1.04 - The Tower Job

So many doggies

Such a good reminder that there are people out there who enjoy doing seemingly silly little inconsequential jobs. It’s not the job they hate, it’s being treated like undervalued shit.

he sure customized the delivery experience

Fuck you.

Fuck you.

Fuck you.

Fuck you.

Fuck you.

Your horse archers could never hope to best mine. Your bronze is of inferior quality.

Mad because my river delta means my cities can only be besieged by naval forces you don't have.

Jumping up and down furiously and demanding that my court poets draft declamatory verses comparing you to a mandrill.

I am unaffected by your epic poetry because of my bountiful grain tributaries

this sentence makes me hopping mad. WHAT R U TRYING TO TELL ME

How fleeting are all human passions compared with the massive continuity of celery

the default way for things to taste is good. we know this because "tasty" means something tastes good. conversely, from the words "smelly" and "noisy" we can conclude that the default way for things to smell and sound is bad. interestingly there are no corresponding adjectives for the senses of sight and touch. the inescapable conclusion is that the most ordinary object possible is invisible and intangible, produces a hideous cacophony, smells terrible, but tastes delicious. and yet this description matches no object or phenomenon known to science or human experience. so what the fuck

this is what ancient greek philosophy is like

I’ve been getting a lot of these lately, and I guess I just want you all to know what I think when I read them.

[ID: “A cry for help” Boggletheowl talks about approaching this phrase differently in two images mainly full of text, each with a cartoon owl with its head turned in different directions, seeming both assertive and confused with others. Text in first box:

I don’t like the phrase “A cry for help.” I just don’t like how it sounds. When someone says to me, “I’m thinking about suicide, I have a plan; I just need a reason not to do it,” the last thing I see is helplessness.

I think: your depression has been beating you up for years. It’s called you ugly, and stupid, and pathetic, and a failure, for so long that you’ve forgotten that it’s wrong. You don’t see any good in yourself, and you don’t have any hope.

But still, here you are; you’ve come over to me, banged on my door, and said, “Hey! Staying alive is really hard right now! Just give me something to fight with! I don’t care if it’s a stick! Give me a stick and I can stay alive!”

How is that helplessness? I think that’s incredible. You’re like a marine: trapped for years behind enemy lines, your gun has been taken away, you’re out of ammo, you’re malnourished, and you’ve probably caught some kind of jungle virus that’s making you hallucinate giant spiders.

Second image text:

And you’re still just going, “Give me a stick. I’m not dying out here.”

“A cry for help” makes it sound like I’m supposed to take pity on you. But you don’t need my pity. This isn’t pathetic. This is the will to survive. This is how humans lived long enough to become the dominant species. With no help, running on nothing, you’re ready to cut through 100 miles of hostile jungle with nothing but a stick, if that’s what it takes to get to safety.

All I’m doing is handing out sticks.

You’re the one staying alive. / END ID]

@boggletheowl I’m trying to make this wonderful post as accessible as possible. hope you’re ok with it.

i avoid printers at all costs but deep down i think i should've been a printer. life so easy. i sit there all squarelike and when someone has a minor task for me i goFUCK YOU

Maybe this sounds weird, but one of the things that would be REALLY JUICY narratively about a post-AYITL scenario where Logan is the father of Rory's kid but Jess is the guy "in the picture" is... the probable tensions around money. Because realistically, they'd have a situation where Rory and Jess wouldn't have a lot of money, but the kid's other biological parent DOES, and Rory's side of the family DOES, and there will be different expectations (similar to the original series) of what the child "needs" to be "well cared for." Because you KNOW that Logan (and Emily... and Christopher...) will always want to "help them out," but... The CONFLICT there? Jess is proud (so much like Lorelai in that way) and I think it would bother him to accept extravagant hand-outs from Logan, etc., and he KNOWS that "money is Power," but he'd also not want the kid to be deprived of anything... And how would Rory feel about it? Would they have differing expectations/different levels of comfort with the idea of accepting financial help from Rory's family or Rory's ex? And the conflict of Jess feeling insecure about his perceived inability to "offer" as much in a material sense, but having SO MUCH to offer in other areas...

Like, it could be angsty, but it would be SO INTERESTING from a story perspective, and right in line with the themes of the show overall.

It truly is fascinating because I think Rory is actually pretty spoiled about this sort of stuff. Like, sure she spent her early years in a shed, but that's all glossed over with *so* much romanticism and childlike wonder. By the time of the show they're *very* financially comfortable, constant take out, daily eating out, essentially doing whatever they want without worrying about money. (Well, Lorelai probably has to worry about money enough to make it all fit, but it's very much a "how do we do this" rather than a "can we do this".) And then she gets quite accustomed to luxury with the grandparents more in her life. She's shocked and embarrassed by Lorelai clipping coupons, she never seems to *get* Lane struggling with money, she listens and accepts stuff like not buying branded things, but she needs each thing specifically laid out for her, she can't hear "money is tight" and then see the obvious implications of that.

Jess, by contrast, is the person who sleeps in his car when he has to. Who slept on a mattress on the floor for months. Who skipped school to work a job so he had enough money for comfort. He's very used to things being to the bone and understanding the lines between "absolutely necessary" and "first priority past just surviving" and "nice to have but not important". And I think as a kid there were times where, either due to money or due to neglect, he was genuinely without essential or important things, so I think he'd also be more sensitive to when something important might slip through the cracks in favour of something else being prioritised.

One thing I urge adults to unlearn is the stigma surrounding forgetfulness.

Perfect memory retention is rare. A faulty memory can be the result a host of mental illnesses, from ADHD to PTSD. It's not a sign that someone wasn't listening. I have a friend that has a four year gap in her memory due to trauma. I have another with poor short term memory retention because that's one of their autism symptoms.

Your brain can also trick you into misremembering things. I can't tell you how many times I've remembered putting my keys somewhere and unearthed them in a completely different place. I have to remind myself what my birth date is because I said it wrong once and now the wrong date is in my memory forever. I have to come up with mnemonics for birthdays, anniversaries, and events because my brain doesn't do numbers for some reason.

I see people bicker about forgetting a person's favorite food or what their mothers favorite color. I think it's important to forgive people who forget easily.

Denazification, truth and reconciliation, and the story of Germany's story

Germany is the “world champion in remembrance,” celebrated for its post-Holocaust policies of ensuring that every German never forgot what had been done in their names, and in holding themselves and future generations accountable for the Nazis’ crimes.

All my life, the Germans have been a counterexample to other nations, where the order of the day was to officially forget the sins that stained the land. “Least said, soonest mended,” was the Canadian and American approach to the genocide of First Nations people and the theft of their land. It was, famously, how America, especially the American south, dealt with the legacy of slavery and Jim Crow.

Silence begets forgetting, which begets revisionism. The founding crimes of our nations receded into the mists of time and acquired a gauzy, romantic veneer. Plantations — slave labor camps where work was obtained through torture, maiming and murder — were recast as the tragiromantic settings of Gone With the Wind. The deliberate extinction of indigenous peoples was revised as the “taming of the New World.” The American Civil War was retold as “The Lost Cause,” fought over states’ rights, not over the right of the ultra-wealthy to terrorize kidnapped Africans and their descendants into working to death.

This wasn’t how they did it in Germany. Nazi symbols and historical revisionism were banned (even the Berlin production of “The Producers” had to be performed without swastikas). The criminals were tried and executed. Every student learned what had been done. Cash reparations were paid — to Jews, and to the people whom the Nazis had conquered and brutalized. Having given in to ghastly barbarism on an terrifyingly industrial scale, the Germans had remade themselves with characteristic efficiency, rooting out the fascist rot and ensuring that it never took hold again.

But Germany’s storied reformation was always oversold. As neo-Nazi movements sprang up and organized political parties — like the far-right Alternative für Deutschland — fielded fascist candidates, they also took to the streets in violent mobs. Worse, top German security officials turned out to be allied with AfD:

https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2018/08/04/germ-a04.html

Keep reading

I studied WW2 in college and I was today years old when I learned that IG Farben ran a damn death camp.

Every time Goethe University in Frankfurt tries to rename the IG-Farben building, the students and alumni raise hell. Yeah, IG Farben ran the factories that made Zyklon B and used slave labor during WW2. It’s a stain on such a beautiful building. That’s why we are keeping the goddamn name.

People on the internet treat autism like it's some cute, childish thing, but like, autism and the trauma that comes with it have literally lead me to severe alcoholism, anger issues and a criminal record.

This post goes out to autistic addicts and autistic people who have personality disorders and autistic people who have hurt people during meltdowns and autistic people who have been in trouble with the law and autistic people who have been diagnosed with every mental illness under the sun only to find out it was autism all along.

You are loved. Your trauma and your reactions to it do not make you a bad person.

For those concerned about the horse’s ears,

The horses do indeed wear earplugs to protect them and to prevent spooking. The horse and rider both are generally required to wear hearing protection in this particular kind of show.

the problem is that pretty much all pride flags are horizontal, theres no vertical tricolours or anything

bisexual ireland

bireland

Trance

there’s no way humans could build the Eiffel Tower

must've been the animals

Peer reviewed and passed.