Willowyandcerebral - ❀

The Big Dipper Never Sets ✨

Look up on a clear night in the Northern Hemisphere, and chances are you’ll spot the Big Dipper — one of the most recognizable star patterns in the sky.

It’s not a constellation, but an asterism: a prominent shape made of stars that’s part of a larger constellation — in this case, Ursa Major, the Great Bear.

What makes the Big Dipper special is that it’s circumpolar — it never dips below the horizon at mid to high northern latitudes. Instead, it appears to rotate around Polaris, the North Star, staying visible all year long. As Earth spins and the seasons change, the Dipper slowly pivots through the night sky, pointing in different directions depending on the time of year.

For centuries, sailors, travelers, and stargazers have used the Big Dipper to find true north and navigate by the stars. Its reliability makes it both a celestial compass and a familiar anchor in the ever-shifting sky.

So the next time you’re under the stars, find the Big Dipper and know that you’re looking at a cosmic constant that has guided humans for generations.

Arabic dark academia

Having tea first thing in the morning, the afternoon, evening, night and whenever you have nothing to do and whenever you have everything to do

Practicing calligraphy, hoarding calligraphy pens and quills like a dragon hoards its jewels

Youre now a calligragon btw

Pretentious hand written letters

Fragments of poetry and prose on the wall

In Egypt you can buy a vintage gramophone (as far as I remember)

Wrinkling your nose at orientalists who have clearly never been anywhere near the culture they're trying to portray.

Appreciating the orientalists who have in fact been there and paint like it. (Sorry to disappoint but there were never sexy slave babes roaming the streets)

Mourning for the scholars of Al Andaluas and times when Arabic was the language of science

Arguing over e'arab (the value of a word with regard to others in the sentence) and balagha (it translates to "eloquence" but is more like a complex version of figures of speech) of words

Arabic being such a complex language you get carried away sometimes

Passing the allotted wordcount so you start going over your paper and compressing a whole sentence, consisting of a conjunction, a subject, a verb and two objects into a word in desperation

Words like فأسقيناكموه (faa'skainakumooh) meaning "and so we have let you drink it" being an example.

Tea over burning coal. Over logs (hatab) tea over bokhour/oud hits different and you know it.

Brewing coffee over low heat and humming to Layali Al Ouns

"No offense but I like real coffee" when someone mentions starbucks

Um Kulthoum and Asmahan are superior you cant change my mind.

NO I DID NOT FORGET ABDUL HALIM HAFEZ I WANTED HIM A BULLET OF HIS OWN.

Fareed al atrash concerts at 3 am.

Nothing you ever cook will be under seasoned.

Reciting poetry to yourself in the mirror

Big chunks of jewelry (usually gold) engraved or woven through with intricate patterns and swirls. Wearing four bracelets in one hand is absolutely fine and under dressing is a myth

Owning swords is not out of fashion (ancient arabs were well known for their swordsmanship) but using them is, unfortunately <3

Wondering how they won wars with these swords. I couldn't even lift it enough to stab myself if I wanted

Extra names. People called شهد honey (shahd), جمال beauty (jamal), زهرة flower (zahra), ليلى night (laila), سماء sky (samaa), مهند/سيف sword (mohanad/saif) and صفاء purity (safaa) like it's the most normal thing in the world (which it should be, along with names of ancient gods)

Poetry from the abbasid era describing palaces and fountains and music so eloquently your heart skips several beats and you wonder how it is still beating at all and if, after all, you have been born in the wrong era.

Classic poetry from the school of Apollo brimming with romance and yearning you have never seen matched.

Poems that tear at your heart and stitch it whole with every bayt (verse? The equivalent for it) and you keep coming back for more.

Stories so well told that you swear you can see the princes and charmers and musicians and dancers all flicker to life in the flames before you

Historical masjids and churches.

Going to the palaces and shrines and towers from the ancient days of yore

Not exclusively (as neither is anything on this list) arabic but BRAIDS and braid jewellery that clinks when you shake your head

The unwavering belief that poetry is meant to be sung.

Singing poetry because it is meant to be sung

Thick eyebrows

Lining already lash lined eyes with kohl.

Beautiful brown eyes. Honey eyes. Chocolate eyes. Freshly turned earth eyes. Eyes that hold all the ethereal beauty of the world.

Hair styled in dark, thick curls or braids

Savouring the way the words move around from your throat to your chest to the tip of your tongue, like liquid gold,

The sweet music from the strings of a qitharah (string instrument)

Scented candles are cute, but have you ever heard of oud (perfume infused wood)? Anyhow one of my Sudanese friends make it AND IT IS BEAUTIFUL.

Wanting to study with the scholars of baghdad and azhar so bad

Recognizing that for all your culture, some of it is inspired by others and that's okay.

Please add what you can to this list. It is far from complete.

Dreamed I was swimming with fish, then I jumped out of the water and flew with the birds, then I fell and turned into a rock, then I grew into a tree.

just learned that magnolias are so old that they’re pollinated by beetles because they existed before bees

Slate Magazine

I’m the TikTok Couch Guy. Here’s What It Was Like Being Investigated on the Internet.

The invasive TikTok sleuthing I experienced was not an isolated instance, but rather the latest manifestation of a large-scale sleuthing cul

Posted without commentary:

On Sept. 17, 2021, my long-distance girlfriend, Lauren, paid a surprise visit to me while a friend filmed my reaction. Three days later, she set the 19-second clip to a hokey Ellie Goulding song and posted it to roughly 200 TikTok followers. The first commenters—Lauren’s close friends—had positive things to say. But soon strangers—among whom the video was less well received—began commenting, criticizing my reaction time or my being seated on a couch next to friends who happened to be of the opposite sex. “Girl he ain’t loyal.” “Red flag! He didn’t get up off the couch and jump up and down in excitement.” “Bro if my man was on a couch full of girls IM WALKING BACK OUT THE DOOR.”

As comments accusing me of infidelity rolled in, the video quickly became the topic of fierce online debate, à la “The Dress.” I, an ordinary college sophomore, became TikTok’s latest meme: Couch Guy. TikTok users made parody videos, American Eagle advertised a no-effort Couch Guy Halloween costume, and Rolling Stone, E! Online, The Daily Show, and The View all covered the phenomenon. On TikTok, Lauren’s video and the hashtag #CouchGuy, respectively, have received more than 64 million and 1 billion views.

While the Couch Guy meme was lighthearted on its surface, it turned menacing as TikTok users obsessively invaded the lives of Lauren, our friends, and me—people with no previous desire for internet fame, let alone infamy. Would-be sleuths conducted what Trevor Noah jokingly called “the most intense forensic investigation since the Kennedy assassination.” During my tenure as Couch Guy, I was the subject of frame-by-frame body language analyses, armchair diagnoses of psychopathy, comparisons to convicted murderers, and general discussions about my “bad vibes.”

At times, the investigation even transcended the digital world—for instance, when a resident in my apartment building posted a TikTok video, which accumulated 2.3 million views, of himself slipping a note under my door to request an interview. (I did not respond.) One viewer gleefully commented, “Even if this guy turned off his phone, he can’t escape the couch guy notifications,” a fact that the 37,600 users who liked it presumably celebrated too. Under another video, in which hall mates of mine promised to confront Couch Guy once they reached 1 million likes (they didn’t), a comment suggested that they “secretly see who’s coming and going from his place”—and received 17,800 approving likes. The New York Post reported on, and perhaps encouraged, such invasions of my privacy. In an article about the “frenzy … frantically trying to determine the identity” of the “mystery man” behind the meme, the Post asked, “Will the real ‘couch guy’ please stand up?” Meanwhile, as internet sleuths took to public online forums to sniff out my name, birthdate, and place of residence, the threat of doxxing loomed over my head.

Exacerbating these invasions of my privacy was the tabloid-style media coverage that I received. Take, for example, one online magazine article that solicited insights from a “body language expert” who concluded that my accusers “might be onto something,” since the “angle of [my] knees signals disinterest” and my “hands hint that [I’m] defensive.” This tabloid body language analysis—something typically reserved for Kardashians, the British royal family, and other A-listers—made me, a private citizen who had previously enjoyed his minimal internet presence, an unwilling recipient of the celebrity treatment.

Mercifully, my memedom has died down—interest in the Google search term “Couch Guy” peaked on Oct. 5—and I have come to tolerate looks of vague recognition and occasional selfie requests from strangers in public. And my digital scarlet letter has not carried much weight offline, given that Lauren and the other co-stars of the now-infamous video know my true character. Therefore, my anxiety rests only in the prospect that the invasive TikTok sleuthing I experienced was not an isolated instance, but rather—as tech writer Ryan Broderick has suggested—the latest manifestation of a large-scale sleuthing culture.

The sleuthing trend sweeping TikTok ramped up following the disappearance of the late Gabby Petito. As armchair TikTok sleuths flexed their investigative muscles, the app’s algorithm boosted content theorizing about what happened to Petito. Madison Kircher of Slate’s ICYMI podcast noted how her “For You page just decided I simply needed to see” TikTok users’ Gabby Petito videos “over and over again.” It appears that a similar phenomenon occurred with my lower-stakes virality, as I found myself scrolling through countless tweets bemoaning the inescapability of “Couch Guy TikTok.” One user despairingly reported seeing “five tik toks back to back on my [For You page] about couch guy.” (I assure you, though, that nobody despised Couch Guy’s omnipresence more than myself.)

The most recent target of the app’s emerging investigative spirit was Sabrina Prater, a 34-year-old contractor and trans woman, who went viral in November after posting a video of herself dancing in a basement midrenovation. The video’s virality began with parody videos, but quickly veered into the realm of conspiracy theory due to (you guessed it) the video’s apparent “bad vibes”—at which point I got a dreadful sense of déjà vu. As Prater’s video climbed to 22 million views and internet sleuths came together to form a r/WhosSabrinaPrater community on Reddit, Prater faced baseless murder accusations, transphobic comparisons to Buffalo Bill from The Silence of the Lambs, and overzealous vigilantes who threatened to go to her neighborhood to investigate further. This incident reveals the harmful potential of TikTok sleuthing. One expert aptly summed up the Prater saga to Rolling Stone: “It was like watching true crime, internet sleuthing, conspiracy theories, and transphobia collide in a car crash.”

Given the apparent tendency of the TikTok algorithm to present viral spectacles to a user base increasingly hungry for content to analyze forensically, there will inevitably be more Couch Guys or Praters in the future. When they appear on your For You page, I implore you to remember that they are people, not mysteries for you to solve. As users focused their collective magnifying glass on Lauren, my friends, and me—comparing their sleuthing to “watching a soap opera and knowing who the bad guy is”—it felt like the entertainment value of the meme began to overshadow our humanity. Stirred to make a TikTok of my own to quell the increasing hate, I posted a video reminding the sleuths that “not everything is true crime”—which commenters resoundingly deemed “gaslighting.” Lauren’s videos requesting that the armchair investigation stop were similarly dismissed as more evidence of my success as a manipulator, and my friends’ entreaties to respect our privacy, too, fell on deaf ears.

Certainly, noncelebrities have long unwillingly become public figures, and digital pile-ons have existed in some form since the dawn of the digital age—just ask Monica Lewinsky. But on TikTok, algorithmic feedback loops and the nature of the For You page make it easier than ever for regular people to be thrust against their wishes into the limelight. And the extent of our collective power is less obvious online, where pile-ons are delivered, as journalist Jon Ronson put it, “like remotely administered drone strikes.” On the receiving end of the barrage, however, as one finds their reputation challenged, body language hyperanalyzed, and privacy invaded, the severity of our collective power is made much too clear.

i’m so upset

I just realized that the reason ghosts say Boo! is because it’s a latin verb

they’re literally saying ‘I alarm/I am alarming/I do alarm!!

I can’t

🙃 Regular reminder that while Hozier has amazing love songs, he is ALSO very outspoken about his leftist politics, specifically anti-fascism, anti-racism, reproductive rights, Palestinian rights and more.

Take Me To Church and Foreigner’s God are scathing critiques of organized religion, specifically the Catholic Church and the colonization of Ireland.

Moment’s Silence is about oral sex but it’s ALSO about how that specific sexual act is often distorted to a show of power rather than that of love.

Nina Cried Power is an homage to various (mostly Black) civil rights activists from the US and Ireland and a call to follow their path.

Be criticizes anti-migrant policies and Trump and his ilk.

Jackboot Jump is about the global wave of fascism and about protest and resistance.

Swan Upon Leda is about reproductive rights and the violent colonial oppression of Ireland and Palestine.

Eat Your Young is about the ruinous way the 1%/capitalism and arms dealers prioritize short-term profit over everything else to the detriment of the youth/99%

Butchered Tongue is about Irish and other indigenous languages being suppressed and erased by imperial powers.

If any of the above surprised you, please, please delve deeper into Hozier’s music, you’re missing such an important part of his work.

When I shed my skin for you, I left intact my animal heart the desire to crack bones between delicate teeth.

Jeannine Hall Gailey, “The Animal Heart: She Warns Him,” from She Returns to the Floating World (via lifeinpoetry)

i am gonna make it though this year if it kills me