Unmade Bed

A personal blog for the guy who runs the (mostly inactive) music review blog you've probably never heard of, "Golden Age". Just some stuff. A link to "Golden Age": http://strangledeggs.tumblr.com/

[2colde]

Borghei-Cookston House (designed by Ray Kappe, completed in 1984 in Santa Monica, California, USA)

[mtsodie]

moodboard

[undying-princess]

laughing at a joke about the "refusal of the call" but shaking my head the entire time so the audience knows i don't approve of the monomyth as an effective structure for literary analysis

[brickylittle]

oh my god I just realized this is the year people will stop being born and stop aging and stop dying

[trippin-on-apple]

What football will look like in the future

Something is terribly wrong. Something is terribly wrong. Something is terribly wrong. Something is terribly wrong.

[mamawasatesttube]

the thing about media literacy is that understanding why the author chose to specify that the curtains are blue is the same skill set as understanding that the way the author characterizes all black characters as angry or all chinese characters as meek and silent is racist. it is the same skill set as being able to identify when a news source is biased or when someone is feeding you propaganda. the ability to ask "why did this person choose to present this premise in this specific way?" is a critical skill in a world full of misinformation. why are the curtains blue? maybe it's a characterization detail. maybe it's extraneous worldbuilding. why is this character written as being right all the time? maybe you're intended to disagree with them. maybe it doesn't matter. maybe you should still ask why.

[pettydisco]

Do you live in Canada and find that you're getting blinded by headlights at night?

Then Transport Canada has a survey for you!!! You don't even have to have a driver's license to partake. Driver, pedestrian, cyclist, etc, they want to know your thoughts. The survey is open until April 20th 2026, takes less than ten minutes to fill out, and you can take it here.

If the link breaks, just look up "Transport Canada headlights survey" and it should be the first result. Or if you prefer, you can also just email your thoughts to [email protected].

[staff]

for april fools we’re deleting this entire site sayonara you weeaboo shits

[probablyasocialecologist]

Stop Building Now! | Reinier de Graaf

Housing shortages have been identified in practically every country of the world. But how real are they?

Shortages and vacancies . . . Hardly ever is a connection made between the two. Either vacant properties are not considered part of the solution because they are not for sale (often because it pays for owners to keep them empty), or they are dismissed as the wrong type of housing in the wrong place by policymakers or developers (often a combination of the two). Vacancies are thought to represent two ends of the spectrum with no relevance to mainstream requirements. The arguments seem flimsy. Empty homes that are not for sale can either be subject to heavy taxation (as is happening in certain places) or to laws banning the phenomenon altogether. The second argument—wrong homes in the wrong place—is unconvincing given that it is commonly made by the same people who cite desperate housing shortages. Furthermore, given the increasingly footloose nature of work, “the wrong place” qualifies as a bit of a misnomer. The planning and building of large new urban developments while significant portions of the existing built environment remain empty goes against all common sense. Much is said about sustainability and forms of sustainable building. Well-intended as the notion may be, the uncomfortable reality is that how we approach things is simply not sustainable in its current form. Our unrelenting urge to “build away” our shortages comes with massive environmental consequences. The toll of the construction industry on the environment is well known, accounting for 50 percent of global resource extraction, 52 percent of all steel and 25 percent of all aluminum produced worldwide, and 16 percent of the world’s freshwater consumption. Buildings produce 33 percent of greenhouse gas emissions, are responsible for a third of global energy use, and consume three quarters of all electricity produced, while their demolition accounts for a third of all global waste. Furthermore, 30 percent of particulate matter emissions come from construction, while 56 percent of the occupational cancers in men are within the construction industry. It is hardly possible to overstate the impact of construction on the global ecosystem.

17 March 2026

[sinensis26]

You all need to hear this:

1. You probably dont suck at your craft as much as you think you do, I bet a lot of people are amazed at what you can make, and

2. If you actually are the Literal Worst In The Whole Wide World at your craft... who the fuck cares? What are they gonna do, call the police on you? Keep making your shitty little things, youre the boss of you, fuck the haters.

[gourmetpunk]

Tumblr must be full of a lot of artists (for the sake of this post, this includes writers/musicians/etc.) that are just profoundly different from me in every way, because I simply do not experience these kinds of anxieties at all! And I see truly unhelpful (to me) advice like this passed around all the time on this site as if the worst thing that could happen to an artist is for people to hate their work!

My anxiety about my own art has almost nothing to do with this. I would love it if people hated my work - that would mean they're engaging with it in some way! My worst fear about my own art is that it would be ignored and/or forgotten (which, like, it already is). And I've rarely heard any advice on coping with that! I don't do the catastrophizing thing which apparently 99% of artists on this site do where they can't complete their work because "what if it's bad and everyone laughs at me?" Instead, I can't complete my work because...why bother if no one else cares? I've released albums, I've written stories, but nobody wants to listen to them or read them, respectively. Why should I bother working on more of that? (And of course the answer to this is just that you have to try anyway, but it's not a very satisfying one!)

[annabelle--cane]

my eternal personal bugbear about "authenticity" in specifically artwork is the central irony that a given piece will only be accepted and understood as suuuuper authentic and raw and real if it matches what the audience perceives as the artist's True Self. "authenticity" has a look, it has a style, it has a vocabulary, it has a hierarchy of materials and media, it should be folk craft or handmade over industrial or digital, it should be emotional and warm over detached and bitter, and obviously it should look pre-21st century because as we all know no one has ever existed honestly since the turn of the millennium and all Authentic Culture died to death badly in 1990. I've heard tons of artists in marginalized groups repeatedly get the feedback that they should make their art "more authentic" and more "reflective of their identities" by people who clearly just mean "make it look more like the stereotype I expect from you." it's a framework that relies on the idea that the only real representation of a culture or identity comes when you strip away all its interrelations with other groups, as though cross-cultural exchange and technological innovation aren't constants throughout human history.

[memecucker]

Iranian monarchism seriously feels like it’s a masterful psyop orchestrated by the Islamic Republic to make opposition look like the most unsympathetic people you can imagine

[a-silly-poll-side-blog-yay]

the last 2 films you watched just fused, is it good?

yes

no

actually yes?

it's so bad that it's funny

awful bruh

results

Voting ended onFeb 16

[tpwrtrmnky]

Fucking incredible that this is the first example they used lmao

[bunnygirlpaws]

the last one is pretty funny too

[gourmetpunk]

"If you've been unconsciously adapting to the symptoms, you may not realize that you're already suffering from irony-poisoning! You could be forgiven for having absorbed so much of it in the first place - irony is present in today's cultural ecosystem in such high concentrations that it's almost impossible to avoid ingesting at least some of it. Scans reveal that many people are living with blocks of irony up to 7cm in diameter lodged in their brains! But don't worry, it's not too late for you: our specialist theoreticians recommend an irony detox diet of strictly sincere media to help flush the poison from your system. Be sure to consume only organically-sourced cultural products with emotions you can articulate and pronounce, and you should start to feel better after the first week of the detox!"

#IronyPoisoning #SincerityDetox #Homeopathy #Naturopathy

[gourmetpunk]

Some of you in Canada (or maybe even elsewhere) may have heard about this recently: https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/london/beal-library-old-book-purge-9.7040273

I need to explain something that is not being addressed in this article, and that is that most of the people they talk to in it (yes, including the Actual Librarians) don't know what they're talking about. This might horrify you, but it is actually incredibly common for school libraries to get rid of large numbers of books as the TVDSB did. This is a normal process called "weeding", and it is NOT (usually) a form of censorship.

"But getting rid of books is bad!" Not if your library is running out of space and you want to buy new books! Also, getting rid of outdated non fiction books (which is a large part of almost any weeding project I've ever seen - think books that still list Pluto as a planet, geography books that still show the USSR, etc.) is pretty irrefutably a good thing, especially in SCHOOL libraries.

"But they threw out The Diary Of Anne Frank!" Libraries do this all the time, and the reason isn't antisemitism: it's almost always because those copies were so beat-up, they might actually fall apart the next time they're circulated. It's not like they're not going to replace them! But they've weeded them from the system to make space for newer copies that aren't falling apart.

"But 10,000 books is too many!" Libraries almost always have more books in them than you think. I've been to school libraries with collections of 20-30,000 books. If a library like that has been neglected for years (and often, with library budgets being as small as they are, this can happen), a good weeding process may very well find 10,000 books to get rid of.

"But the other librarians in the article said they should preserve the old stuff because it's potentially historically important!" Actually, the vast majority of it is mass-market stuff that has little historical value. Additionally, the librarians in the article come largely from either archivist or academic backgrounds. These are institutions that have massive budgets for such kinds of preservation work, which is indeed a different kind of work from standard library operations and would require an additional department to handle. I, personally, would love to try and preserve old things from certain school library collections for their historical value - but school libraries are never given the budget for this. In fact, the same Conservative government that is responsible for freezing ALL library weeding operations province-wide is also the one that has continuously cut back funding for school boards and libraries throughout its far-too-long term.

Also, I'm not going to get into it in-depth here, but you might want to look into that teacher from the TVDSB who raised this fuss in the first place - he's clearly not acting entirely in good faith here, since he seems to have lost his job over disagreements with the school board.

So all of this is to say, a bunch of fascists just made it harder for me to do my fucking job for no reason and I'm really pissed off. I only post this to help clarify that this whole fiasco is almost certainly NOT any kind of "censorship" from libraries, as I'm sure it will be framed, and is instead just normal library operations that were taken out of context by a bad-faith actor.

[weirdness-is-good]

[gourmetpunk]

See, I get how this happened - the Chinese on the left is "jing bao shang pin", and "shang pin" is indeed "goods/commodities/products/etc." The tricky part is with "jing bao" - I knew "jing" is "startling" and "bao" can mean "sudden/violent/etc.", and I confirmed via mdbg that "jingbao" typically translates to "unexpected", which is where we get into the connotation trickiness. Is it completely inaccurate to say that "horrifying" is a viable translation of "jingbao"? Not entirely, since unexpected and startling things in English may also have the connotation of being "scary", or..."horrifying"! But a better translation would probably be "Astonishing Goods".

[cryptotheism]

Opinion piece writers salivating at the bit to tell you that kidnapping a head of state and starting a nakedly self-interested war is lowkey morally nuanced and kinda complicated as fuck.