what if I told you...

it's that kind of beauty that flows with time

[paranoidcyborggirl]

[hagiomoto]

[akimojo]

someone on twitter requested lightning getting passed around like a blunt and who am i to refuse

[chewbacca]

There's some weird shit goin' on out here.

SINNERS (2025) ✧ dir. Ryan Coogler

[communist-hatsunemiku]

Freeform v2 - l33oh

[seethroughhue-deactivated201902]

[modernbaseball]

2 am: bedtime were meant to be broken 😈

7 am: I hope i get in a car accident

[kissycat]

Him: are you fucking stupid

Me:

[segamascott]

[froggos-are-superior]

I love you characters who try so hard to avoid becoming one specific thing that they end up becoming something arguably worse. I love you characters with backwards development. I love you characters whose ideals dissolve over time. I love you characters who start out bright-eyed and end their stories with several important pieces missing.

[capacity2]

This is just the trajectory of my life really

[gabalut]

Capsicum pelvis, watercolor and colored pencil on paper

Process video available on my Patreon HERE

[romanceyourdemons]

rip to the guy who posted his very expensive yixing teapot to r/tea, only for the comments to be not compliments on his taste as he expected, but instead GREAT GOOGLY MOOGLY and I SHOULD CALL HER. he then crossposted it to r/gongfutea, which is ordinarily more dignified and self-serious, but was it? was it?? of course not, because this is reddit, and this was the teapot

[resistance-army]

microdosing hell by being alive in summer 2026

[naderalanqar2007]

Stop playing games, stop watching movies, stop following football matches, stop listening to music... Leave them alone, even if only for a minute. Sit with yourselves for a minute and think carefully: Do we deserve to die? Do we deserve to live this life? If the answer is no, then do something for us. Either donate, participate, or do anything that makes us feel that you are with us and not leaving us alone in front of the genocidal criminals.

[naderalanqar2007]

I am a person who wants to complete my education, and my life is very similar to yours. The difference is that I was born in Gaza, so I need you to contribute in any way so that I can live a safe life and protect myself and my family from death and malnutrition. I should not die at the hands of the Zionists. Please stand by me.

[naderalanqar2007]

If you think my fundraising campaign is for individuals and would like to donate and help more people, or if you just want to help as many people as possible at once, my campaign has a large number of beneficiaries. You can donate here.

[socalgal]

Please share this post and donate if you can. Nader and his family are suffering greatly. Please help them and donate now. If everyone who shares this post donates $10, we will raise a good amount to help Nader and his family.

[naderalanqar2007]

In addition to this, my father is going through the most difficult days of his life and may pass away any day because he hasn't received the necessary treatment to fully cure his illness and have stents implanted in his heart arteries. Please donate and help us; we truly need assistance. Your donations are what will help us survive. Please donate now.

[treecitysessions]

Please donate if you have the means to at all. Everything helps

[naderalanqar2007]

Hey everyone, please keep sharing this post and don't hesitate to donate. We desperately need your donations. Please donate now!

[altocat]

[theylov3evie]

Me?

[cellberry]

Gongaga.

[pspsappho]

& honestly there's no debate to be had the zendaya earrings are orders of magnitude worse than kim kardashian wearing that marilyn dress. yes that piece was a one of a kind unique textile made so specifically for marilyn monroe she had to be sewn into it. at the end of the day it was a ~70 year old usamerican cultural artefact being repurposed by an american for an american cultural event and everyone involved knows exactly where the dress came from + what happened to it + where it went afterwards. zendaya is wearing the looted (or forged) cultural heritage of a people her government is currently bombing & whose lives they have been deliberately making unliveable for decades to a movie premiere that has fuck all to do with iran. we don't know where those discs came from where they were found or by whom & we never will. AND the jeweller appears to have altered them substantially from their original condition. destroying a people's cultural heritage at the same time you destroy their country + their lives so you can look good on a red carpet One Time i want to fucking hurl

[uhhhhmanda]

Zendaya’s The Odyssey premiere earrings spark ethics row

The earrings, worn by Zendaya at The Odyssey press tour, are believed to be 2,000-3,000 years old and come at a time when the US is bombing

An archaeologist quoted in the article says "the point of these earrings is not to showcase legitimate ancient artistry, it is to fetishize the past, to be a commodity, stolen from the elite, circulated illegally, and immorally…this is about class signalling."

[flyingkoalaandsloths]

The irony that your president telling he will end their millennia old civilization and you wearing a symbol of that civilization...

[classicslesbianopinions]

it is like. i am deliberately not posting that much about the nolan odyssey because i don't have much genuine interest and i find the whole like outrage theater people do at adaptations to be exhausting and unproductive and often misguided + i don't really care what celebrities are doing. but zendaya's 3000-year-old iranian earrings are like. such an on-the-nose fuck you. like 1. you can practically feel the stylist going "oh, it's old, it must be on-theme!" without really considering that ancient cultures are not interchangeable. but also 2. there's a very clear and important difference between ancient greece and ancient iran, in that there's a reason zendaya isn't wearing ancient greek artifacts on her ears--ancient greece has a cultural cachet that ancient iran does not, by virtue of its position as the perceived origin point of "western" (white) civilization. they are just interchangeable enough that zendaya can wear the artifacts of one civilization to a premiere of a work based on the mythos of another, but just different enough that she can get away with one but not the other.

and of course there's 3. which is that modifying and wearing a cultural artifact of dubious provenance taken from a country the us is actively bombing (and in doing so presumably destroying plenty of historic buildings/artifacts) asserts a certain lack of respect for and/or sense of ownership over that country's people and culture. and obviously this is what makes it seem like such a specifically heinous move.

[perrenlore]

Really important to note when it comes to (3) that the elite (and frankly Orientalising) appropriation of ancient Near Eastern artefacts as jewellery has a long colonial history. Cylinder seals are these little cork-shaped cylinders with pictoral or written designs engraved on them, and work the same way as a signet ring in that you could roll them over wet clay to leave an impression of the engraved relief on the clay to dry. They look like this:

(Cylinder seal of First Dynasty of Ur Queen Puabi, found in her tomb, dated circa 2600 BC, with modern impression. Inscription: 𒅤𒀜 𒎏 - Pu3-abi(AD) Nin - Queen Pu-abi. Nicked straight off Wikipedia as it's a fab comparison of seal / relief.)

In the British Museum you can find "Lady Layard's jewellery". Austin Henry Layard is a guy whose academic efforts I'm admittedly very indebted to. He was passionate about Venetian and Roman glass and did a great job re-popularising both styles in the UK, but more importantly he was the assyriologist who excavated Nineveh and the Library of Ashurbanipal—where we've found the majority of the Gilgamesh tablets. Pioneer figure in terms of Near Eastern archaeology... but check this out:

This is a necklace Layard had made for his wife. It uses real cylinder seals.

To quote the British Museum's entry on the item: One cylinder seal is Akkadian (about 2200 BC) and four belong to the second millennium BC, but eight are late Assyrian (about 1000-612 BC). Late Babylonian and Achaemenid stamp seals (about 600-350 BC) are used for the pendants and clasp.

Enid later wrote in her diary that, when they dined with Queen Victoria in 1873, it was 'much admired'.

Ancient Near Eastern artefacts, repurposed as jewellery in a set that doesn't give a single fuck about accurately dating them, let alone treating them with the sort of respect you might perhaps expect of items over four thousand years old. Instead they've become a mark of elite colonial status, an Oriental curiosity utterly separated from their historical context. They're 'old'. They're non-descriptly 'other'. Time and place dissolve into an attractive and vague exoticism.

All while the place these seals have been appropriated from is busy being exploited by the very empire this "jewellery" is being shown off to!

So to bring it back to your third point: you're absolutely right!!! And this has precedence dating right back to the start of Western study (and plundering) of the Ancient Near East. It's a carelessness, it's an ignorance of historical context, and it's explicitly colonial.

[classicslesbianopinions]

thank you for the added context!

[evolutionsbedingt]

The irony here is that setting a cylinder seal in a gold cap and wearing it was definitely a thing that happened in the time where they were in active use. When I wrote my BA thesis there was only a handful of articles on it and I've admittedly not kept up with the topic, but golden seal caps where known for the first half of the second millennium BCE. (The Tell Leilan examples I studied specifically date to the 18th century). Also the reuse and, essentially, over-writing of older seals was common practice as well, making the jewellery somewhat in line with cultural practice.

It never should have been done like this, because it voids the seals of all meaning and turns them into a curiosity, but at least there's no significant damage to be expected and it retains the original intention to some degree.

Meanwhile, the medaillons Zendaya wore are, if I remember correctly, usually meant to be stitched to fabric or nailed to wood (you can see the holes intended for their application to something slightly to the viewer-left of the place the earring is attached). They're thin sheet metal and won't hold up well to hanging freely, attached only to a small point at the very edge of the disk, not to speak of the damage the attachment itself is bound to do.

So while Lady Layard's jewellery is in bad taste and undeniably orientalist, the damage done to the artefacts is likely minimal, while Zendaya's earrings actively altered the artifacts beyond their intended use and likely damaged them in the process.

Lady Layard showed off their exploitation of the western Asian peoples connected to these seals, but is bound to have known something about them thanks to her husband's work. Zendaya was given these earrings, likely with no intention or information beyond "They're old, sort of in the region and fit the outfit." which makes it, to me, the more egregiously orientalist piece.