ohthepaint asked: dude it's not about liking or pretending to like whitney houston, it's like this fairly important musical figure (well important in terms of musical history + you know, most people know who she is and what her music sounds like) has died and people wanna be respectful, maybe? why should you care if people express grief or whatever over a public figure. as long as they're not being dicks (because there are enough people being dicks over people's death), what's the problem?
I’ve been looking for a way to answer this, especially since it relates to a post I reblogged. Then ABC’s The Drum stepped in and did the hard work for me:
There’s no right or wrong way to do grief, to do concern, to do love, to do angst. Nor is their any imperative to do anything at all in the wake of a tragedy. But pretending that thumbing out a rest-in-peace tweet counts as something, as action, as empathy is self-indulgent and severely deluded.
The bane of my own existence as a critic/commentator is the fact that the internet saves things forever, and I can’t possibly be alone on this.
While I try my best to remain above blatant trolling, there really is no more irritating thing than to click into a disagreement post and find A.) “In this you said X but over here you said Y” as the content and B.) that the “Y” example is citing a statement made so long ago even I don’t precisely recall making it.
The fact is, all human beings change their minds (and tastes, and turn-ons) over time about any number of things. We tend to accept that, up to a point, with friends and acquaintances because the passage of time is real to us in those situations. But when your relationship with another party is wholly in the form of digital pieces that can be called up from any era with a keystroke, it’s easy to lose track of the fact that the sliver of white space between Google’d-up hyperlinks can sometimes represent years of opinion-reshaping experiences.
Now, to be fair, the argument can certainly be made that people whose job it is to make public pronouncements of quality have it incumbent upon them to keep said public appraised when they no longer agree with their past selves, but the plain fact of the matter is that most changes of outlook aren’t all at once epiphanies - they occur gradually, over time. And almost no one has the time or inclination to go back over everything they’ve ever written to check for ideological consistency.
SPOILER ALERT: It’s the same technique behind a vodka sunrise. Except it’s in the mixer and split into nine colours instead of two. Cool bonus: you can see for a split second at the end he stuffs up and pours the remainder on top of the other drinks and, as expected, it sinks to the bottom without affecting the colour of the rest.
I just visited 9GAG for the first time and over the course of the 15 minutes I spent scrolling I saw proper attribution to the correct source of a picture once.
Congratulations, Tumblr: There’s a place worse than you.
"Two characters watch Umbridge getting dragged away — Harry Potter and Hermione Granger. At least one of those two knows that centaurs are rape machines. (Hint: It’s Hermione, the character whose main purpose in the plot is to know absolutely everything.) Neither of them make an effort to save Umbridge. Potter gets in a witty, James Bond-esque quip as she’s being dragged away, and Hermione seems satisfied that mass horse rape is a fitting punishment. We like to think that on the way back to school, Harry asked “So what do you suppose those centaurs are going to do to the professor?” and that Hermione casually described to him how Umbridge would almost certainly be brutally violated by equinely endowed inter-species rapists. And that was the day Harry learned that you do not mess with Hermione Granger."
The photo was taken in Hamburg in 1936, during the celebrations for the launch of a ship. In the crowd, one person refuses to raise his arm to give the Nazi salute. The man was August Landmesser. He had already been in trouble with the authorities, having been sentenced to two years hard labor for marrying a Jewish woman.
We know little else about August Landmesser, except that he had two children. By pure chance, one of his children recognized her father in this photo when it was published in a German newspaper in 1991. How proud she must have been in that moment.
I enjoy things like this immensely.
This guy is the meaning of swag. He’s all “FUCK Y’ALL NAZIS, IMMA SIT HERE AND LOOK AT THE TREES!”
You know, I was going to make a joke about how long it would take from the creation of Beyonce’s/Hova’s tumblr blog for their original photographs to be incorrectly credited to another blog.
Woe is me: it happened before I even knew it was a thing.
