true romance
Just so y'all know, there’s more lol

titsay
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ellievsbear
Sade Olutola
wallacepolsom
Sweet Seals For You, Always
RMH
Alisa U Zemlji Chuda
Misplaced Lens Cap
sheepfilms
dirt enthusiast
trying on a metaphor

tannertan36
Show & Tell

Andulka
he wasn't even looking at me and he found me
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almost home
NASA
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@adefectiveidealist
true romance
Just so y'all know, there’s more lol
I’m very much a proponent of “food not lawns” but I’m also fucking realistic that a ton of people do not have the resources/time/energy and getting into gardening is daunting as fuck. I’ll excitedly encourage it but if people can’t or even just don’t want to then that’s FINE. I hate the posts full of pictures of idealistic food lawns. Even outside of the actual growing and care, just processing a harvest takes so much damn time and More Energy and More Resources or Techniques and acting like it’s as simple as “just grow your own food!” is setting people up for a huge letdown when they realize how much that can take
i watered my garden every single day it didn’t rain last summer. no matter how tired i was, i had to go trundle around with the hose and the watering can. because i didn’t use pesticides, i lost all my pumpkins and squashes to a squash borer. my carrots didn’t really amount to much. all my watermelons died on the vine, tiny. my grape vine still hasn’t fruited. my herbs pretty much universally croaked. my lettuces looked great but were so bitter. i didn’t harvest my cabbages in time and only got to eat one–the slugs got the rest. i planted a bunch of peppers and got almost nothing from them, just weird little gnarled green fists.
then i got an absolutely absurd amount of cucumbers and turned every single jar in my house into a pickle container. i’m still working my way through the six gallon freezer bags of frozen beefsteak tomatoes that august produced.
your garden will produce way less of a lot of stuff you want and way more of some stuff you’re not prepared to consume or preserve. you have to water, to weed, to think about sun exposure, to debate about pesticides.
i love gardening! it’s great, it keeps you grounded, it feels wonderful to materially contribute to the local ecosystem, to see the wasps and spiders and bees and butterflies, and fresh tomatoes are delicious! but it’s SO MUCH MORE WORK THAN A LAWN.
Hi, indigenous person here with good news: The food not lawn doesn’t have to be food -for humans-
You can do amazing work for your local ecosystem by replacing your lawn with native wildflowers, shrubs, and trees. Which have the added benefit of generally not needing any looking after -because they are native and evolved to be there-
The following infographics are going to be North American (and specifically Northeast) centric because guess where I’m from:
^^ this is it, and “what would happen if you did LESS maintenance” is such a good question to center with.
In terms of human food, I’m a big fan of allotment/community garden style food production, where you go away from your immediate home to a place shared with others with individual personal plots for the purpose of producing food. People are available to help, it creates a place to go, it becomes a social center, you can have events and work days, and if you form enough relationships then someone will be available to (say) water your plants through the tricky periods or during vacations; plus, if you get bored or hate the work, you simply stop paying dues and hand the plot to the next eager person. Of course, this isn’t available everywhere - but setting one up might be a valuable use of time and energy, with more resilience than converting your home plot to something high-maintenance.
i. “Your name is Tasbeeh. Don’t let them call you by anything else.” My mother speaks to me in Arabic; the command sounds more forceful in her mother tongue, a Libyan dialect that is all sharp edges and hard, guttural sounds. I am seven years old and it has never occurred to me to disobey my mother. Until twelve years old, I would believe God gave her the supernatural ability to tell when I’m lying. “Don’t let them give you an English nickname,” my mother insists once again, “I didn’t raise amreekan.” My mother spits out this last word with venom. Amreekan. Americans. It sounds like a curse coming out of her mouth. Eight years in this country and she’s still not convinced she lives here. She wears her headscarf tightly around her neck, wades across the school lawn in long, floor-skimming skirts. Eight years in this country and her tongue refuses to bend and soften for the English language. It embarrasses me, her heavy Arab tongue, wrapping itself so forcefully around the clumsy syllables of English, strangling them out of their meaning. But she is fierce and fearless. I have never heard her apologize to anyone. She will hold up long grocery lines checking and double-checking the receipt in case they’re trying to cheat us. My humiliation is heavy enough for the both of us. My English is not. Sometimes I step away, so people don’t know we’re together but my dark hair and skin betray me as a member of her tribe. On my first day of school, my mother presses a kiss to my cheek. “Your name is Tasbeeh,” she says again, like I’ve forgotten. “Tasbeeh.” ii. Roll call is the worst part of my day. After a long list of Brittanys, Jonathans, Ashleys, and Yen-but-call-me-Jens, the teacher rests on my name in silence. She squints. She has never seen this combination of letters strung together in this order before. They are incomprehensible. What is this h doing at the end? Maybe it is a typo. “Tas…?” “Tasbeeh,” I mutter, with my hand half up in the air. “Tasbeeh.” A pause. “Do you go by anything else?” “No,” I say. “Just Tasbeeh. Tas-beeh.” “Tazbee. All right. Alex?” She moves on before I can correct her. She said it wrong. She said it so wrong. I have never heard my name said so ugly before, like it’s a burden. Her entire face contorts as she says it, like she is expelling a distasteful thing from her mouth. She avoids saying it for the rest of the day, but she has already baptized me with this new name. It is the name everyone knows me by, now, for the next six years I am in elementary school. “Tazbee,” a name with no grace, no meaning, no history; it belongs in no language. “Tazbee,” says one of the students on the playground, later. “Like Tazmanian Devil?” Everyone laughs. I laugh too. It is funny, if you think about it. iii. I do not correct anyone for years. One day, in third grade, a plane flies above our school. “Your dad up there, Bin Laden?” The voice comes from behind. It is dripping in derision. “My name is Tazbee,” I say. I said it in this heavy English accent, so he may know who I am. I am American. But when I turn around they are gone. iv. I go to middle school far, far away. It is a 30-minute drive from our house. It’s a beautiful set of buildings located a few blocks off the beach. I have never in my life seen so many blond people, so many colored irises. This is a school full of Ashtons and Penelopes, Patricks and Sophias. Beautiful names that belong to beautiful faces. The kind of names that promise a lifetime of social triumph. I am one of two headscarved girls at this new school. We are assigned the same gym class. We are the only ones in sweatpants and long-sleeved undershirts. We are both dreading roll call. When the gym teacher pauses at my name, I am already red with humiliation. “How do I say your name?” she asks. “Tazbee,” I say. “Can I just call you Tess?” I want to say yes. Call me Tess. But my mother will know, somehow. She will see it written in my eyes. God will whisper it in her ear. Her disappointment will overwhelm me. “No,” I say, “Please call me Tazbee.” I don’t hear her say it for the rest of the year. v. My history teacher calls me Tashbah for the entire year. It does not matter how often I correct her, she reverts to that misshapen sneeze of a word. It is the ugliest conglomeration of sounds I have ever heard. When my mother comes to parents’ night, she corrects her angrily, “Tasbeeh. Her name is Tasbeeh.” My history teacher grimaces. I want the world to swallow me up. vi. My college professors don’t even bother. I will only know them for a few months of the year. They smother my name in their mouths. It is a hindrance for their tongues. They hand me papers silently. One of them mumbles it unintelligibly whenever he calls on my hand. Another just calls me “T.” My name is a burden. My name is a burden. My name is a burden. I am a burden. vii. On the radio I hear a story about a tribe in some remote, rural place that has no name for the color blue. They do not know what the color blue is. It has no name so it does not exist. It does not exist because it has no name. viii. At the start of a new semester, I walk into a math class. My teacher is blond and blue-eyed. I don’t remember his name. When he comes to mine on the roll call, he takes the requisite pause. I hold my breath. “How do I pronounce your name?” he asks. I say, “Just call me Tess.” “Is that how it’s pronounced?” I say, “No one’s ever been able to pronounce it.” “That’s probably because they didn’t want to try,” he said. “What is your name?” When I say my name, it feels like redemption. I have never said it this way before. Tasbeeh. He repeats it back to me several times until he’s got it. It is difficult for his American tongue. His has none of the strength, none of the force of my mother’s. But he gets it, eventually, and it sounds beautiful. I have never heard it sound so beautiful. I have never felt so deserving of a name. My name feels like a crown. ix. “Thank you for my name, mama.” x. When the barista asks me my name, sharpie poised above the coffee cup, I tell him: “My name is Tasbeeh. It’s a tough t clinging to a soft a, which melts into a silky ssss, which loosely hugs the b, and the rest of my name is a hard whisper — eeh. Tasbeeh. My name is Tasbeeh. Hold it in your mouth until it becomes a prayer. My name is a valuable undertaking. My name requires your rapt attention. Say my name in one swift note – Tasbeeeeeeeh – sand let the h heat your throat like cinnamon. Tasbeeh. My name is an endeavor. My name is a song. Tasbeeh. It means giving glory to God. Tasbeeh. Wrap your tongue around my name, unravel it with the music of your voice, and give God what he is due.”
Tasbeeh Herwees, The Names They Gave Me (via libeeya)
New Yorker Covers You Might Have Missed
These narrative cover designs were made by illustrator Chris Ware for The New Yorker. Each is a nuclear story, speaking a thousand words with only a few pictures. Check out five more of the most talented illustrators in the world right here! Source: Chris Ware
New Yorker Covers You Might Have Missed
“Lighten Up” by Ronald Wimberly
Beautifuly written- and drawn.
THE GREATEST JOKE ADVENTURE TIME HAS EVER WRITTEN
People like to make fun of animators but jokes on them…
WHY’D YALL LEAVE OUT THE BEST ONE?
Can’t forget this gem.
Untitled by ezook
Thank you SO much for those kind words of encouragement! I really appreciate you saying that as I really needed to hear it. I’m so happy for myself and happy for you too in your life and what you’ve been doing. I hope you’re well! 💖
Magical encounter while free falling.
Can you imagine being that bird? You see a big falling dot off in the distance, so you go to investigate. And it’s a human. Just, like, hanging out, in the middle of the sky. Plumbing toward earth at terminal velocity.
“Huh, that’s weird” you think to yourself.
You land on them. They seem nonplussed by their predicament.
But you’re a busy bird, you’ve got places to be. So you just fly off. Good luck, crazy human. Hope you make it.
Why is this so amazing
A few of the incredible collections at the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History.
See also: The Feather Lady
Can you dig it? An anonymous fear submitted to Deep Dark Fears - thanks! You can find both Deep Dark Fears books online and wherever books are sold! Ask your local comic book shop about them!
HOMEGROWN
The Rose Serpent