put me in the universe where Columbo ran through the 1980s and had a crossover episode with Knight Rider. I think they deserved it, and I am not just saying that because they’re my two favorite Old Shows. @telebeast wrote a little fanfic blurb about it and I HAD to visualize it into a comic (which is also the longest comic I have finished thus far at five pages…), so writing credit goes to them.
my crack team of internet addled 16-24 year olds have been working day and night to invent a belief system that is near identical to that of the average white father in the 1950s. No its ok we are using words that are newer and also dumber.
I’m about to save you thousands of dollars in therapy by teaching you what I learned paying thousands of dollars for therapy:
It may sound woo woo but it’s an important skill capitalism and hyper individualism have robbed us of as human beings.
Learn to process your emotions. It will improve your mental health and quality of life. Emotions serve a biological purpose, they aren’t just things that happen for no reason.
1. Pause and notice you’re having a big feeling or reaching for a distraction to maybe avoid a feeling. Notice what triggered the feeling or need for a distraction without judgement. Just note that it’s there. Don’t label it as good or bad.
2. Find it in your body. Where do you feel it? Your chest? Your head? Your stomach? Does it feel like a weight everywhere? Does it feel like you’re vibrating? Does it feel like you’re numb all over?
3. Name the feeling. Look up an emotion chart if you need to. Find the feeling that resonates the most with what you’re feeling. Is it disappointment? Heartbreak? Anxiety? Anger? Humiliation?
4. Validate the feeling. Sometimes feelings misfire or are disproportionately big, but they’re still valid. You don’t have to justify what you’re feeling, it’s just valid. Tell yourself “yeah it makes sense that you feel that right now.” Or something as simple as “I hear you.” For example: If I get really big feelings of humiliation when I lose at a game of chess, the feeling may not be necessary, but it is valid and makes sense if I grew up with parents who berated me every time I did something wrong. So I could say “Yeah I understand why we are feeling that way given how we were treated growing up. That’s valid.”
5. Do something with your body that’s not a mental distraction from the feeling. Something where you can still think. Go on a walk. Do something with your hands like art or crochet or baking. Journal. Clean a room. Figure out what works best for you.
6. Repeat, it takes practice but is a skill you can learn :)
I have been in EMDR therapy recently to help with past trauma and like 90% of the appointments is just this post. Which I thought was silly at first bcs I was like “well I know how I’m feeling, I feel bad” but man you have no idea. Literally JUST talking through whatever stressful thing I have going on at the moment and whenever I feel a Big Emotion stopping and acknowledging, naming, and sitting with it. I’ve made more progress with my trauma and mental illnesses just doing this in a single year than I have in like 10+ years of therapy.
It might feel silly or pointless at first but stick with it, it really helps.
Hey Science side of tumblr folks, if you were working on an NIH grant that was canceled, ProPublica is looking to hear from you to amplify your story and put it in the perspective of the ongoing assault on our commitment to care for each other.
Multiple relatives of mine donated their bodies to science. That donation was in each case an awe inspiring act of kindness and love, an effort to help create a world in which the thing that was at the time actively killing them would not do so to others if they could help it.
Huge swaths of disease research is based on similarly beautiful commitments to humanity, and the NIH represents our societal commitment to make those sacrifices matter.
So I am taking these bastards pulverizing it extremely personally and am incandescent about it. I am personally committed to making everyone involved in this suffer as much as I personally can. Which is to say I would appreciate if you took the time to help ProPublica shine a light on this atrocity if you have a story to tell them.
ProPublica is reputable af and extremely hardcore in their investigations. They’ve also got a pretty good track record of embarrassing politicians enough to get good shit done.
I support them financially because we NEED them, and I encourage anyone who fits the profile to get in touch with them.
“if tumblr goes down find me a-” we have been making these posts for a decade now.. either i wake up one day and its gone and i take up cigaretts to fill the void or 40 years from now i post my 5G cancer xray results direct from my neuralink
People on this website will really mock anti-vaxxers and flat earthers for ignoring scientists and getting their alternative facts from facebook, and then turn around and insist they know more history than historians and more archaeology than archaeologists because they read an unsourced tumblr post once
Is there a real life example of this?
It happens a lot.
I know it’s bad but I kind of want to know more about the woman who thinks the Roman Empire never existed
Oh shit i believed the Leonardo Da Vinci one
Also why do people make these
What do you hope to gain
There are a lot of different misinformation dynamics at play here. Only some are innocent, only some are malicious. But that’s why it pays to fact-check things, because the innocent misunderstandings, the arrogant personal hypotheses stated as fact, and the malicious lies are all jumbled together.
Some of these are a misunderstanding or conflating of true facts. The Da Vinci one goes here. Many historians do believe that Leonardo da Vinci had a romantic/sexual relationship with his apprentice(s). And it’s well-established that his apprentices modeled for some of his paintings. But they did not model for any of his paintings of Jesus - which was the core point of the post that this fact came from, enjoying the irony. So this isn’t true because it’s a conflation of several true facts into a false but understandable conclusion.
Some of these are just a victim of internet telephone. The “Persephone’s daughter” and “fake Greek goddess” ones refer to Mespyrian, who was some teenager’s wattpad OC daughter of Persephone and Hades, that someone else on tumblr accidentally mistook as a real figure from Greek mythology.
Some of these come from people making their own conclusions about history, and then turning around and insisting that the experts therefore must be lying to you. This is where it gets dangerous. The “archaeologists broke the noses off Egyptian statues to hide the fact that they were African” one goes here. Many Egyptian statues are missing their noses, so several years ago someone on the internet claimed that it was because archaeologists deliberately broke them off, and this gained a Lot of traction because it felt true and people wanted it to be true. People overwhelmingly want to believe that they, ordinary citizens of the world with no special training, are actually smarter than the experts. People love to believe that, so it’s very, very easy for people to decide the experts are stupid and clueless (the “History Hates Lovers” song, the thing about the dodecahedron or the Roman hairstyles or the leather burnishers) while salt-of-the-earth ordinary folk are smarter than those ivory-tower eggheads. At worst, people decide the experts are maliciously hiding the truth about the world for their own gain (the Lovers of Valdaro one here is an example of this, but you also see this a lot regarding “all ancient cultures were feminist utopias until the Catholic Church invented misogyny and covered up the feminist past” type posts that are extremely popular with TERFs.) This is the dynamic I’m comparing to anti-vaxxers and flat Earthers, and yes, this kind of anti-intellectualism is dangerous.
Some people are just trolls because they like lying on the internet and riling people up. This cannot be discounted. People do do this. The tiktok woman who doesn’t believe in the Roman Empire and doesn’t believe that Vesuvius erupted is almost certainly a troll who likes the attention her wild false claims get.
It’s a combination of things, but it’s why you shouldn’t assume that historians are all old homophobic clueless idiots and only you, tumblr user persephonesmassivebadonkers or whatever, know the REAL truth. Because that’s how you get Flat Earthers, but more pressingly, it’s how you get antisemitic conspiracy theories and transphobic radfem proclamations of We Need To Return To The Ancient Feminist Utopia (By Destroying All Trans People)(And, Usually, Abrahamic Religions).
But also by believing easily-debunked falsehoods it makes genuinely well-meaning people easier to dismiss by bigots as Brainwashed By Those El Gee Bee Tees Who Will Lie Because They Want To Destroy Academia/Biological Sex/The Church.
Spreading misinformation on tumblr is an understandable consequence of the existence of the internet, but it’s not harmless and really ought to be challenged when it’s seen.
And it’s not remotely helped by the fact there’s plenty of similar true stories that can be pointed to. Like, here’s a list of things: Brits in the 1800s used to eat Egyptian mummies, numerous gay relationships in history were called “friendships” by Christian historians, the Vatican is hoarding almost all history ever written and refuses to let anyone access it, the original biographies of the Sons of Liberty were all works of fiction (like Washington and the apple tree), Greek and Roman statues were painted but the people who discovered them found it garish so they stripped the paint off, DaVinci invented a tank, Lancelot is a fanfiction OC, and the Catholic Church was founded after numerous other Christian churches and proceeded to burn the holy books that didn’t support their version (like the Gospel of Judas, which establishes that the “betrayal” was Jesus’s plan because how was he supposed to die as planned, and they plotted it together). It’s easy to believe bullshit when the truth is just as rank.
This is exactly the sort of thing I’m talking about: confidently firing off a mix of half-remembered and out-of-context factoids with “lies and coverups in history!!!” to make them seem like they’re correcting the record rather than reducing a mix of truth, common misconceptions, conspiracy theories, misunderstandings, and poor reporting to pithy one-liners. Let’s go through them.
Brits in the 1800s used to eat Egyptian mummies,
It’s complicated. There’s definitely a grain of truth to this, but it’s not quite what the common narratives suggest. For example, eating mummies was a Medieval thing more than it was a Victorian thing; Victorians did “Scientific” mummy-unwrapping parties, but they didn’t then eat them - they were collectible antiquities. For another, the mummies used by Victorians for paint were rarely ancient Egyptian humans. I’ll let @thatlittleegyptologist take this one because they’ve talked about it. A lot. Like a lot. So often.
numerous gay relationships in history were called “friendships” by Christian historians,
It’s complicated. Have historians in the past denied that their favorite historical figures could possibly be gay? Absolutely. But people who were romantically and sexually involved with each other in the past very often did call each other “friend.” (Or, in ancient Egypt, “brother”). Even husbands and wives would call each other “friend.” (it’s midnight and I am blanking on how to search for sources that show this but I have transcribed 18th century letters and diaries, I have seen this.) Like, while historical squeamishness and denial of gay relationships has been a thing… the modern assumption that friendship cannot possibly ever include any gay stuff is also not helping. And heteronormatively taking words at face value is somewhere in between. It’s sometimes malicious, but you have to give space for simple hetero brain too. And give space for all the queer and queer-affirming historians working in the field. And for people like Oscar Wilde who were arrested for sodomy and the Ancient Greeks who were Ancient Greek so it’s hardly like anyone’s denying that, even if their interpretation was that it was Bad. It’s not cut and dry.
the Vatican is hoarding almost all history ever written and refuses to let anyone access it,
This one isn’t actually complicated, it’s just a bizarre misunderstanding (generous interpretation) or an Evangelical conspiracy theory (less generous interpretation) of what the Vatican Apostolic Archive, formerly known as the Vatican Secret Archive, is. They’re not “hoarding almost all history ever written” (how would that work?). It’s an archive of the Church’s and the Vatican’s records, accounting, correspondence, declarations, decisions, and other various affairs. Over the past several hundred years of dutiful documentary-keeping, that does add up to a lot of history about the development of European politics, culture, and colonization! There are in fact two archives; one which has been accessible to scholars since 1881, and one which is owned unilaterally by the Pope and only extremely rarely opened for any sort of access to outsiders. John Paul II actually made it easier for researchers to access those archives, though “easier” does not mean “easy” and is still very much at the Pope’s discretion. However, they are archives pertaining to the Pope’s and Church’s affairs, not all of human history.
the original biographies of the Sons of Liberty were all works of fiction (like Washington and the apple tree),
True! But also a little complicated. The story about Washington and the cherry tree is complete fiction, and we know who to blame for it: Mason Locke “Parson” Weems, who wrote his famous biography of Washington right after Washington died and the nation was clamoring for tributes to him. He was kind of shameless about writing for the masses things that would sell. But at the same time, it was part of the myth-making of the new nation, part of a very common process at the time of nearly deifying Washington. But it is also true that we do in fact have a lot of letters and diaries written directly by these guys. We don’t need to rely on Weems for fanciful stories about them, even if they have entered into the mythology-building of the US as a nation.
Greek and Roman statues were painted but the people who discovered them found it garish so they stripped the paint off,
Have you ever seen what happens to painted stone when left out in the elements over time? The paint chips off. Being exposed to the elements or buried in the dirt for hundreds or thousands of years does a number on the painted exterior of a statue. Here’s a Jesuit scholar from 1913 lamenting this: “It is a notorious fact that the remains of colour fade very fast from marbles that are exposed to the light after centuries of burial and concealment. It is the universal experience of classical archaeologists. A French explorer describes some colours vanishing from sarcophagi found at Carthage "comme de la fumée” [like smoke]. Add to this the perfectly intelligible cleaning consequent on first discovery in the earth, and the still more disastrous and less pardonable washings with acid that, until recent years, were the fate of all classical statues. Even still another risk has to be remembered, the taking of casts […] Add these fates together, and say whether their total does not offer an explanation for a prejudiced view.“ Honestly, as Gisela M. A. Richter (1944) says, "The fact that any color at all remains is really more remarkable than that it has disappeared in the majority of cases.” Greek and Roman statues, probably even marble statues, were painted! Yes! But there was probably little paint remaining even when the Renaissance sculptors and art collectors got ahold of them. And while the discoverers deliberately stripping off the paint because they decided it should not have been there is one potential reason (note the reference to acid-washing), and the pure white marble was a very ideologically-loaded Enlightment-era aesthetic highlighting the purity of the form, and 1700s-1800s English archaeologists and antiquarians had vicious debates over whether the marble statues were painted like the fate of their cultural hegemony rested on it, “removing the paint for its garishness” was not even close to the primary reason the colored paint does not remain. These are some resources about the Gods in Color exhibition that did experimental reconstructions of the colors of some statues.
This is either a flippant or deeply disingenuous way to describe the origins, evolution, and recording of King Arthur mythology, its use in literature and nationalist propaganda, and the way this is different from the way fanfiction interacts with a canon. @chimaerakitten knows much more about this than I do.
and the Catholic Church was founded after numerous other Christian churches and proceeded to burn the holy books that didn’t support their version (like the Gospel of Judas, which establishes that the “betrayal” was Jesus’s plan because how was he supposed to die as planned, and they plotted it together).
Ohhhh boy it’s complicated. I am out of energy and by god it is late but there is a reason that books and books and books have been written about the history of Christianity, the early schisms, the creation of the canon, Gnosticism, and the origins of the Catholic Church.
Basically: if it can be summed up in one sentence as a “gotcha!” it is probably More Complicated Than That.
OP, you deserve many medals for not simply having many of the replies to this post become your supervillain origin story. Sympathy from the very bottom of my soul.
Thank you to everyone who submitted theme suggestions during the interest check!
Zukaang Week 2025 will have prompts based on a theme. From the theme suggestions we received, we have compiled a list of potential themes for you to vote on. You may also suggest prompts for the themes you vote for.
ALT
ALT