[veganfoody]

Vegan Holiday Recipes

[lonestorm]

I met my favorite person this weekend.

I have these Native American reenactments in the summer, okay. We dress in authentic Native garb and go teach about our culture and whatnot at historical events. There’s this one on a weekend that housed all reenactors from Ancient Greece to World War II–you can walk through a timeline of living history. It’s cool.

So there are these guys in a tent on the far hill called the Scottish Highlanders. They bring about two to five people to their thing per year. They do all the good medieval Scottish jazz. Kilts, weapons, challenging you to fights.

But theres this one guy that is there every time. I always go visit to hear him give in depth talks about Scottish Reavers and their malitia and weaponry and stuff. He’s fun, so I go talk to him and he’s asking about what school I’m going to, what I want to do, etc.

So I tell him I want to be a history teacher and I like to write. He asks me if I have anything published, and I say no, thinking he means an actual book. But he waves me off and asks, “No, online. Have you ever heard of Fanfiction.net?”

Let me explain a thing. This guy. Is well over six feet. His biceps are bigger than my head, he’s about 45 years old, he has the thickest Scottish accent you’ve ever witnessed, he can wave two axes around like nobody’s business, he usually resolves friendly arguments with full on battle in armor with real weaponry with the scars to prove it, and he kind of has a biker gang.

And this guy starts telling me about the 700 page Doctor Who fanfiction that he’s been writing for six years and still running. 

Shamelessly continues to explain how he gets together with his badass biker buddies and they ride to his house with bottles of Jack Daniels and talk about the next fanfiction that they’re going to write together. (More Doctor Who, Xena Warrior Princess, Agents of Shield, Lord of the Rings…) They dare each other to write crossovers for interesting character interaction. This guy raves with excitement over character development and analysis. 

I cried. 

[lonestorm]

By the way

Here he is. Mike. In his Scottish glory.

Here he is with his buddy, Bear.

Here he is with his buddy Bear and me.

And here he is holding an ax to my throat.

[justgot1]

I LOVE THIS. The perils of a site like Tumblr which is dominated by people under 30 (not on my dash, though, but that’s what demographics insist is true) is they genuinely don’t think anyone older has any interests in common with them. I feel like Livejournal was more varied in this regard, though again, my flist on LJ had all ages on it, so maybe it was just me. The only over 40s they know are the adults in positions of authority like parents and teachers, and surely Mom and Mr. W the Chem teacher have never heard of fan fiction or have the least interest in anything on the interwebs. A kid at work (I work at a university) who I jokingly called a meme lord once told me I needed to stop learning such things from my kid – who is 11 and basically uses the internet to watch Minecraft videos on YouTube, but of course she must be the one teaching me all these modernfangled intertoob things!

I admit though that I have fallen into the stereotype that fandom is all women, because that’s been my experience by far; I think the number of male-identified people I’ve come across in my various fandoms wouldn’t pass the single digits. But that’s probably due to the nature of my reading and the way I curate my dash. Where’s a big ol’ 40 something biker dude who writes Stucky?? Point him out to me and I’ll add him to my dash!

[leaper182]

Mike the Doctor Who Scottish badass fills me with hope and love. <3

[captainhuggermuggerus]

okay but what’s his username I want to read a 700 page Doctor Who fan fiction

[obeekris]

@copperbadge This is just screaming your name (though I don’t know how old you are).

[copperbadge]

I’m not sure what my age has to do with it (I’m 37 :D) but good for Mike and Bear and lonestorm, this sounds like an awesome hobby!

[beautyexplore1989]

[the-disney-elite]

Various paintings by Disney designer and artist extraordinaire, Eyvind Earle.

[ceevee5]

[writernotwaiting]

yknow if romeo had just Cried on juliets corpse for a couple hours instead of drinking poison Right Then they would have been Fine

[persephonesidekick]

The moral of the story is: always take time to cry for a few hours before making important decisions.

[runecestershire]

[runecestershire]

So I’m more or less being facetious here, but this is actually a thing.

Hamlet is genre savvy. Hamlet knows how Tragedies work, and he’s not going to rush in and get stabby without making absolutely certain he’s got all the facts.

Except once he thinks he has all the facts – once he’s certain that it really is the ghost of his father and Claudius really did kill him, he rushes in and stabs the wrong guy, which starts a domino line of deaths and gets Laertes embroiled in his own revenge tragedy and ultimately results in the deaths of nearly every character other than Horatio.

That’s the irony and the tragedy of the story. Hamlet knows his tropes and actively tries to avoid them, and the tropes get him anyway. It’s inevitable, the tropes are hungry.

[motherfuckingshakespeare]

I want a sticker that says the tropes are hungry so I can put it on my laptop

[daimonie]

i met a scholar once who said that tragedies aren’t about a silly “flaw” or anything, it’s about having a hero who’s just in the wrong goddamn story

if hamlet swapped places with othello he wouldn’t be duped by any of iago’s shit, he’d sit down & have a good think & actually examine the facts before taking action. meanwhile in denmark, othello would have killed claudius before act 2 could even start. but instead nope, they’re both in situations where their greatest strengths are totally useless and now we’ve got all these bodies to bury.

[whopooh]

The tropes are hungry and the hero is in the wrong goddamn story.

I love this post.

[intindra]

Always a pleasure to do these studies, lobo-de-luna is the best.

[fuckyeahillustrativeart]

by Cinthya Álvarez Follow them on Tumblr!

[austinkleon]

Morris Berman, Why America Failed: The Roots of Imperial Decline

Picked this up off a tip from @mattthomas​ — it’s a “post-mortem” of our nation, the third in a trilogy about the Decline of the American Empire (part one is The Twilight of American Culture, which I’m reading now, and part two is Dark Ages America). It’s a bleak portrait, one which I’m not sure a lot of people want to read about around the holidays, but for some perverse reason, I found it very enjoyable and oddly comforting — in the first book, Berman says “I’ll do my best not to entertain you,” but he fails. 

The big idea here is that the dominate mode of America is a kind of “technohustling”—America is a “hustling” culture (“American English contains more than two hundred nouns and verbs referring to a swindle”) that believes in endless technological progress (“technology is not neutral”) and it’s left us with a hollowed-out nation —economically, spiritually, emotionally — in which a few have much and many have very little.

Berman points to a long “anti-hustler” tradition of people such as the Transcendentalists, Herman Melville (he sees Moby-Dick as maybe the greatest book about America), and Lewis Mumford, that culminates with Jimmy Carter’s “Crisis of Confidence” speech he delivered in 1979, which Berman regards as the tradition’s “last stand.” Here’s Carter:

In a nation that was proud of hard work, strong families, close-knit communities, and our faith in God, too many of us now tend to worship self-indulgence and consumption. Human identity is no longer defined by what one does, but by what one owns. But we’ve discovered that owning things and consuming things does not satisfy our longing for meaning. We’ve learned that piling up material goods cannot fill the emptiness of lives which have no confidence or purpose.

Berman sees very little that the individual can do to escape the “American Nightmare,” other than flee (he went to Mexico) or pursue what he calls the “monastic option” (which he explores in detail in the first book): “resisting the dominant culture and trying to do something meaningful with your life as opposed to living the mass dream.”

Made up a good reading list of books I’ve wanted to check out for a while: 

Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America

A General Theory of Love

Barbara Ehrenreich, Bright-sided: How Positive Thinking Is Undermining America

E.F. Schumacher, Small Is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered

Lewis Mumford, Technics and Civilization

Filed under: my reading year 2016

[beatonna]

cold hard steel

[coffeeandboox]

History presentation due tomorrow 🙂+ revision schedule for midterms 🔫 15/100 days of productivity

[21douglassirkstreet]

[black-multiverse]

Stunning

[snazzy-lester-blog]

ok so there was this post talking about how boys love flowers too and no one ever gets them any or like cares,, SO we were doing awkward icebreakers in class and i decided to ask the guy next to me what his favorite flower was (half expecting him to say wut idk??) and he looked at me with a huge smile and said sunflowers and i think we should all just raise awareness that boys like flowers too

[crossedkeys-archive-deactivated]

I work at a flower stand and we probably get as much men buying flowers for themselves as women I remember one elderly man coming in, taking one look at the sunflowers and saying “they’re all smiling!” my heart

[fag]

humans of ny is definitely cancelled

[fag]

@humansofnewyork you suck

[predical]

I mean… if they are human… and live in NY…  Can’t keep ignoring ignorance. The bubble has been popped, Trump is going to be the president. The problem won’t just go away if we pretend it’s not there. I am a bit annoyed that they provided them a courtesy of not showing their faces. I don’t think I’ve seen that before until now.

[melissmint]

Stanton is not currently in New York. He is in Macomb County in Michigan. You should read the post he made about it.

Humans of New York has previously intentionally left the subject’s face out of the shot for particularly intimate or embarrassing stories, such as those about abuse, drug addiction, crimes, etc. I imagine this would be to protect the subjects from possible retaliation. Witchunts are very much a thing. Stanton may do this at the request of the subject, or protect himself from liability in the event that something should happen. That's why I'd do it, anyway.

[matociquala]

Call your congressperson. Here’s a script.

I know phones are terrifying, but this is important. 

Stephen Bannon’s appointment to the Trump White House is a test of how far America will go in allowing the alt-right (which is code for white supremacist, antisemitic, homophobic woman-haters) control of the American government. You can help stop his appointment, but tweeting or reblogging or snarking on facebook will not accomplish this.

What will help accomplish this? A simple phone call.

This website will give you the contact information.

First, call your representative or senator. You have two senators and one representative. Call all three. It’s okay to take anxiety meds beforehand if you need them. 

When somebody answers the phone, here is what you say:

If your congresscritter is a Democrat or Independent: “Hi, I’m [Name], one of [Name’s] constituents. I am calling because I strongly believe that the [Senator/Representative] should follow the lead of their colleagues, such as Ed Markey and Nancy Pelosi, in condemning President-Elect Trump’s appointment of a white supremacist misogynist, Stephen Bannon, as his chief of strategy and chief counsel.”

If your congresscritter is a Republican: “Hello. Hi, I’m [Name], one of [Name’s] constituents. I’m calling to ask if you can confirm your candidate’s position on white supremacy and white nationalism for me.”

After they answer, then you say, “In that case, I would call on the [Congress(man/woman)/Senator] to condemn President-Elect Trump’s appointment of a white supremacist misogynist, Stephen Bannon, as his chief of strategy and chief counsel in no uncertain terms.“

They may ask your address, Give them the address from which you vote. It’s how they confirm you are for reals.

You can do this. It does matter.

[zazamatic]

Beatrix Potter, Mycologist: The Beloved Children’s Book Author’s Little-Known Scientific Studies and Illustrations of Mushrooms

The pervasive Victorian enthusiasm for natural history produced quite a few female amateur scientists, including ornithologist Genevieve Jones, lepidopterist Maria Merian, and fossil-hunter Mary Anning — “amateur” being not a reflection of their scientific rigor and dedication, which were formidable, but of the fact that a formal scientific education was virtually inaccessible to women, except for the rare Ada Lovelace or Maria Mitchell, and membership in scientific societies was strictly reserved for men. But Potter’s scientific work was exceptional in that she deliberately tried to penetrate the very institutions that dismissed women’s scientific labor solely on the basis of gender.

Imagination is the precursor to policy, the precondition to action. Imagination, like wonder, allows us to value something. Imagination allowed Beatrix Potter to value the natural world and to share the treasures she found in the Lake District and its culture. As a far-sighted businesswoman she understood that their preservation was inherently linked to the success of fell farming.

Beatrix Heelis’s stewardship created a singular moment in the recovery of nature in the twentieth century; a paradigm of environmental awakening.

https://www.brainpickings.org/2015/07/28/beatrix-potter-a-life-in-nature-botany-mycology-fungi/

[cognitivedissonance]

Text: Patrick Farley Illustration: Jon Wolter

[azspot]

Using your Presidential transition website to promote your own business properties is not normal.

Calling for millions of federal employees to sign nondisclosure agreements apart from standard government forms is not normal.

Blasting journalists with product placements for the labels your child, who is on your transition team, is wearing is not normal.

Having a wide range of senior figures in your own political party distance themselves from your transition team, citing the profound irregularity of it and worrying about future ugliness, is not normal.

Placing your children in charge of your business empire, then placing them on your transition team, then seeking top secret security clearances for them, is not normal. The conflicts of interest that this represents are almost too many to count, but at a basic level: you do not give someone with a financial interest to work against U.S. policy access to sensitive information — at all, ever.

Putting one’s children into senior positions of a government is the behavior of a banana republic, not a constitutional democracy with strong institutions. This is not normal.

For a president who ran on his business acumen to refuse to disclose his taxes to the public, which in turn denies anyone the ability to see if financial conflicts of interest are driving his policy decisions, is not normal.

Asking if he can decline the President’s salary, so as to avoid paying taxes, is not normal.

Owing hundreds of millions of dollars in business debt to a foreign bank and refusing to fully divest yourself from those finances is not normal.

Ascending to the White House while your eldest son, who is also on your transition team, and for whom you also seek a top-secret clearance, seeks out seven-digit business deals in Russia, is not normal. When Russia then names the President elect an “honorary Cossack,” it is not normal.

Asking a hostile foreign intelligence agency to hack into the emails of your opponent in the campaign is not normal. Refusing to comment while they expand those hacks into other institutions is not normal. Watching that same government’s propaganda network dramatically change its tone in order to benefit the incoming president is not normal. That this foreign government is also the subject of numerous investigations into the President elect’s improper business conduct is not normal.

Threatening to cut off Europe from NATO if payment is not received, like a gangster demanding protection money, in a way that benefits said foreign government, is not normal.

Chanting for the summary imprisonment of your political opponent despite repeated conclusions that she has committed no crime is not normal. Refusing to back down from that call to summarily imprison her is not normal. Essentially suggesting a show trial before you’ve even assumed office is not normal.

Hiring an avowed white supremacist and proud antisemite to be the chief of strategy at the White House is not normal. That the new White House chief strategist has bragged, openly, of his desire to destroy the United States is not normal. That the cofounder of the Simon Wiesenthal Center raised money for this is not normal.

Staff participating in authoritarian victim-blaming and antisemitic conspiracism is not normal. Collaborating with cable news channels in that antisemitic conspiracy about protests is not normal.

When one of the new administration’s most senior proxies and spokesmen calmly discusses committing war crimes in the Middle East, it is not normal. When he is shortlisted for the Department of State — despite lobbying for terrorists who killed Americans, despotic regimes in the Middle East, and the tyrannical government of Venezuela — it is not normal.

When that proxy is simply following in the footsteps of the new President-elect, who has called for reinstating torture and summarily executing the families of alleged terrorists, it is not normal.

The leading candidate for the department of education (who himself has no background as an educator or in education policy) openly suggesting to censor speech on universities is not normal. Nominating an oil executive as the Secretary of the Interior is not normal. Nominating a climate change denialist funded by the oil industry to run the EPA is not normal. When the leading candidate for Defense Secretary having a long history of openly racist comments toward his own staff it is not normal.

The FBI intervening decisively in the last week of the election to alter its outcome for one candidate is not normal. But the FBI refusing to address the president elect’s violation of sanctions against a communist country is also not normal.

When a woman accuses a presidential candidate of having raped her as a child, but then refuses to go forward with her allegations because of a barrage of death threats yet still receives almost no media coverage, it is not normal.

It is not normal for a president-elect to have 75 pending lawsuits against him, ranging from business fraud to illegal hiring practices. It is not normal for his lawyers to demand those lawsuits be delayed until after his inauguration for not discernable reason other than to retreat behind the immunity of the office.

Relentlessly attacking the legitimacy of the media (to be distinguished from criticizing media conduct) is not normal. Threatening to sue the media because you don’t like being criticized is not normal.

Being so steeped in the language of fascism that you and and your staff mirror Hitler (“make the trains run on time“), appeasing Hitler (“America First“), or Mussolini (“drain the swamp“) is not normal.

[attackoftheskydancers]

Trying to appoint an attorney general who was once called “too racist to be a judge” is not normal