so i don’t do much work anymore… @fabulaturbatory - Tumblr Blog

pinned post updated jan‘26

support palestinians here

read “the question of palestine” (1979)

welcome in if you’re a stranger, stay away from here if you know me irl.

i’m a queer, disabled, tme, white-passing chicano college student

i’m majoring in history, information science, and classical humanities, minoring in material culture. i’m especially interested in the history of record keeping and classification systems!!

my work interests will likely focus less around scholarship & academia, more around public access to information resources, potentially as a reference archivist or a museum educator. i’m an archival assistant during the school year, and an elementary STEM educator over the summers, and i quite like both of these ambitions.

this blog is textposts, artifacts, and ephemera, generally around topics like technology history, ancient civilizations, music history, language, print culture, and (on special fun days) paleontology

i also dabble in folklore, media studies, storytelling, print + digital journalism, and music in many forms (singing, guitar, cello, piano, and most lovingly songwriting)

the languages i feel comfortable in are english (mother tongue, fluent) or french (6 years, intermediate), and i also speak latin (2 years, proficient in reading/translating), some poor spanish and italian, and the barest winds of ASL and ancient greek

dm for the url of my main!! it’s becoming a closely guarded secret

(these are just some pictures i’ve taken that i hope lend themselves to the vibe shdhdf)

gentlyepigrams

What does the fox say? Konrad Kyeser, Bellifortis, Germany 15th century. Besançon, Bibliothèque municipale, ms. 1360, fol. 78v.

softiekurbie

I Do Not Come to You as a Reality, I Come to You as the Myth (Pentecost), Jamilla Okubo Studio, 2021.

polari

I fall asleep in his arms, and we forget to finish the second fusion of ourselves. He falls asleep with his fingers dipped in the honey. To sleep this way I must have found the end of pain.

— Anaïs Nin, Henry and June: From A Journal of Love: The Unexpurgated Diary of Anaïs Nin 1931-1932

dreamstars

dearparentheses

Rebecca Manson

several-mice

print inspired by queer online friendships

classicjdiesandgoestohell

i study 2 languages, norwegian and swahili, and the differences between their resources kind of drives me insane.

norwegian has 5 million speakers. it has courses on any language learning platform you can think of. the norwegian learning subreddit has 58k members - a bunch of passionate learners and natives who answer questions. in the last year ive managed to find 12 books in norwegian at thrift stores, book warehouses, etc. never even bothered to get some online because of this! you can watch basically any show you want in it, or at least with subtitles.

what does swahili have? swahili has around 100~ million speakers, making it the most spoken language in africa (excluding colonizer languages like french and arabic). most platforms dont have a course for it, but the few that do are incredibly poorly made and almost impossible to use to learn with. the swahili learning subreddit has only 6.7k members (and most of these people have personal ties like family, as opposed to norwegian where people just learn it randomly for fun). i have never found ANY books IN swahili. ive found two dictionaries, and they were both at speciality stores (unlike norwegian which ive found at my usual medium sized town thrift store). virtually nothing is translated to swahili. not even the fucking Lion King, which uses words from the swahili language (hakuna matata, simba, rafiki, mufasa).

im not expecting tanzania and kenya to translate every western movie ever, they have their own stories to tell (as well as some government censorship), but thats not the whole story. the west has no interest in giving their stories to africa and they have no interest in translating african stories to english.

and like. I understand Why these disparities exist. due to colonization and therefore lower education levels, there are less books in swahili in the first place. people would rather learn a language with grammar and vocabulary similarities to their own, like an indo european language. but the difference is actually fucking absurd. a language with 100 million speakers should not have this few resources. with norwegian, i could always google any niche grammar question i had and find someone online asking the same question. with swahili, i have to search through decades old grammar guides in search of an answer on my own.

swahili is a beautiful language. it has the most consistent grammar of any language ive studied. i wish more people were interested in it, in ANY african language. i cannot imagine what resources are like for literally any other african language! i want people to care to learn these languages the way that people randomly decide to learn lithuanian, estonian, and other smaller european languages. i want their resources to be greater, more courses to be created, more books to be written, more translations to bridge the gaps between cultures.

scavengermenace

They're quite a bit cheaper than manufactured nozzles if you can dissect them.

#WHAT THIS IS SO COOL

pclysemia

“The conventional wisdom of the Tower of Babel story is that the collapse was a misfortune. That it was the distraction, or the weight of many languages that precipitated the tower’s failed architecture. That one monolithic language would have expedited the building and heaven would have been reached. Whose heaven, she wonders? And what kind? Perhaps the achievement of Paradise was premature, a little hasty if no one could take the time to understand other languages, other views, other narratives period. Had they, the heaven they imagined might have been found at their feet. Complicated, demanding, yes, but a view of heaven as life; not heaven as post-life.”

— Toni Morrison’s Nobel lecture, December 7, 1993

#i fucking love toni morrison ❣️

bloopychips

Some lesser known Mark 1 photos, including one of the many times he could not fit into a doorway.

livingforstars

Our Dusty Universe - January 21st, 1998.

"What's black and white and red all over? Add our Universe to this list. Adrift in a vast sea of darkness are not only familiar bright stars, but dust that glows predominantly in far-infrared light. This cosmological dust was discovered in data taken previously by the COBE satellite, and visible as a diffuse glow visible in the above image. The amount of dust in the Universe is important because it is a measure of the number of stars that created it, of the number of stars that are cloaked by it, and of the amount of distortion created in measurements of the distant Universe."