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@chrysaliscomplex

cori * they/she * jewish * queer
by the most basic metric i’m an adult

[I.D. - 

I wanted a poem to come out of my sadness, but no poem came. I wanted a revolution to come out of my burnout, but no revolution came. I wanted a bird to fly through my open window, but my window was closed. I wanted sun on an evening when it was already dark. I wanted just a bit of grief rather than despair. &, in my shame, I wanted my childhood back. I wanted to walk backward out of the room where I kept my secrets. I wanted to say I’m hurt before my hurt became a character trait I told no one but myself. When I wanted unknowing, I was given certainty, & when I wanted the hard & fixed line, I was given mystery. Sometimes, I wanted to give it all back, but to who, I wondered, & how? I wanted a life to come out of my life, but instead I was left with my life. All that wanting, I think now, & still I woke this morning to light & the memory of the time a bird did fly through the open window of my apartment, &, scared & senseless, shat all over the couch before leaving. All that wanting, right? Sometimes it happens & sometimes it doesn’t & sometimes it happens worse. Make do, little friend I call myself. Walk backward out of the room you have made out of your wanting into the room of where you are. The poem is here. The revolution, too. & love, still, even in the evening, when light still shines.

End I.D.]

maybe its bc i live in a place where forestry is one of the dominant industries but like tree planting rly isnt good. like the majority of the time its done by forestry companies to “offset” what they’ve cut down, and they almost always just plant fir & spruce monocrops and then they prevent the rest of the forest from naturally regenerating by spraying glyphosate, because they want to kill off the hardwoods that grow back since softwoods are worth more to the pulp industry… anything a company does that is supposedly “green” never is.

They aren’t actually replanting the forest, they’re building lumber farms in the middle of it and trying to pass them off as the same thing to people who think a forest is just trees because they live in a world mediated by images and have never been in an actual forest long enough to be able to tell healthy diverse growth from a struggling monocrop.

This is one of the things I like to bring up when I’m giving nature tours in places with a logging history (which, around here, is almost everyplace with trees.) It’s a great opportunity to talk about things like biodiversity and structural complexity, and how tree plantations lack both and why that’s a bad thing.

Before Barbenheimer, there was Apocalypse in Pink,” the August 1983 theme of fashion/culture magazine SPECTAGORIA. The issue’s controversial imagery of Barbie-esque models attempting to stay gorgeous and glamorous amidst nuclear annihilation sought to, in the words of editor/photographer Sera Clairmont, “revel in the morbid absurdity of the new American condition,” an “anxiety vibrating underneath all our plastic smiles.”

“It’s The Hot Pink Cold War,” Clairmont wrote in her introduction. “It’s ‘Material Girl’ on the radio and ‘WarGames’ at the drive-in. It’s ‘Girls Just Wanna Have Fun’ interrupted by the emergency broadcast signal. We’re told to look sexy, dress fashionable, make money, and spend money, but be sure we’re just the right amount of terrified about the bomb. Get that Malibu dream home, keep working on that perfect body, sip cocktails by the pool in your little pink bikini and watching the stocks go up — but STAY VIGILANT! and for God’s sake vote Republican, because that dream home could melt into a pink plastic inferno at any given moment. Just don’t stop smiling as the blast liquefies your skin into bubbling ooze like a Barbie doll in a microwave - it’s bad for the economy.”

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NOTE: This is a work of fiction created by me. This alternate reality horror story is part of my NightmAIres narrative art series (visit that link for a lot more). NightmAIres are windows into other worlds and interconnected alternate histories, conceived/written by me and visualized with synthography and Photoshop.

If you enjoy my work, consider supporting me on Patreon for frequent exclusive hi-res wallpaper packs, behind-the-scenes features, downloads, events, contests, and an awesome fan community. Direct fan support is what keeps me going as an independent creator, and it means the world to me.

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“Some periods of our growth are so confusing that we don’t even recognize that growth is happening. We may feel hostile or angry or weepy and hysterical, or we may feel depressed. It would never occur to us, unless we stumbled on a book or a person who explained to us, that we were in fact in the process of change, of actually becoming larger, spiritually, than we were before. Whenever we grow, we tend to feel it, as a young seed must feel the weight and inertia of the earth as it seeks to break out of its shell on its way to becoming a plant. Often the feeling is anything but pleasant. But what is most unpleasant is the not knowing what is happening. Those long periods when something inside ourselves seems to be waiting, holding its breath, unsure about what the next step should be, eventually become the periods we wait for, for it is in those periods that we realize that we are being prepared for the next phase of our life and that, in all probability, a new level of the personality is about to be revealed.”

Alice Walker, Living by the Word

“A key factor in the perpetuation of white-body supremacy is many people’s refusal to experience clean pain around the myth of race. Instead, usually out of fear, they choose the dirty pain of silence and avoidance and, invariably, prolong the pain.”

— Resmaa Menakem, My Grandmother’s Hands: Racialized Trauma and the Pathway to Mending Our Hearts and Bodies"

19th century Purim pastry stamps from Odessa, Ukraine. Pisces and Fish symbols are associated with the Jewish calendar month of Adar in which Purim occurs.

The Jewish Museum, New York City

it’s so funny that margot robbie said she read the script and thought “wow, no way they let us make this movie,” even though when i watched it i was like, “yeah these seem like pretty standard ideas that i support and have been on board with for a while,” but like, i forget i live in a super left-leaning online bubble and that, to an average audience, this film might seem radical. given some of the backlash, especially from conservatives, it clearly was

I really love how A Series of Unfortunate Events worked Lemony’s narration into the show by just having him show up for casual exposition, without anyone noticing or acknowledging him. It’s such an integral part of the books, and the story really wouldn’t work as well without an outside narrator wandering in to deliver random tangents about philosophy and word definitions, and repeatedly warning the audience that the story is depressing as fuck.

But probably the best use of Lemony as a narrator is in the second episode of the Austere Academy, where they have Lemony doing his usual thing of showing up in Jacques’s cab to talk about philosophy, and Jacques starts whistling halfway through the monologue. Then Lemony clarifies he’s quoting something his brother said, and he’d give anything to sit and talk with him again. And then the monologue just… stops. The entire episode stops, just to linger on this one scene of Jacques and Lemony whistling a song together. Except they aren’t whistling together, Jacques is driving an empty cab down an empty road and whistling to himself, because Lemony isn’t there. He’s telling the story from a decade in the future, Jacques is long dead, but Lemony needs to pretend otherwise for just a minute. Then the story can continue. It almost feels like he’s stalling, in a way - Lemony wants to live in this moment of Jacques being calm and safe, because in this moment, Jacques is alive, but the story is inevitably moving towards his death.

It’s a really important moment, and honestly might be my favourite scene in the whole show. Lemony’s grief and how it colours every part of the narrative is such an integral part of the story; he’s telling a story about three children he cares about going through hell, and that story begins with the death of the woman he loved, has his brother’s murder in the middle, and ends with his sister’s death. Lemony isn’t involved in the story personally, he’s just the guy telling it in the aftermath, but he’s never a detached narrator. He knows the entire story, and he spends the whole time grieving for things he hasn’t told us yet.

a five year old had my phone & this is what he searched

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[image description: searches for "the weird bees," "the werewolf," and "the deadly rat." end description]

Hey yeah in the midst of all the hype and the strikes, can we PLEASE fucking talk about this

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^link to the article that screenshot is from.

Not crediting the vfx crew is actually fairly common practice in Hollywood, and because vfx artists aren’t unionized, there is no recourse for the worker and no penalty for the studio when credits are omitted or misrepresented. In a day and age when literally everyone connected to a film production gets a credit, from craft services to on-set teachers of child actors to random “production babies” who didn’t even work on a film, it is utterly incomprehensible that vfx artists, whose work makes possible the final images that appear onscreen, are routinely omitted from screen credits. Oppenheimer is yet another example of how live-action filmmakers like Nolan denigrate and misrepresent the work of vfx workers to the media, and then add insult to injury by not even acknowledging them in the credits. The fact that over 125 people who contributed to Oppenheimer’s success aren’t listed in the credits is a reminder of how the vfx industry is a corrupt and broken enterprise that undermines and disrespects its workers at every juncture.

I have an end-of-life patient to whom I spoke today. She burst out laughing and said, "It was all such fun. I just had so much fun." I wish this for everyone. I wish that we each would meet death laughing, with little regret and even less fear.