[alittlebiteverything]

i’m 101% sure that this entire line was improv and tom couldn’t help it

[thorodinson]

Valkyrie is a world-class warrior. When we find her in this film, she’s a reluctant hero. She’s someone that really gets back into the game with Thor and with the Hulk. And she’s just a badass… She’s really hardcore. I kick a lot of ass. — Tessa Thompson

[gnine2]

[yesterdaysprint]

The Kansas City Gazette, Kansas, September 12, 1907

[animate-mush]

How dare you call me out like this in my own home

[amindamazed]

“Some people read entirely too much, and the unwashed dishes are the silent witnesses that prove it.”

[sanguinarysanguinity]

We legit lost a brownie pan among the books once. Couldn’t find it for months, but there it was, halfway up a stack of books.

[kropotkhristian-deactivated2019]

Which is the original: catholicism or orthodox?

This anon wants to relive the schism of 1054 through Tumblr discourse

[ineptshieldmaid]

The Donation of Constantine is Problematique and fake, pass it on.

[feminerds]

[transylmania-deactivated2017092]

Rusalka (1996) — Mermaid by Aleksandr Petrov

[2headedsnake]

Oil paint on glass animation

[unpretty]

Tumblr: *rolls out “best stuff first”*

My blog:

[unpretty]

on the one hand this is a joke post because lol i have never made a good post in my life, but also, if i hadn’t made the connection between this update and my sudden nosedive in activity, i would have been really fucking discouraged about all the shit i’ve been working on lately. i guarantee there are people on tumblr right now who haven’t made that connection, and who are trying to figure out why suddenly no one likes anything they’ve made. and that fucking sucks.

[jasper-appreciation]

Reminder to go into your settings and turn off ‘Best Stuff First’ because my activity’s tanked a couple days ago for no reason so this stuff IS happening.

You WILL miss content with that setting on.

[sergle]

i ain’t joking when i say that my activity looks JUST like this too and i wasn’t sure why

[characterdevelopmentforwriters]

I’m sure you all have seen posts like this before, but you will be missing out on a lot of content if you have this feature activated.

[transformativeworks]

Fyi, folks, this account has been hit pretty hard by this change. Engagement is currently at about 30% of normal, which means that there are a lot of people missing out on informative posts like this one about original works on AO3.

In order to change this setting on mobile (it’s unclear if it’s available on desktop at the moment), view your blog by tapping the little silhouette in the bottom right of your screen, then tap the settings gear in the top right of your screen. From there, select Global Settings (iOS) or General Settings (Android), then Dashboard Preferences, and toggle the switch for “Best Stuff First.”

Thanks to everybody who follows this account, everybody who reblogs and/or likes the posts here, and everybody who joins in with events like Fandom First Friday! You’re all awesome!

[lastwingedthing]

MOTHERFUCKER i’ve checked my settings like eleventy times and haven’t seen the ‘best stuff first’ toggle, so I shrugged and figured it wasn’t active on my account. 

HAHA NOPE apparently you just can’t see on desktop!!!

...because that is logical, useful and makes complete sense. 

fuuuuuuuuuuuuuck

[class-struggle-anarchism]

The tendency of Americans to overestimate what they have accomplished on their own and deny how much they owe to others has been codified in the myth that the colonists came on an “errand into the wilderness” and built a land of plenty out of nothing. In reality, however, the abundant concentrations of game, plants, and berries that so astonished Eastern colonists were not “natural”; they had been produced by the cooperative husbandry and collective land-use patterns of Native Americans. In the Northwest, the valuable Douglas fir forests and plentiful herds of deer and elk found by early settlers existed only because Native American burning practices had created sustained-yield succession forests that maximized use of these resources without exhausting them.

The Way We Never Were: American Families And The Nostalgia Trap Stephanie Coontz (via gaydognerd)

[speculumannorum]

Keith Westwater: The Head of Department’s Prayer on a Change of Government

Our Minister, who art in cabinet, hallowed be thy name. Thy party won, thy will be done, in fact as it is in fiction. Give us this day your empty signifiers, And cover our stuff-ups, as we cover yours when you pot us. And lead us not into the glare of scrutiny, but deliver us from scarce resources. For thine is the government, the power and the spin, at least until the next election. Amen/Awomen 

This one’s for the kiwi’s on this auspicious (??) day. Congrats on having a government, guys, it only took you three weeks

[niktipolos]

If you’re poor, the only way you’re likely to injure someone is the old traditional way: artisanal violence, we could call it – by hands, by knife, by club, or maybe modern hands-on violence, by gun or by car. But if you’re tremendously wealthy, you can practice industrial-scale violence without any manual labor on your own part. You can, say, build a sweatshop factory that will collapse in Bangladesh and kill more people than any hands-on mass murderer ever did, or you can calculate risk and benefit about putting poisons or unsafe machines into the world, as manufacturers do every day. If you’re the leader of a country, you can declare war and kill by the hundreds of thousands or millions. And the nuclear superpowers – the US and Russia – still hold the option of destroying quite a lot of life on Earth. So do the carbon barons. But when we talk about violence, we almost always talk about violence from below, not above. […] People revolt when their lives are unbearable. Sometimes material reality creates that unbearableness: droughts, plagues, storms, floods. But food and medical care, health and well-being, access to housing and education – these things are also governed by economic means and government policy.[…] That’s a tired phrase, the destruction of the Earth, but translate it into the face of a starving child and a barren field – and then multiply that a few million times. Or just picture the tiny bivalves: scallops, oysters, Arctic sea snails that can’t form shells in acidifying oceans right now. Or another superstorm tearing apart another city. Climate change is global-scale violence, against places and species as well as against human beings. Once we call it by name, we can start having a real conversation about our priorities and values. Because the revolt against brutality begins with a revolt against the language that hides that brutality.

Call Climate Change What It Is: Violence, Rebecca Solnit. (via kuanios)

[unreconstructedfangirl]

Probably no man has ever troubled to imagine how strange his life would appear to himself if it were unrelentingly assessed in terms of his maleness; if everything he wore, said, or did had to be justified by reference to female approval; if he were compelled to regard himself, day in day out, not as a member of society, but merely (salva reverentia) as a virile member of society. If the centre of his dress-consciousness were his cod-piece, his education directed to making him a spirited lover and meek paterfamilias; his interests held to be natural only in so far as they were sexual. If from school and lecture-room, Press and pulpit, he heard the persistent outpouring of a shrill and scolding voice, bidding him remember his biological function. If he were vexed by continual advice how to add a rough male touch to his typing, how to be learned without losing his masculine appeal, how to combine chemical research with seduction, how to play bridge without incurring the suspicion of impotence. If, instead of allowing with a smile that “women prefer cavemen,” he felt the unrelenting pressure of a whole social structure forcing him to order all his goings in conformity with that pronouncement. He would hear (and would he like hearing?) the female counterpart of Dr. Peck informing him: “I am no supporter of the Horseback Hall doctrine of ‘gun-tail, plough-tail and stud’ as the only spheres for masculine action; but we do need a more definite conception of the nature and scope of man’s life.” In any book on sociology he would find, after the main portion dealing with human needs and rights, a supplementary chapter devoted to “The Position of the Male in the Perfect State.” His newspaper would assist him with a “Men’s Corner,” telling him how, by the expenditure of a good deal of money and a couple of hours a day, he could attract the girls and retain his wife’s affection; and when he had succeeded in capturing a mate, his name would be taken from him, and society would present him with a special title to proclaim his achievement. People would write books called, “History of the Male,” or “Males of the Bible,” or “The Psychology of the Male,” and he would be regaled daily with headlines, such as “Gentleman-Doctor’s Discovery,” “Male-Secretary Wins Calcutta Sweep,” “Men-Artists at the Academy.” If he gave an interview to a reporter, or performed any unusual exploit, he would find it recorded in such terms as these: “Professor Bract, although a distinguished botanist, is not in any way an unmanly man. He has, in fact, a wife and seven children. Tall and burly, the hands with which he handles his delicate specimens are as gnarled and powerful as those of a Canadian lumberjack, and when I swilled beer with him in his laboratory, he bawled his conclusions at me in a strong, gruff voice that implemented the promise of his swaggering moustache.” Or: “There is nothing in the least feminine about the home surroundings of Mr. Focus, the famous children’s photographer. His ‘den’ is paneled in teak and decorated in rude statues from Easter Island; over his austere iron bedstead hangs a fine reproduction of the rape of the Sabines.” Or: “I asked Mr. Sapristi, the renowned chef whether kitchen-kult was not a rather unusual profession for a man. ‘Not a bit of it!’ he replied, bluffly. ‘It is the genius that counts, not the sex. As they say in la belle ecosse, a man’s a man for a’ that.’ –and his gusty, manly guffaw blew three small patty pans from the dresser.” He would be edified by solemn discussions about “Should Men Serve in Drapery Establishments?” and acrimonious ones about “Tea-Drinking Men”; by cross-shots of public affairs “from the masculine angle,” and by irritable correspondence about men who expose their anatomy on beaches (so masculine of them), conceal it in dressing-gowns (too feminine of them), think about nothing but women, pretend an unnatural indifference to women, exploit their sex to get jobs, lower the tone of the office by their sexless appearance, and generally fail to please a public opinion which demands the incompatible. And at dinner-parties he would hear the wheedling, unctuous, predatory female voice demand: “And why should you trouble your handsome little head about politics?” If, after a few centuries of this kind of treatment, the male was a little self-conscious, a little on the defensive, and a little bewildered about what was required of him, I should not blame him. If he traded a little on his sex, I could forgive him. If he presented the world with a major social problem, I should scarcely be surprised. It would be more surprising if he retained any rag of sanity and self-respect.

Dorothy Sayers, from her essay “The Human-Not-Quite-Human” (via unreconstructedfangirl)

[yeoldenews]

Today’s highlights in my ongoing project to read through and transcribe the letters of Rachel (a wealthy Victorian girl at boarding school on the East Coast in the 1890s) include…

Rachel’s cousin Will and his Yale roommate Allen both have the measles. Rachel shows limited sympathy (”Poor boy!”), before immediately mocking them and calling them “childish” for getting a disease only little kids get.

Rachel and her roommate “B” (It stands for Bertha!) attempted to steal a sign (what sort idk) from a fair they went to but found they “were carefully guarded”. She wishes Will could have been there to help.

Will has a crush on a girl named Jenny, who Rachel knows, and is constantly asking Rachel if Jenny has mentioned him.

“B” often sits next to Rachel as she writes and suggests things to add to the letter or just generally distracts her.

Will and Jack, who are brothers, don’t write to each other. They write to Rachel and tell her to write to the other and pass on a message for them. Rachel keeps asking why they do this, but goes along with it anyways.

Rachel always explains why there are ink blots or areas of sloppy writing in her letters. Explanations so far include such classics as: the dinner bell just rang, it’s after lights-out and I’m writing this in the dark, “B” is shaking my arm, “B” is kissing me, this pen is broken, the postman is almost here, and there was a bee.

For her 18th birthday Rachel received: a new Kodak camera, eighteen white rosebuds, silver manicure scissors, a pair of shell side combs, a silver pencil, and a vase of pink roses. However her favorite present was from her father who wrote to say she could just buy her own present and he would pay for it.

Rachel is always mentioning the pictures she takes with her Kodak. I wish I knew what happened to them. 

In addition to Calvé, Marlowe and Sothern, Rachel has now also gone to see performances by Ellen Terry, Henry Irving, John Philip Sousa, Ignacy Jan Paderewski (playing the piano, not governing Poland), and freaking Sarah Bernhardt! 

Rachel likes to put question marks in the middle of sentences to denote sarcasm; i.e. “I am very ? sorry for you.” and “Men were not excluded and we had the pleasure ? of meeting several.”

Your 1890s slang word of the day: “squelch” (verb) - to be lectured or punished for something. Example: “I expect to be squelched unmercifully by mama and papa.”  Can also be used as a noun as in: “This term we have had nothing but squelches.”

[allthingslinguistic]

I’ve learned a new favourite French idiom. Apparently god can also be wearing the breeches, the breeches can also be a vest, and either can also be made of silk.

[alyciajazmin]

Jennifer’s Body (2009) dir. Karyn Kusama

[probablyasocialecologist]

Rich people force poor people to work for them for wages. The poor do not get to negotiate these wages. Wages are what the market dictates is a fair price for one hour of their labor. Though a cashier at McDonald’s handles easily hundreds of dollars in an hour, she will be paid $7.25 an hour regardless of what her employer earns from her labor and they will insist this is fair. She may hate her job and cry every night on her mother’s pullout couch wishing she could find a better, higher-paying job, but all of this suffering is her choice, obviously. Oh, that’s right — a lot of people think that if you’re not being coerced to work by top-heavy goons by gunpoint, you’re somehow not being coerced to work. They like to spin these weird pretzels of logic where those without money or resources are actually free to live in a world where the rich have now privatized the commons and kicked out the ladder. When confronted with the reality that single moms work because if they don’t their kids are taken away, they shrug and insist those moms shouldn’t have had kids. When confronted with the bleak dilemma that many millions of chronically ill people face staying in horrible jobs every day to keep their health insurance, they shrug and insist it’s their own fault for getting sick in a country where medical care is prohibitively expensive. So on and so forth. Capitalist shitbag science means the rationalizations for injustice never end. No, unless you’re literally being held down by gunpoint, none of this will ever qualify as coercion. They always win because you’re always free to choose something else — apparently.

Holly Wood, Why Capitalism is Just Shitbag Science (via probablyasocialecologist)

[enoughtohold]

At first the marchers came one by one, then in droves. By 7 P.M., on April 24, 1993, Dupont Circle was filled to bursting, spilling over like a dyke Times Square on New Year’s Eve. Young ones, old ones. Suburban dykes in their khakis, city dykes in their boots, softball dykes with the little rat tails in the back of their short-cut hair, shaved Sinéad heads like mine, the big hair of die-hard femmes in dresses, butches dressed to the nines. People who knew about the march before they got to D.C. brought their own banners and signs. The rest dragged each other. I was supposed to be in charge, but how can you manage a hurricane? A tsunami of twenty thousand dykes? You don’t. You just try to get out in front. The Avengers gathered the fire-eaters and drummers together and with the banner pushed our way to the head of the crowd. When that huge entity started moving, what a roar. […] I bellowed the few words I had to say into a bullhorn. Probably no one understood, though it didn’t much matter because all those dykes knew where we were (in front of the White House), and how many we were (enough to fill the streets of the entire city), and that together we were Dyke America taking over the capital. After I got done shouting, a dozen of us Avengers stood on the plastic crates we’d toted from New York. The crowd around us grew quiet. It was getting dark by then. You could hear voices shouting in the background, others yelling, “I can’t see. What are they doing?” We dipped our torches into lighter fluid, lit them, and raised the flames in the air. Then, silhouetted against the familiar glowing white form, we brought them slowly toward our faces, which were lit up, too. Exhaling, as the heat approached our lips, fire entered our mouths and disappeared. The crowds hollered and screamed. And we did it again, while Marlene Colburn tried to get a chant going, “The fire will not consume us. We take it and make it our own.” That moment, of dykes eating fire in front of the White House, endured as the image of the Avengers. Photographers sent out their photos. The Ministry of Propaganda shot off their press releases. Journalists from major venues beat down our doors for interviews, marveling at the turnout, at the drama and life compared to the same old, same old of the official March on Washington for Lesbian, Gay, and Bisexual Rights and Liberation with all the groups lined up and orderly. All the speeches predictably moving. The message of the Dyke March was in our bodies. All twenty thousand of them there together in front of the White House, lit up with flame. We were disorderly, raucous, happy to be behind our own lesbian banner for a change. I can almost hear a couple of dyke readers murmuring as they turn the pages, “What’s the big deal? I don’t need anybody’s validation.” But if you don’t think it makes a difference, it’s because you don’t know. Maybe you’re dulled a little by seeing one or two lesbian faces on TV, in your local politics. One among thousands. Well, imagine what it’s like to suddenly be the majority. Not even the one in ten on the street or whatever it is. But the 100 percent. I suppose that would be my Lesbian Dream if I could describe it now. To be big enough to count. To take up space in the great brain of the country, for even ten minutes a day. To be free.

Kelly J. Cogswell describing the first national Dyke March in Washington, DC, in Eating Fire: My Life as a Lesbian Avenger (2014), Ch. 1, Pt. 8 (via enoughtohold)