I reblog art I like to @oh-this-is-good-art!
My favourite part of writing professional emails is sending them and immediately running over to my "sent" folder to check I did in fact write "Yeah, I can make a 3 PM meeting" and not "I think you're a big stupid piece of shit and I fucked your wife" somehow
song of the summer (via muco_0 on tiktok)
ALTYou can’t just leave us without translation!
Fiction podcast themed picnic. What are you bringing?
Seaweed snacks (Mika and Sascha's favourites)
If wolf359 is anything to go by, uh. Gun
Mmmm....Chinese food
A fucking apple
Canned peaches. No utensils
bakewell tart and an inconspicuous can of beans
peanut butter and marshmallows with good bad instant coffee
Hot cocoa, or enchiladas <3
biscuits and gravy
biscuits and gravy (British edition)
I’m at a sociology conference and just attended a memorial for one of the giants of our field, and one of the panelists told this story…he was at a meeting with this guy, who he got his PhD under and had a long standing relationship with, and he was bemoaning the current state of the world, and he asked this old professor, “how can you be so optimistic? I can’t ever be anything but a pessimist.”
and the old professor said, “you little fucker, I’m going to make a statement and then I’m going to take you out to the parking lot and beat your ass. What good does your pessimism do?”
and that really struck me. not the least because I also knew this old professor and he very rarely swore, so I know this was something he was really worked up about. what good does your pessimism do? What GOOD does your pessimism DO. I’ll be thinking about that for awhile.
“Now there's this about cynicism, Sergeant. It's the universe's most supine moral position. Real comfortable. If nothing can be done, then you're not some kind of shit for not doing it, and you can lie there and stink to yourself in perfect peace.”
- Lois McMaster Bujold, Borders of Infinity (1989)
"It helps me be prepared!"
As a recovered pessimist raised by a horrendously toxic pessimist: No, it doesn't.
Foresight and practicality are completely separate qualities that can exist without pessimism. You can acknowledge the worst that might happen and prepare for it without having a completely negative worldview.
And pessimism can absolutely exist without those qualities. Which is a miserable way to live.
evangelicals being like "god made men to do This and be like This and women to do That and be like That that's just how it is" and it's just a picture of a white man and woman following traditional gender norms makes me so insane like you boring fascist fucks. god made 2 million species of beetles. god made whales, ducks, humans, and 1500 other species capable of same sex behavior. god made fish and amphibians that change sexes. god made more than 30 different intersex variations in human beings. god, in his infinite curiosity. wake up!!! fuck!!
hey wait! i know you! we used to be chained next to each other in the cave! wow, so good to see you, how are ya? man. remember how we used to talk about the shadows on the wall together. gosh that was a long time ago. but hey. sure is one heck of a sun out here, right? it's good to see you.
i wrote this post with happy tears in my eyes sitting in a parking lot after getting coffee for 3 hours with someone i did youth shakespeare with when we were teenagers and hadn't seen in 15 years, in which time we both transitioned, got into nerd shit, found a job that feels good, found people to spend our gay little lives with, and coincidentally moved to the same city. this is exactly how it felt. never ever ever kill yourself
for some reason when i listen to american idiot i picture the lucky star dance, so i bring you faggot america friday
As an aroace person I actually never had that feeling of being broken. I thought everyone was the same way and some people were just dramatic 😭
THIS IS SO FUCKING FUNNY THATS EXACTLY HOW I FELT WATCHING ATTACK OF THE CLONES FOR THE FIRST TIME LMAOOOOO 😭😭😭😭
Let's play hide and seek?
SOUND ON SOUND ON SOUND ON
Description: A can of la croix is sitting on a desk, a cockatiel stands up from behind the can, showing its head, and say "Peekaboo!" the person holding the camera laughs and the bird hides behind the can again, then pops up and says "Peekaboo!" the person continues laughing and says "Peekaboo!" too as the bird continues ducking up and down - when the bird pops up near the end of the video it makes an ascending whistle (like a slide whistle) when rising up, then a descending whistle when it ducks down, and an ascending whistle again while the person laughs harder.
THE SLIDE WHISTLE SOUND
all of it, TOO adorable
It's finally time for the first episode! I started setting up Real Time LBD in June and I'm so excited for it to kick off! Also check out @realtimelbd-socialmedia and @realtime-lookbackdiaries for the social media posts from all the characters and Ashley Clements's 10-year anniversary retrospective
Or you use a plastic/silicon spatula?? Or a silicon whisk?? go to literally any dollar store they have shitty plastic/silicon kitchen utensils you can scramble eggs with without scratching up your pans
Now that’s what I call
ALTIn the interest of not derailing this already-long-and-awesome thread, here are some more details! (Paging @sparrows-corner and any other interested parties.)
So in my first semester of college, I took an Intro to Psychology class. I didn't expect anything special; it was just one of those general education courses that everybody was supposed to take at some point. But it turned out amazing.
What the general public didn't know at that point was someone in the college administration had screwed up and forgotten to assign a teacher to this class. Until a week before class. When several students emailed to ask why that detail was missing in the online listing.
The administration panicked, scrambled for someone-anyone-omg-who-can-drop-everything-and-teach-this-class. They called recently-graduated owners of Masters Degrees in teaching.
They found Sandy.
She was qualified and available, and much older than the average recent grad, with the confidence to go with it. This was still a daunting task, though, and she agreed on one condition: that she team-teach the class with a friend of hers who was still working on finishing his degree.
Having no other choice and seeing no real problem with this, the administration agreed. And thus was born the most glorious educational comedy act in my entire academic career. The two of them were a delight. They knew all the stuff they needed to teach, and they knew a great deal more, and they delivered lectures in a way that had everyone paying eager attention. It was great.
This friend, by the way, was awesome in his own right. While Sandy was a curly-haired white lady around middle age, Wayne was a black guy who (1) dressed in impeccable suits and (2) had cerebral palsy.
I think a lot of 18-year-old minds were quietly enlightened about a few things just from watching these two banter back and forth, one with joints more wobbly than the other. Wayne told a memorable anecdote at one point about stopping by a grocery store in sweat pants instead of his usual classy wear. The cashier asked some gentle question about what he spent his time on, assuming that he had some sort of carer following him around. The expression on her face when he told her that he taught college was one I'll never forget, and I didn't even see it.
Anyways, at the end of this semester, the two teachers asked a few of us smart kids if we wanted to be TAs (teaching assistants) for the next semester. Since most of us had already become friends during the make-a-group-and-discuss-things portions of the class, this sounded like a party that would look good on our records later. And it really was.
I TA'd for that class a few times in a row, with my buddies and the two very cool teachers. We met up outside of class for holiday parties and everything.
And, since this was during the time the Lord of the Rings trilogy was first coming out in theaters, we all dressed up in costume and went to an early screening together.
Wayne drove. His handicap placard meant we got to park at the front, which was pretty awesome.
Now, I'd met people before who knew more LotR lore than I did, but they all paled in comparison to Sandy. As I said in the notes on that other post, she shared some stories of her youth with us. When she was fourteen, she ran away to join a hippie commune. She already knew fluent elvish, and she used that to help the commune's drug-runners stay out of the clutches of the cops, by translating their drug notes into a language the cops couldn't read. With a start like that, it was unsurprising that she still knew elvish now, along with all sorts of fascinating deep lore.
She had a limited edition book that looked shockingly expensive. She made beeswax candles for all the TAs as holiday gifts, with our names written on them in elvish. I still have mine somewhere.
I haven't heard from any of these lovely people in a long time, since college moves on and so does life, but I will treasure those memories forever. I hope Sandy and Wayne and the others are doing well. They deserve the best.
African Canvas Margaret Courtney-Clarke
The Art of Africa is a casualty
of colonial exploitation, surviving
principally in the museums of
other countries. ~ Nadine Gordimer
“My objective in this work is to document an extraordinary art form - vernacular art and architecture in West Africa - that is not transportable and therefore not seen in museums around the world. It is an attempt to capture the unseen Africa, a glimpse into the homes and into the spirit of very proud and dignified peoples. In much the same way as I photographed the art of Ndebele women, I have drawn on my personal affinity for the art itself, for methods, design and form, rather than the socio-anthropological or political realities of a people or continent in dilemma. These images portray a unique tradition of Africa, a celebration of an indigenous rural culture in which the women are the artists and the home her canvas.”
