TVSTRANGERTHINGS
tannertan36
Misplaced Lens Cap
PUT YOUR BEARD IN MY MOUTH
Kiana Khansmith
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Not today Justin
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wallacepolsom
todays bird
One Nice Bug Per Day
🩵 avery cochrane 🩵
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Mike Driver
macklin celebrini has autism
izzy's playlists!
trying on a metaphor
sheepfilms
Jules of Nature
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@cuteasamuntin
She/They || Jewish || Queer || Oldish || Cis+ || Weird Girl™ Disorder || IRL Historic Preservationist & Architectural Historian
Judge my literary & comics taste on StoryGraph
Read my fanfic on AO3
Jewish self-determination & Palestinian self-determination are not mutually exclusive ideals, and non-Jews identifying as “"Zionist" or "anti-Zionist” is super weird
LIKES TO CHARGE REBLOGS TO CAST
you people aren't CASTING
My favorite part is when the kitty runs to the window and looks out like “the outside stuff????? It is inside?????”
i
i had to
Y’all this is a great video to study to observe the body language of a very happy but also very excited cat. Lots of people see videos of excited cats doing things like climb rock climbing walls or get on small boats and think they are angry or scared, when they aren’t. Here’s a good example of happy excitement and tension in a cat where the cat’s pleasure is easy to see. The cat’s tail is lashing and its ears are going backward and forward like crazy, but the cat is not angry, it is merely off its shits because snow is just incredible. This is a wildly playful cat which might play-attack a hand or other animal because it is so excited, but not out of anger. Note the zoomies at the end to burn off some of that energy!
Think about it. When we humans do something fun and very physical, our bodies are often tense, at the ready, and a lot of our body language does look kind of aggressive or even scared. Cats are the same! Animals at play or investigating new things often show some tension, but tension is not the same as anger or fear!
HM... Okay new theory!
The skull in Harrow Chapter 7 is the Sixth, and of course they do talk about Cassiopeia and her achievements in general quite a bit there, so that's plenty reason to be relevant.
But now I'm thinking. In the River, the Body is nowhere to be seen, though Harrow had been seeing her up until they submerged. And that makes sense, for there not to be the distinction between John and Alecto within it.
It also makes sense for Harrow not to identify his soul as having multiple parts, given she recognizes herself as one "point" of light but also as being made of 200 smaller lights.
But now... When Harrow sees the five points of light, and at the end thinks, "Five?" There are a few possibilities.
It "could" be foreshadowing Gideon, or maybe Alecto and Harrow just didn't expect to see evidence, but... I stand by that there shouldn't be a separation between John and Alecto in this context, and for Gideon... On one hand I'm incredibly convinced Gideon shares the god soul, and if she does, then she should blend into John and Alecto's light; and if she doesn't, then wouldn't she blend into Harrow's? She doesn't see Babs as distinct from Ianthe or Cris as distinct from Mercy; Gideon should just be one more of her many lights, right?
Another possibility is Wake in the sword, but however determined a revenant she is, I feel like there's a solid case to be made that Wake wouldn't stand out next to any normal ghost in the River. On top of that, if Harrow can see this, surely at least John also can, and I feel like he would have caught Wake sooner if he'd seen something amiss within the ship.
So looking at how this effect is first described...
Hot bloody blisters bubbled up from your skin, and you were aware of yourself, not as a structure, but as a sickly radiance: one sickly radiance among other sickly radiances, one, two, three, four, five, all around you, one beneath.
Why would one of them be beneath? And all five are a "sickly radiance." Sickly doesn't sound like Alecto's light, and radiance on par with the Lyctors doesn't sound like Wake. This sounds like five Lyctors (counting John as a form of one). And if it's something outside the ship, I can see John just, not really having looked down while focused on Harrow and the trip, or having not paid it any mind if he's seen that kind of radiance drift by before.
But yeah, so I'm suddenly really really really hope the chapter skull has another layer as a hint and we'll find out later that the fifth point of light she saw was actually Cassy.
We have never truly met this woman but I want to so so badly.
All this discourse over who does "painting with light"
Hiroshi Nagai's paintings need sunglasses to look at.
They look like how it feels to walk across a parking lot on a 98° summer day without a speck of shade in sight.
They look like heaven but also like you'd burn your bare feet on the ground.
Even when you can see shade you know it's not enough and the minute you step out you'll be burnt to a crisp like a vampire.
And it's BEAUTIFUL
I'll throw in the wonderful Eizin Suzuki into this ring too, a man whose work just breathes light without actually using dynamic lighting in the usual way. It's no surprise both Nagai and Suzuki are both considered prolific in art pertaining to the city pop genre because they're able to paint these kinds of scenes with a delicate touch.
This feels like I could trip on that radio and fall right into that water, feeling the crystal waves as I drop in.
And this, a nice stroll down a resort strip, where my sunscreened skin could literally feel cooked if I leaned too close to the tiling.
And then a nice stretch of summer street, wherein you could see your face in the flushed red of that car provided it didn't blind you from its sunny reflections.
I don't think I even need to say anything more, Suzuki's a massive influence in how he even places colours so warmly in such unorthodox manner. It's a naturally sunkissed talent~ 🌊
me when there's work at work
salad is mostly items
Most of us have a gross food at a friend’s house while growing up story but mine was sooooo wild. We sat down to dinner, the side dishes were like white rice and broccoli and the main entree was shrimp. Just shrimp. Unseasoned steamed shrimp. Pink. Not a shred of any sort of herb or flavoring on that thang. I do not enjoy shrimp on the best of days but I can tolerate it, I bit into one just to make sure there wasn’t like a clear lemon sauce or something that wasn’t visible but no, this was really and truly completely unseasoned shrimp. This was a predicament. I was in maybe the third grade, I really wanted to make a good impression so I politely asked if there was any cocktail sauce to dip the shrimp in as that was what I was used to doing. Her dad laughed and said no.
I straight up could not make myself eat it. I tried very politely to nibble on the side dishes and I did not place additional shrimp on my plate as to be polite and not waste food but it was fucking surreal. The whole unseasoned meal combination was not human food, it was like a fancy meal for an expensive dog. Her, her parents and her brother are eating it like unseasoned rice, broccoli and shrimp is a completely normal meal. I feel it is important to note that this was occurring in North Carolina so I’m not used to dealing with this, I had never experienced an unseasoned shrimp with no sauce in my 9 or 10 years of life. I also feel it is important to note my friend is biracial, Black mom, white dad. This is not a midwestern Caucasian mom mealtime disaster, this is 100 miles inland from the fucking coast in North Carolina. Shrimp is not a cheap food so it’s not like they just couldn’t afford to season the protein. To this day, I still do not understand. Maybe they were health freaks, maybe someone in the household was on a low sodium diet but not a single HERB??? NOTHING????? WHY WERE THEY EATING LIKE THAT???????
My friend’s dad mentioned to my dad that I hadn’t eaten at dinner when they walked me home, presumably because he didn’t want my dad to think they had me over for dinner and refused to feed me when I went home starving. My parents taught me to always be polite and gracious and I’d get in trouble for being rude for things I did not completely understand were slights but I knew bonding over food is a big part of the culture in the south so not feeding someone when they’re at your house and/or not eating when offered is considered rude and bizarre. I waited for them to leave and I was sooooo worried I’d be in trouble but I explained the unseasoned shrimp dilemma to my dad and the look on his face was like 😟, he was also truly fucking baffled and I was absolved of all guilt.
Please tell me you still know these people, I need answers
stop. analyse that text through the lens of its author's intentions and original historical context. okay now take the author out back and kill them dead and analyse that text as though it were published by your mutual yesterday and is in direct conversation with the contemporary discourse that's most relevant to your life. okay now pick your favorite angle of interpretation and come up with the strongest possible argument against it. now imagine that the text is your best friend and that it means you well and that you naturally give it every benefit of the doubt because you're on its side and you want the best for it. now imagine that the text wants you dead and it'll eat you if you don't eat it first. now pretend that you found this text locked away in a cave with no evidence of when or where it came from and you have to divine its meaning solely through its internal coherence and nothing else. okay now address the elephant in the room aspect of the text you've been ignoring because you find it boring or confusing or uncomfortable and become the number one expert on it. now spend forty minutes assigning all the characters dnd classes with at least three sentences of reasoning each. okay now do the cha cha slide.
Your heart is not true enough to enter the gates of Margaritaville
My heart was heavier than the feather; I am sentenced to Rainforest Cafe
some people read an awful lot, but don't read very well. deep reading is itself a skill. being able to untangle the threads of theme, subtext, characterization, narrative style, and more are all things that it takes time and intentional engagement to learn.
if you've ever watched a movie with your film buff friend and chatted about it afterwards, that friend might have pulled hours more of conversation out of the same 90 minutes of screentime, and wondered how the fuck they did that - it's not raw intelligence, it's a skill that's been honed. And I learned a lot about film from talking to friends who knew about film, and reading critique by film scholars
literature works exactly the same. so if you want to get more out of your reading, there are things you can do to train that. Find a book or short story you think you've got a pretty good grasp on, preferably from a widely read & respected author like Ursula K Le Guin or Ray Bradbury (if you're new at this don't swing for the Toni Morrison or the Samuel Beckett yet unless you feel very comfortable with the complexity of the text - the point is to develop a complicated new skill on good foundations). Then go to JSTOR, create a free account, and look up criticism on the story you've chosen. Find something that looks readable to you and at least somewhat interesting. Read that article, and look at what that writer got out of the same story you've read that you didn't get. Do you see the critic's points? Did they teach you something about the text? Go reread that story and see if the criticism has changed how you read it. Are you seeing more? Are you thinking about the implications of a line that you hadn't noticed before? Does the story feel richer now?
there are other more involved ways of finding criticism. Learning to use academic databases, going to your local library to do interlibrary loans, finding critical voices you appreciate; these are all useful subskills. Literacy isn't just being able to read words, it's being able to read words in context and think about what they tell you about the text, the author, or the time and culture in which the text was produced. Literacy is the skill of being able to look at the world with open eyes and think clearly about how its parts are connected. It'll change your life
this keeps getting shared around and ive seen some different tags responding differently so i just want to make some important clarifications and distillations
you don't have to read more deeply if you don't want to (but i'd recommend it, i genuinely think it makes you a better person)
if you want to learn to read more deeply, the resources are out there. try to find critical literature (that is, academic writing that analyzes the text) on works your familiar with so you can get a sense for how to do that analysis too
learning to deep read literature can help you deep read many areas of your life
writers tend to put a lot of work into their stories. if you learn to read that work you'll (probably) appreciate the stories you love even more. And if not, then you'll have developed your taste. This too is worth doing
slow burn where they're already having sex. such a beautiful combination i cannot put it into words
of course, the best part of any character's corruption arc is their cool new outfit
you tell me that all the bad people are stupid. you tell me that stupid people should be killed, bred out, that evolution will leave them behind. i tell you that's not funny, that i have an intellectual disability, that i want to be allowed to love and to have children of my own. that maybe it's not the end of the world if "stupid" people get to stay. that my caregiver loves me and takes care of me. that she reads to me. that i get by with my little accessibility tools scattered about the house, my aac, and by being gentle. you tell me it's a joke. clearly you aren't like those REAL eugenicists, you only talk like them. you tell me surely i must agree- all the bad people, the ones who take away my rights, they must not be smart, they must be lacking some information to make them like this. i tell you smart people have hurt me more than anyone else because they know better and they still choose cruelty. these people in power aren't lacking anything. they have all the resources in the world and brains that work the way they want. they don't know struggle, they doom everyone who does. you don't stop talking about "stupid people" like we're a disease to eradicate. i note you down as one more smart person who has failed me by choosing to be cruel when you knew better
shit I missed my window, next week I guess
Reblog on Tuesday to let your followers know it’s safe to leave the bog
Man I miss free the nipple. Its getting warmer and we don’t even have free the nipple anymore
feminism has backslid so hard in recent years people don't even know what free the nipple means anymore
For those who genuinely don't know, "free the nipple" is about going topless. As in no clothes over the tits at all.
materialist-scumbag
THE TICK THAT DREW THE MAP OF THE WEST June 28, 2026
So the longhorn was a garbage animal. Stringy, mean, half-feral, descended from Spanish cattle that had gone loose in the brush country for a couple centuries and bred for survival rather than meat. In Texas after the war it was worth maybe three or four dollars a head, because there were millions of them and nobody to eat them. The local market was Texans, and Texas was broke. Up in Chicago or New York the same animal was worth thirty, forty dollars, because the Union had spent four years eating its way through the eastern cattle supply and the cities were short on beef.
That spread is the whole engine of the cattle drive. You don't need a tick to explain why a man would walk a cow a thousand miles to multiply its value by ten. The arithmetic does it.
What the tick explains is the SHAPE.
Because the thing about the longhorn nobody in the romance mentions is that it was a carrier. Centuries in the brush had given it a shaky immune truce with Babesia bigemina, a protozoan that lived in its blood and rode around on a tick that dropped off into the grass wherever the herd went.
The longhorn itself looked fine. Walked fine, sold fine, butchered fine. But the cattle it walked past, the fat improved Midwestern stock that had never met the parasite, those animals would start pissing blood and die at a rate that touched nine in ten. The Texans, reasonably, refused to believe their healthy-looking cattle were doing it. They took it to the Supreme Court in 1877 and won, on the entirely correct observation that their cows weren't sick. The cows weren't sick. The cows were Typhoid Mary.
(The disease disappeared every winter, too, north of a certain latitude, which baffled everybody for thirty years until somebody worked out that the tick just froze to death up there, no vector, no disease, the whole thing seasonal in a way that made it look like a moral judgment on Texas cattle specifically. It wasn't anybody's leading hypothesis that an insect was committing the murders. The leading hypothesis for a while was that the longhorns were poisoning the grass.)
So now run the two facts together. The cow is worth ten times more up north. The cow kills every other cow it passes on the way up north. What do you get?
You get a line.
You get a bunch of lines, actually. Quarantine lines, drawn and redrawn by Missouri and Kansas legislatures and eventually by the federal government, declaring that Texas cattle could not cross at all, or could only cross in winter when the tick was dead, or could only cross by rail if they were going straight to slaughter and never touched dirt that a local cow might later stand on. Missouri shut its border. Farmers formed Vigilance Committees (which is a polite nineteenth-century way of saying armed men) and turned the herds back at gunpoint. Kansas banned Texas cattle outright in 1885. And every one of those legal and shotgun-enforced lines was a wall the drive had to find a gate in.
The gate was the railhead.
This is the part that rewires the map. The famous cattle town (Abilene, Dodge City, Wichita, Ellsworth, the whole gunfighter pantheon) is not a town that grew up around ranching or water or gold or a river crossing. It's a point where the trail coming up out of the quarantine zone touched a railroad that could take the cow east to the slaughterhouse without it walking through anybody's protected pasture.
Abilene gets invented basically from scratch in 1867 by a man named Joseph McCoy who looked at the map, found a spot on the Kansas Pacific that was far enough WEST that the trail in from Texas could swing around the settled farm country and its quarantine, and built stockyards there. The town is a loading dock. The cowboy at the end of the trail, in the saloon, shooting the place up: he is a longshoreman who has just finished a shift, and the shift was getting the cargo to the one point where it could legally change from hooves to wheels.
And the cargo had to keep moving west precisely because the tick kept the settled east closed. As Kansas farmers spread and the quarantine line marched west with them, the railhead had to march west too. Abilene to Ellsworth to Wichita to Dodge, each town flaring up and dying back as the line of legal infection-free transfer slid across the state. The towns weren't competing on amenities. They were competing on being the current solvent point in a chemistry problem about where a tick could and couldn't survive the trip.
(Dodge City lasts longest because it's furthest out, last to get caught by the advancing farms, sitting out where the quarantine couldn't reach it yet. Its whole mythological career (Wyatt Earp, Boot Hill, the Long Branch) is a few years long and happens because of an agricultural-settlement frontier creeping toward it at the speed of homesteading. When the farms arrive, the party's over. The party was always a function of the farms not having arrived.)
So the geography of the Wild West, which towns exist and why they're where they are and why they boom for five years and empty out and why the trail bends where it bends, is not topography and not destiny and not the romance of open range.
It's the intersection of a price differential and a quarantine map. The price differential said go north. The quarantine map, drawn by the tick, said you may only go north HERE, and HERE, and now not there anymore, here. The cow drew the route and the parasite drew the borders and the men with the guns were just enforcing a public-health regime they didn't know was a public-health regime.
And it all gets zeroed out, eventually, the same way these things always do, not by a hero but by a logistics upgrade. They build the Kansas City stockyards and the packing plants, and then the rail net gets dense enough that the cow doesn't have to walk to the train at all, the train comes to the cow. Refrigerated cars mean you slaughter in Chicago and ship the meat instead of the animal. The long drive, the trail town, the whole apparatus that existed only to get a tick-bearing animal across a quarantine line to a loading point, it just stops being necessary, and the gunfighter towns settle down into being ordinary Kansas, dry and flat and law-abiding, within about a decade of their own legend.
The cattle tick itself they finally beat in 1943, dipping every cow in the South in arsenic for forty years to break the lifecycle. Nobody made a movie about the dipping vats.
Same as it ever was.
