybe something else wasn’t on bogo’
But the the next time, it was the same and it hasn’t gone back. I told my family and they are just like ‘well what are you buying? You must be buying extra stuff for your total to be so high’ and like NO.
I am buying the same fucking things I always buy. I might get green apples vs red depending on what looks best, but everything is the same. Same toilet paper, same pasta, same granola bars, same seltzer water. And I get the same amounts to last for about a week.
The prices have just gone up! And my pay hasn’t changed. (Although the assholes that run the company have cut payroll, so even though I make the same amount dollar wise, hour wise I make less. It’s a fucking pay cut without cutting the pay rate.
But yeah. I’m not sure what the income threshold is to where you don’t notice the inflation/gouging, but it’s fucking there.
