So it’s been awhile since I’ve bound anything, but when I read the Cursed Amulet Story by @sunderwight, I was like, I gotta make an actual, physical evil amulet now. Except the evil amulet is also going to be a book. And the book is like a diary by the guy trapped in the amulet.
The book is held in the brass frame (also made by yours truly) by friction; it pops out super easily so you can read it but it’s not going to fall out accidentally.
The typeset fit into exactly one piece of normal 8.5x11 printer paper, and if anyone else wants the file to make their own evil amulet, I’m happy to share.
Hot take, but even if you ARE punching up (instead of punching sideways at a group that is in the same boat as you), there's a limit to what you can say without sounding like a violent facist but woke this time.
Making fun of a group of people that are privileged over you is one thing, but wishing non-cartoonish violence and death on them ("they should fall off a cliff" vs. "they should be wiped out"), wishing sexual violence on them, dehumanising them, claiming that they're less capable of creating art or living meaningful lives, saying that their relationships are inherently shallow and fake - these things are fucked up. I understand venting and saying extreme things when in pain, but when you find yourself regularly posting about wanting certain people tortured and killed, you need to examine that.
When the only thing stopping you from completely dehumanising someone is your own judgement regarding their privilege level relative to yours, you are not a safe person to be around.
"convince your followers that their Oppressor Class (whether real or imagined) is less deserving of human rights" is the oldest and most reliable trick in the book to incite mass violence, and you're not immune to it because you're a Good Person with Correct Opinions. you will continue to be a potential breeding ground for fascist thought until you stop dehumanizing people in any context, regardless of whether they deserve it or not, or how serious you are. there can be no acceptable targets.
In the spring of 1994, the small African nation of Rwanda was engulfed in a maelstrom of violence that saw at least 800,000 Tutsi and modera
I always think of the Rwandan Genocide when it comes to this. Thank you for bringing it up.
In particular, from that second link:
As we have already seen in this series of articles, Rwanda’s ethnic division between Hutu (around 85 %) and Tutsi (around 14 %) had deep roots in colonial rule. Under Belgian administration, identity cards fixed ethnicity as a rigid category, and the Tutsi minority was favoured for education and government work. After independence in 1962, this hierarchy inverted, and Hutu elites consolidated control. [...]
When RTLM launched in July 1993, it combined pop-culture style with extremist ideology. This hybrid made hatred sound normal, even entertaining. Music, jokes, gossip, and death threats co-existed in the same broadcast. [...]
RTLM’s language fused entertainment with ideology. It mocked Tutsis as arrogant “cockroaches” (inyenzi), accused them of conspiring to enslave Hutus, and encouraged listeners to “work” to eliminate them—a euphemism for killing. Humour, music, and familiarity disguised the lethal message.
“Anything goes as long as it’s punching up” is also the central tenet of antisemitism. Leftists think Jews are the ultrawhite ruling class, worst of the worst of whiteness, and conservatives think we’re a race secretly controlling the world and pretending to be white as a plot to bring down the white race. People who believe the latter are in charge of the US government rn. The nature of antisemitism is that we serve as a misdirect for the people with real power. Whatever issues you care about, people in power will find a way to blame the Jews. I cannot remember the exact quote or who it’s from, but I will paraphrase it anyways. Depending on who you ask we’re communists, capitalists, nationalists, rootless cosmopolitans, white, least white, liberals, conservatives, fascists, anarchists, or whatever other “existential and powerful” threat one may believe exists. But what we never are to these people is human. We’re the monsters who hurt them and so it’s okay to hurt us. The truth doesn’t matter, of course, because they aren’t actually afraid of us. We’re just a safer and easier target, and the lie that hurting us is dangerous and makes a change is easier than the hard truths and dangers one must face to fight real power. As Jean-Paul Sartre said, “If the Jew did not exist, the antisemite would invent him.” Because it is not about the truth, but having a comforting lie that you can make positive change through abusing the vulnerable.
Posting this for my soul cat Kenzie (she passed a few years ago but I still think of her every single day) and for everyone else who has lost someone they love. ❤️
I have a gift for falling in love with random objects. One time, my aunt got me a little rubber chicken, and whenever I squoze it, a little egg thing popped out. Very silly. Except that chicken became something like my best friend. I carried it with me to school, and I kept it with me in my pocket, and whatever social hazards there were about Being The Guy Who Got Stressed Whenever His Rubber Chicken Was Missing were far outweighed by being The Guy Who ALWAYS Had a Rubber Chicken On Him. There's a lot of comedic opportunity that comes with always having a good prop on your person.
Of course, the chicken did eventually. Explode. And such was my grief that I did not eat for 36 hours. This was very stressful for many people. Mostly my mom. I was a very strange child to work with. She took parenting so incredibly seriously, and then I'd pitch her these curve balls like refusing to eat for a day and a half because my rubber chicken died. No parenting book tells you what to do when that happens. You just have to feel it in your heart.
A less tragic story of an object that I fell in love with was a large, foam toad that I found in a trinket shop. The toad was the size of a very large grapefruit. Much too large to carry with me to school (thank god) but enough that I could move it around the house, to keep me company during my solitary pursuits. If I was reading, the toad was there, and if I was tinkering with legos, the toad was there, and even when I slept, I would wrap the toad up in layers and layers of blankets, and then spoon it. I did this until the rubber coating on the foam started to wear out, and the foam started to get brittle and break down and leak this repulsive yellow powder. Then I simply put the toad in the playroom and would consult it on matters of great importance. Eventually I stopped doing that, and someone took the opportunity to dispose of it. Not sure who. By the time I noticed its absence, too much time had passed for me to actually be sad. As an adult, part of me thinks I would have maybe liked burying the toad, but part of me also thinks I might have refused to part with the toad, which would have resulted in it leaking more repulsive yellow powder into the house. So I understand why that decision was made.Â
I want to state that this does not happen often, and it does not happen on purpose. I don't choose to fall in love with random objects. And it's always a little bit embarrassing when it happens.Â
Which brings me to my wife.Â
Before meeting my wife, I did not often go to places with crowds. I didn't really think of it as avoiding them - those places just didn't seem fun to me. But she liked those places, and I really liked her, and being with someone who really likes something can kind of sell you on liking it too, so I'd take her to places and watch her Visibly Enjoy the Fair and go: Alright. The fair is pretty sweet. Â
Which is a thing that happened. After fourish months of dating, I took her to the fair. And she fell very visibly in love with a large series of quilts, and she stayed near them for a while, which she thought was very embarrassing, and I got to pretend to be understanding as an outsider, because I thought it would be much more impressive than also being the type of person that would fall in love with a quilt.Â
Do not do this. The gods punishment for my hubris was that the room next to the quilts was full of butter sculptures, which was an entirely new thing to me, and I immediately fell embarrassingly in love with all of them. It was like the biggest, sappiest non-sexual crush you've ever had, but not only did the other person not recipropcate, they could not, because they were made of butter. I actually got yelled at for pressing my face against the glass, which is fair, but also, I hadn't realized I was pressing my face on the glass, I just started leaning forward because after approximately 30 minutes of staring wistfully at a cow made of butter my legs got tired. And I think I should be given some grace for that.
Anyway. My wife was very patient with me taking more time to look at the butter sculptures than the average person might spent at the Louvre, and she also felt much less embarrassed over falling in love with a quilt, and we had a good laugh about it on the ferris wheel.Â
A few weeks after that was my birthday. And I don't know what I expected, exactly - but I did not expect what she did.Â
Dear reader, she made me a butter sculpture. Of a duck.
She picked a duck, because our first kiss was at a Japanese friendship garden. It was our second date, and she'd made up her mind not to do any kissing until the third date, but as we sat on the grass, a duck walked past me, and I'd just seen the hold-duck-gentle-like-hamgurber meme,
so I sort of impulsively reached out and snatched it. I honestly didn't think it would work. I don't know who was more flabbergasted, me or the duck. But we looked at each other, and then I looked at her, and then she looked at the duck, and she looked so incredibly envious that I assumed that must have wanted the duck so I just handed it to her.
It turned out she was actually envious of the ability to just grab a duck as it walked by, but she accepted the duck and stroked it a few times before releasing it. (She also made up her mind to kiss me in that moment, which was very nice.) Â
Anyway.
She made me a butter duck of my own. Obviously, I fell in love with it immediately. I cleared out all of the freezer-portion of my mini fridge, and I put the duck in there, and for the next several months, when I felt sad, or lonely, I would open the door up and spent some quality time. Just me and my duck.
But this is, of course, not the end of the story.Â
Because.
After several months.Â
The mini fridge died.Â
I really didn't use it that often. It was mostly my duck storage container. But one day, I walked by it, and it struck me that it wasn't humming. So I opened the door, and it was just. Far, far too late. The duck was dead. Dead dead. Turned into a foul-smelling slime dead.Â
I cried. I did. After the rubber chicken thing, I thought I had changed, but I had not changed, and the unexpected death of my butter buddy left me pretty shook. I texted my then-girlfriend now-wife about how sad I was, and she actually came over to help me say goodbye. We didn't even bother scraping the duck out of the mini-fridge, we just said our goodbyes to both and threw them together in the nice dumpster behind the chapel, because it seemed appropriate to put it in God's dumpster. And it did actually help quite a bit. I certainly did not go 36 hours without eating again.Â
And that was, for some time, the end of the butter duck.Â
However. Three (or four?) years ago, for my birthday, my wife was looking around thrift stores. And she found something interesting.Â
The original butter duck had an odd pose. She'd sculpted it laying flat, intending to raise it up later. But the butter was less flexible than she thought, and she was afraid of cracking it so she left it down which left the duck with a very elongated, very in-motion appearance. And she found a brass statue of a duck in the same, running posture.
It wasn't the original. But it was oddly on the nose. It was a yellow brass, it had the same strange posture, the same crude little face feathers.Â
I think it was $3, but it remains perhaps the most thoughtful gift I have ever received. I got very choked up when I unwrapped Butter Duck, The UnDying.Â
So, I’ve been pulled over a few times in my life. Not many, but a few. And I’ve also been in a couple of cars that got pulled over. And let me tell you, if you were actually doing something wrong, the officer doesn’t make any small talk, just straight into “I clocked you doing 70 in a 55.” The only time I’ve ever gotten the “do you know why I pulled you over?” was the time when I wasn’t doing anything wrong, and I got let go even though he insisted to the end that I was doing 87 in a 70 (white privilege at work).
“Do you know why I pulled you over?” is a trap. It means there’s a good chance the officer doesn’t actually have a good reason to ticket you, and is trying to get you to waive your 5th Amendment rights and incriminate yourself. If you make a guess, that’s a confession of guilt.
But there’s another trap, that I’ve heard of but haven’t yet experienced. It’s “do you know how fast you were going?” With that one, they’re hoping you’ll say no, because then they can name whatever speed they want – you just said you didn’t know how fast you were going, if you deny the speed they name then you’re lying to them.
Oh, I’ve had that one. Go with “yes.” Don’t give them a number, just say “Yes.” Then they still have to offer a number and you can deny it without contradicting yourself. They could just ask you, at that point, but that’s suspiciously similar to saying they don’t know, and they tend to avoid doing that.
Also, you can always go to court and contest a ticket, and a lot of times you’ll win. Or if the cop thinks you’ll win they won’t even show up and you’ll win by default.
They like to target out of state plates because anyone who would be majorly inconvenienced by a court date two months away is a lot more likely to just pay it.
I feel like people try to explain how [historical figure] had all the time to do so many Great Accomplishments and thus go "it's because they had servants". Which is true. But then leave it at that rather than continue on to the more important point that the servants actually often were as tired and overworked and unable to have time for themselves as so many of us are. "People lived this way because they had servants" okay and how were the SERVANTS living???
i've literally only just started reading but i had to come back and ask if there's a recipe for the braised onion pasta you mention in your new (extremely exciting premise) braime fic 👀👀
Hello! There is, and it is here. I don't know why the Food52 link, which has the full recipe, isn't pasting properly, but you can find the sacred text (Beard on Pasta) here:
Classic pasta dishes from America's 1st and most beloved master chef
Whether you're entertaining guests or simply cooking for 1, pasta is su
Hello, I work for a large moderately evil corporation and for at least five years now I have to sign a yearly thing to say I will never ever have one of these devices in the same room as me while I work.
My large moderately evil employer takes it for granted that these things are spying on me at all times, and you should too.
1) if you can find me a 160yo to be friends with, I will do so in a heartbeat, but until then no I do not.
2) this is a very badly-conceived question unless you're literally only asking like. KIDS. Because that is such a HUGE gap to the point of the question being laughable. A 13yo, the youngest age someone can have an account on tumblr to vote on this poll, would need to have a 52yo friend to vote "yes". By the time they're 16, they'd need to have a 64yo friend. the 18-24 demo is (i believe) the largest on the site. I don't think most 18-24yos have friends in the 72-96yo range.
I'm not saying that's impossible, obviously, but like... it's VERY unlikely. Plus once you pass 29, you officially can simply no longer have a friend 4x your age, given that the oldest (age independently verified) living person is 116.
(side note but shout out to Jeanne Calment of France, 1875-1997, oldest recorded and independently verified person to ever live, at 122 years. She lived on her own until she was 110, met van Gogh when he moved to her hometown of Arles, France when she was a teenager, and recorded a spoken word musical album shortly before she died. Absolutely fantastic.)
Anyway, as I said, this is a very badly-conceived question by the asker, the percentage of people who are even theoretically able to say yes is already pretty low, let alone taking into account how few people are ever actually going to be friends with people that much older than them. Not related to, not "I know someone this age" or "I'm fond of someone this age" but actually friends with them.
We could, however, start befriending really old tortoises or sharks if we wanna be able to say yes, do they have to be human? OP do they have to be human??
practicing self care less out of self love and more for the sheer logical reasoning of it’d be kinda stupid of me to expect myself to be able to function without proper maintenance
“oh i don’t deserve rest and relaxation, i haven’t done enough, i haven’t earned it” and my car’s breaks don’t deserve break fluid because they aren’t breaking well enough to earn it. that’s what you sound like!!!!!
The dogs woke me up early today so before my first client I watered the flowers, made my smoothie, worked out, read the paper with Husband, did yoga and worked out! By noon it already felt like a productive day.
Now it is afternoon and I have been braindead for for hours. Productive mornings will fuck you up.
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