[990729]

just in case tags keep disappearing lol

[sailermoon]

this is how new yorkers @ mamdani

[sailermoon]

[pansyfemme]

yes im addicted to attention and orgasms and food and shiny jewlery and 7$ Iced Lattes. does that really not sound like an awesome lifestyle to you

[thelastgoodcountry]

Persepolis, Marjane Satrapi

[fforsythiaaa]

Once when I was in undergrad, someone described something as “problematic” in class and our professor was like, “That’s cool, but ‘problematic’ doesn’t really mean anything. It means that the thing you’re describing has a problem, and in and of itself that’s not bad. Art, especially, should always have problems, or else it’s not interesting and not art, either. It sounds like you’re trying to say that this is bad, but you don’t want to say ‘bad.’ Is that right?”

So from then on whenever one of us called something problematic, he would make us talk it out until we could name the “bad” thing we were hinting at. In this particular class, 7/10 it was some type of oppression, and the remainder was like, “I’m uncomfortable because this is very new/confusing/pushing boundaries that made me feel safe.”

Once we stopped calling things “problematic” and stopping at that, class got way more interesting and... we all had to say, like, “that’s racist” or “that’s misogynistic” or “ew capitalism gross” out loud, which a lot of us had never done in a classroom before. Or we had to be like, “Uhhh... I’m not sure what’s so bad?” and confront our own beliefs and that was maybe even more useful.

Anyway. Whenever I see the word problematic, I can’t help but think of this professor being like, “Good starting point, now let’s get specific.” I think when we have to commit to saying “that’s ___” it requires a lot more careful thought about the truth and impact and complexities of whatever we’re claiming. Sometimes there really is some bullshit afoot, and also sometimes it’s art, and it should be full of problems, because that’s what art is.

[hypokeimena]

#'this is present in the text' is often a good first step #but those second and third ones (naming it; describing its function) are vital (via @elucubrare)

[longseasons]

[gwydionmisha]

Bonus: If I buy a book I get to keep it! The publisher can't turn up at my house at random and confiscate all the books I bought.

[geckyjuno]

my bedsheet is pregnant and it's. the rest of my laundry

[muppetyaoi]

another one for the collection, gang.

[thirdity]

“Fantasy is nearer to poetry, to mysticism, and to insanity than naturalistic fiction is. It is a real wilderness, and those who go there should not feel too safe.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin, The Language of the Night

[stuckinapril]

Truest thing ever unfortunately

[persianmom-deactivated20260602]

carl jung girl you were so right about avoidance

[persianmom-deactivated20260602]

“if we don't accept our own destiny, a different kind of suffering takes its place: a neurosis develops, and I believe that that life which we have to live is not as bad as a neurosis. if I have to suffer, then let it be from my reality. a neurosis is a much greater curse! in general, a neurosis is a replacement for an evasion, an unconscious desire to cheat life, to avoid something. one cannot do more than live what one really is. and we are all made up of opposites and conflicting tendencies. after much reflection, I have come to the conclusion that it is better to live what one really is and accept the difficulties that arise as a result-because avoidance is much worse.”

[funeral]

Carl Jung, Analytical Psychology: Its Theory and Practice (The Tavistock Lectures)

[snake-eggs]

“There aren’t enough hours in a day.” There are actually. The problem is that we think 40 hour work weeks are an unavoidable fact of life.

The problem is that everyone has to work 8 hours, pretty much no exceptions, and with getting ready time + (unpaid) lunch + commute, “8 hours” is actually anywhere between 9 and 12, every single day, with more work to do when you get home because our society and culture was built around having one member of the household home full time and nothing has changed now that almost everyone works.

No wonder Americans are reliant on DoorDash and fast food, there’s no time or energy to cook. No one wonder mental and physical health are in shambles, many just spent all day sitting in fluorescent lights with little to no stimulation. “Just wake up earlier” “Just meal prep”… these are ok short-term, individual solutions, but the broader, systemic issue is obvious. We aren’t built for this. There’s no work-life balance. Genuinely, I think if our culture could normalize a shorter work week, many individuals’ biggest problems would simply evaporate.

[broken-horn-of-equius]

[crazy-brazilian]

[less-ismore]

‘It all depends what you mean by a weed’. The definition is the weed’s cultural story. How and why and where we classify plants as undesirable is part of the story of our ceaseless attempts to draw boundaries between nature and culture, wildness and domestication. And how intelligently and generously we draw those lines determines the character of most of the green surfaces of the planet.

The best-known and simplest definition is that a weed is ‘a plant in the wrong place’, that is, a plant growing where you would prefer other plants to grow, or sometimes no plants at all.

Richard Mabey, Weeds: in defense of nature's most unloved plants, 2010.

[2productive]

[sirenofthegreenbanks]

this is from "research as a leisure activity" by celine nguyen, publs. on stubstack in 2024. it's a very good read

[990729]

I have an awesome job right now, I know, it’s a dream, I know, but how the hell do people work 40 hours (or more! A week?)

[homunculus-argument]

Libraries are sneaky, because once you go in, it's soo easy to get a library card, and once you have one, you can pretty much grab one of everything of all the stuff they have there with no consequence, and take it home. But then once you're home and you've read all the stuff you'll have to go back to the library to return the stuff, and once you're at the library again, you're at the library again, so might as well pop in to see what they got, and then you're hauling half their shit home again, and then you'll need to return to the library to return them, so you're at the library again

And the next thing you know you've read 3000 books, your crops are clear and your skin is watered, an angel descents from the heaven to suck your dick twice a week, and also you've got some books to return so you've got a perfectly valid reason to go pop in to the library. Just a little bit.

[partingglances1986]

If you enjoyed this book you should read every other book in the world for extra textual context. All things are intricately related to one another.