Forget Me, I Forgive You, Always

i think maybe we could spend less time thinking about things that make us angry and more time thinking about other stuff

YEAH EXACTLY HOLY SHIT

oh my god hes perfect. replace the faces on us currency with him

@todaysbird

tumblr has gone wild for the pukeko!

Comparing livestock color-words.

The Bee Keeper

Gouache and gold ink on paper

Inspired by medieval bee keeping garb which looked absolutely wild and I’M HERE FOR IT!

Okay. Say you ask a small child to draw you a house, and they come up with something like this:

For the purposes of this analogy the child is shit at colouring in, because I only wanted to give the general idea.

So, we can all agree that the child who draws a house probably isn't trying to communicate anything in particular other than “look at this cool house I drew”, right?

Cool.

So… Why is it seemingly in the middle of nowhere, when most children live in houses with neighbours?

Why is the main body a square and the roof a solid triangle when that doesn't look like any house that has ever been built anywhere?

Why does it have a wood-burning stove with smoke actively coming out of the chimney, even though the sun indicates warm weather?

Why is the sun smiling? Why is it yellow?

Answer: because the child has seen picture books, and films, and the drawings of other children, and has on some level absorbed that this is what a house is meant to look like.

Face to face, the child almost certainly wouldn't know where to begin communicating “yellow is a colour culturally associated with happiness and warmth, and two dots accompanied by a curved line symbolically represent a smiling human face, so I have combined these attributes with the sun to convey that it is a very warm and pleasant day”.

Or “historically most houses in my country used fire for heat and cooking, and even though this is no longer the case for the majority of households, most media portrayals of houses are inspired by other, older, media portrayals and therefore include the chimney. I have chosen to follow this trend.”

Or even, “I have poor motor control because of my age, and large, 2 dimensional shapes are easier to draw than anything involving detail and perspective”.

Yet this is all information that you can pick up from detailed study of the house drawing.

Ultimately, it's not about what the writer intended. That's what the whole death of the author thing means.

If you think of literature like as a conversation, then think of all the analysis stuff that your English teacher keeps trying to get you to look at as like body language. It's the stuff that the other person doesn't even necessarily mean to communicate, but that can tell you a hell of a lot about what they mean.

Also, a poem written by a poet who got high is still a poem written by a poet.

People love to say dismissive bullshit like, "oh, that's just the drugs talking" but actually, drugs can't fucking talk! It is always the human being doing the talking regardless of how intoxicated they are. The drugs are not creating the poetry. The poet's mind is creating the poetry. A person doesn't stop being a person just because they took something.

David Bowie said he was so high the year he wrote the album Hunky Dory that he didn't remember writing it (in fact he said he didn't remember anything about the year).

This is the album that includes "Life on Mars?", which many people consider to be some pretty cutting commentary on Marxism and capitalism.

Bowie himself could not tell you what that song is about, or if it's about anything at all. But quite a few people have found a lot of meaning in it.

My teenager is working on a big art project for school and they said their meanings tend to be very surface level

Their work is about flora and fauna is a mix of bone motifs, animal shapes and natural flora intertwining to create one beast that symbolises the land

And when I pointed out that it seemed to me like a commentary on how the ecosystem works and every part is reliant on another and how life and death are two sides of the same coin they didn't go "no I was just doing surface level nature is cool" they went "oh yeah! I can see it now!"

And I've had that experience as well

Sometimes artists don't know the meaning until other people point it out

Post canon Toph who doesn’t want to go back to her shitty parents so she just decides to stay in the Fire Nation and bum off Zuko’s hospitality.

Zuko’s like no, yeah, I totally get it, and just makes her one of his advisors. At first it’s just so she has a good excuse to stay but after the first meeting Toph storms out shouting about how EVERYONE was lying why would you even need to lie about what kind of tea you want??

Zuko: I mean they’re politicians…..but also who, and when, and in what way

They make a subtle Morse code system so Toph can warn him when someone is lying to him without tipping anyone off that she can sense lies.

Zuko gets a reputation for somehow being both extremely socially inept and yet somehow disgustingly perceptive?? You can’t get ANYTHING by him???

#my lord what EXACTLY is ms Beifongs role in these meetings #a nervous nobleman asks after the third time she interrupts them with stupid commentary #zuko with perfect deadpan: she’s my scribe

You CAN’T leave that in the tags

atla heritage post

“Wait, you know the Fire Lord?”

“I’ve never seen that man in my life.”

Every character is aroace to me until proven otherwise

Every character

is aroace to me until

proven otherwise

Beep boop! I look for accidental haiku posts. Sometimes I mess up.

The flip side of “cleanse diets don’t do anything” is that if you tried a cleanse diet and you did experience a notable reduction in fatigue, joint pain, and general blarginess, you need to talk to an allergy specialist, because there’s nearly a 100% chance that means you have an undiagnosed allergy to some component of your customary diet.

This is an excellent point and I’d imagine there’s a lot of quack diets that continue circulating and getting press based on this exact principle.

Absolutely – a great many diets of the “stop eating everything except these three foods” variety are 100% trading on the fact that they’re practically guaranteed to generate some positive testimonials by virtue of coincidentally cutting somebody’s undiagnosed food allergy out of their diet.

Reread SVSSS I said. It'll be fun I said. I'll surely stop at an appropriate time I said.

I've been reading for ten hours straight. It's 10 am. I'm ending this binge on chapter 69. How did I get here?

Whyd you start at midnight????

... Seemed like a good idea at the time

One of the funniest failures of US school system is the fact they are legally obligated to teach us all the states but they never actually show how big Alaska is like I have actually had teachers tell me that Texas is the biggest state. We have all just convinced ourselves that Alaska is that small shrunken down thing on most US maps and the people that know it's the largest state can almost never accurately describe how large it is.

For context here is a picture

what

It has a national park that’s bigger than maine. Or Switzerland. A park. 

I lived in Alaska for two years and I will never get over the sheer overwhelming bigness of it. 

Nights where the sky is clear you can see clusters of stars or the Northern Lights dancing. When the lights are rippling especially strong and fast you can hear a static crackle in the air. When the moon is out after it’s snowed, you don’t need flashlights to see. Everything glows and glimmers like polished quartz.  

But when the sky is clouded over so you can’t see the stars, you can kind of almost sense the mountains towering over you and helping to block out the light, these giant monoliths acting like this void darker than your soul. I’ve never experience night like Alaska night. 

Everything is big, the mountains, the sky, the valleys. 

And the dark. 

what the fuck

[attempting to flirt] if i was stuck in a timeloop id desperately explain my situation to you every single reset

Ever since reading my first time loop-based book as a preteen, I’ve had a Secret Time Loop Code Word. It’s been the same word all these years. I’ve never written it down anywhere or told anyone what it is, just kept it tucked away in my brain. That way, if someone I know ever confided in me that they were stuck in a time loop, I would have a way to confirm it: I would tell them the time loop code word and instruct them to find and talk to me again on the next loop. Of course, if it’s a time loop, I wouldn’t remember telling them the code word. But they’d remember it. So if someone ever came to me and said ��I’m stuck in a time loop, and the time loop code word is [X],” and it was indeed the word I’ve secretly held onto for most of my life, I would know that we had had this conversation in a previous loop and that they were telling the truth.

Will this ever be useful? Almost certainly not. But hey, there’s nothing wrong with having a completely absurd contingency plan. In case of time loops.

my grandmas dawg

heres what your grandmas dog wold look like. if they were a trail of ant

im getting sick of this.

Tea is a form of magic, all of you should be practicing your tea magic regularly

I remember your tea crimes, Worm

Tea magic* thank you very much.

I am so desperate to tell you about my food crimes, which are 100000000x worse

Tea magic is following ancient brewing rites and customs, not dumping unholy amounts of sugar in.

I do not possibly see how your food crimes could be much worse

Not my tea magic. My tea magic is making delicious tea at perfect drinking temperature straight from the kettle.

Also. Vinegar on pizza is the mildest food crime i have committed

Caution!!!! Committing tea crime: Too Hot To Handle will give you

Hot Beverage Curse: Esophageal Cancer Risk ! ! !

this also applies for coffee, maté, and hot food (eg soup, takoyaki)

why are cyberpunk tabletop things so obsessed with decency and personhood being tied to how many surgeries you haven’t had

“if you have a prosthetic it takes out a part of your soul” like thanks shadowrun

in early cyberpunk, the point was more along the lines of “if we integrate technology into our bodies we risk becoming dependent upon the people and institutions who control that technology, who would then use that to enrich themselves at our expense”

unfortunately that was too anti-corporate for American mainstream culture so as cyberpunk moved out of its niche it became “uhhh it eats your soul I guess”

tags by @rubyvroom: 

#this is important context #if you weren’t around at the time it is easy to miss but #anti-corporate sentiment was pretty much the lynchpin of cyberpunk until there were movies and games making money off it #it was the 1980s you guys #the entire point was that corporations are evil and technology should be used to circumvent them and escape their control over our lives #and not be used to make ourselves into another product #now that the internet is entirely monetized and corporate it’s harder to remember that originally it was synonymous w freedom & independence

Yes, exactly. Cyberpunk is anti-corporations, not anti-body-modification.

#the real horror is medical debt ( tag via @bronanlynch )

And they (the original message, not Shadowrun) were right. So many people with prosthetics and sensory aids and insulin pumps and so forth are at the mercy of the bloodthirsty corporations who own the rights to their devices.

touched by this