Good to know we're all coping so well with the S2 finale
Artist miles, musicians gwen and hobie. I think Pav's artsy thing would be crafting/jewelry making/embroidery 🤷
as usual inspired by @miraclechildask by @bramblepatch equius occasionally sees flickers of the past
been drawing some werewolf stuff over twitter, here, have them all together as one big sequence. the bit where she's complaining about it keeping her awake is about 2 weeks later. for the record: the talk of coyotes is because there are no wolves here on my island. they are extinct and we imported coyotes to take their place (it did not work well)
Even Weird Al has had that™ experience with Tony Hawk
Tony Hawk IS Forrest Gump
So I looked up why and how this happened, and it turns out Weird Al hired a company called Birdhouse Skateboards to provide some “skate/punk” extras for the video. Birdhouse Skateboards is a company started by Tony Hawk, so not only did Weird Al end up putting Tony Hawk in his video without realizing it, he actually hired Tony Hawk’s company without realizing it! And then Tony Hawk just decided to go along as one of the extras himself.
BTW, he’d already won like 40 contests already, some of them international skateboarding contests. So it’s not like Weird Al cast some unknown skateboarder who ended up becoming World Famous Skateboarder, he was already well known and was running his own Skateboarding company.
Think of it this way. This wasn’t ‘Weird Al got Tony Hawk to be in his video’, this was ‘Tony Hawk found a way to be in a Weird Al Video.’
The chance that Tony Hawk has infiltrated your location or piece of media is low
BUT NEVER ZERO.
wow this is too intimate to share with my close friends or family let me put this on my tumblr blog for hundreds of strangers to see
The wise man, when caught naked in public, covers not his junk but his face.
I think the bicycle helmet discourse really just reinforces the idea that people believe that accidents only happen to the stupid and careless, and that people who get hurt somehow deserve it. And since nobody wants to believe themselves to be stupid, or thinks they could be careless or distracted, it's not necessary to take precautions.
And then they take safety advice as an insult because telling someone to be safe is seen as an accusation of being stupid and irresponsible, and not just a value neutral acknowledgement of statistical inevitably. We see it with masks, and seatbelts, and now bicycle helmets because everyone wants to believe they're too clever to get hurt, and too lucky to get hurt badly, until suddenly you're not and you have to resign, in shame, to being one of the people you previously saw as annoying nags, assuming you're even still alive.
It's easy to see how chemophobia became so widespread to the point that companies advertise their products as containing "only ingredients you can pronounce." It's wretched that this spawned the antivax movement and other similar movements, but there are incredibly good historical reasons behind WHY people are terrified of "chemicals."
Reasons like: Agent Orange, DDT, Superfund sites, any of a wide range of incidents where chemical companies—in many cases, knowingly—poisoned people and communities because Number Go Up. History has shown again and again that companies do not give a fuck about ruining people's lives exposing them to toxic substances.
Unfortunately these people live in a world where EVERYTHING around them contains ingredients they can't pronounce and there is very little knowledge of basic chemistry, and a person has no choice but to either develop life-altering paranoia about contamination, or just settle into a sense of (naive?) security about the Chemicals in the world around them.
So these powerful cultural memories (and totally rational distrust of Bayer, DuPont, and Monsanto) have been hijacked to Sell Product (No chemicals! Ingredients you can pronounce! All Natural! Organic!) and/or been channeled into some horrible and ultimately baseless movements that, these days, form a pipeline straight into fascism.
Alex Jones' anxiety about chemicals "turning the freakin' frogs gay" is part of The Anxiety about a world that is now made of ingredients we can't pronounce. Our world is now made of very different physical stuff than the world of our ancestors, and it makes total sense for panicky reactionaries to blame sexualities, genders, religions, and ways of existence they don't understand on the strange, unprecedented "chemicals" that have intruded into the material components of the world around them.
The material changes to our lives mesh quite nicely with the paranoia of fascism. People, without any scientific expertise that would inform them, decide that "natural" things are good and "artificial" things are bad, and this leads people to reject very simple, comprehensible, and well-understood processes like "heating something up, but not quite to boiling, and letting it cool down" (pasteurization) in favor of "contracting bovine tuberculosis."
But it's not that natural is good and artificial is bad, it's that natural is, at least in theory, understandable, and artificial is bound only to the laws that tell DuPont it must disclose what is in a product being sold and test the product for harms to human and animal life—and the power of those laws to actually control DuPont. Hemlock and nightshade can be recognized and avoided, but a Product emerges from an Amazon Prime box in a curiously sterile afterbirth of plastic and foam, stinking of acrid VOC's that some people enjoy in the form of the "new car smell."
And we know that nature has no shortage of things that kill us that we CAN'T readily detect with our senses, like lead and uranium, but before mining for coal and metals ripped open our Earth and pumped thousands upon thousands of tons of toxic waste up from its depths, any given creek or patch of dirt in Eastern Kentucky was at least less likely to be dangerously toxic and radioactive.
This definitely fuels the blind and often dangerous urge to go back to a time when things were "simpler." It lubricates the slide down into reactionary bigotry a little bit, this abundance of ways the world has gone Wrong and has been irreparably changed.
It gets harder and harder to say "No, natural is not always good/bad, no, unnatural is not always good/bad" and be listened to. Our world is far, far harder to understand now in some ways, but we have to try, and that's a hard sell.
i am Unlimited Trees. i make video games.
hello. this is a little pinned post for me. i am unlimited trees and i am a pixel artist and game developer who has been making video games since 2014.. ive worked on tons of original projects and fan games, with my newest games being ‘UNITRES Dreams’ and 'TREES’ ADVENTURE’ which are on newgrounds dot com and itch.io. i am the silliest game developer of all time ! click the read more for More Info …
