miserably jingling fool

i like birds and art and making text posts that no one sees

[crockpot-corn]

i thought it was obvious that the targaryens are meant to be albino?

based on the pale white/silver/gold hair, very pale skin, and purple eyes, it seems like that is describing an albino person exactly. this would contribute to them looking otherworldly as well- instead of looking like normal blonde people, they have very pale eyes and white eyelashes and brows in addition to the hair, features that are very rare. hell this even works out in casting for shows and films, as these features are possible in any race of human.

[crockpot-corn]

I think that my crippling desire to lose weight is really based on my desire to find comfortable clothes that fit. I was thinking about it and looking at outfits for my body type on pinterest, and i realized i dont even find slim or skinny people particularly attractive. I think im hot. the thing that really gets me is my clothes always always being too small. i love clothes, i love shopping! but i find so many cool pieces and bring a metric ton of clothes into the fitting rooms, and then leave with nothing. all too small. or, i get discouraged and buy something im not perfectly happy with, then dislike it when i get home. i understand that the fault is with the clothing and not with my body, but that does not erase the fact that it is miles more effort for someone of my shape to find clothes that fit. my desire to change my shape comes from the frustration of never finding things to wear. i want that to be easier! that is what losing weight would do.

[victusinveritas]

[oodles-of-boodle]

For anyone who wants an easy copy-paste into their favourite recipe keeper:

Pumpkin Pudding Pie w/Orange Zest and Cardamom Whipped Cream

(makes ~3 pies)

Ingredients:

Pie:

2 ½ cups sugar

15oz can pumpkin puree

2 eggs

½ tsp baking soda

2 cups flour

2 tsp baking powder

½ tsp ground cinnamon

¼ tsp vanilla

pinch of salt

2½ cups milk

4 TBSP butter (melted)

1 orange

1 tsp powdered sugar

Whipped Cream:

1 cup heavy cream

2 TBSP powdered sugar

1 tsp cardamom

pinch nutmeg

-----------

Instructions:

Pie:

Preheat the oven to 325°F

Prepare the pie crust (that's another recipe's job- either find a scratch recipe or buy a pre-made dough or graham cracker crust)

Blend 2½ cups sugar, pumpkin puree, eggs, and baking soda in a large mixing bowl (if using a mixer, blend with a paddle attachment)

Add the flour, baking powder, cinnamon, vanilla, and salt; blend until well mixed

Add the milk and melted butter, whisk until well mixed (if using a mixer, blend with the whisk attachment)

Pour your batter into the crust, filling right up to the edge (the mix will be more liquid than solid, but it will rise/solidify in the oven)

Bake at 325°F for 55 minutes

Remove from the oven and let it cool

Top with sifted powdered sugar

Zest an orange over the top of the pie (microplane if possible but regular zester is fine; have found that the most aesthetically pleasing version is to peel the orange and then finely dice the peel but that's a hassle!)

Whipped cream:

Put your metal mixing bowl and whisk in the freezer for at least 15 minutes

Whisk powdered sugar, cardamom, and nutmeg together in bowl

Add heavy cream; whisk until stiff peaks start forming

Serve on a cooled pie :)

[afloweroutofstone]

Depending on the context, different people love to haul out this idea that there’s a “hate speech” exception to the First Amendment. Normally you just see it among random posters online, but here’s the leader of our Justice Department

There is no such exception. Hate speech is fully protected as a form of free speech in the United States, as confirmed unanimously by the Supreme Court in Matal v. Tam. What’s more, it is a good thing that hate speech is legal here, because “hate speech” is an incredibly slippery term with no consistent definition, and laws against it are tools in the hands of some of the most hateful politicians in the world. Governments with laws against “hate speech” frequently use them to suppress the opinions of ethnic/religious/social/political minorities. Anyone who wants to regulate “hate speech” is your enemy.

[brainstatic]

A little advice from someone studying extremist groups: if you’re in a social media environment where the daily ubiquitous message is that you have no hope of any kind of future and you can’t possibly achieve anything without a violent overthrow of society, you’re being radicalized, and not in the good way.

[embervoices]

If the solution to your problems sounds like “we need a blank slate” it’s a lie. There are no blank slates, and the closest approximation people can generally imagine is “burn it all down and let God/fate/history sort it out”.

That’s not problem solving. It’s barely catharsis, in practice. It doesn’t just create more problems than it solves, it destroys more solutions than it creates.

Put the apocalypse down, and back away slowly.

Real solutions to complex, systemic problems are not so easily reduced to “us good, them evil; kill them.”

[punkrorschach]

[flower-crow]

[image transcript:

Voting as Fire Extinguisher

When the haunted house catches fire: a moment of indecision.

The house was, after all, built on bones, and blood, and bad intentions.

Everyone who enters the house feels that overwhelming dread, the evil that perhaps only fire can purge.

It’s tempting to just let it burn.

And then I remember:

there are children inside.

—Kyle Tran Myhre. end id]

[lierdumoa]

There is clear historical precedent that when a society collapses, it actually makes the people who survive *more* vulnerable to authoritarian exploitation, not less. Just look at what happened to Europe after the Black Plague hit! Society didn’t become better and more egalitarian as a result. Quite the opposite — the plague rolled out the red carpet for the Spanish Inquisition!

[dragon-in-a-fez]

so my friend posted "the beast is slain" on facebook this morning and I naturally assumed it was about, you know, the happenings, but apparently they just passed the bar exam

[theonion]

As law enforcement officials search for a person of interest in the assassination of 31-year-old Turning Point USA co-founder Charlie Kirk, witnesses on the scene at Utah Valley University admitted Thursday they had assumed the shooter was just an ordinary gunman on campus. “When that first shot rang out, we all figured it was going to be a run-of-the-mill mass shooting” said UVU junior Michael Tompkins, who explained that when students spotted a man clad in black and carrying a rifle on a roof overlooking the crowd, they had no reason to suspect anything unusual.

Full Story

[crockpot-corn]

i know how bad charlie kirk was, he was an incredibly influential man promotion horrid and violent ideas and it seems someone finally called his bluff. i will not be mourning him.

but. if you are promoting gun control, if you are anti-gun violence, you must be anti gun violence for everyone. if you are pro-free speech, no one has free speech if one of us is getting murdered for it.

gun violence, political violence does not stop at your personal enemies. your enemies are not bulletproof and neither. are. your heroes.

watch yourself.

[moonshinemagpie]

okay so I finished Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861) by Harriet Jacobs, and here are my takeaways, because it was AMAZING and I can't believe all US students aren't required to read it in school:

shows how slavery actually worked in nuanced ways i'd never thought much about

example: Jacobs's grandmother would work making goods like crackers and preserves after she was done with her work day (so imagine boiling jars at like 3 a.m.) so that she could sell them in the local market

through this her grandmother actually earned enough money, over many years, to buy herself and earn her freedom

BUT her "mistress" needed to borrow money from her. :)))) Yeah. Seriously. And never paid her back, and there was obviously no legal recourse for your "owner" stealing your life's savings, so all those years of laboring to buy her freedom were just ****ing wasted. like.

But also! Her grandmother met a lot of white women by selling them her homemade goods, and she cultivated so much good will in the community that she was able to essentially peer pressure the family that "owned" her into freeing her when she was elderly (because otherwise her so-called owners' white neighbors would have judged them for being total assholes, which they were)

She was free and lived in her own home, but she had to watch her children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren all continue to be enslaved. She tried to buy her family but their "owners" wouldn't allow it.

Enslaved people celebrated Christmas. they feasted, and men went around caroling as a way to ask white people in the community for money.

But Christmas made enslaved people incredibly anxious because New Years was a common time for them to be sold, so mothers giving their children homemade dolls on Christmas might, in just a few days' time, be separated from their children forever

over and over again, families were deliberately ripped apart in just the one community that Harriet Jacobs lived in. so many parents kept from their children. just insane to think of that happening everywhere across the slave states for almost 200 years

Harriet Jacobs was kept from marrying a free Black man she loved because her "owner" wouldn't let her

Jacobs also shows numerous ways slavery made white people powerless

for example: a white politician had some kind of relationship with her outside of marriage, obviously very questionably consensual (she didn't hate him but couldn't have safely said no), and she had 2 children by him--but he wasn't her "master," so her "master" was allowed to legally "own" his children, even though he was an influential and wealthy man and tried for years to buy his children's freedom

she also gives examples of white men raping Black women and, when the Black women gave birth to children who resembled their "masters," the wives of those "masters" would be devastated--like, their husbands were (from their POV) cheating on them, committing violent sexual acts in their own house, and the wives couldn't do anything about it (except take out their anger on the enslaved women who were already rape victims)

just to emphasize: rape was LEGALLY INCENTIVIZED BY US LAW LESS THAN 200 YEARS AGO. It was a legal decision that made children slaves like their mothers were, meaning that a slaveowner who was a serial rapist would "own" more "property" and be better off financially than a man who would not commit rape.

also so many examples of white people promising to free the enslaved but then dying too soon, or marrying a spouse who wouldn't allow it, or going bankrupt and deciding to sell the enslaved person as a last resort instead

A lot of white people who seemed to feel that they would make morally better decisions if not for the fact that they were suffering financially and needed the enslaved to give them some kind of net worth; reminds me of people who buy Shein and other slave-made products because they just "can"t" afford fairly traded stuff

but also there were white people who helped Harriet Jacobs, including a ship captain whose brother was a slavetrader, but he himself felt slavery was wrong, so he agreed to sail Harriet to a free state; later, her white employer did everything she could to help Harriet when Harriet was being hunted by her "owner"

^so clearly the excuse that "people were just racist back then" doesn't hold any water; there were plenty of folks who found it just as insane and wrongminded as we do now

Harriet Jacobs making it to the "free" north and being surprised that she wasn't legally entitled to sit first-class on the train. Again: segregation wasn't this natural thing that seemed normal to people in the 1800s. it was weird and fucked up and it felt weird and fucked up!

Also how valued literacy skills were for the enslaved! Just one example: Harriet Jacobs at one point needed to trick the "slaveowner" who was hunting her into thinking she was in New York, and she used an NYC newspaper to research the names of streets and avenues so that she could send him a letter from a fake New York address

I don't wanna give away the book, because even though it's an autobiography, it has a strangely thrilling plot. But these were some of the points that made a big impression on me.

Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl also inspired the first novel written by a Black American woman, Frances Harper, who penned Iola Leroy. And Iola Leroy, in turn, helped inspire books by writers like Nella Larsen and Zora Neale Hurston. Harriet Jacob is also credited in Colson Whitehead's acknowledgments page for informing the plot of The Underground Railroad. so this book is a pivotal work in the US literary canon and, again, it's weird that we don't all read it as a matter of course.

(also P.S. it's free on project gutenberg and i personally read it [also free] on the app Serial Reader)

[moonshinemagpie]

update!!!!

So Harriet Jacobs's brother was named John Swanson Jacobs, and in her memoir she's like "btw my brother ran away too." But we don't learn a lot about him.

Well, guess what? John Swanson Jacobs wrote a memoir, too. And it was rediscovered. Recently. It was published in full for the first time since 1850 last year, in 2024.

Harriet and John Jacobs both ran away, but they lived very different lives. Harriet Jacobs took a more "typical" path for a Black abolitionist of her era: She asked a white abolitionist to take the credit for her book, since otherwise it wasn't going to get published/read (it was only proven in the 21st century that Harriet herself wrote it).

But John Swanson Jacobs?

He gave all of America the middle finger, became a sailor, traveled the world (the Caribbean, England, Russia, Ukraine, Thailand, India, all over), then ended up in Australia and got his memoir published in a newspaper in Sydney, where he didn't need white people's "permission" to publish it, didn't have to accept the indignity of having a white editor, and didn't need to pretend that he wasn't really the author of his own book.

He called it The United States Governed by Six Hundred Thousand Despots, referring to the 600,000 slaveowners living in the US.

Like, whoa.

The historian who discovered his memoir,,and wrote a biography on him, describes him as a man with "apocalyptic intelligence."

It is so cool that this book exists. And it kinda sucks because I just know if it'd come out in 2020 people would have been all over it, but I haven't seen it in any bookstores. I got my library to stock it; maybe you can request it at your library, too.

The new edition is annotated by Jonathan D. S. Schroeder, the historian who found Jacobs's memoir in an 1850 Australian newspaper. He recommends--and I do too--reading Harriet and John Swanson Jacobs's memoirs back-to-back, and the annotations in Six Hundred Thousand Despots highlight parts where the siblings' books corroborate or differ from each other's accounts, something I'm personally enjoying a lot.

The United States Governed by Six Hundred Thousand Despots

Lost on the other side of the world since 1855, the story of John Swanson Jacobs finally returns to America. This comprehensive edition incl

So yeah. Our only extant fugitive slave narrative written by a world-traveling sailor who told all of America to fuck off and went to live his life. Very very cool book. 10/10 recommend.

[mcmansionhell]

simulacra for bootlickers

FYI, this post is a little more NSFW than usual with the language.

Usually I think McMansions are kind of funny. Sometimes, I even like them. If I didn't like them at least a little bit, I don't think I'd be running this blog for a solid eight years and counting. Some McMansions are so strange and so fascinating in their architectural languages (it's never just one language) that they test the boundaries of what residential architecture can do on an individual and often ad hoc level. Others so cogently and often whimsically express various cultural fascinations and deeply entrenched American ideas of what prosperity looks like (read: neuroticisms), that, as a sociological text they remain unrivaled.

But some (many!) McMansions are, to put it bluntly, evil. And it is these McMansions that reveal the ugly truth beneath the ugly architecture: that the McMansion is a manifestation of power and wealth meant to communicate that power and wealth to others as explicitly as possible, and that it does so in a country besieged by brutal and inescapable income inequality. In our present political moment characterized by extreme and deliberate cruelty, fear, and baleful destruction of all that is pro-social in nature (and nature itself), I figured it was my duty to show my readers a house that embodies these sentiments, one we can all use to assuage some of our perceived powerlessness by way of mocking the shit out of it.

There are a lot of fake White Houses in the US. Most of them can be found in or around the area of McLean, Virginia, the ground zero of DC blob sickos whose job it is to mete out the ratio of lethality and economy for weapons manufacturers. This one, however, is in Indiana, outside of Evansville. It was built at the apex of theme park mindset in architecture (1997) and is on the market for $4.9 million dollars. However, don't be fooled by this opening exterior shot. It takes literal drone footage to show how unhinged this house actually is. In reality, the White House facade is akin to the light dangling from an anglerfish, luring the unsuspecting victim in...

Completely NORMAL amount of money at play here!

There are some images historians (if there are any left) will look back upon and say, such a phenomenon truly would not be possible without an abundance of cheap oil and derivative products. Fortunately, in the immanent post-neoliberal chobani yogurt solarpunk utopia, this house will be converted into a half ruin garden (though this will take some time with all the plastic) half public spa complex. A better world is possible, but only if we imagine it.

Pro tip: there's a way of saying "wow it's so big" that can land as the most devastating insult in the rhetorical lexicon.

I'll be real, the armchair thing is a new one for me, too.

(Rise and grindset voice): Inside you are two lions. Both of them are hungry for prosperity and success. Let's get this bread, king.

Not to do gender here, but compared to the rest of the house, this is a "my wife got her way" room if there ever was one.

Fixer Upper was basically 9/11 for "architectural foam trappings" and "color." Look what they took from you...

Honestly, what a great juxtaposition. This is what that book The Machine in the Garden was all about. (No it's not.)

Half of this post tbh:

Well, that's it for this extremely upbeat and positive McMansion Hell post in this extremely positive and upbeat time we are living in. Join us soon for the concluding part 2 of the Neuschwanstein Castle series, especially if you like beautiful, psychosexually crippled swan boys (real and fictional) and kitsch theory.

If you like this post and want more like it, support McMansion Hell on Patreon for as little as $1/month for access to great bonus content including a discord server, extra posts, and livestreams. (Don't worry! This doesn't adjust for inflation! Now's the perfect time to join!)

Not into recurring payments? Try the tip jar! McMansion Hell stocks, much like mortgage-backed securities only ever go up!!

[pandavalkyrie]

I don't think I'm ever going to understand people treating Tumblr post comment sections as a confession booth seeking validation from OP. It comes up again and again when discussing boycotts, political action, or god forbid listening to a rap song

You can just not tell people on the Internet when you do something that's being mildly criticized and no one will know.

"I don't listen to rap because they talk too fast for my audio processing disorder." Ok. And there's no need for you to tell a stranger that

"I can't participate in BDS because McDonald's is my safe food." Ok. So don't post about it and no one will judge you.

"I have to buy a piece of Harry Potter branded merch at least once a week or I'll fall into a depression." You can just not tell people this and they won't know.

Things you can do instead of commenting on posts about how you're a special exception that deserves a pass for doing something being criticized:

Ignore the post and scroll past

Block OP and save both of yourselves the trouble

Take the opportunity to reflect on the practice and think about why you're being defensive about it, maybe consider there is a way you can challenge yourself a little and give it a try

Stop assuming every Tumblr post is made for and targeted towards you and requires you respond to it

Have the defensive thought and then keep it in your head where no one else can know or judge you for it

Log off and go do something else

Any of these things will work out better for you than going into a comment section and explaining to strangers why you can't/will continue to do something currently under scrutiny. They don't care, they probably don't know who you are, and no one has to know this about you.

Stop seeking validation in the Tumblr dot com comment section you're only hurting yourself and pissing off the op

[theconcealedweapon]

[methamphetatitties]

Everyone keeps saying "four years" as if we are not living in a christo fascist oligarchic dictatorship now. I envy your optimism and naivety.

It's been three days since I originally posted this and I'm here to say

I fucking told y'all

[lyricwritesprose]

This is a distraction. Constitutional amendments are stupid hard to pass. Probably more useful to check and see if your state is gearing up to use immigrants as slave labor (Missouri is, there's a whole bill setting it up) or how to give money to the legal organizations that are currently stalling on transferring trans prisoners to their AGAB prison, or other bits of harm delay. They want us so overwhelmed we do nothing. Screen out the news, pick a thing, and do something about it.

[crockpot-corn]

this is cringe! quit being apocalyptic and get up. quit falling for the media flooding bullshit that trump is pulling once again, and look at what he's actually doing!

he doesn't have as much power as he thinks he does and power systems built off of hero worship of one person crumble incredibly easily! get up!

[livedinthecastle]

what fucking hell dimension are y’all blogging from

[crockpot-corn]

this boy

[crockpot-corn]

silent floor of library. man, open mouth as if screaming in pain or despair. no sound coming out. quietly scrolling on computer.

[crockpot-corn]

hhheh

[crockpot-corn]

not making this any better tubi

[crockpot-corn]

hhheh