Cynically Sweet

I absorb canon by fandom osmosis

[art-by-moosie]

Discord silliness leads to endangered shark awareness :3

[teathattast]

[2-kamikou-1]

there mexico!!

[homunculus-argument]

Oh, to be granted the power to speak to animals for just like 38 seconds, so that I could tell this pebble-brained feathery fuckass that nobody is impressed that he started singing earlier than anybody else. There's no bird pussy available at 2 am. The dames can sense your desperation. Stop screaming for at least three more hours.

[narrenstrich]

“i‘m sorry anakin, for all of it“

[whereareyourightnow]

[teaboot]

how could you like the colour yellow

see a therapist immediately

I actually used to hate it! Like, actually despise it! Yellow was too bright, too loud, discordant, unruly, and clashed with everything. Nothing like what I wanted in my life, nothing I wanted to be.

When I first moved away from home, everything I owned was black. Jet back. As black as I could get. Smooth, cool, sleek, discrete, calm, unassuming. Flexible, cohesive, agreeable black. Fashionable black.

I had a really, really bad time. Unrelated to the decor. It was my first year out of a toxic place I'd grown used to my whole life, my first year acknowledging a mental illness I'd believed to be normal, my first year fending for myself with very little money or sleep or companionship.

I'd grown up on instant white rice and unseasoned ground beef. One day I realized that everything I'd been raised on tasted like cardboard. While out on an assignment, I passed a tent with a woman selling spices, and bought myself some turmeric. I went home and tried making curry with it. It was so yellow.

Another time, my professor took us out to a modern art gallery. I wasn't sure what I was expecting, but when we got there, the whole building had been painted bright sunshine yellow.

The artist's theme was "happiness".

What it is. How we make it. How to share it.

All bright, lovely yellow.

The house I grew up in was beige. The walls were white. The appliances were post 9/11 stainless steel. My job was to be quiet, compliant, presentable and agreeable.

Black goes with everything. Black is neutral. Black is quiet, reserved, elegant and mysterious.

Yellow is warm. Yellow does what it wants. Yellow tastes sweet and spicy and hot and cool, like a summer breeze, like sunflower petals, powdery like dust on a long dirt road and soothing like well-worn linen.

I still like the look of black. I like the look of most colors. But I like the way that Yellow makes me feel.

Do you understand?

[raspbrrytea]

[teaboot]

DUDE

[misty-anne]

Adamtots

[nobodyfamousposts]

So here’s a thought: the strangest reverse kidnapping the Waynes have ever experienced.

So Tim gets kidnapped. 

Makes sense. He is the CEO of Wayne industries. Of of the most notable Wayne children. His kidnapping is really no surprise. He gets kidnapped every other month.

But usually the kidnappers tie him up.

And take his phone.

And his laptop.

And lock the door.

And make it so he can’t just…y’know…leave.

And they especially don’t give him a very nice desk set up where he can continue his work unimpeded.

Bruce is confused.

Tim is confused and intrigued.

The kidnappers are by no means special. They aren’t any sort of costumed crook. They have no magic or powers. They are absolutely normal people.

Normal but smart people.

“Mr. Wayne, we have your son.”

“Which one?“

“The one who runs your business.“

“I see.”

“We want $10 million for his release.”

“I think you’ll find that Tim has already been subjected to multitude of kidnapping in the past. I am not concerned.”

“Oh, this one’s different.” The head kidnapper responded.

“It is different so far. I’m not tied to a chair and there’s no lock on the door. What’s to stop me from leaving?” Tim asks, bemused and gesturing to the aforementioned unlocked door with his again unbound hands.

“Because we have coffee.“ The kidnapper replies, gesturing to a rather fancy coffee setup with a freshly brewing French roast.

Tim immediately perks up.

“And for every hour that our demands are not met, we will give him a fresh pot of coffee with an increasing grade of caffeine.”

Ten seconds pass.

There is a “ding” from the kidnapper’s cellphone as the notification of the payment goes through.

The kidnappers blink.

“I’ll be honest. I didn’t expect that to work.”

Tim, who had taken advantage of this time to make himself a cup of coffee and already finished it, sets the empty cup down.

“I’ll double it to keep me.”

“Tim!”

[cafeinevitable-deactivated20220]

Turtle Quilt by Laurraine Yuyama

Tokyo Quilt Festival

[writingfeedsthedarkestones]

QUILT

[finallygaveintothesirencall]

QUILT

[nyanletnest]

[whitepeopletwitter]

[ramshacklefey]

No IDs, but these tags got me in a huff:

So ok look. The point is not the flared leg by itself. These cannot be yoga pants. These are, and you have to understand this if you are too young to have worn them, BLUE JEANS. And this was the last years before all jeans were 70% spandex.

They were denim, and they weren't bell bottoms. They hung loose from the knee in a way that would make a wizard envious. We all walked around like we were wearing hakama. And they dragged on the ground. That was important. Ragged cuffs. If your jeans weren't so long that they had ratty cuffs, they were embarrassingly short.

And the thing about denim is that it's a twill weave and it's cotton. So not only does it hold a lot of water, it wicks. Walking around in these suckers on a wet day could get you wet to the knees even if you never stepped in a puddle.

Then you'd go inside and take off your shoes and try to avoid letting your freezing, wet, filthy pant legs touch your skin.

Yoga pants. Hmf.

[elodieunderglass]

people in cold climates would have a tide line of white marks around their knees (if they were normal height) in the winter.

From wicking up road salt.

[taibhsearachd]

The visceral memory of that time is something that never leaves you. Everyone's jeans were many inches higher in the back than the front because you kept stepping on the hem and ripping it off. Your lower legs were so very cold. Every new pair of jeans literally enveloped your entire foot, they were so so long re: leg-to-waist ratio. Walking on a rainy day was a legitimate workout. You have no idea.

[no-one-offical]

‎

[fibrearts]

Starry Night Microsweater

2022 1.3" x 1.6" ~50,000 stitches, 76 stitches/inch 500+ hours in the making. Over 70 different colors of silk thread including thread combinations

[jabberwockypie]

That’s Althea Crome’s work. You’ve seen her work before if you’ve ever seen the movie Coraline because she did the teeny tiny star sweater and gloves for the stop motion puppets to wear.

She does, however, work even smaller.

[johnny-depp-is-loved]

what is this genre of photos called

[seasons-in-hell]

Daniel Andersson

Safe From Harm (2022)

[animentality]

[thebibliosphere]

Why must I be awake.

[thebibliosphere]

#another victim of the woke agenda

@natalieironside what's it like being one of the funniest mother fuckers on the planet?

[natalieironside]

I wish it paid more

[thebibliosphere]

Honestly? Valid.

[uss-edsall]

At 1 PM on a Friday I get an email from my boss. I'm busy as hell so I don't check it immediately. Then I get a phone call from my boss, which has almost never happened before. I'm a white collar worker, a historian. There's never a 'historical emergency' requiring a phone call to kick me in the ass and get to work.

The request is so urgent my boss needs it by the end of the work week. Which, y'know, is 5 PM on a Friday. So I have four hours to do it.

It's a forwarded request. Somebody contacted a member of the donation team asking for help, "I need a map from the Vietnam War to use for a presentation." It's somebody she's trying to coax into giving a five figure donation to the museum.

The request was asked to the donation team member, who then emailed my boss, who then emailed and called me urgently.

This map required:

North and South Vietnam in it

All four areas that South Vietnam was divided into for military purposes ('Corps') clearly delineated

Four cities, all of them horrifically misspelled, and only identifiable because I know what battle the requester is asking about (it’s in III Corps on the border with Cambodia) (the requester danced around the battle but I’m knowledgeable enough to identify it)

Has Laos and Cambodia in it

Has the Ho Chi Minh Trail in it

So. I was mad about the 'you have literally four hours to find a map with a lot of requirements.'

I was then mad at myself about finding a copyright free map from Texas Tech University within half an hour, proving her right for asking me to do it.

Then, after I found a map that perfectly met the requirements, I was equally amazed, baffled, and horrified when I read further into the forwarded email chain.

The donation team team member they were speaking to used AI to generate a map.

The above put half of North Vietnam in South Vietnam, made the Ho Chi Minh Trail a country, made 60% of Cambodia part of South Vietnam, put the DMZ extremely high up in North Vietnam, completely disconnected the southern tip of Vietnam, misplaced all of the Corps zones, etc etc

At the very last second the donation team member had a moment of divine clarity, remembering there's three historians on payroll to ask for this kind of thing from. So she contacted my boss while saying, "I had fun with this, but I decided I should check for accuracy before I send it to the donor! I need a fact check by the end of the day, then I send it"

My boss, while not the most knowledgeable on the Vietnam War, does know her geography. She took one look, and knew it was so off she called me to tell me how urgent it is that I look at the email and respond

good fucking god, jesus tap dancing goddamn christ, I'm glad I was asked to look at it and then find a real map

[the-murmuration-project]

My fear has never been that AI would replace human intelligence. My fear has been that the people who Know Things and the people who Make The Decisions are almost never the same people.

We’re throwing real intelligence out on the street to starve while worshipping the shambling Frankenstein-ed corpse of knowledge puppeteered by those who see us as disposable assets.

[we-are-knight]

You know, I don't think I'll ever get over how that one post I made about women as knights in history, made it all the way to Reddit only for a bunch of redditors to argue that women couldn't actually be knights because:

- "the term is gendered" (it's not, and feminine equivalents were sometimes created specifically for the purpose)

- "they didn't actually do things as knights" (who didn't? The Hatchet women fought the Moors. A few other Orders had women as masters of arms. Both martial and formal examples)

...and a few other reasons that come down to "I don't like imagining my manly men in steel had women in their ranks, girls have cooties".

And the reason I say this is because recently, Wikipedia updated their page on "Knight", specifically adding a section about women with the title of knighthood, and what function they performed. And I know: "Wikipedia is not an academic source"--but every academic institution will accept the sources and articles used to back up wikipages, which confirm what has been said.

Knights were sometimes women. 🤷

[we-are-knight]

I saw this and needed to answer.

The gendered versions of 'knight' come from Romance languages, and literally just change the word to fit the gender of the subject (within a binary). So it isn't like English, where a female knight has always been a 'Dame', but, using Spain as an example, the word for Knight in Spanish is 'Cabellero'. This is the default masculine.

The feminine word for Knight? 'Cabellera'.

Similarly in French: "Chevalier" becomes "Chevaliére".

In Italian, "Cavaliere" becomes "Cavaliera".

Outside of Romance languages, "knight" is just a title for a social rank, so even the English Dame is by default a knight by rank, but may not have the title (although not impossible).

So it's not a silly infantilisation, than using a word for the knightly class and gendering it in a binary, which means we can actually tell that, yes, women as knights existed, enough that the feminine form of the word pops up now and then, so we know it existed.

[jv]

ooh, where one could read that original post??

Just a note about translations and ... well, patriarchal bullshit.

When you say "Hatchet women fought the Moors" I was like "hey, that seems to be part of my local history, how have I never heard about it?", and when I googled it ... I actually have heard about it, it's the Orden del Hacha from Catalonia (Orde de l'Atxa in the original Catalan). But ... there's something odd going on. Why the fuck in English they have translated like "Order or the hatchet"? You know, in Spanish and Catalan there's no really a difference between "Axe" and "Hatchet": There's a single word for them, "Hacha/Atxa". But in English, there's a difference. A Hatchet is a hand axe, pretty much the smallest one you can think of:

So It's pretty remarkable that whoever translated the name of the order to english first decided to use "Hatchet" and not "Axe". I'm pretty sure if this was a order of men warriors the name would have been pretty different. Specially when THIS was their coat of arms:

So dear academic-who-translated-this-first: Does that look like a hatchet to you, motherfucker?!?!?

[we-are-knight]

Important inclusion I was not aware of, thank you very much friend. :)

[heroineimages]

I’m going to be chuckling over ‘Does this look like a hatchet to you, motherfucker?!?!?” for the rest of the day.