why are we here? just to buffer?

"youth doesn't rhyme with mouth" it could if you weren't a coward

"soldier doesn't rhyme with moldier" it could if you weren't a coward

"deface doesn't rhyme with preface" it could if you weren't a coward

"forfeit doesn't rhyme with albeit" it could if you weren't a coward

"coward doesn't rhyme with toward" it could. if you were a [k(w)ɔ˞ d].

(trying to delicately ask if my friend's new bf is scrawny) does he... have scrawn?

scrimshaw is a nepo baby art form. good luck breaking into scrimshaw without daddy's ivory reserves

not romantic not platonic but a secret third thing [what would happen between earth and the moon if the earth stopped spinning as illustrated by xkcd randall munroe]

[ID: A page from a What If? book that reads, "In fact, the Moon — our faithful companion — would act to undo the damage Andrew's scenario caused. Right now, the Earth spins faster than the Moon, and our tides slow down the Earth's rotation while pushing the Moon away from us. (There's a footnote here, that says, "See 'Leap Seconds,' http://what-if.xkcd.com/26, for an explanation of why this happens.") If we stopped rotating, the Moon would stop drifting away from us. Instead of slowing us down, its tides would accelerate our spin. Quietly, gently, the Moon's gravity would tug on our planet..."

Here, the page has a comic of the Earth and Moon. There are four "panels" — there are no lines separating them, but there are four depictions of the Earth and Moon — and in each, Africa and Eurasia are shown on the Earth as the Moon spins around it. The Moon says, "Hey, Earth. Earth? Why'd you stop? / Oh no. Are you okay? Earth, are you okay? / Don't be scared, Earth! I can help! / I'm here, Earth. Your moon is here."

The text finishes, "... and Earth would start turning again." There is a final panel of the comic, where the Earth has turned, showing Australia, a bit of Asia, and the Pacific Ocean. The Moon tells the Earth, "I will never leave you." /end ID]

well. whatever burns your goat

wei wuxian smiling at his shidis yunmeng jiang disciples as they rush to and swarm around jiang cheng THE UNTAMED (2019) — episode fifty

[Image transcript: These days, The Fall has something of a cult reputation among the ones who know, though it remains elusive on home video and streaming. That’s something Tarsem Tarsem wants to rectify, and soon. “The rights have reverted back to me and I have a 4K restoration,” he says. “I feel like it needs to be out there. People are watching really bad YouTube versions and everybody’s asking about it. I always wish they were around when the movie came out because no one wanted anything to do with it. It just tanked. But in the next two or three months, I’d really like to find a home for it.” /end transcript]

In previous years I've tried uprooting small fir trees in my woods to use as Christmas trees, making sure to be gentle in the process and keep as much of their root system as I could, but when I replanted them in the woods later it just never worked. The trees didn't appreciate being treated like this, so last year I didn't even try replanting my Christmas tree and just fed it to the llamas (who did appreciate.)

I meant to do the same this year, and on my to-do list this week I had "cut a Christmas tree" and "get rid of 10m2 of broom plants" (this is on my to-do list in perpetuity. They grow so rampantly, if I didn't fight back there would be no pasture left.)

^ But then after I went and cut a bunch of horrible brooms I thought, well this is absurd, I'm going to kill a perfectly nice fir tree that I have no beef with, to have something green in my living-room for Christmas, when I could humiliate my plant nemesis by festooning its slain offspring with tinsel? I mean, shrubs are green. They fit the bill. I bet with a star on top they could pass for a Christmas tree.

At first I tried to cut a tall and large broom, then poke holes in its trunk with my drill to stick smaller broom branches in there like this: \o/ to give it a rough Christmas tree shape. It didn't work. Brooms as it turns out are extremely dense and fibrous and my drill didn't like drilling into them one bit.

So I lowered my expectations, and started gathering a big bouquet of younger brooms (the only positive aspect of broom invasiveness is that I have an infinite number of shrubs to experiment on. I cut a half dozen of them to try and drill holes into them and by the time I gave up, another two dozen had grown back in their place). I tied up my broom bouquet into something vaguely reminiscent of a fir and, I mean, with a star, it sort of looks the part?

I had to do the tying-up part several times, because the pretty and festive golden string I initially used was too weak. This bouquet of broom branches may look placid and easygoing in photographs, but when tied together tightly, it is determined to free itself.

But I managed to tame it using hay bale string. It didn't look happy with its fate, but I mean, it's a broom shrub. Its only ambition in life is to conquer as much pasture territory as possible and add it to its broom empire. It does not want to be a decorative plant in a living-room.

Take any historical figure who was mainly known as a ruthless conqueror and try to picture turning him into a Christmas tree. He won't look happy about it.

I ended up making two Christmas Brooms, one for the greenhouse and one for my living-room. The greenhouse one was originally meant for the living-room, but it was made up of particularly obstinate Pampe-like branches and I was worried one of my cats would poke it and the "tree" would suddenly break its chains in an explosion of vegetal triumph and traumatise the cat.

It may look like a peaceful Christmas Yew in the below pic, but don't underestimate its very strong desire to free itself from even the tough hay bale string, which forced me to use my garlands to tie it up some more, wrapping them around the "tree" less loosely and festively than usual. But I put my biggest star on top and that means it looks like a Christmas tree. A Christmas tree with a restraining order.

This tree is held together with tinsel, threats, and Christmas magic.

In the dark and from afar you really can't tell it's a bunch of unruly invasive shrubs tied together <3 And here's the much thinner and therefore less angry version in my living-room:

It was tilting to the left somewhat worryingly so I put a heavy stuffed hedgehog at the bottom to stabilise it, and a mountain goat at the top to dissuade it. All hands on deck. They both look somewhat petrified, like they are begging the faux-tree to remain a tree for the duration of the holidays...

Thus ends my Christmas Broom journey. It was a bit of a pain to set up but at least an innocent fir out there got to escape a grim fate (devoured by llamas), and a small gang of invasive shrubs get to be looked at with approval and joy for the first time in their life. It's a win-win.

If you know anything about Al-Nakba, everything you see now feels like deja vu. I look at the escalation of genocidal violence in Gaza and I am eerily reminded of the stories of the Nakba survivors in my own family because time is really just a flat circle and I would argue that Al-Nakba never really ended for Palestinians. Because how could you say Al-Nakba, literally meaning the Catastrophe, has ever stopped for us?

I mean, look at what we've been seeing. I see schools and homes and hospitals bombed in Gaza and I think of the terror campaigns of the Hagana, the Irgun, and Lehi (who integrated into the literal IOF - terrorist colonizers through and through), who blew up homes and schools and threw bombs into crowds of Arabs. I see the IOF drop leaflets from the sky in Gaza warning Palestinians to flee to the south or face punishment and I think of the loudspeakers in Palestinian villages warning if they did not leave their homes they would face terrible consequences like mass murder and rape of Deir Yassin.

I see the men (and as many pointed out, children and women too) in Gaza rounded up, stripped of their clothes, and carted off to who knows where, and then I think of people like Haim Avinoam, who was ordered by the Hagana to circle Balad al-Shaykh and kill as many men as they could. Or how in the villages and towns that were taken over by the Hagana, men of military age were expelled or imprisoned in POW camps.

I see IOF soldiers in Gaza looting Palestinian homes and rummaging through their belongings for all of social media to see and think of the looting that happened in 1948 - settlers taking precious belongings like jewelry and books but also entire stores and homes. I see the openly genocidal statements of Israeli officials and think of the letters and dreams of Zionists who orchestrated the Nakba, like David Ben-Gurion (the first prime minister of Israel), who would write to Moshe Sharett about starving Arabs out of Jaffa and Haifa and even to his own son wrote: 'The Arabs will have to go, but one needs an opportune moment for making this happen, such as a war.'

I push back strongly on the Israeli notion that all of this started on Oct 7th, because it is 1) ahistorical and 2) frames everything that is happening as a reaction to 'Palestinian violence' that just came out of nowhere and not that Palestinian violence is a reaction in itself to over 75 years of consistent Israeli settler violence. This is Al-Nakba.

I hate how people can openly complain about "overpopulation" in the global south and "low birthrates" in europe and japan

If you're white and you have 8 kids you have a big happy family and you could even get a tv show from it

If you're black and have 8 kids you're contributing to the downfall of the west

It's so blatantly racist, when talk of low birth rates come up here (In Norway, but I assume same in other european countries) the solution is never immigration or adoption. Immigration (from global south, not from white countries) is a problem that needs to be solved/stopped apparently, but we also need... More people to be born??? It is so transparently racist and based in white supremacy, I can scarcely fathom that it's still even said outright, aloud with 0 consequences.

it is not just racist but a kind of anxious racism rooted in the tension between needing cheap labour to sustain capitalist growth and needing to maintain a white supremacist status quo. australia has always struggled with this, oscillating between importing labour for the sake of profit and turning it away for the sake of white purity. all the way from blackbirding and indentured asian workers in the 1800s to south european tradesmen post WW2 to the end of the white australia policy (which was not a triumph of anti racism but a concession to economic interest). right now there’s an “immigration crisis” because the government has decided the best way to pretend we’re not in a recession is to artificially inflate the economy via skilled migrants and their money. so these migrants are now the scapegoat for the concurrent “housing crisis” “rental crisis” “cost of living crisis” despite the fact that none of these problems would be truly solved by reducing immigration because the deterioration of social infrastructure is endemic to neoliberal capitalism. we have almost no social housing left but the most pressing problem is that international students are inflating inner city apartment rents and keeping vacancies low? despite the fact that those students have been allowed in the country BECAUSE of their relative wealth?

the non-racist answer to low birth rates is not immigration insofar as the question is still: how do we maintain a viable class of workers that can keep generating profit and reducing the need for social infrastructure. the need for aged care workers is going to be absolutely massive in the coming years and if these low-birth-rate countries resort to immigration to meet that need, i bet they will do everything they can to ensure those care workers remain an exploited underclass

sorry but it’s actually so horrific how little of a sense of community people have, how little regard they extend towards the other humans around them. killing people for being loud on the subway or turning around in your driveway. loading your gun and waiting at the door because a child ran your doorbell unexpectedly. ring cameras, neighborhoodapp, community watch group Facebook pages. you’ve assigned yourself the role of the one true peacekeeper and casted everyone else around you as a threat to be controlled. there’s no connection or love or compassion. just a deep distrust and hatred.

and the people who face the most significant consequences from this are the ones who are already deemed as outsiders. people of color, especially Black people, disabled people, people with mental illnesses, homeless people.

and so many people are willfully promoting this complete alienation from each other. the obsession with true crime, the hatred directed at children for existing in public spaces, the policing and controlling of where homeless people are allowed to be / what they’re allowed to do, the constant fearmongering about public transportation. you are building a society of FEAR. you are conditioning yourself to distrust everyone around you. you need to make an active, conscious effort to engage with the world and the life around you in a healthy manner.

I have never seen such an accurate depiction of what it looks like without glasses.

For writers with good eyesight, this is a good reference for what it’s like trying to see without our glasses

I’m a broken record at this point but people messing up your name and not caring is absolutely a racialised experience. no one expects people to know how to pronounce names they’ve never heard before the first time they see them, but it’s an issue when they don’t care about getting it right at all (when, in contrast, people are generally very apologetic when they screw up white people’s names and they generally correct the error). there’s a generalised disrespect and disregard for the names of nonwhite people, especially if those names are non-European (which occurs interpersonally but also shows itself in discussions of public and historical figures). ask any given person of colour (including ones with European or Europeanised names) and they could probably write you a dissertation about how their name is responded to and how those responses are clearly calling on racialised scripts. no one here is upset over nothing.

some relatable Poc Name Troubles

if he was still alive I know in my heart that Terry Pratchett would have done a bit about Igors and Igorinas doing gender confirmation surgery by now. going into a lab full of bubbling vials and picking out a penis from a tank the way you pick a lobster. that one, please. you gotta be careful though because they'll really try to upsell you into getting two or three installed. people going to the clinic as pairs and just having parts swapped out for a discounted rate. maybe you actually just trade brains, that's even easier. Igorth have already been doing that thurgery for thenturieth.

#one day an igor forgets the lock the cage and a pack of penises escapes into ankh-morpork#the watch spends the next three weeks rounding them up (via @thestuffedalligator)

Okay but do you see how Jesper saying they're like brothers and Kaz saying yes doesn't have nearly the same level of drama as Kaz accidentally calling him his dead brother's name in an argument that ends with them trying to beat the shit out of each other

Last night I dreamed that someone invented a new version of chess called Rookmeo and Juliet where two rooks are in love and trying to run away together. To achieve this they have to make it to the other side of the board, but these rooks don't have any visible signs to differenciate them from the rest, just a small mark in their base. Neither of the players knows what rook from the other side is in love with their rook, so they have to play a regular game of chess, fully aware that they might unknowingly kill the lover of their rook. If they kill it, the game keeps going, but their rook betrays them, switches sides and turns into a second queen for the other player. People wrote a ton of essays about the symbolism and metaphors of that version of chess and the creator didn't have the heart to tell them that he simply invented it because he thought Rookmeo was a great pun

obsessed with mass market paperbacks. their pleasing rectangular proportions. how they fit badly in a hoodie pocket so you can drag them around everywhere with you like a temporary little buddy. the way they fit in your hand because they're MADE for human hands and not as bookshelf decoration. the way the pages feel when you riffle them gently with your thumb. How pristine and crisp they look when you get them and how creased and folded they look when you're done, even if you try to be nice to them. how that wear is okay, how that's correct actually, because they're made with the philosophy that books aren't meant to be PRETTY, they're meant to be read. that little ripple new ones get on the left side from where you hold them when you're reading, the way the ripple only goes as far as you've read, because u change stories by reading as they are changing you. how you can find thousands of these creased and folded and loved little dudes in every thrift store and used book shop and neighborhood library and you can instantly see the ones that someone carried around in a backpack for weeks or read to pieces or gave up on halfway through because they wear being read like fresh snow wears footprints. I love these poorly made, subpar little rectangles so much. truly the people's books.

Fuck personality quizzes who do you think of when I say Neil

please tag your most obscure blorbo