We for real for real for realsies have to popularize the term smith college problem . And normalize telling people they’re having a smith college problem . And if you’re always posting about smith college problems it is your duty to normalize going oh okay never mind once people tell you that you are smith college problem posting
problem: people assume that I’m non-binary just because I’m a woman with a shaved head. This is a reductive harmful and widespread approach to gender identity that people need to grapple with and work on.
Answer: you are having a Smith College Problem. If you live anywhere in the world that is not the dorms on a women’s college campus you won’t have this issue. If you lived anywhere else in the world you would be having issues like sure hope I don’t experience hiring discrimination for being a woman with a shaved head. Sure hope I don’t get called a slur on the street for being a woman with a shaved head.
Problem: when a character gets a love interest of another sex people complain because they headcanoned them as queer and now they’re confirmed straight. This is an erasure of bisexuality becuase you can date other sexes and still be same sex attracted because you’re bisexual.
Answer: you are having a Smith College Problem. You’re not critiquing reactions to a student film festival. You’re critiquing reactions to very main stream media funded by corporations who want to make money at all costs. This corporation is not trying to give you nuanced bisexual representation. This corporation is cutting gay readings off at the knee because when it did the coin flip on whether or not pink dollars are worth it the answer was no.
If anyone is curious what she says directly after this quote:
When one or the other of these thought patterns makes it hard to throw things away, we can’t see what we really need now, at this moment. We aren’t sure what would satisfy us or what we are looking for. As a result, we increase the number of unnecessary possessions, burying ourselves both physically and mentally in superfluous things.
The best way to find out what we really need is to get rid of what we don’t. Quests to faraway places or shopping sprees are no longer necessary. All you have to do is eliminate what you don’t need by confronting each of your possessions properly. The process of facing and selecting our possessions can be quite painful. It forces us to confront our imperfections and inadequacies and the foolish choices we made in the past.
Many times when confronting my past during the tidying process I have been so ashamed. My collection of scented erasers from primary school, the animation-related goods that I collected in junior high school, clothes I bought in high school when I was trying to act grown up but which didn’t suit me at all, handbags I bought even though I didn’t need them just because I liked the look of them in the shop.
The things we own are real. They exist here and now as a result of choices made in the past by no one other than ourselves. It is wrong to ignore them or to discard them indiscriminately as if denying the choices we made. This is why I am against both letting things pile up and dumping things without proper consideration. It is only when we face the things we own one by one and experience the emotions they evoke that we can truly appreciate our relationship with them.
There are three approaches we can take towards our possessions. Face them now, face them sometime, or avoid them until the day we die. The choice is ours. But I personally believe it is far better to face them now. If we acknowledge our attachment to the past and our fears for the future by honestly looking at our possessions, we will be able to see what is really important to us.
This process in turn helps us to identify our values and reduces doubt and confusion when making life decisions. If we can have confidence in our decisions and launch enthusiastically into action without any doubts holding us back, we will be able to achieve much more. In other words, the sooner we confront our possessions the better. If you are going to put your house in order, do it now.
“the end goal of fiction is (of course) to collectively identify and consume only the good things. good stories make you a good person and bad stories make you a bad person” you guys literally sound like the 2nd grade teacher who told my mom not to let me read the golden compass
not to swing the bat 360°, but i’ve seen a lot of weird, condescending nonsense on the other side of this as well
look, the end goal of strong literacy skills isn’t to have perfect taste and be right all the time. i frequently enjoy things that have objective flaws. i frequently fail to enjoy things that most people would consider flawless. sometimes, i fall for propaganda. sometimes, something makes me uncomfortable, or confused, and i have to pause to figure out why. that’s life!
the more comfortable you are navigating the relationship between what a story wants to say, what it is saying, and how that affects you, the easier your life will be. you are free to criticize the things you love and celebrate the existence of the things you hate.
i say this with all the compassion of a person who went through years of therapy for OCD—your gut reactions do not define you, and you don’t have to worry about The Bad Media turning you evil
The fact that there’s an actually functional website for the library of Babel is one of those things that fucks me up more and more the more I think about the implications.
So, if anyone hasn’t encountered the concept of the library of Babel, the idea comes from a story of the same name by Jorge Luis Borges, which is set inside a seemingly infinite library which contains every possible combination of letters, periods, commas and spaces that fits within 410 pages.
So like… It isn’t THAT out there that someone was able to make a digital version of it. Making an algorithm that randomly generates every possible combination of those 29 characters within that space and making a website that lets you explore those combinations are things that are pretty squarely within the scope of things you’d expect someone to be able to make a computer do.
But it begins to get pretty out there when you start thinking about all the things that are technically contained there (and that someone randomly browsing it could THEORETICALLY stumble upon) just by virtue of being one of those possible combinations of letters, spaces, commas, and periods.
Somewhere in that website there IS a book that specifically mentions me by full name before giving an accurate, excruciatingly detailed, 410-page long physical description of me. There’ also many more books that SEEM to be that but are actually factually inaccurate. There’s also versions of all of those containing every possible combination of every possible typo, spelling mistake, and grammatical error.
Somewhere in that website there IS a book that’s a perfectly accurate prediction of how and when I will die narrated in third person over the course of 410 pages. There’s also a book that contains the exact same events narrated in first person. Not only for me, but for every person in the world. There are many more that claim to be that but are actually inaccurate.
Somewhere in that website there IS a book that’s completely blank except for the world’s funniest dick joke written right at the end of the very last page.
But chances are no one browsing that website is EVER going to see any of that because for every book we would consider useful, interesting, or even intelligible there are millions upon millions upon millions more that are just completely full of gibberish from cover to cover.
Every single thing I will ever write (barring punctuation marks that arent periods or commas and the letter ñ) is already contained somewhere on that website.
I have a volume from the Library of Babel! it’s one of my most treasured books.
on the second to last page, about halfway down it reads “OH TIME THY PYRAMIDS” a singular grain of order in the sea of chaos.
The library of babel contains every book to ever exist and moreover it contains all information that can be encoded in a finite string of characters from its alphabet.
I cannot overstate how much I love the Library of Babel. it’s wonderful, it is my heart and soul.
at last we created the perplexing nexus, from the novel “wouldnt it be weird if there was a perplexing nexus?”
![Registration Snowboarding lessons in B.C.? Visit the Canadian campus of your choice? What does your future hold? Complete Registration EARN 300 NP!!! Discover your destiny @ LulusRoom.ca [CLICK HERE]](https://64.media.tumblr.com/d6bf910c6148382afff0826f436944ce/de7ab1acb6f290f9-7c/s250x400/972914f109341081316607680dfdff8c02888f09.gifv)
