Even As Someone Who Supports And Actively Encourages The Reappropriation Of Memes In Order To Take Away

DASHBOARD UNFUCKER V1.0

as 90% of desktop users have probably found out, today @staff released an update that for some insane reason COMPLETELY remodels the dashboard to replicate twitter's. this is of course in the wake of numerous other thoroughly hated changes and a continued refusal to fix any of the site's actual problems, half of which stem directly from site management.

HOWEVER, thanks to the power of jQuery, i was able to throw together a userscript that remodels the dashboard back to its original look almost perfectly.

here is my dashboard right now, with the script active:

and here is the old dashboard in separate tab container that hasn't received the update:

it's hardly perfect; i had trouble making it force reload to the fixed layout when switching between other pages and the dashboard, and it currently only fixes just the dashboard. it's also completely untested on browsers other than firefox, and chances are it looks a bit screwy on ultrawide monitors. but for now at least, it's a good fix.

the unfucker is a tampermonkey userscript. all you have to do to use it is install the tampermonkey extension, hit "create new script", and replace the default code on the page with the script (link here) and save it.

Hi, I just wanted to let you know that I really appreciate your social and cultural historiography. While I'm familiar with English and French Monasticism from 1300 onward, my focus was on clerical life and theology having contemporaneous context is really helpful. Your explanations are also clear and funny, which I appreciate as well. I haven't gotten too far into your studies yet but do you have any knowledge of European Muslims outside of the O.E.?

Aha, I am afraid I don’t actually know what you mean by “outside of the O.E.” (this is on me for not being a Cool Kid, no doubt, but there you have it). However, if you mean Muslims in medieval Europe, medieval Europe’s perception of/interaction with Muslims, how this changed in the late medieval/early modern period, and where these sites of contact were most likely to happen: yes, I absolutely have all of that! (Edit: @codenamefinlandia kindly suggested that this might mean outside the Ottoman Empire, which I doubtless should have thought of, but I hope this is indeed what you mean? In which case, yes, the below resources will be very helpful for you in exploring the European Muslim presence well before the Ottomans.)

I wrote briefly about Muslims in my Historical People of Color in Europe post, including in the context of the crusades, their long-term settlements in medieval Spain and Italy, and the relationships of the Muslim empires with Elizabethan England. There are, as you might expect, many studies focusing on Muslim-Christian contacts in medieval Europe and in the wider medieval world, of which the crusades are probably the best-known example. Below follows a selection of some reading material which might be helpful:

Sea of the Caliphs: The Mediterranean in the Medieval Islamic World by Christophe Picard (this is about medieval Islamic trade in the Mediterranean, as it says on the tin, starting in the 7th century with the original Muslim conquests, and focuses on its role in cultural contacts between Muslims and Christians of southern and eastern Europe)

The Arab Influence in Medieval Europe, ed. Dionisius A. Agios and Richard Hitchcock (a collection of essays about Arabic influence on medieval Europe, this one doesn’t have any e-version so you might need to consult a university library)

The Muslims of Medieval Italy by Alex Metcalfe (examines the rise and fall of the Islamic presence in southern Italy and Sicily between about 800--1300, and how this was transformed into a frontier of cultural contact, exchange, and conflict alike)

Idols in the East: European Representations of Islam and the Orient, 1100--1450, by Suzanne Conklin Akbari (examines how the Islamic world was depicted in the ‘high’ medieval era, and the developments of some of these Orientalist images in the 19th century and onward)

Sons of Ishmael: Muslims through European Eyes in the Middle Ages by John V. Tolan (in something of the same vein as the above; he has written another book called Saracens: Islam in the Medieval European Imagination which focuses more on the semiotic, literary, and narrative construction of the “othered Muslim”).

Muslim and Christian Contact in the Middle Ages: A Reader, ed. Jarbel Rodriguez (a GREAT book with multiple types of examples, primary sources, regions, and types of contact between Muslims and Christians from the seventh through the fifteenth century, including Byzantine, Jewish, Muslim, and Christian authors of the time period)

Muslims of Medieval Latin Christendom, c. 1050--1614, by Brian Catlos (another book which I really need to read more of, focusing on medieval Muslims who actually lived IN Europe, including in Spain, Italy, Hungary, the Balkans/Eastern Europe, and other places).

The Republic of Arabic Letters: Islam and the European Enlightenment, by Alexander Bevilacqua (studies how the study/approach to Islam changed i the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and how many Enlightenment scholars learned Arabic and read Islamic texts)

As Catlos says in Muslims of Medieval Latin Christendom: “In fact, the Muslims of medieval Europe included substantial communities scattered right across the Latin-dominated Mediterranean, from the Atlantic coast to the Transjordan, as well as in Central and Eastern Europe. In some areas they survived for only a century or two, whereas in others they persevered for well over five hundred years. They did not live as isolated enclaves, they were not uniformly poor, and were not necessarily subject to systematic repression; rather, they comprised diverse communities and dynamic societies that played an important role in the formation of what would eventually emerge a modern European culture and society.” In other words, while we’ve discussed before that medieval Europe was never uniformly white and never uniformly Christian, people tend to think that Jews were the only other religion that lived permanently in Europe. While Italy, Iberia, and the Balkans maintained the most enduring Muslim communities, that was not the only place they lived, and they were not merely merchants passing through without settling (though there was plenty of interreligious trade). We’ve discussed before how Yusuf/Joe would not necessarily always be a surprising or unexpected sight in Europe, and how people there would be a lot more used to him than you might expect. So: yes, Islam was always embedded in the fabric of medieval Europe, both as enemies during the crusades and as long-term citizens and communities at home.

Bonus: have some work on queer medieval and early modern Muslims, because reasons!

Sahar Amer, ‘Medieval Arab Lesbians and Lesbian-like Women’, Journal of the History of Sexuality, 18 (2009), 215-236

Sahar Amer, Crossing Borders: Love between Women in Medieval French and Arabic Literatures (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008)

Samar Habib, Arabo-Islamic Texts on Female Homosexuality, 850--1780 A.D. (Teneo Press, 2009)

Samar Habib, Female Homosexuality in the Middle East: Histories and Representations (London: Routledge, 2007)

Samar Habib, Islam and Homosexuality (Praeger, 2010)

E. J. Hernández Peña, ‘Reclaiming Alterity: Strangeness and the Queering of Islam in Medieval and Early Modern Spain’, Theology & Sexuality, 22 (2016) 42-56

Gregory S. Hutcheson, ‘The Sodomitic Moor: Queerness in the Narrative of Reconquista’, in Queering the Middle Ages, ed. by Glen Burger and Steven F. Kruger (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001), pp. 99-122.

Gregory S. Hutcheson et al., eds., Queer Iberia: Sexualities, Cultures, and Crossings from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999)

Scott Alan Kugle, Homosexuality in Islam: Critical Reflections on Gay, Lesbian, and Transgender Muslims (Oneworld Publications, 2010)

Stephen O. Murray and Will Roscoe, Islamic Homosexualities: Culture, History, and Literature (New York: New York University Press, 1997)

Anyway. Let me know if you want me to expand on any of these topics in more detail, and I hope some of these resources are helpful!

See you in the New Year.

bullet points cause i’m too fucking tired to do anything else: 

if you buy h0gwarts l3gacy you’re actively feeding a TERF. you’re giving her money. you’re helping her profit. full stop. idgaf if you rpf or consume or write hp fanfic–fuck, i write hp fanfic to try and make it what it could have been and to process my feelings about the foundational fucking series of my childhood being so absolutely grotesquely coopted and destroyed–but if you buy any fucking hp merch or have anything to do with it at this point monetarily we are fucking done. 

if you buy h0gwarts l3gacy you’re contributing to the active transformation of hp into antisemitic, transphobic, white supremacist dogwhistles. people are getting fucking death threats. this is not a fucking joke. this game was written by an antisemite and it is worse than even my worst nightmares. do not fucking touch it. 

if the two above points don’t convince you, fucking unfollow and block me. i can’t deal with this shit. i don’t know how to make it clearer that funding this game is funding TERF and antisemitic rhetoric in a way that will kill people. if you choose to do it anyway, i want nothing to do with you at all. 

there is something so cool about the prefix dis- in words. dispassionate. disillusioned. disuse. dis- doesnt just mean an absence, it means the essence of the word has been leeched out. your passion has been sucked dry. your blissful ignorance has been torn away. the object is forgotten somewhere knowing the joy of being loved and used and the shame of becoming unneeded even more so.

isn't it insane though how schizophrenic people are viewed as violent and dangerous by the majority of society when in reality schizophrenic people are nearly 14 times more likely to be on the receiving end of violence than to be the perpetrators...

What do you all study when you're doing art studies??

So Netflix is releasing this animated movie but here’s the thing - all backgrounds are done in AI. No actual BG artists were hired or credited for this work.

And here’s the kicker - I gave them too much credit. I realized that not even the AI users are credited apparently. Check this out:

“+Human”. No names, no nothing. 

I know it’s tempting, but please don’t hate-watch this thing. Numbers equal profit even if the people watching are just doing it to mock. Don’t give Netflix and other studios even more incentive to fire more animators and replace them with machines trained on their work and skill. 

Hilarously, the excuse used is ‘there aren’t enough artists’. That’s not true - there are more than enough artists, but the real issue is that no one wants to pay a living wage. Here’s a short video about the reality of animation in Japan.

The biggest winners in this equation at the end of the day are the AI infrastructure owners - owners of Midjourney, Stable Diffusion, etc. Do not feed this machine, it creates more monopolization of entire industries, raises a powerful few and dehumanizes the rest.

The first official step towards banning any and all LGBTQ+ art and literature has been taken.

This is what hypersexualizing queer topics was always leading towards. Expect this to be the signal flare that gets some state legislature barreling forward to enact this exact measure, solely so the bill can be struck down, challenged legally, then taken all the way to SCOTUS.

...

Repeating what I said on Twitter: This is a good time to remind people that just being LGBTQ in this moment in time can be considered an outright radical act, so anything less than going all-in on the life you want to lead is fucking pointless.

Put another way, if you're putting actual time and energy into respectability shit right now, do everyone *and* yourself a huge favor, and stop wasting your time.

You can't fucking negotiate with Christian Terrorists.

Evelyn and Philip open rp