wonder boy

staring straight into the light of trouble

[speedlimit15]

In my dream you could order your coffee with a bunch of decorative flavorless tiny white flowers sprinkled on top and they were called ooh lala blossoms

[persianmom-deactivated20260602]

the beautiful thing about aging is there are so many versions of your life, so many things you thought you would never get over, so many funny and absolutely heart breaking things that you not only get over but just sort of forget about

[persianmom-deactivated20260602]

like sometimes my sister and I will be reminiscing and she will be like “remember when you were addicted to opiates?” and I hardly remember that version of myself because I was not even 20 and now i’m 37. it truly feels a different version of my life but back then, I was convinced that was all i’d ever be. and the year my father died, when he was really sick, and I asked him what am I going to do when you die? and he said “you’re going to keep on living” and I did and I will and so will you

[pissbataille]

Anne Carson, Norma Jean Baker of Troy

[zegalba]

Fata Morgana

a superior mirage caused by warm air resting on patches of colder air in an atmospheric duct that acts like a refracting lens. Objects on the horizon could appear to be mirrored, distorted, or float. This form of mirage could be the reason for the Flying Dutchman Legend.

[herske]

Tonight I am Searching for An Image that May Very Well Change My Life

[midnightssea]

it’s amazing how women are able to navigate crowded rooms without ever touching a palm to a man’s lower back

[xenasaur]

we talk about how cis people are just handed a gender and accept it without thought but I think what we fail to mention is that the same happens with sexuality

[xenasaur]

this extends beyond the bounds of simple heterosexuality. it's also about being told that you enjoy skinny white cis women with button noses and straight hair and no stretch marks and no cellulite etc. lotta gay people never let go of that one!

[davidhockney]

irl passed a buddha with colored chalk in front of it and a giant sign next to it saying please dont color on our buddha

[wonderarium]

this sewing pattern just touched me while i was in the middle of reading it

[soviet-furries]

A Little Frog is Looking for His Father (Лягушонок ищет папу)

Soyuzmultfilm, 1964

[eng sub]

[artemisiasea]

From Octavia Butler’s notebooks, 1988

[olli-online]

the palestinian children gathered around that single tv watching egypt earlier cheering so happily when they scored...i feel sick. it was everything for egypt to dedicate their win to palestine

[olli-online]

the argentina fans in the crowd holding up those israeli flags too. everything about this makes is nauseating

[olli-online]

:((((

[lakevida]

i bet the pain will end if i arrange a perfect enough sentence about it

[great-and-small]

Saddest thing ever is reading an academic paper about a threatened or declining species where you can tell the author is really trying to come up with ways the animal could hypothetically be useful to humans in a desperate attempt to get someone to care. Nobody gives a shit about the animals that “don’t affect” us and it seriously breaks my heart

[great-and-small]

“No I can’t come out tonight I’m sobbing about this entomologist’s heartfelt plea for someone to care about an endangered moth”

[bogleech]

This is how I learn there's a moth whose tiny caterpillars live exclusively off the old shells of dead tortoises.

[thepastisaroadmap]

[Image description: text from a section titled On Being Endangered: An Afterthought that says:

Realizing that a species is imperiled has broad connotations, given that it tells us something about the plight of nature itself. It reminds us of the need to implement conservation measures and to protect the region of which the species is a part. But aside form the broader picture, species have intrinsic worth and are deserving of preservation. Surely an oddity such as C. vicinella cannot simply be allowed to vanish.

We should speak up on behalf of this little moth, not only because by so doing we would bolster conservation efforts now underway in Florida, [highlighting begins] but because we would be calling attention to the existence of a species that is so infinitely worth knowing. [end highlighting]

But is quaintness all that can be said on behalf of this moth? Does this insect not have hidden value beyond its overt appeal? Does not its silk and glue add, potentially, to its worth? Could these products not be unique in ways that could ultimately prove applicable?

End image description]

[headspace-hotel]

because we would be calling attention to the existence of a species that is so infinitely worth knowing

[rackiera]

I was so inspired by this I made it into a piece of art for a final in one of my courses for storytelling in conservation

[a-book-of-creatures]

[firstfullmoon]

Something big happens. Something bigger than you. My mother marches at a student protest in 1984, wearing suede boots, the sun rising over the mountain. Or, seventy years earlier, Kafka wakes up and learns that Franz Ferdinand was assassinated. Sunlight moves through the water glass on the nightstand. God comes down to Moses and tells him to refuse to golden calf, to take his children out of Egypt. My great-great-grand-father leaves his tribe on the Iranian border and settles in Afghanistan and says the Shahada. A whistleblower sits in a courtroom, his gaze turned towards a blue book that contains the sentence that will define his fate. Trials are held. The world spins. We send rockets into space, robots that take pictures of planets we have never been to. We write down the law, we amend it, and we define who is good, who bad. Documents are classified, hidden for years. Exile. War. Terrorism. A girl brushes her hair and plants a bomb in a café in Algeria. I felt no regrets. I did it for my people, she will say from her prison cell. Apokalypsis, which means revelation: the bride removing the veil, turning her face in the direction of the grainy wind. Sand fluttering in her eyes. You watch the news; everything you feared is true: They hate us. You belong, you understand, to the others. You think of Celan’s “Todesfuge,” the image of graves in the sky. You think of Palestine. And then, as always, there is loneliness. A loneliness as old as your childhood.

— Aria Aber, Good Girl

[grayghostofthenorth]

Borzoi White Mohair with zipper (box for pajamas), glass eyes

[elodieunderglass]

It’s so weird that pyjama cases were a thing. They went so abruptly out of fashion, too. The idea was (I think) that it was vaguely indecent to leave your pajamas around, and it definitely spoils the look of your nicely made bed, so lots of people put them under the pillow; but a cuter thing to do was to have a specially made empty stuffed animal or cute purse or pillow thing, with a zipper, and you’d stuff it with your pajamas in the morning and place it cutely on your nicely made bed. Then in the evening, you would unzip and disembowel the soft plump object, and reclaim the pajamas. It wasn’t just a thing for kids; adults did it too. In the kind of pre-1950s novels I like to pick up, authors describe a character’s pyjama case to reveal a bit about the character; but of course they never say why you’d have a pyjama case. “Everyone knows what a horse is.”

I suppose it’s been culturally decided that it’s an unnecessary step in the bedtime process. We’re busy bastards, aren’t we? Who makes their bed every morning, I mean, really?

Perhaps, also, our clothing is no longer of the material and methodology where you have to spend extra time/attention/tools on them. Pyjama cases may have had some benefit - extending the life of the pyjamas, or something. Perhaps it was more common in those days for mice to climb into your silk pyjamas, or they kept them from being attacked by dogs, or something. It’s possible that there are unspoken benefits to keeping your pyjamas in a stuffed toy, which previous generations knew instinctively and we have forgotten. Some people are like that, they maintain rituals and practices that don’t get written down, and so become arcana. My father-in-law owns special clothing maintenance tools such as shoe trees (which you place in your shoes every night at night) and trouser presses (in which you leave your worn-but-not-dirty trousers overnight so they are crisp in the morning). He irons his pocket handkerchiefs - why? so that they fold into a precise pocket shape, with the same fold pattern as plastic-wrapped disposable tissues: the optimised shape for pockets. You are not going to read in the literature about there being a reason for ironing pocket handkerchiefs. It is a habit that is not captured by history. You have to speak to a practitioner to even consider that there is a specific value in pocket handkerchief folding. Maybe we operate at a remove from the people who could have told us why they bothered with the idea and then stopped.

You can buy a selection of pyjama cases online, but with no explanation of why you’d want to, it’s hard to see how this helps. The only real thing i can see is that it’s cute and tidies the pyjamas up, but we’ve all decided that untidy pyjamas are a problem that doesn’t need solving.

Pyjama cases have no Wikipedia article; search engines have nothing to offer. Old books only self-reference them being a normal thing. Someone who knows about pyjama cases or textile history could heroically fill this in. Please do. Otherwise, this tumblr post is going to suddenly become the leading analysis of pyjama cases, and that would be sad.

[progressivemillennial]

“If I have one message to give to the secular American people, it’s that the world is not divided into countries. The world is not divided between East and West. You are American, I am Iranian, we don’t know each other, but we talk together and we understand each other perfectly. The difference between you and your government is much bigger than the difference between you and me. And the difference between me and my government is much bigger than the difference between me and you. And our governments are very much the same.”

― Marjane Satrapi, Iranian graphic novelist

[velutfortuna]

Goodnight, and rest in peace, Marjane Satrapi. Thank you for your work and your voice. May we hear you.