Aurora

[monogreek]

The floor (1993) by Giorgos Rorris (b. 1963)

[whatcha-thinkin]

The bar is closing and you and your drunk friends are hungry! In your opinion what's the best drunk food?

tacos

pancakes

hot dogs

chicken wings

burgers

pizza

nachos

Philly cheesesteak

ramen

peanut butter & jelly

dude see if there's a [tag] nearby

I would never bring this garbage into the temple that is my body

Remaining time: 4 days 14 hours

[sexhaver]

lmfao the Scots in town for the World Cup have made a pilgrimage to Boston's world-famous Cop Annihilating Slide

[goldcrescent]

I also think that the strength gap is at least partially manufactured women would in fact be stronger overall if little girls were encouraged to do physically taxing games and activities and eat their fill while they’re growing vs having to constantly diet and be sedentary indoors (or god forbid do intense cardio while under-eating). The amount of adult women honestly afraid to lift weights bc they think they’ll get bulky as though bulking isn’t a full time job that athletes have to spend all their time on and anyone on earth gets shredded from just using their adult muscles for their intended purpose, girl your bone density 🥀

[goldcrescent]

if you say women are intentionally nerfed from birth in 2026 people look at you like you’re insane and start condescendingly telling you about how women are just better at different things (but not during their periods haha) but this was a completely basic feminist talking point I grew up with like “girls can do it too! [shot of little girls climbing and running with boys]” nickelodeon commercial tier base level I hate it how is everyone suddenly dumber than the average 7 year old

[sprinkledsalt]

Some women will never want children in their life in any meaningful capacity. They don't want to give birth. They don't want to adopt. They don't want to be the fun auntie. They don't want to be a godmother. They don't want to work in a field with children. They will never change a child's diaper and don't believe their lack of childcare skills is a problem that needs fixing, because childcare is not a crucial part of the human experience, with billions of people on the planet. They go about their day while only seeing kids out at the grocery store or at the park, and nothing is missing from their lives.

The refusal to accept this is driving a global right-wing backlash movement.

[arsanatomica]

Religious art leaves out the best part and it’s such a goddamn shame. Livestock, Agriculture and Food is an integral part of any culture and we all need to be pushing for more realistic sheep in religious art. #FATTAILSFORJESUS

[hildegard-von-bloggen]

“How think ye? If a man have a hundred sheep and one of them be gone astray, doth he not leave the ninety and nine, and goeth into the mountains and listen for the clappeth of it’s itinerant cheeks?” - Matthew 18:12, the bible

[arsanatomica]

CLAPPETH….

[arsanatomica]

I made this post a long time ago and never posted the follow up post, so here it is. Additional info on Fat tail sheep

Fat tailed sheep is not a single specific breed of sheep. It’s a catchall word like “Health care worker”.

There’s tons and tons of different breeds. They all store fat in their tails, but fall into two main categories: WIDE tails and LONG tails

Wide tails store fat in the rump area and have no visible tails.

Long tails store fat in the tail itself, which vary in length in different breeds. In the olden days, people took pride in breeding sheep with the longest tail. They are not so popular today as it’s hard to find a decent tail cart on Amazon.

Speaking of Tail carts, they come in different styles and designs. We dont have any that are actually preserved, but old drawing of them show different wheels harnesses.

Some of them are literally just skateboards

Back in the day, breeding sheep with long dragging tails was all the rage. Nowadays different tails types have been developed to prevent them from dragging their tails on the ground. Such as the “folded tail” or the “Only fat at the base” Tail

Despite fat tail sheep being the most common sheep breeds in the world, most people in the west have never heard of them. The West likes Wool Sheep. Fat tails are strictly meat sheep and have little useful wool. They also do poorly in colder climates

There’s a huge community of shepherds on youtube that script, choreograph and shoot elaborate videos for their sheep complete uplifting music to highlight their best qualities (for sale and stud) It is fantastic. Such as this one:

People kept bringing up Fat Bottomed Girls. Ya’ll are wrong. These are fat bottomed BOYS. Sheep are often continuously bred, so the females are constantly getting pregnant, giving birth and nursing.

That’s very hard on the body, so they can’t build up as much fat as the boys.

The fattest sheep, the ones with the truly VAST tails, rocking them little carts are ALWAYS males.

This is why the Bible specifically states that ONLY the rumps of the Males are to fit to be offered to the lord……

Picture: God desiring the tail

“And he shall offer of the sacrifice of the peace offering an offering made by fire unto the LORD; the fat thereof, and the WHOLE rump” -Leviticus 3:9

I mean… look.

Arguably these are just minor details and doesnt matter….

But beyond it’s teachings the bible is also a work of literature about life in the ancient world. And on some level these kinds of small details bring a sort of richness to these depictions of real…

Ancient people bred out sheep with huge butts, took the largest sheep butts, set them on fire and prayed over the burning butt. It checks out.

[what-am-i-doing-in-this-fandom]

hey, I was just at "things got better" island and everyone there is talking about how excited they are to meet you

[switchblade-dragon]

Hey yeah so this post literally kept me alive for like 6 months. Thank you. And OP is so right. Everyone on this island became my best friends. And guess what? Now they can't wait to meet *you* and they talk about you every single day.

[firagasoap]

Broccoli Knuckle Duster by David Delahunty

[ma-gpie]

[animentality]

[mortalityplays]

This is a dangerous sentiment for me to express, as an editor who spends most of my working life telling writers to knock it off with the 45-word sentences and the adverbs and tortured metaphors, but I do think we're living through a period of weird pragmatic puritanism in mainstream literary taste.

e.g. I keep seeing people talk about 'purple prose' when they actually mean 'the writer uses vivid and/or metaphorical descriptive language'. I've seen people who present themselves as educators offer some of the best genre writing in western canon as examples of 'purple prose' because it engages strategically in prose-poetry to evoke mood and I guess that's sheer decadence when you could instead say "it was dark and scary outside". But that's not what purple prose means. Purple means the construction of the prose itself gets in the way of conveying meaning. mid-00s horse RPers know what I'm talking about. Cerulean orbs flash'd fire as they turn'd 'pon rollforth land, yonder horizonways. <= if I had to read this when I was 12, you don't get to call Ray Bradbury's prose 'purple'.

I griped on here recently about the prepossession with fictional characters in fictional narratives behaving 'rationally' and 'realistically' as if the sole purpose of a made-up story is to convince you it could have happened. No wonder the epistolary form is having a tumblr renaissance. One million billion arguments and thought experiments about The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas that almost all evade the point of the story: that you can't wriggle out of it. The narrator is telling you how it was, is and will be, and you must confront the dissonances it evokes and digest your discomfort. 'Realistic' begins on the author's terms, that's what gives them the power to reach into your brain and fiddle about until sparks happen. You kind of have to trust the process a little bit.

This ultra-orthodox attitude to writing shares a lot of common ground with the tight, tight commodification of art in online spaces. And I mean commodification in the truest sense - the reconstruction of the thing to maximise its capacity to interface with markets. Form and function are overwhelmingly privileged over cloudy ideas like meaning, intent and possibility, because you can apply a sliding value scale to the material aspects of a work. But you can't charge extra for 'more challenging conceptual response to the milieu' in a commission drive. So that shit becomes vestigial. It isn't valued, it isn't taught, so eventually it isn't sought out. At best it's mystified as part of a given writer/artist's 'talent', but either way it grows incumbent on the individual to care enough about that kind of skill to cultivate it.

And it's risky, because unmeasurables come with the possibility of rejection or failure. Drop in too many allegorical descriptions of the rose garden and someone will decide your prose is 'purple' and unserious. A lot of online audiences seem to be terrified of being considered pretentious in their tastes. That creates a real unwillingness to step out into discursive spaces where you 🫵 are expected to develop and explore a personal relationship with each element of a work. No guard rails, no right answers. Word of god is shit to us out here. But fear of getting that kind of analysis wrong makes people hove to work that slavishly explains itself on every page. And I'm left wondering, what's the point of art that leads every single participant to the same conclusion? See Spot run. Run, Spot, run. Down the rollforth land, yonder horizonways. I just want to read more weird stuff.

[afloweroutofstone]

This captures everything I love about being online

[normal-horoscopes]

This reminds me of the time that I asked if anyone had resources on the history of Shinto and while nobody had book recs, turns out an actual Temple Maiden followed me on Tumblr and was down to chat.

[boycritter]

the annoying thing about weightlifting is that you have to lift weights that are a little too heavy for you if you want to get stronger. and you have to push yourself outside of your comfort zone in order to keep building muscle. fucked up.

[boycritter]

thank god this same principle doesnt apply to any other skill you want to improve at! that would really suck.

[whentherewerebicycles]

Opinion | My Students Can’t Read

The generational collapse in literacy is measurable, persistent, and likely to get worse.

this is making me panic how do we raise children in this educational & tech environment

[whentherewerebicycles]

“In July 2025, the journalist Mary Harrington argued in The New York Times that “thinking is becoming a luxury good.” The ability to read deeply and reason at length is fragmenting along class lines as ultra-processed digital media replaces text in everyday life, much as ultra-processed food has replaced cooking. Her longer treatment of the subject in First Things makes the more provocative case that we are witnessing the end of print culture itself, and with it the end of the cognitive substrate on which modern liberal democracy was built.

I see this stratification in the classroom and on the page every week. My students from districts that protected sustained reading through small class sizes, strict phone policies, and faculty who refused to teach to the test all arrive with their attention relatively intact. My students from districts that surrendered to devices and standardized testing arrive cognitively winded. A democracy that requires a literate electorate is now training one fraction of that electorate out of literacy while marketing to the other a “deep work” lifestyle as a luxury good. The students who cannot read a 20-page article today are the voters who will not be able to read a bill, or the jurors who cannot follow a closing argument, tomorrow.”

also I have been banging this particular drum to friends for a while now… the rich kids are going to get low-tech educations that prioritize critical thinking and deep engagement. the poorer kids are going to get “career readiness” training that urges them to use AI for everything and to give up on the hard work of sustained engagement with ideas

[adz]

reddit is having a glitch where it puts the wrong captions over photos and it’s the only thing i care about right now

[dietspam16]

[rubyvroom]

I Cut the 'Big Five' Tech Giants From My Life. It Was Hell

Week 6: Blocking them all

Writer tries to use the internet without relying on Amazon, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, or Apple. Writer struggles. A lot. Not because she can’t stop googling things, but because Google is integrated with everything, and anything it isn’t is hooked into is partnered with at least one of the other four. 

For an example, she details the long process of figuring out how to send a large file without relying on the Google iCloud or Amazon Web Services:

My Gmail alternatives—ProtonMail and Riseup—tell me the file is too large; they tap out at 25 MB. Google Drive and Dropbox aren’t options, Dropbox because it’s hosted by Amazon’s AWS and relies on Google for sign-in. Other file-sharing sites also rely on the tech giants for web hosting services.

…O’Brien directs me first to Send.Firefox.com, an encrypted file-sharing service operated by Mozilla. But… it uses the Google Cloud, so it won’t load. O’Brien then sends me to Share.Riseup.net, a file-sharing service from the same radical tech collective that is hosting my personal email, but it only works for files up to 50 MB.

O’Brien’s last suggestion is Onionshare, a tool for sharing files privately via the “dark web,” i.e. the part of the web that’s not crawled by Google and requires the Tor browser to get to. I know this one actually. My friend Micah Lee, a technologist for the Intercept, made it. Unfortunately, when I go to Onionshare.org to download it, the website won’t load. 

“Hah, yes,” emails Micah when I ask about it. “Right now it’s hosted by AWS.”

The troubling implications of tech monopolies on our private data are discussed, as well as potential solutions that don’t sound very appealing at all:

An uncomfortable idea I keep coming up against this week is that, if we want to get away from monopolies and surveillance economies, we might need to rethink the assumption that everything on the internet should be free.

So when I try to create a fourth folder in ProtonMail to organize my email and it tells me that I need to upgrade from a free to a premium account to do so, I decide to fork over 48 euros (about $50) for the year. In return, I get a 5 GB email account that doesn’t have its contents scanned and monetized.

However, I’m well aware that not everyone has $50 dollars to spare for something that they can easily get for “free,” so if that’s the way things go, the rich will have privacy online and the poor (and most vulnerable) will have their data exploited.

[mangled-by-disuse]

in happier pride news i actually found this deeply heartwarming

that's solidarity baybeeee

[lgbtlaughs]

Further context: Durham city council (Reform UK) cut funding and support for Pride. The Durham Miner's Association and other trade unions raised enough money for Durham Pride 2026 to go ahead - a direct call back to when Lesbian and Gays Support the Miners (LGSM) raised money for mining communities when Margaret Thatcher seized union funding during the miner strikes of 1984-85.

At the 1985 Labour party meet, the motion to support LGBT rights as a party was passed due to a block vote from mining unions.

Stephen Guy, the chair of the Durham Miners’ Association, said that when it became apparent Durham Pride was under threat, he took it upon himself to “encourage the trade union movement to step up and do the right thing, and stand shoulder to shoulder with the LGBT+ community […] They not only raised funds for us, but came to our communities, uplifted our spirits when they were down, and showed their solidarity.”

[cathkaesque]

My understanding is that the cut funding from Durham council was £2,500 - the trade union donations raised in response were worth £25,000

[cypresstrees]

crazy how if you do your chores and obligations first thing on a day off you can enjoy your free time more than if you feel like you’re procrastinating your chores and obligations the whole time. i will not be learning from this experience