we're not kids anymore.
he wasn't even looking at me and he found me
Jules of Nature
The Stonewall Inn
#extradirty
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roma★
Love Begins
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Origami Around
d e v o n
art blog(derogatory)
JVL
sheepfilms
YOU ARE THE REASON
NASA
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h
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@havecourage-andbekind
Sometimes a family can be one trekkie and all 25 of Quark’s original costumes.
@weyounbathwater
So fellow trekkies, are we team Garak is colorblind and Quark’s too chicken to question it or team Quark’s idea of sophistated is tacky AF and Garak knows just how bad it looks and revels in it?
Team “This is what models wear on the runways of space and only Quark has the guts to wear it in real life. Garak is thrilled to know him.”
25 years ago an unknown Chinese protester stood in front of a tank in defiance of the government. No one knows the identity of the man but he was given the nick name “Tank Man”. This is one of the most iconic photographs of the century.
It’s actually been 27 years now since the incident known as the Tiananmen Square Massacre occurred. The picture above, famously referred to as “The Tank Man” was actually taken on June 5, the day after the massacre. (Which honestly makes him the one of the bravest person, to go back and stand up to a regime after such a terrible event transpired)
So what happened? I’m gonna give the TL;DR version:
April 15, 1989. Hu Yaobang, a former Communist Party Chief dies.
Many people, including workers, laborer, students and some officials come to mourn. You see, those protestors were originally there to mourn, not protest.
Time passed and there were some hunger strikes, and protests, and a call for accountability and reform from the government.
Eventually, things went south, because the communist party doesn’t have time to deal with these sorts of “demands” and grievances.
Keep in mind, the people wanted not the end of the Communist Party, but for the party to stop with the official corruption, rule of law, and the gross monopoly of information and power.
Incidentally, China still suffers from all of these SAME problems to this day…
June 3, 1989. The massacre started at night to disperse the crowd. Many were shot, wounded, and killed.
June 4, 1989. Some of the parents of the protestors who never came home went looking for them. It was still total mayhem.
June 5, 1989. The iconic image of the tank man was taken. To this day, no one knows what became of this person.
Content Warning for video: blood
“Tell the world…”
I cannot stress how important it is that people remember and know about this event. Do you know how China responded? With lies and censorship.
Even now, in 2016, we do not have an official death toll on the Tiananmen Square Massacre, the Chinese government doesn’t even acknowledge the event as a “massacre”. And they weaves these cover stories of “counter revolutionaries trying to overthrow the government”. Therefore, the violence was necessary to ~protect~ the people. (Or some bullshit like that)
The amount of lying and censorship in China is, quite frankly, scary amazing. Tumblr, which somehow managed to fly under their radar, found itself being blocked in that country.
After all, tell a lie often enough and it becomes the truth.
And those who remember the incident in China? …………well, you tell me.
Please at least REMEMBER this tragedy. Untold innocent lives were lost, and a nation has been fed a lie for almost three decades now from their oppressive af regime.
I have never seen this video before.
What the fucking hell.
What the hell.
Tiananmen Square happened when I was seven, and let’s just say children have a really interesting way of interpreting information.
I just remember thinking it was a happy event, because all these people were out on the street, and at first the army were interacting with these people. And it almost looked like a festival because people were singing and talking, and hopeful. And then tv coverage for the events got cut off.
The blocking of the live coverage had all the adults anxious, nobody said anything for ages, I just remember my grandmother saying, “Just be glad your father isn’t in China, now.”
And that stuck with me to this day. Because yeah, if dad had been in China then he would have been in Beijing studying, he would have been on those streets with those other students.
It was the first time I knew that something horrible had happened to all those people I saw on the television. I don’t even remember how I knew that the army must have shot at the civilians, I just knew. Because when you grow up in China, especially in the 80s you knew there were things you don’t say, that you can’t express in a public forum, because that can get you and your family in trouble. You just knew, and it didn’t fucking matter if your were a child or an adult.
To this day I don’t remember how I found out what happened in Tiananmen Square, because the news covered it up, but people found out. My grandparents knew, my uncles and aunts knew. Extended family visited my grandparents, I remember people telling my mother not to mention my father’s name because my father was a Chinese Beijing University graduate, who had gone overseas. Because there were people who died in the protests that my dad knew.
And it was all just so frightening because nobody was telling me directly what was happening, but I just knew that all the people on the streets was probably dead.
Looking back on it, Tiananmen Square instilled in a me a life long distrust of governments, but especially the Chinese government. I’m ethnically Chinese but I never want to return to China, not even for a holiday, and this has been my attitude even before Xi Jinping took power. Because Tiananmen Square was a peaceful protest that ended up with the army using heavy artillery against their own people. How can you trust in a system, in a government like that? Because if my dad had delayed further studies overseas by two years he would have been one of those students, one of those fucking kids on the streets that would have died.
And you know, when the Umbrella movement was happening in Hong Kong I was deeply panicked and just anxious because I kept on thinking all those people, all those kids are going to be killed. And when that didn’t happen it was such a relief.
When I found out years later that Chinese people a few years younger than me didn’t know what happened in Tiananmen Square I was so fucking angry. I can’t even articulate the rage and the sheer tiredness of it all.
Dad and I talked about Tiananmen Square a few times through the years, broadly, politically, and at times with sheer rage on dad’s part. I don’t even know what I wanted to say, but just fuck this fucking regime.
I was In Hong Kong when Tiananamen Square Massacre happened. Hong Kong was still a British colony then and had full freedom of press, and its reporters were there recording live footage while trying to stay as long as possible when tanks rolled in and shots were fired, when students lay in blood and their fellow students piled the injured bodies on those wooden plank carts to get them to the hospitals, while asking the Hong Kongers who were there to support the movement to please remember that night and spread the story of the massacre far and wide, because they already knew they would be silenced, if not imprisoned or murdered.
That night, and in the upcoming months, Hong Kong was in perpetual tears, and in literal shock.
Hong Kongers were mostly Chinese, just south of the border with people traveling back and forth. It also shared a language, and so HKers could follow the whole movement and hear news that western media had little access to without the distorting effect of translations. And they followed very closely, because by then, Hong Kong was already scheduled to be returned to China in 8 years time. How the Chinese government dealt with the movement would be a sign of how it’d treat dissent, how it’d treat people who’re used to the idea and practice of freedom.
What they saw was deadly. Ugly. It broke the hearts of millions of Hong Kongers who trusted that The Chinese Government had left its Great Leap Forward, its Cultural Revolution days behind. Those who could leave, left. Everyday the airport was filled with families about to be torn apart, who decided to trade the life they had in one of the richest, most vibrant and freest city at the time with the unknown, just so their own children would have the freedom to speak their minds, to have a higher education and not to be seen as the enemy of the state because higher education always led to independent thinking, to questioning, to asking for a better government as those university students in Beijing in the spring and summer of 1989 did.
The heartbreak and fear was almost palpable in its intensity. Most HKers were refugees from China or 1st generation of them. Unlike the HK youths now protesting who are more generations removed, they felt much more connected to the people in China. They still saw themselves as Chinese, like those students in Beijing. They mourned. They cried and cried and cried. They wore black or white everyday like it was the death of their closest relatives. TV stations played these Tiananmen Square clips all day. I can still play many of them out of my memory, can still recite what the students and government officials said (for example, they didn’t use tear gas because they only had three), the songs played — I know every word of China’s national anthem for that reason; the students were singing it. They were patriotic. They demanded reforms because they wanted their country to do better. 8964 was and still is, etched in my psyche. It is just one of the long list of atrocities this government has done against its people, but this one, I was close enough to feel it.
China censored the June 4th Massacre quickly and thoroughly — if you believe China has censored queer material, for example, I’d say this — the extent of that censorship is not even close to what a true China censorship does. A true Chinese censorship is you can’t find the info, or a hint of that info anywhere. You can’t talk about it in a roundabout away. You can’t change some elements of time/place/person and pretend it’s fictional. It would literally ban the numbers 8,9,6,4 from search results, even though the searcher may really be just be interested in the numbers themselves. Whoever speaks of it may be sent to the police station for a “discussion”; their family would be sent, if the speaker is outside China; the speaker may be arrested, and may never be seen again.
The western worlds pretended to be enraged about the massacre for a while and soon forgot about it, kept its diplomatic relations with China and did business with its government as usual. UK returned Hong Kong to China as scheduled, on July 1st, 1997. The city has been the only place that insisted on the mourning the victims and had done so insistently, consistently for 30 years, holding a yearly candlelight vigil in Victoria Park until this year, when because of the protests, the Chinese government decided to not even pretend to honour the international treaty they signed that promised HK its freedom until 2047 anymore. They shut the vigil down in the name of the pandemic (there were <10 cases/day then). Still, some people risked being arrested to go to Victoria park and lit their candles.
The Chinese government fears HKers for this reason. They are outside their iron curtain / firewall but have always been close enough geographically, culturally and ethnically to know and more so, to care. And there’s nothing more a government like China’s fear than people who insist on remembering the truth. With the National Security Law in place in Hong Kong now, probably the yearly vigils can’t continue. To understand how insane that law is, by writing this reblog, by saying things that make you dislike the Chinese government, I’m already in violation of its Article 38. It doesn’t matter I’m writing it in a foreign country. It doesn’t matter I’m a foreign citizen. That law includes everyone on Earth.
Yes, that includes you. And you. And you. And you. They can arrest you for trying to overthrow the Chinese government if you pass the borders of Hong Kong.
Please help remember 8964 Tiananmen Square Massacre. That summer day, Beijing citizens asked Hong Kongers to please remember this event for them because they knew they wouldn’t be able to afford to remember it themselves. Now that Hong Kongers can’t afford to remember it anymore, I’m hoping that everyone who reads this to please remember it, for the students who perished only because they wanted their government to be better, for the Tank Man who, on his way home with his groceries, decided to stand in front of a tank all by himself because it was the right thing to do.
to summarise what’s happening, the queen was exposed for lobbying the government to hide her private wealth, and shit is sort of starting to hit the fan.
for those of you who aren’t familiar with how uk parliament works, there are several “formalities” that exist within the legislative process which involve the monarchy - for example, every bill must gain royal assent (i.e. must be approved by the queen) to become law. you might be thinking: wait a second, the monarchy is unelected, that doesn’t sound very democratic. and you’re right! this is an argument that’s been ongoing for years, but mostly it’s been ignored because until recently these formalities were seen as harmless (it’s incredibly rare, as in it hasn’t happened in centuries, for the monarch to refuse to pass a bill that’s gone through parliament into law).
this scandal, however, has brought into light the reality of what these formalities actually mean for uk democracy. see, there’s this fun little thing called “Queen’s consent”. essentially, this is where the government asks the queen’s permission for parliament to be able to debate laws that affect her, and it happens before the debate takes place (rather than royal assent, which is the final stage of the legislative process). it was this procedure that the queen used back in the 70s to conceal her private wealth from the public and save her own arse by having government ministers alter a transparency law. no one has ever paid much attention to it, primarily because most people didn’t know it existed until now.
it seems, however, that the queen has repeatedly used Queen’s consent to privately lobby the government. the guardian’s investigation found that the queen used Queen’s consent to vet over 1000 laws, along with evidence of her lobbying for changes to at least four draft laws, though she might have interfered with way more. the laws she’s interfered with range from wealth and taxation laws (shocker), to laws regarding the nhs and even animal welfare. if it’s still not obvious to you why this is a problem, let me explain:
Queen’s consent is democratically dangerous enough as it is, seeing as its existence basically allows the monarchy to alter and even put a stop to legislation that has the potential to limit its power. the way that it’s being used is worse. the sheer breadth of policy that the procedure covers means that the queen, as we’ve discovered, has access to basically all legislation created by parliament, regardless of whether it affects the crown.
tldr: the queen is using parliament as means of maintaining her wealth and power, and Queen’s consent is an inbuilt tool within our democracy that facilitates that. This Is A Problem.
an update: the guardian just reported that using Queen's consent, the queen successfully lobbied to be exempt from race and sex discrimination laws, and those exemptions remain in place today.
essentially, this means that the royal family can discriminate against employees of colour (and women employees) without facing any legal repercussions, and employees cannot take complaints to the courts if they experience discrimination. as well as this, employees of colour were banned from assuming senior positions and could only be employed as "domestic servants"; even today, there are no senior employees of colour. the queen reportedly went to great lengths to cover up this lobbying, and the royal family have refused to acknowledge the ban nor clarify if/when it ended.
this is the danger of Queen's consent. this is direct evidence of the queen abusing human rights using this procedure, and it's barely front page news. this is the opposite of democracy.
thinking abt when pacrim said there are people out there who will have the capacity to know you completely and love you in a way where you genuinely complete each other, VERY much a metaphor for platos concept of two souls splitting from one and then said this is important because you can pilot a huge robot and beat up giant aliens together
将古道西风瘦马换小桥流水人家
#if my therapist had one of these bad boys in his office he could unlock a spectrum of mental disorders only perceptible to shrimp
he was in the fridge!!!
ovbiously this person has done so much research and cares about their tortoise so much but.... the mf idea of having a live tortoise in a TUPPERWARE?! IN MY FRIDGE?? WITH ME FOOD? ahahahaha
the concept of opening someone else’s fridge only to find a WHOLE ASS TORTOISE in there... idk if I’d ever recover
@esperantoauthor when the food doesn’t come to Tesla, Tesla comes to the food
Reminds me of when I accidentally stumbled across this photo for the first time...
mutuals put me in your fridge
Back in 2015, I went over to a classmate's house for group project work late in the fall, and in the middle of working on the presentation, offered to grab sodas for people but they were out of pepsi and Andrew whose house we were at said "Oh, there's more in the basement fridge."
So I go down to the basement, which is well-lit and finished and indeed there are more pepsi but also in the fridge is a massive tortise. This animal was the dimensions of a desktop computer and probably outweighed a labrador. It's not moving, and is set in the middle of a plastic tray so it's apparently supposed to be there. I go back upstairs.
"Hey Andrew." I say, nonchalantly. "So is the tortise in the fridge down there for soup or what?"
"The what?" says the other member of the group project. I don't remember her name, just that she always wore her hair in pigtails with butterfly clips that were based on real butterflies and she had at least a dozen species.
"Oh! No, that's Andrew Too." he says. "His species hibernates so he stays in the fridge for the holidays."
"You named your tortise after you?" I ask.
"No, uh- Well, my grandfather got him in Egypt or somewhere while he was on leave during the war and He was named Andrew, so he thought it would be funny to name him 'Andrew Too'. ...Then Mom named me after him so Gandpa left me Andrew Too in his will. He's pretty cool when he's awake. Lets us dress him up for summer holidays, doesn't bark."
"Oh!" Said Butterflies. "My dad served in the Gulf War too! What unit was he in?"
"Oh no, Grandpa was with the Royal Air Force in World War Two. Andrew Too is going to be 70 this year! We're going to make him a carrot cake!"
a hypothetical d&d party
The bard is mute.
It’s not the first thing people notice about her, usually. The first thing is generally that she’s young, and female, and lovely–the first thing people notice about their entire party is that they’re all young, and female, and lovely, and that’s gotten more than one would-be thief or mugger in far over their head when they haven’t noticed the the paladin’s hammer or the ranger’s axe. It comes up rather quickly though, often enough. Whoever heard of a bard who can’t sing?
She plays a lute, mostly, or a lap-harp made of shell and sinew, string instruments she can pluck while she smiles in secret and watches everyone around her. She dances quick, except when she’s tired, when she’s scared, when she forgets to remember the feet at the ends of her legs.
She doesn’t tell her story to strangers, but enough of the other girls have learned to sign by now, and it’s easy enough to sketch out the outlines of the old bargain: the voice, the prince, the witch, the thousand shards of glass she walked upon on her way up the beach, the look in her sea-green eyes when they travel too near water. The thousand shards of glass she walked upon when she left the palace, and turned back towards the sea to throw herself upon the rocks, and then made her way up the road inland, and kept walking.
.
The warlock is beautiful and mild and self-effacing and shy, is tidy and generous and charming. She’s small with herself in exactly the right way to shout abuse to the half of her party who knows how to recognize that same look in the mirror in the morning. The bird on her shoulder is too small, too bright, too sweet for a real warlock’s familiar. The knife at her belt is sharp enough for anything that needs doing, though, cooking or otherwise.
Her fae patron visits sometimes, in the quiet hours between dusk and midnight, a sweetly old godmother made of moonlight and shadow. She’s kind to the whole lot of them in her own chaotic way, free-handed with transmutations and illusions that break halfway through the evening, for better or worse. She once spent three hours around their campfire drinking brandy and gossipping outrageously about the Feywild and teasing the wizard into fits of laughter.
She’s never told the story of how she met the warlock’s mother, or what debt was owed there, and the warlock doesn’t know herself. It was never meant to be a debt paid in power and violence and the deft will-sapping enchantments the warlock weaves now, but, well. The prince wasn’t meant to be cruel, the warlock says. The palace was meant to be warmer than the fireplace cinders in her stepmother’s house. The faerie was meant to be saving her from her lot, not throwing her into something worse. The power’s an apology of sorts.
.
The wizard is awkward and joyful and nervous. She has no fear of heights or small places, which just stands to be expected, she says, after all those years in that little tower, and she’s got no skill at lying or even edging around the truth at all, which is why she isn’t in the tower any more in the first place. She says too much or too little or the wrong thing entirely, always, but the most well-socialized member of the whole party is the ranger who walks around with a dire wolf at her hip, or maybe their mute bard, so who are any of them to judge.
There was nothing to do in that tower but read, and brush her hair, and sort through the witch’s endless stockpile of dried herbs and potions ingredients, and watch out the window as woodcutters and hunters and princes rode by, and dream. The reading was more interesting than the dreaming, most of the time, and the witch didn’t mind it as much when she talked about it. She never bothered to actually use any of the magic in the witch’s books until the thing with the prince and the haircut and the desert, which she’s told them all about in all the detail they could ever ask for, but most of the girls get uncomfortable when she starts talking about princes. It’s a little easier if she just starts rambling about conjuration and abjuration and illusion theory, about the 400-year-old history of a city that doesn’t exist any more, about the proper grammatical structure of Celestial, until maybe one of the quiet ones finally answers back.
Her hair is too short. She keeps an illusion up over it whenever she can, while it grows back slowly, tickling the side of her face and the back of her neck and leaving her head too light and unbalanced.
.
The ranger doesn’t care about princes, which makes one of them at least. Then again, the ranger doesn’t trust anyone, really, prince or no, not wolves or monsters or the men who kill them. She more or less trusts the rest of them by now, mostly, when the wind blows in the right direction.
She wears bright red in the middle of the woods and it shouldn’t help her slip into the shadows half as easily as it does, but most beasts can’t see color and red’s just another shade of gray if the light’s low enough. She never uses her axe against trees. She doesn’t need to. She can find a path through any brush without it. She picks flowers when she finds them, and tucks them into the other girls’ hair.
Her wolf’s mother killed the man who taught her to use the axe, and the man who taught her to use the axe killed that wolf’s mate before that, and the mate had an old woman’s blood on his teeth when it happened. The ranger’s blade found the wolf’s mother’s throat. The ranger’s mother sent her out into the woods in the first place. It’s not as though anywhere is really safe, cottage or forest, axe or teeth. One of these days maybe her wolf will turn and go for her in return, and maybe one of these days her axe will be faster and maybe it won’t. In the mean time, there’s flowers and berries and pastries and enough game to keep everyone sated, for a little while.
.
The paladin’s hair is raven black and her skin is chalky as a corpse. She’s not undead, mostly. The undead are her job. She knows that much.
She was sweet, once (they were all sweet, once) but apples are bitter now and so is she, and there’s judgment to lay out in the world. Her grip on her warhammer’s all wrong–she holds it like a mining hammer, but it hits as hard as it needs to. Her armor’s all dwarven make, and her shield’s black and red and white like snow.
She was sweet once, and frightened, and when she says it quietly around the campfire in the night when none of them can quite make out the glimmer of understanding on each others’ faces, everyone still nods. She took a bite of poison and somebody left her a full year in a glass coffin of Gentle Repose, dangling on the edge of the Raven Queen’s domain while all the other newly-arrived dead passed by and faded away. She woke up to somebody’s lips and hands and skin on her lips and her hands and her skin. She doesn’t like princes. She doesn’t like necromancers.
She likes sunlight, and summer, and colors that aren’t black and white and red. She likes the way the bard grins when she whirls into a dance, and the look in the warlock’s eye when she sets her feet to say no, and the wizard’s laughter on high with a Fly spell, and the ranger’s gentle fingers braiding flowers into everything she can touch.
Thank you for engaging in the mortifying ordeal of being known so that I may partake in the euphoric experience of knowing you.
What’s the word for when you’re attracted to people who look like they just fell down an especially dirty flight of stairs, but like, they have a nice smile
Some nights I stay up (reading Ao3 fic)
Inspired by the amazing Hallelujah video, I have created… this.
7 most adhd moods
–the Only Mood everyone else knows about: i wanna do THIS and THIS and THIS and THIS and THIS and–SQUIRREL
–galaxy brain: i was listening to the lecture but the prof said something that reminded me of something else and now i’m not sure how much time i was lost in thought
–the tutorial only comes in video format: i’m sorry, but you’ve thrown off the emperor’s groove *hurls product & its tutorial video into the sun*
–damn you hyperfocus: i went to bed intending to wake up and write but this morning i was possessed by a cleanliness spirit and spent the next 14 hours organizing the apartment
–i dont think u tried at all.jpg: did i seriously spend an entire free day refreshing twitter b/c i didn’t want to spend 10 minutes finishing my hw but wouldn’t let myself do anything else until i finished it???? (yes)
–patrick star: *unlocks phone* time to check the weather. *opens twitter* the weather. *opens messenger* the weather. *opens mobage game* the weather. *opens facebook* the weather. *opens twitter again* THE WEA–
–smells like depression: literally everything is too boring. i’m going back to sleep
Holy fucking shit this is incredible!!!
… holy COW
Toni Morrison: The Pieces I Am (2019)
not me catching up on welcome to night vale while i do some editing for work only for an episode from 2018 to have the line “in all reality, the apocalypse will likely just be you, alone in a room, with the flu.” in the form of a bath and body works commercial.
One of the baristas at a nearby Starbucks makes me lose my mind every time I’m working there by saying things that are not outside the spectrum of normal human words but are just slightly off-the-wall.
Barista: Welcome to Starbucks, home of delicious, what deliciousness can I put in motion for you today?
Customer: … Can I get a trenta pink drink please?
Barista: Go big or go home, we here at Starbucks appreciate your commitment, what else can I get started for you?
***
Customer: Nitro cold brew with shots of espresso please.
Barista: Brave of you to commit to staying awake for three days, anything else today?
***
Barista: *slams open drive-thru window* HI HOW ARE YOU?
Customer: …I’m pretty good.
Barista: Are you ready to be even better? Because you’re about to be. *hands them their coffee*
***
Barista, realizing that a drink was made wrong: *slams open window* SO how do you feel about surprises?
Customer: ….they’re okay.
Barista: Great because I’m about to give you one.
***
Barista: You have two drinks so I am going to hand you two straws which means, FANTASTIC news, these straws double as drumsticks. / You have one drink so I am going to hand you one straw and, promise not to tell anyone, this straw doubles as a magic wand.
***
Barista: Here are those cake pops, I plucked them fresh from the tree myself.
***
Barista: *slams open window, holding drink* Amazing, fantastic, delicious, you are a very lucky man/woman!
***
Barista, realizing drink is being delayed or remade: Looks like it’s gonna be just one minute so they have time to put the extra love in.
***
Barista: I’ll be with you in one hot second. *beat* WOW that second sure was hot!
Anyway she has a few dozen catchphrases she rotates appropriately and it’s both distracting and fantastic to listen.
World Heritage Post
