despite her efforts to evade me, i have finally filmed my cat playing my harp
evilpsychologist-deactivated202
insane how many people just have these incredible artists in their families who get no recognition outside of crocheting circles because this art form is devalued for its association with women
in my country, the word for crocheting, is used metaphorically, to compliment a surgeon’s work.
every AFAB person my mother’s age and older, had practiced this craft at one point on another.
My mom has made literal paintings, that decorate our house for years (I’ll come back with pictures when I visit next) you can only see that they are crocheting when you go very close.
as promised here’s my mom’s crocheting “paintings”
There is another one but it had been stored many years ago, (i remember it from my childhood) and sadly it is probably damaged by mold, it depicted wild horsed running in nature
Watching them start losing it is half the joy.
itscarororo
bonk
What I find hilarious is, that they are communicating completely different things.
Goats butt heads. It’s not exactly aggression, but it’s always relevant to dominance. That goat is trying very hard to start a fight.
But to the horse, this is a gentle “hello” kind of head bump, and the horse is trying to be polite and return the gesture.
Big “I can take you! I can take you!” vibe here. (And the horse going “YOU ARE SO CUTE, LET’S BE FRIENDS!”) (…chortle)
GOAT: Bro! Bro! Come at me, bro! HORSE: We are so different yet he hails me as a brother and beseecheth me to approach in friendship. I love him.
Two tigers,
Chillin’ in the hot tub!
Yes YES! Five feet apart
Cuz they’re not caged.
Source: fotki.yandex.ru
I really don't like how many people use "be normal about x" to mean "be respectful of x" because
a) for a lot of the things people are being told to "be normal" about, the "normal" perspective is derision, hatred, and contempt
b) normalcy is not a good yardstick for morality.
It especially irks me to see other queer people employing this rhetorical device because. Isn't the whole point of "queer," "no, we're not normal, fuck 'normal,' we're proud of being abnormal"?
I would like to clarify something.
While this is partially about fandom discourse, it's more so about people saying stuff like "be normal about aspec people" or "be normal about trans people" or "be normal about Jewish people," etc.
I really don't like that people are reinforcing this narrative of "normal = good/moral," and conversely "weird = bad/immoral." A lot of these same people will refer to assholes and bigots as "weird" or "freaks," too. Which is not a rhetorical direction I appreciate.
Again, isn't the whole point of much of our activism "normal isn't necessarily good actually, we're weird freaks and proud of it?"
Be abnormally excellent about Jews, please
going insane about murderbot and ART hours are 24/7
Idk about this one boys, Cookie Monster always refers to Cookie Monster's self as "Cookie Monster".
no he doesn’t. he refers to himself as “me.” elmo’s the one that talks in third person. that’s the joke. elmo doesn’t use pronouns and cookie monster is blue. how dare you assume i made this post and didnt know my fucking sesame street history. christ
Yesterday I almost cried because my baby cousin ran up to my grandmother and was like. “Ha! Buhbuh ba ha.” And she said okay you want to show me something? And he led her over to the garden patch and crouched down and pointed at rocks and plants and was like. “Ah. Habah ba ah” as she listened attentively.
And I was like that happened 1,000 years ago. Probably 10,000 years ago. Maybe 100,000. The youngest human in a group went to the oldest one and said to the best of their ability “come see.” And the adult went.
this is such a beautiful post it doesn't need my dumb addition, but i can't fit this in the tags. at the archaeological site Dolni Vestonice in the Czech Republic there are a bunch of really really fascinating finds and I'm only going to tell you about one tiny detail of one of the most interesting sites in the world.
at this settlement 20-30,000 years ago there lived a person who appears to have been a sort of sorcerer-grandmother-ceramics artist and her workshop was preserved very well in the sedimentary layers. her hut where she had her kilns was full of little sculptures of animals and people that seem to have been made to explode in the kiln on purpose, we're not sure why but nevermind. the relevant detail is that when you sculpt something with your hands and then fire it, your fingerprints can be preserved in the surface of the clay forever, so we have fingerprints of ancient ceramics artists that have survived for tens of thousands of years. and one of the major artifacts from Dolni Vestonice has a fingerprint on it that is so small it could only have belonged to a child
so this shaman-grandmother-sculptor, who was buried with her pet fox by the way, had children running through her workshop and touching everything she made while she was at her mysterious work of creating the world's oldest ceramics, none of which appear to be bowls, bottles, pots, or any "useful" items at all, but rather a collection of animal and human and sometimes anthropomorphic figures, some of which appear to be self portraits. exactly the same as sandersstudios' grandmother being led to the garden by an excited baby. we've all been the same for 30,000 years.
man call me crazy or whatever but i'm not very thrilled with the fact that the takeaway that all of y'all are getting from the titanic submarine crisis happening right now is
"People able to spend exorbitantly for some tourist trip thing deserve to die a horrific and torturous death via suffocation after spending 96 hours in mounting dread and awareness of that oncoming reality, all inside a 20 foot long windowless iron casket lost at sea"
and how it isn't
"There is no way in fucking hell that it should be legal to take people into such high-risk environments with zero regulations and shoddy work which almost certainly factored if not is the cause of this crisis to begin with, and the problem isn't that people will spend lots of money on dumb shit, it's that there are companies allowed to prey on that with no oversight"
incredible pompeii book fact that i will think about forever:
Garum, a sort of Roman fish sauce, was everywhere in Rome and apparently Pompeii was particularly famous for their garum industry. There’s lots of sources both in and outside Pompeii, and several different manufacturers and sellers have been found in the city.
The part that I can’t stop thinking about: jars of garum have been found with labels advertising it as kosher.
I mean, of course you hear about the conflicts between the Romans and Jews. They were very much in one another’s orbits. But still, the fact that there was apparently enough of a market in Pompeii to specifically create and sell kosher fish sauce… you know?
This is an amazing history fact, and also I cannot help but compare it to the many, many hours my fiancée spent scouring the internet and peering at images of fish sauce bottles in order to acquire kosher fish sauce for us 2,000+ years later. Some things truly do withstand the test of time, and apparently that includes both fish sauce and Jewish dietary restrictions.
Unironically I think this site and queer spaces in general do a lot of good for appearance anxiety. To be a daughter who grew up in the stranglehold of the Aéropostale mid-2000's era, to now wake up in 2023 and throw on some absolute bullshit in the morning and go "yeah, a lesbian somewhere would find this super hot." Affirming. Soul-healing.
every day I wake up and I put on my silly little clothes and I look in my silly little mirror and I say "a gay preteen in the deli aisle will call me an inspiration"
I know the Star Wars extended universe treats “spice” like it’s this big scary drug, but I kind of like to imagine that it’s basically just space weed, and the only reason Han got in trouble with the Imperials over Jabba’s cargo is that he was evading import tariffs.
If we’re just looking at mentions in the original trilogy, is there evidence it’s even a drug and not something you put on bland food to make it taste like something? What if Han was just carrying a cargo of like cilantro, mint, etc, none of which grow on Tattooine and are thus highly expensive and heavily taxed commodities?
I am fully prepared to believe that the infamous Han Solo ended up in a life-or-death vendetta with the most notorious crime lord in the galaxy because somebody didn’t want to declare taxes on three thousand kilos of cilantro.
pagannerd52
Every who pays a certain amount of attention to Star Wars knows this story already, but I was lucky enough to hear it recounted first-hand last year, so I’m gonna give it yet another retelling.
So The Husband and I were at Sci-fi Weekender (a British based annual Sci-fi and Fantasy convention) last year, and one of the guests that year was Kevin J Anderson, one of the very notable Star Wars Expanded Universe writers. During one of the events, a quiet little interview in a cafe on the event site, he fielded a question from an audience member about what it was like to write for a franchise like Star Wars which often had lots of cooks working on one broth, and he had the following to say (wording recounted as best as I can from memory):
“So in one of my stories, Han Solo, he, he travels to this asteroid planet called Kessel, which is where a lot of Spice comes from, these Spice Mines of Kessel, and I got to really describe the effects of this Spice, this terrible drug and the addiction and all this and before publication I get this call, I get this call from the lawyers, and they say “Kevin, you say in this story that Spice is a drug, you can’t say that, you can’t say that Spice is a drug”, and I say “What? What do you mean it’s not a drug, of course it’s a drug”, and they say “Han Solo used to smuggle Spice, and you cannot, let us be clear, you cannot imply that the Hero of Star Wars used to be a drug dealer”. And I just stood there, at a loss for words, and I eventually said “So what is it then?” and they said to me, very sternly, “It’s a food-additive”. Now, now obviously this is ridiculous, and I won’t back down, and they won’t back down, and none of us will back down, and the book is very close to getting pulled, which I don’t want because I worked hard on it and they don’t want because they already paid me the advance, and eventually, with this great air of superiority they say “OK Kevin, we’ll take this to the top. WE’LL TAKE THIS TO GEORGE”. And they go to all this trouble, this was a long while ago when such things were not so easy to arrange, they go to all this trouble to set up a conference call with all of them and me and with George Lucas and they say “George, Kevin is trying to say in his new book that Spice is a drug, it’s a food additive, tell him it’s not a drug, George”. And there’s this long silence on the other end of the line and eventually George says “It is a drug, though. It’s, it’s a drug, it’s a food-additive? What? Of course it a drug, it’s space heroin, what else would it be? What?” And that was then end of that.“
(chortling)
…This happens in other IPs too. But that story’s hard to beat. :)
A red fox snacking on a plum.
FREDERIC DESMETTE / BIOSPHOTO / MINDEN PICTURES
I have eaten the plums
which you left on the vine to ripen
forgive me
they were perfectly ripe
and I am a fox
Source: National Geographic