The biggest misconception in public schools is that literary analysis is about proving you can be right or wrong about a book you read
Literary analysis isn’t about the book
It’s not even about being right
It’s about performing an investigation and presenting your case to the jury
It doesn’t matter if your defendant killed that guy or not. If you can convince the jury he didn’t, you’ve won
And the incredible life skill of spinning bulletproof bullshit out your ass with a handful of facts and a prayer is soooooooo much more valuable than anyone’s ever gonna tell you
If the average tweenager knew that good media analysis meant you could force your English teacher to admit that fuckin- (rolls dice) What’s Eating Gilber Grape is a metaphor for (rolls dice again) Why the crack cocaine epidemic is good actually- we would have far better literacy and critical thinking skills as a nation. And I stand by that
You could develop the magical psychic and illusory power to force the middle aged bitchfuck who makes you raise your hand and beg for permission to take a shit accept the premise that Cocomelon is a subversive and scathing artistic commentary on the pitfalls of modern democracy. Chat GPT essay engines are stealing this from you
What the hell is this doing on my tumblr dashboard in 2021. What’s happening. None of you know what this is. Nobody even heard of this when I was on it in 1998.
“Palace Chat” was a chat program that worked like club penguin except it came out almost ten years prior and it was meant for adults. When I got addicted to it in 1998 I had to be in the 1% of users under 30.
The smiley faces were default avatars you had if you didn’t make a proper account. Once you had a username you could import any image files you wanted into Palace “Props” you could edit, share, mix up and reposition to make your own avatars.
I grabbed this screenshot off google but I have literally been in this very room. Milton’s avatar looks cool, does anybody know what that’s from?
People made palace chat servers that were like elaborate exploration games with free props hidden around like items which was cool but none of the users seemed to care about that stuff so they’d just hang around the main entry room and talk all day about their sex lives or whether or not Bill Clinton ruined America.
I originally watched the world premieres of Futurama and later Invader Zim in real time with a bunch of people on “The Anime Palace.” I had a “TV Card” in my desktop PC allowing me to watch television on my computer and take screenshots. I made an avatar out of a screenshot from the intro. I had possibly one of the world’s first Invader Zim chat avatars. Then I had an argument with someone who thought it was going to be trendy just because Jhonen Vasquez made it and they didn’t believe me that I actually hadn’t heard of him before.
Sorry I re-reblog more often these days (nobody sees edit additions and nobody knows what I’m talking about if I make a whole new post??) but here are other funny memories of this obscure internet chapter:
Positioning yourself where your avatar overlaps or touches someone else’s without their permission was considered so rude a mod would step in.
Making exactly the same avatar as someone else on purpose, even if it’s just a popular video game character or whatever, was even ruder.
Every time you moved or you changed avatars, the server had to process it for everybody. Being too fidgety could lag or crash other users.
You could assign favorite avatars to hotkeys. If you mashed those keys quickly enough it would lag everyone so bad that doing this often got you a permaban.
You were able to move by either clicking or using the arrow keys but using the arrow keys or “sliding” also lagged everyone, like everyone’s chat would freeze until you stopped moving.
So a troll could just hold their arrow keys and hotkeys simultaneously to glide around the room cycling through their avatars non-stop and basically giving everyone blue screens of death.
Mods had the ability to lock you into the default avatar, which people
thought of as “stripping” you, and they could trap your avatar in place
which not only “stripped” it but displayed chains and padlocks over the
smiley face.
EVERY troll would say “….kinky” whenever that happened.
Lots of couples would make complementary avatars or avatars that could fit together.
It was possible to position yourself so your username was off screen and some people would then wear an avatar made from a piece of the room’s background image, perfectly camouflaging themselves.
Some people did this in private rooms hoping to eavesdrop on people who didn’t know this was a thing or that you could check the actual number of users in the room with you
You had to download the official Palace color palette file and apply it to your chosen image in a paint program for it not to look like complete ass when imported as an avatar
People skilled enough at making avatars look at all decent would be rewarded with rare props, mod powers, whatever
There were private rooms and private chat function but accidentally broadcasting your text as a public announcement to the whole room was one misclick away
One time a moderator disappeared with their girlfriend into a private room for a while and nobody had ANY means of contacting them to tell them they were sending their internet sex as a stream of announcements to all 100+ rooms and 1000+ users on at the time for like an hour
Crucial to your appreciation of that last note, announcements were often set up to display as speech bubbles from the mouths of like, anime characters or the MST3K robots integrated into the background images
Whenever my aunt springs her insane superstitious/religious cures on me I specifically remember when I was 17 and she got me exorcised. The priest was like “I don’t think she’s possessed” and she insisted “well there’s something wrong with her, she’s always [symptoms of depression] so…”
And the guy said some verses and touched my head and stuff then said I should drink only holy water for an entire week. Which wasn’t hard to do, but my fav part of this whole experience was me saying I want to eat instant noodles and my aunt going “I’ll make them for you. With the holy water he gave us.” And then I had holy instant noodles
wow, for some reason, less than 4 months after she made her account, my girlfriend got silently banned off Tumblr! thats crazy!
i wonder what my black trans girlfriend did to get herself banned! oh well im sure there was a really good reason for it
this website is a fucking joke.
if you arent furious over this in light of the recent downsizing of tumblr’s staff to about 25, then you havent thought yet about how purposeful you have to be to single out a single black trans person for being black and trans out of a userbase accounting for 300 million daily logins.
because of something existential that they dont like about her.
no email or anything by the way. no notice of deletion, she just attempted logging in and couldnt. there is no consistent terms of service to account for this, it is very blatant transmisogynoir for this to have come to pass.
im sure they could come up with some legal bullshit reason to cover themselves, but think about it. 25 staff. thats fewer people than a highschool classroom, as my other partner put it so well, and they still decided hers was the most dangerous blog on tumblr. alright man.
Dunno how to put it properly into words but lately I find myself thinking more about that particular innocence of fairy tales, for lack of better word. Where a traveller in the middle of a field comes across an old woman with a scythe who is very clearly Death, but he treats her as any other auntie from the village. Or meeting a strange green-skinned man by the lake and sharing your loaf of bread with him when he asks because even though he’s clearly not human, your mother’s last words before you left home were to be kind to everyone. Where the old man in the forest rewards you for your help with nothing but a dove feather, and when you accept even such a seemingly useless reward with gratitude, on your way home you learn that it’s turned to solid gold. Where supernatural beings never harm a person directly and every action against humans is a test of character, and every supernatural punishment is the result of a person bringing on their own demise through their own actions they could have avoided had they changed their ways. Where the hero wins for no other reason than that they were a good person. I don’t have the braincells to describe this better right now but I wish modern fairy tales did this more instead of trying to be fantasy action movies.
“In [fairy tales], power is rarely the right tool for survival anyway. Rather the powerless thrive on alliances, often in the form of reciprocated acts of kindness - from beehives that were not raided, birds that were not killed but set free or fed, old women who were saluted with respect. Kindness sown among the meek is harvested in crisis.”
STOP no more live-action remakes. We’re going the other way now. Animated Casablanca. Animated The Godfather. Animated Oppenheimer. Animated Fight Club.
Animated Goncharov.
Definitely that one.
unless, hear me out…
Muppet Goncharov
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Look at these idiots who haven’t seen Gonzorov (1993).
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