✨

sublimepaperfury

secondbeatsongs

for anyone too young to know this: watching The Truman Show is a vastly different experience now, compared to how it was before youtube and social media influencers became normal

before it was like, "what a horrifying thing to do to a human being! to take away their autonomy and privacy, all for the sake of profits! to create fake scenarios for them to react to, just to retain viewership! to ruin their happiness just so some corporate entity could harvest money from their very humanity! how could anyone do something so evil?"

and now it's like, "ah, yeah. this is still deeply fucked up, but it's pretty much what every influencer has been doing to their kids for a decade now. probably bad that we've normalized this experience"

monkeychewtoy

Instagram and TikTok have successfully created the Torment Nexus from Jim Carrey's iconic work, "Don't put people in the Torment Nexus"

hneycmb

catchymemes

dearratroi

animentality

rotationalsymmetry

becausegoodheroesdeservekidneys

Currently sat in a summer school type thing we're hosting in work and some English architect is telling us about sustainable design in Wales, except she hasn't bothered learning a single Welsh name and if I have to listen to one more "I don't know how to say 'Welsh name' so I'm going to use 'shitty English name/nothing while laughing at it' I'm going to throw this slanty drawing desk at her head

becausegoodheroesdeservekidneys

Spot the unforced errors:

"Wales has three national parks. There's the one I can't pronounce so I'm going to say Brecon Beacons, there's Pembrokeshire Coast, and there's Snowdonia."

Said with that lil laugh English people do when they say this stuff, because they think they're being funny and charming in a 'what am I like' way rather than disrespectful and arrogant as fuck

"This one is by a reservoir in Gwent I can say, tee hee! Landy something, but-"

Me: Llandegfedd

Her: uh... yes, so difficult! Tee hee!

FUCK OFF

"This one is called... Um... I don't know how to say it tee hee!"

Me: Ysgir.

Her: I'm so bad at Welsh haha

YOU ARE DELIVERING A THREE QUARTER HOUR LECTURE TO WELSH STUDENTS IN WALES ABOUT WELSH INFRASTRUCTURE

YOU HAVE MULTIPLE WELSH SPEAKING COLLEAGUES CRAWLING OUT OF THE WOODWORK WHO COULD HAVE TOLD YOU

LEARNING TO PRONOUNCE THE PLACES SHOULD HAVE BEEN PRIORITY ONE YOU ARROGANT BITCH

becausegoodheroesdeservekidneys

Like listen. LISTEN. I know this is entirely normal. I know this is so exceptionally common that about 80% of English people do it, I know they think it's funny, I know they don't even see there's a problem, I know I'm basically kicking off at rain in a wet country. I don't know why this extremely normal and commonplace occurrence is nettling me this much today.

But last year, I gave a lecture on grassland management. As part of it, I told the students about the ngitili silvipastoral systems in Tanzania. I am in no way saying I'm perfect!!! I am not a template to be copied!!! But ahead of that lecture, I scoured YouTube until I found a video of an indigenous person in Tanzania talking about the system!!! And I listened to how they pronounced it, and I memorised it, and then I even wrote out the phonetic pronunciation on the slide so my students could learn too, because not bothering to learn that while then presenting myself as an authority on the subject would have been grossly appropriative and colonialist and also plain fucking rude.

And none of those students were Tanzanian for me to insult to their faces