every paragraph of this is a fucking banger it's so hard to pick something to excerpt!!!
sign language is literally one of the coolest things on the planet to me. like. humans recognized some humans can not hear well and devised a language around that that's so fucking cool
The thing that is the most cool to me about sign languages is that they are not word-for-word equivalents of the spoken languages alongside which they exist. They are languages in their own right, with their own unique vocabularies, grammar, and even regional dialects. Signed languages are made up of so much more than just hand gestures. Signers use their whole bodies to communicate.
This is GLORIOUS
One of those rare and beautiful occasions on which people collectively decided to use TikTok for good instead of evil.
Source: tiktok.com
— catherynne m. valente, deathless
My best friend came up with this exchange for our dream Muppets and Poirot movie and I had to do something with it.
I would watch the hell out of this movie.
The thing is, I have nothing against socialism or communism as a political ideology; trust me, I'm as anti-capitalist as they come. The leftism is really not the problem here.
The problem is when in their leftism, people – Americans, really, and western Europeans – use the ussr as this sort of goal, this complete antithesis to the modern capitalist society, this almost-utopian place to live. They use hammer and sickle symbol, the ussr anthem; sometimes, as a joke, sometimes, not so much.
Not only that clearly shows that they know absolutely nothing about the ussr – it's also spreading russian propaganda, whether it's on purpose or not, which is especially insidious now, when russia is literally committing a genocide.
The ussr wasn't a socialist utopia where everyone is equal. It was a totalitarian dictatorship, responsible for colonisation and genocide of multiple people and cultures. Just like the russian Empire before it. Just like modern russia continues to do now.
For many Eastern European and Central Asian people, hammer and sickle is not just a symbol of a political ideology. It's the symbol, under which people were starved to death, imprisoned or executed for daring to write in their own language; in which cultures were erased, people – forcefully assimilated, stripped of their own national identity.
It's the propaganda of being "the same people, the same nation" that russians love to use; that westerners love to believe, for the sole reason of the oppressed daring to look similar to the oppressor; for the sole reason of Americans being unable to look past their own history and realize oppression comes in many shapes and forms.
By using the ussr symbols in your political movement, you're denying the atrocities commited under that symbol and spreading russian propaganda, whether it's on purpose or not.
It's not "progressive" to wave around a hate symbol.
Do your research.
To the people in replies equating the hammer & sickle to the reclamation of 'queer':
No.
The word queer was created by queer people, and though it was appropriated as a slur for a while, it has been reclaimed as a self identifier for generations. The only people we hurt by calling ourselves by name is, perhaps, ourselves. Even if the term had originated as a slur, it would have been targetting queer people as victims, meaning we are the people to listen to about its reclamation.
US and W Euro communists did not create the hammer and sickle. It was not used to symbolize genocide against W Europeans and US Americans.
It is a military symbol of an empire that attempted, even occasionally succeeded at, genocide. The survivors of those attempts are the people harmed by its use.
We have no business 'reclaiming' the hammer and sickle; they aren't ours. The victims of USSR genocide alone determine who gets to reclaim it.
The rest of us would do well to defer to them, just like so many people deferred about the swastika after it was used as a symbol of genocide, too.
For a full century, use of the symbol was voluntarily deferred by Buddhists, Navajo, and other groups that used it. It is only being slowly re-adopted as the direct survivors of that genocide die of old age.
Meanwhile, the most recent USSR genocides were occurring during my own childhood and I'm a fucking millennial.
The only people who get to have an opinion about 'reclaiming' this symbol are the survivors of the genocides it represents.
We already have a simple, easy to use symbol for labour rights and equality that came out of our own history as W Euro and American communists. And it wasn't even used to justify mass murder!!
Shut the fuck up, put on your big kid panties, and use Bread and Roses. 🥖 🌹
Hi, Eastern European leftist here to cosign this.
The USSR was a brutal, genocidal, totalitarian dictatorship. The rest of the Eastern Bloc was no better. In the last century, the second most common cause of death in my family (after Nazis) was "torture and murder by the communist government".
I have family members whose NAMES I don't even know, because the government thoroughly unpersoned them. (This is not a TikTok euphemism, btw. It's from Orwell's 1984.) Many of my family members were still terrified of speaking out against the government, even twenty years after the communist regime fell, even in private.
I don't even know what to talk about, really, to get people to see my point. The multiple genocides that the Soviet Union did, in an attempt to leave only the good Russians? The way that Jewish and Muslim communities were targeted far, far more than Christian ones? The mass surveillance and propaganda campaigns that left the populace a nervous and confused wreck? The KGB?
I mean, I get it. Y'all grew up in the West, all you've known your whole life is the crushing boot of Christianity and capitalism. You learned the word "propaganda" and you learned how the west lied and subverted and waged war and you decided that if the west was bad then the governments they opposed, such as the USSR, must be good, and that all the horror stories are propaganda.
They're not. The reality of Eastern European communism, as told to me by my family and by my country's historians, is WORSE than whatever you learned in history class.
And you, Western leftists, are not the inheritors of that trauma, and you don't get to claim it's symbols.
Stop using the hammer and sickle. Stop calling people "comrade". Stop talking about the glory of the Soviet Union. And for fuck's sake STOP PLASTERING IMAGES OF LENIN AND STALIN EVERYWHERE, my god, why the fuck is this even a thing I need to say.
The ugly history of the hammer and sickle is not limited to the USSR, either. The Communist Party of China has a similar past - and continuing - record of oppression, state sanctioned murder, and genocide against ethnic and religious minorities both within China and in occupied territories.
So, by all means, be critical of capitalist systems of exploitation. Champion communist ideologies of equality. But DON’T do so by erasing the oppression, imprisonment, torture, and murder of millions of people by totalitarian governments.
Goddamn. Okay
Did you have a kid in your neighborhood who always hid so good, nobody could find him? We did. After a while we would give up on him and go off, leaving him to rot wherever he was. Sooner or later he would show up, all mad because we didn't keep looking for him. And we would get mad back because he wasn't playing the game the way it was supposed to be played.
There's hiding and there's finding, we'd say. And he'd say it was hide-and-seek, not hide-and-give-UP, and we'd all yell about who made the rules and who cared about who, anyway, and how we wouldn't play with him anymore if he didn't get it straight and who needed him anyhow, and things like that. Hide-and-seek-and-yell. No matter what, though, the next time he would hide too good again. He's probably still hidden somewhere, for all I know.
As I write this, the neighborhood game goes on, and there is a kid under a pile of leaves in the yard just under my window. He has been there a long time now, and everybody else is found and they are about to give up on him over at the base. I considered going out to the base and telling them where he is hiding. And I thought about setting the leaves on fire to drive him out. Finally, I just yelled, "GET FOUND, KID!" out the window. And scared him so bad he probably wet his pants and started crying and ran home to tell his mother. It's real hard to know how to be helpful sometimes.
A man I know found out last year he had terminal cancer. He was a doctor. And knew about dying, and he didn't want to make his family and friends suffer through that with him. So he kept his secret. And died. Everybody said how brave he was to bear his suffering in silence and not tell everybody, and so on and so forth. But privately his family and friends said how angry they were that he didn't need them, didn't trust their strength. And it hurt that he didn't say good-bye.
He hid too well. Getting found would have kept him in the game. Hide-and-seek, grown-up style. Wanting to hide. Needing to be sought. Confused about being found. "I don't want anyone to know." "What will people think?" "I don't want to bother anyone."
Better than hide-and-seek, I like the game called Sardines. In Sardines the person who is It goes and hides, and everybody goes looking for him. When you find him, you get in with him and hide there with him. Pretty soon everybody is hiding together, all stacked in a small space like puppies in a pile. And pretty soon somebody giggles and somebody laughs and everybody gets found.
Medieval theologians even described God in hide-and-seek terms, calling him Deus Absconditus. But me, I think old God is a Sardine player. And will be found the same way everybody gets found in Sardines - by the sound of laughter of those heaped together at the end.
"Olly-olly-oxen-free." The kids out in the street are hollering the cry that says "Come on in, wherever you are. It's a new game." And so say I. To all those who have hid too good. Get found, kid! Olly-olly-oxen-free.
— Robert Fulghum, "All I Really Need To Know I Learned In Kindergarten"
I have run nightmare mode SWTOR raids with a 76-year-old man and three ladies in their 50s. Don’t tell me who does and doesn’t play games.
I should have something to post after January 1, but for now, sharing an epic project I knitted this summer; a vintage boatneck sweater w/ the Doors of Durin incorporated into the front. The chart itself is a free download from Ravelry, while the sweater is from a 1980s knitting magazine I bought at a book sale long ago. Handknit in acrylic yarn.
The Hunter(s) and the Prey.
New personal work – I wanted to tell a scary story here that is not immediately obvious but only at second glance.
Stained glass window Afghan with the border is now finished!
Bravissimo!
someone i loved once gave me a box full of darkness
A moment of light during the siege
It really does feel like that