Every time I see this quote I realize how poor even very smart people are at looking at the long game and at assessing these things in context.

One of my favourite illustrations of this was in a First Aid class. The instructor was a working paramedic. He asked, “Who here knows the stats on CPR? What percentage of people are saved by CPR outside a hospital?”

I happen to know but I’m trying not to be a TOTAL know it all in this class so I wait. And people guess 50% and he says, “Lower,” and 20% and so forth and eventually I sort of half put up my hand and I guess I had The Face because he eventually looked at me and said, “You know, don’t you.”

“My mom’s a doc,” I said. He gave me a “so say it” gesture and I said, “Four to ten percent depending on your sources.”

Everyone else looked surprised and horrified.

And the paramedic said, “We’re gonna talk a bit about some details of those figures* but first I want to talk about just this: when do you do CPR?”

The class dutifully replies: when someone is unconscious, not breathing, and has no pulse.

“What do we call someone who is unconscious, not breathing, and has no pulse?”

The class tries to figure out what the trick question is so I jump over the long pause and say, “A corpse.”

“Right,” says the paramedic. “Someone who isn’t breathing and has no heartbeat is dead. So what I’m telling you is that with this technique you have a 4-10% chance of raising the dead.”

So no, artists did not stop the Vietnam War from happening with the sheer Power of Art. The forces driving that military intervention were huge, had generations of momentum and are actually pretty damn complicated.

But if you think the mass rejection of the war was as meaningless as a soufflé - well.

Try sitting here for ten seconds and imagining where we’d be if the entire intellectual and artistic drive of the culture had been FOR the war. If everyone thought it was a GREAT IDEA.

What the whole world would look like.

Four-to-ten percent means that ninety to ninety-six percent of the time - more than nine times out of ten - CPR will do nothing, but that one time you’ll be in the company of someone worshipped as an incarnate god.

If you think the artists and performers attacking and showing up people like Donald Trump is meaningless try imagining a version of the world wherein they weren’t there.

(*if you’re curious: those stats count EVERY reported case of CPR, while the effectiveness of it is extremely time-related. With those who have had continuous CPR from the SECOND they went down, the number is actually above 80%. It drops hugely every 30 seconds from then on. When you count ALL cases you count cases where the person has already been down several minutes but a bystander still starts CPR, which affects the stats)

That Vonnegut quote brings this particular moment to mind:

Yes, it’s just a pie. Yes, the pie itself doesn’t do much direct damage in the grand scheme of things. But the pie is resistance, and resistance inspires resistance. Resistance inspires survival. Throwing pies sometimes starts a movement. Throwing pies sometimes saves lives.

And of course, we haven’t spoken about the inherent morality of throwing pies at oppressors in a world where oppressors have outlawed pie throwing. At the very least, pie throwing is a reminder to the oppressors that no matter how much money they have, no matter how much power they have, there are still some people, some moments they can’t control.

I’d rather go out throwing pies than just rolling over and accepting that pie throwing isn’t going to solve anything. Yeah, the pie throwing doesn’t immediately solve the problem, but it doesn’t have to because it’s just a starting point. So throw the damn pie.

So throw the damn pie

Something I realized fairly recently about peaceful protests is that they are, in essence, a dress rehearsal.

Yes, peaceful protests can change things on their own - blocking traffic, preventing customers (and employees!) from entering a business, and so on.

But the unspoken part, is what they do is demonstrate that this is an issue that people will turn out in force for. Both to those in power who need to listen, and those trying to share the message: we are not alone, and we will do this thing if it needs to be done.

Sometimes the powers that be forget this - or think they can elide it - but the connection is there. When people aren’t allowed to talk about things affecting their work, whether it’s their wages or that the “please please pleas epleas pleas resign we’ll pay you we prommy” email is clearly a huge scam, that lack of connection takes agency and power from those people.

Art, a pie in the face, hippies getting photographed mid-protest - it’s all communication. Not everyone is happy with the status quo, and now that information is in the world. The more people who talk about it, share it, connect to it, the greater that quiet force grows until you realize it’s actually a whole lot of people when you used to think it was just you.

It’s important to note, btw, that the pie ruined her fucking career. After that pie, pretty much nobody took her seriously anymore, which didn’t end homophobia, but it pretty much did end that one homophobe.

Bro absolutely COOKED with this.

If you ever hear the phrase "fascism is aesthetics as politics," that's what this post is talking about.

It's not about being tough on crime, because the absolute toughest most brutal measure you could take against "crime" as a social problem is to alleviate poverty, and increase access to education, healthcare and social mobility.

It's about performing "tough on crime" as an aesthetic by enacting violence against a prop, i.e. minorities and the impoverished, who are fetishized and objectified to represent "crime." They are brutalized as punishment for crime, but never with the purpose of alleviating the problem of crime.

This is why a lot of conservatives and other right wingers can get straight up angry when you suggest things like reform or social measures to reduce crime. They don't want crime to be reduced, they want an eternal war against "crime" because it provides an arena for the righteous to demonstrate virtue by brutalizing their enemies.

The Australian Ballet is doing Alice in Wonderland again and on one hand I’ve seen it before, and on the other, their Queen of Hearts has my favourite costume in anything every

It’s just this and her court pushes her around the stage on wheels and every act it gets taller until she towers over everyone

Also in act 3 (I think) it swings open at the front and her husband is sitting inside reading a newspaper

I saw this again on Tuesday so here are some things I’d forgotten about:

here’s a video

more. (btw this is a parody/reference to the very famous “rose adagio” from sleeping beauty)

the Caterpillar is pretty neat too

(all of these videos are from the Royal Ballet’s productions in 2014 and 2017)

Finally an adaptation that makes feel like I’m going to have stroke, it’s perfect

This looks fucking bonkers, I love it.

Wow fascinating!

one of the things about a lot of abstract art is that if you look at an artist's most famous work you might just think "this is just a bunch of colorful rectangles? what?" and, to be fair, it is just a bunch of colorful rectangles. but then you look back at their earlier work of the same genre and you can tell that it's not quite... done yet? something about the compositional balance and color palette is out of whack. then you go back earlier to their first forays into abstraction and it's almost completely different to their later work. it's not necessarily bad, but it's clearly their first pass at a new idea. then you look at their most famous work again and you can see what it's actually trying to do. the layout of the areas of negative and positive space give it room to breathe, the colors feed into each other in a specific way, the surface quality of the paint makes you imagine how it would feel to touch. looking at the finished product, you may well have the dexterity to copy how it looks without much trouble and it could be a pleasant exercise to do, but this image was the product of years of experimentation to arrive at a desired effect. it's harder to see the effort than with, say, academic figural oil painting, but it is undoubtedly still there. I should avoid ever attending a hilma af klint show because I know I'd try to make out with a canvas.

How is bnha anime of the decade...... they aren’t even anime of the hour of the minute of the second

The notes on this post were so toxic that staff just axed em

1969.........

Yes, when the original post is deleted from the server (not just the blog, but the Tumblr servers), there is no root post for notes to be added onto, and also no root post for time to be counted from, so it starts from zero. Most computer operating systems use Unix, which was launched in 1971 with t.he epoch date of midnight on January 1, 1970 as 1. Therefore zero is one second behind that date: December 31, 1969. Also, very unfortunately, this also means nobody except you and anyone you reblog it to will see this explanation, as you cannot open the notes to see comments when there are no notes.

Tumblr is truly one of the webbed sites ever

ohmg

post's haunted.

Skeletor has forever destroyed our ability to come up with voices for skeleton characters.

this is like saying NASA has forever destroyed our ability to wonder what it's like on the moon. like we can still use our powers of imagination if we want to but the question's pretty much fucking settled.

Donald Trump signed an Executive Order to defund libraries!

SHOW UP FOR OUR LIBRARIES! 📚 CONTACT YOUR CONGRESSPEOPLE!

Here’s a couple actual links to concrete things you can do to help, as determined by the American Library Association, who already stopped this maniac from doing this once. There are many smart & experienced people fighting for libraries & museums, but they need your help too.

This link allows you to send your personal library story directly to Congress: https://oneclickpolitics.global.ssl.fastly.net/messages/edit?promo_id=23577

And this is a straightforward petition you can sign in about a minute: https://action.everylibrary.org/eoimls2025

And if you want an easy way to contact your Congresscritters directly, text 50409 or search for ResistBot on Telegram to email, call or fax you Congresscritters. Libraries support democracy & are the last free reliably available 3rd Space in America. This is absolutely an emergency as serious as any of the other major institutional destructions so far this year.

Questions to ask beta readers

General:

Characters:

Setting:

Plot and conflict:

I don't know who the fuck censored "hell" in that last image, but it sure as shit wasn't me. What is this, 3rd grade internet?

Tumblr isn't giving us back the boops for ides of march so I will do it myself.

Get your boops everyone!!!

I just put these together real quick feel free to use them.

knife png to click and drag for your tumblr stabbing needs

NO IM SCREAMING THIS IS PERFECT

HAPPY IDES OF MARCH EVERYONE

There are many benefits to being a marine biologist

it's a beautiful day at the roman senate and you are a horrible goose

can’t believe this iconic moment hasnt shown up on my dash yet in light of today

et tu

there was an aircraft collision over the potomac river. complex, ai-powered algorithms know everything about every person on the planet who has internet access. nazis, some of whom have already been in the federal government for years, are now making themselves publicly known. is this real life america in 2025 or is it the plot of captain america: the winter soldier (2014)? the answer may shock you