Squids and Things

So my mother recently got married (mashallah). And she set up this thing where guests were encouraged to take photos of the proceedings on their phones and text them in to a given number, after which they would be played as a slideshow on a screen at the front of the venue. I want you to take a minute to imagine how this went.

It began just about as you would expect. People taking photos of each other and the décor and taking selfies and having a good time. The slideshow was tasteful. Clearly not “professional,” but nice and personal.

And then people start getting a little drunk. A person who signs their work only as “Moo” posts this masterpiece:

[ID: a vertically oriented photo of a garbage can. A long table draped with lavender fabric at which the bride and groom are seated is in the background. The garbage can is centred in the frame, clearly the focus of the photo. End ID]

Someone at my table notices. “Is that... a photo of a garbage can? What?” We all express confusion and have a chuckle about it. Clearly someone is taking the prompt liberally. But the avant-garde approach to what is worthy of documenting does not end here, and our artist soon enters these submissions into the canon:

[ID: photos of a pendant fire sprinkler, a ceiling vent, a lightswitch, and a door handle. the photos show a casual, non-intensive approach to framing (neither perfectly even nor deliberately askew, &c.) end ID]

Meanwhile someone has uploaded this photo of the groom:

He is sitting at the bride and groom’s table alone with his hands clasped in front of him. I can’t show you his face but he has a bit of stubble and is wearing wire-framed rectangular glasses. I can best describe his vibe to you by saying that he wore this newsie cap to his wedding and this made perfect sense.

Using this photo, someone at our table makes their first few volleys:

[ID: the groom cut out of the photo from before and edited into an empty booth at an empty chain restaurant and an empty movie theatre, respectively. End ID]

At this point, basically everyone except the bride and groom have noticed, and are more or less following the evolution of this guérilla art project. Some people are trying to talk the instigators out of submitting their unworthy photos; others are riling them up.

Moo makes several more of their found object entries:

[ID: a cleaning schedule sign on a bathroom wall; a bathroom sign reading “men”; a digital thermostat; a framed photo of a smiling man, the sign for the men’s bathroom reflected in its glass. end ID]

And it goes back and forth like this for a while, Moo submitting objects (a close-up on the tines of their fork; a mop bucket; a framed fish head) and their nameless collaborator, not be to undone, putting the groom into more situations:

[ID: the groom's head edited onto the body of a cast member in the Broadway musical Newsies, his cap causing him to blend in perfectly; the groom's head edited onto Jamie's head from Mythbusters as he poses next to Adam, his cap causing this edit to be perfectly seamless. end ID]

A further development in the form of these submissions occurs when The Editor invents reappropriation and collage, beginning to edit the groom into photos that other people have uploaded:

[ID: the photo of the groom at the table from earlier, edited so that there are two identical grooms sitting side-by-side: text over their heads reads "Just Married!"; another photo of the groom standing and smiling with a drink in his hand, apparently talking to another groom who is holding his stomach, throwing his head back and laughing aloud. end ID]

Meanwhile, Moo has taken his aesthetic ethos to its only possible logical conclusion:

A photo of a urinal. “Fountain,” Moo, iPhone camera, 2023.

People are now watching the screen even more actively, laughing each time a new silly photo arrives in the stream of genuine submissions. Moo submits a photo of a dented Pringles can seen through a grate in the street outside and a photo of a bag of road-salting ice. The photo of the groom at the table is edited so that he sports a towering Cat-in-the-Hat hat instead of the newsie cap; the groom is edited into an astronaut suit on the moon; he and the bride wearing her fur stole are edited as Jackie O. and JFK in the limo (this last The Editor wisely did not upload but sent only to me).

Not content, however, with editing the groom into non-wedding photos or with sabotaging earnest submissions to the photo album, The Editor proceeds to bring us full circle by reappropriating Moo's recontextualisations, Sherrie Levine-like:

[ID: 1. the photo of the garbage can from earlier, with the groom edited onto the flap that you push garbage through; 2. the groom edited into the photo of the framed photograph from earlier; he has been made greyscale to match the photograph; 3. the photo of the urinal from above, with the groom edited into its bowl. end ID]

The people at Moo’s table (groom’s family) love this last submission ("Urine a Urinal," Anonymous, iPhone camera, 2023). They watch the screen waiting for it to come up again, and when it does, they shout “there it is!” and laugh and clap.

Alas, our destabilisation of what constitutes artistic merit was not allowed to persist. Like the Society of Independent Artists sticking Duchamp’s “Fountain” behind a partition, the bride and groom silently deleted all of the unworthy submissions from the publicly shared album. Luckily, I saw this coming and was able to document the proceedings.

In conclusion, I recommend not crowdsourcing your wedding photos unless you have a very well-developed sense of humour.

Uni.

Aliko Dangote, the richest man in Africa, has been tormented by a Brazilian man named Osvaldo for the last several years.

Aliko is not taking it well

the x files is funny because at the time it was “progressive” or whatever to have the ultra-rational, levelheaded character be a woman

but it’s also a show where all the fucked up alien shit actually is real, so she’s just constantly wrong about everything

What’s funny is how often they’re both wrong. Mulder will be like “the victims all had their livers scooped clean out this is obviously the aliens escalating from cattle mutilation” and Scully will be like “don’t be silly Mulder this is clearly just a serial killer who’s really good with surgical tools” and then it turns out the actual killer is an immortal sewer man who comes out ever quarterly century to feast on human liver.

I cannot stress enough that this is literally the plot of an actual episode

this is possibly the funniest terf take i’ve ever seen. trans people, hate to tell you this but buying clothes is actually capitalist and you should stop /j.

Clothing didn't exist before capitalism

Only Real Men can be anticapitalist. Real Women need capitalism for the makeup and clothing they require to be a Real Woman, and therefore can't fight the system

Unmute !

Love that they put “a sense of impending doom” as one of the symptoms of a heart attack, like girl, that’s just how it is to be alive these days, you’re gonna have to be more specific

This made me chuckle but after scrolling away I felt the need to come back to it.

Because as someone who has felt this I can not stress how different it actually is from anxiety. Which is saying a lot because I have a massive anxiety disorder.

I've only felt this twice in my life - once when I was going into kidney failure due to an infection and again when my body was going into shock due to dehydration and malnourishment due to GI issues - and I can not stress how much it saved my life. It's hard to even put it into words. It's not like a panic attack, or anxiety. It is a horrific gut turning feeling of absolute dread.

Especially if you have anxiety you'll know the difference honestly. It's so much worse. It's every cell in your body and your brain screaming that there's something horribly wrong in a way you've never felt. It's your brain screaming out that you are going to die in a way no panic attack has ever done before.

I can not stress how important it is to get yourself to the ER if you feel this way. Especially if your having other physical symptoms.

This is amazing and incredibly helpful, oh my god. Thank you.

Seconding the above : I was going into shock from internal bleeding, and that sense of “something is gravely wrong” was entirely different from my day-to-day whirlwind of anxiety.

For me, it was very quiet. For me, there was a deep sense that I could just lie down on the floor and not have to ever get up again, no effort required.

That combined wrongness/relief was so weird and so unsettling that I drove myself to the ER.

The “impending” part is really key to that symptom, I think, based on my experience. It’s not the existential dread of late-stage capitalism grinding the world into nurdles. It’s a ghost crow on your shoulder whispering “it’s here, it’s now.”

Impending doom is also a feature of anaphylaxis, something I’m intimately familiar with as someone with mast cell dysfunction.

For me, its the overwhelming, near calm certainty of doom that distinguishes it from the jittery panic of “but something could go wrong.”

There’s no “what if?” There’s no room to question it. It just IS. And it’s very different from the “calm” of disassociation too. I’m not disassociated from myself when it happens. I’m probably actually the most present ever.

I’ve turned to doctors and told them calmly and with utter certainty “I am going to die” and the reaction that calm certainty gets is immediate intervention because doctors also recognize that stillness as the body not bothering to waste any time on fight or flight and just going straight to “death is imminent due to some internal failing, act accordingly.”

THE ICWA IS UPHELD

THE ICWA STANDS

Congratulations to The Register for what might be my favorite coverage of the indictment.

Wait, the closing paragraphs are pretty strong, too.

reblogging to normalize. because we really should be uplifting sex workers as bread winners. Also because they should be able to show their face in public without fear of repercussions??? (cough cough), like this gentleman.

Honestly its unhinged and hilarious but yet also seriously something I want to see more of

Reblog if you’re a cheap whore. Or respect cheap whores. Or have the power to turn young people into cheap whores. (they can never tell which)

support whores both cheap and expensive!

I'm sorry but some of these ads are too much. Now you too can have baboon ass

keep seeing Temu ads on here so just to share cause idk if people are widely aware

hate capitalism and its perpetual use of buzzwords just saw an ad for lemonade with "plant-based caffeine" like where the fuck else would you get caffeine if not from a plant

Like seeing “non-GMO” salt…

…salt is not an O…it’s has no Gs to M…

Very tense living situation happening here