Tumblr Tuesday
Happy Tuesday, Tumblr! You survived another Monday, which is a start. The real question is: Will you survive after all those embarrassing photos of yourself from Halloween surface and spread around the web? I submit that you will, if only because you’ll be distracted by your addiction to all things Tumblr, including the following Tumblr Tuesday selections. They won’t judge you, even if your friends and family will. (I am testing something)
The Day in Photos
The fine people at DailyMe run this exemplary photo blog which captures the news of the day. Everything is generously tagged, which is helpful when you’re looking for that perfect AP photo of a cute baby panda.These Are My Dreams
If you’re into analyzing your dreams, you’ll want to stay awake for this. Zing! TAMD is a collective dream journal, which means this blog has a legitimate excuse for reading like the script from a Spike Jonze movie.Black and WTF
This site makes me wish the internet had been around since photography was invented. Think of all the epic memes and intergenerational lulz we’d be sharing with our grandparents right now.Fuck Yeah Venn Diagrams
Imagine if John Venn could see us now. He invented the Venn diagram in 1881 to demonstrate all hypothetically possible relations between sets and today we’re using them for comedic purposes. And I’m looking him up on Wikipedia. Madness.Toby, Dave & Ian Explain XKCD
xkcd is, of course, a webcomic of romance, sarcasm, math, and language. Toby, Dave & Ian Explain XKCD is a Tumblr blog of answers, speculation, evidence, and interpretation.Who do you nominate for next Tumblr Tuesday?
The ‘news’ is the replica of the never-happened events
According to Raymond Queneau remembering and forgetting are like the metal pipe and the rust covering it. You must scrape the rust to polish the pipe. You must forget to remember the important things.
Whatever “important” means, the selection of memories follows a pattern. Members of one certain group share a pattern, which in return become one very typical characteristic of the community and all its members. Borrowing the term from Thomas S. Kuhn this shared pattern could be identified as the paradigm a solid guide for remembering and forgetting.
For example the members of the Hungarian interwar period aristocracy share the paradigm that the Soviet troops conquered Hungary from 1944. Their family history remembers to the upcoming years as a dark age. For them the memories of the summer pioneer camps do not evoke happy student years with lots of laughing and sport, as the paradigm of conquest filters out the happy bits and saves the sombre ones. Meanwhile Jews recall these years as liberation. For them the very same pioneer camp can be the memory of freedom and equality with others.
The point is that these paradigms are not only influencing how they interpret the very same experience but what they can recall from the very same event. It is the attention to the detail that varies, as details are filtered by the pattern of the community.
Having said that all stories remember in biased ways to past events. Like the layers of an onion the layers of interpretations surround the past. The problem is that as you peel away these layers finally you will find air.
