fantasti𝕔𝕒𝕚𝕥

I love Benjamin Lay, feminism, fanfiction, Dorothy Kilgallen, labor rights, Bioware games, Smedley Butler, sperm whales, Catullus, vegetarian food, Bernini sculptures, maximalist design, Paul Harding's Tinkers, Millennial nostalgia, Rachmaninoff, etc.

[thememedaddy]

[fantasticait]

News these days...

[fantasticait]

[fantasticait]

News these days...

[fantasticait]

The government pays people to divide movements before they can coalesce and make real change.

Don't do their work for free.

[ms-demeanor]

Hey, also, all the anarchist shit aside, tomorrow I want you to make something.

I forced myself to draw something after the 2016 election. I forced myself to draw something when my mother died in 2018. I forced myself to draw something when my spouse was hospitalized for multiple organ failure in 2021.

When you are miserable, make something. Add a row to your project, bake a box cake, draw on a sheet of lined paper, write a poem on a napkin, fold an origami shirt out of a dollar bill, make your favorite recipe for dinner, but make something with your hands, something that you can hold and look at engage your senses in.

It won't fix the world, but it will change the world. You will have made something that didn't exist before. You will have impacted your reality, even in a very small way. And it is going to be something you made *after.* Something bad happened, something shook you, and you made something after, in spite of it.

[fantasticait]

Pretending it's fall in Florida.

[oliviawhen]

A very summery Doggust so far. 🍃

[fantasticait]

Doggust

[hjarta-deactivated20260124]

just learned that magnolias are so old that they’re pollinated by beetles because they existed before bees

[scienceoftheidiot]

They existed *before beetles*

[somethingaboutsomethingelse]

[spacedandelions]

Why is this sad? Why am I sad?

[ignescent]

https://xkcd.com/1259/

Bee Orchid

[sepdet]

This is how I feel about Joshua Trees. They and avocado trees produce fruit meant to be eaten and dispersed by giant ground sloths. Without them, the Joshua Trees' range has shrunk by 90%.

(my own photos)

Not only they, but the entire Mojave ecosystem is still struggling to adapt since the loss of ground sloth dung. their chief fertilizer.

Many, many trees and plants in the Americas have widely-spaced, extremely long thorns that do nothing to discourage deer eating their leaves, but would've penetrated the fur of ground sloths and mammoths. Likewise, if you've observed a tree that drops baseball or softball-sized fruit which lies on the ground and rots, like Osage Oranges, which were great for playing catch at my school, chances are they were ground sloth or mammoth chow.

You can read about various orphaned plants and trees missing their megafauna in this poignant post:

The Trees That Miss The Mammoths - American Forests

Trees that once depended on animals like the wooly mammoth for survival have managed to adapt and survive in the modern world.



[modernvintage]

First quote from the linked article. Found it poetic.

[redlipstickresurrected]

Tim Wilson (American, b. 1970, Newport News, VA, USA, based Brooklyn, NY, USA) - Stairway VIII, 2023, Paintings: Oil on Paper on Linen Panel

[lanotteviene]

my best friend linen my brother in arms cotton my partner wool my beautiful sister silk

[lanotteviene]

our sick deranged enemy polyester....

[fantasticait]

The TEXTURES of the outfit in this painting make me want to crawl into the early 17th century and. Adorn myself.

[storybookprincess]

probably my most powerful interpersonal communication hack is to, whenever possible, ask either/or questions rather than yes/no questions

for example, when chatting with coworkers, i’ll often ask if they have any fun weekend plans. but let’s be real - we all feel like friendless losers when someone asks that question and we go “uhhhhh… no.” so instead, i phrase it as “so, do you have anything fun planned over the weekend, or are you just going to enjoy having some time to relax?”

phrased like this, there’s rarely any awkwardness. you’ve presented two options & given both equally positive connotations, so your conversational partner has an automatic “out,” so to speak

but it works for higher stakes conversations too!!!! my mom was saying this weekend how she and her neighbor both like walking around the neighborhood & that she wanted to suggest they take a walk together sometime, but was worried about how to approach the conversation

so i said “how about you just say ‘i’ve noticed we both like taking walks! would you be interested in going for one together, or do you use walks for some precious alone time?’”

now Walking Neighbor has an automatic “get out of jail free card” if she wants to say no!!!! which means my mom doesn’t have to worry about the conversation being uncomfortable, because she’s set it up to go smoothly

either/or questions rather than yes/no questions. it is really like magic

[fantasticait]

Coconut sheet cake with strawberries and whipped cream 🥥🍓

[southernsolarpunk-deactivated20]

I don’t even care who fucking wins the presidency this year look at this

[themythicalcodfish]

This makes an INCREDIBLE difference!!!! For fuck sake go vote!!!!

[jarmes]

A few years back a Republican won my house district by six vote. Now she’s talking about making it illegal to protest the Gazan genocide. Pay attention to Congress

[autistic-fuckwad]

if any of your circle is telling you voting is useless and it will never get us anywhere is lying to get you not to vote. republicans will always vote. not voting is just pulling your teeth for them. go vote and dont reblog propaganda that makes you feel hopeless

[great-and-small]

My grandfather and my godfather (a beloved neighbor and dear family friend) had a long standing bet- for one dollar- about who would die first. Both of them being slightly pessimistic (in the funny way), they both insisted that they themselves would be the first to die. Any time my grandfather had a health scare, he’d gleefully call up my godfather to boast that he’d be passing “any day now” and he was sure to win the bet. It was a big family joke and they were always amiably sparring and comparing notes about who was in worse shape, medically speaking.

When my grandfather was in hospice care dying of liver cancer, my godfather was quite ill also. It took him great effort to make the journey to see his dying friend. As he came into the room, supported by a family member, he shuffled to my grandpa’s bedside and silently handed him a dollar bill. He was ceding his loss of the bet, as they both knew who was going first. My grandpa had been in quite bad shape for a while and was no longer able to speak but let me tell you he snatched that dollar with unexpected strength and literally laughed aloud. He knew exactly what the gesture meant and he couldn’t help but find the humor within the grief. It was the last time any of us heard my grandpa laugh, as he passed shortly after.

When I talk about my appreciation for “dark humor” I’m not so much thinking about edgy jokes, but rather the human instinct to somehow, impossibly, both find and appreciate the absurdity that is so often folded into the profound grief of life and death. When I tell this story I think it kind of perturbs people sometimes, but it’s honestly one of my favorite memories about two men I really deeply admired. I could never hope for anything more than for my loved ones to remember me laughing until the very end, and taking joy in a little joke as one of my final acts.

[fantasticait]

[fantasticait]