[ID: A drawing of a red kite with white, black and green bows on its tail. The caption says "No amount of propaganda should convince you that some children don't deserve to grow up. End ID]
op's tags say the artist is Henry James Garrett
cherry valley forever
2025 on Tumblr: Trends That Defined the Year
Claire Keane

bliss lane

#extradirty
Mike Driver
hello vonnie
d e v o n

titsay

Jar Jar Binks Fan Club
Cosmic Funnies

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ojovivo

Product Placement

ellievsbear

❣ Chile in a Photography ❣

if i look back, i am lost
I'd rather be in outer space 🛸
🩵 avery cochrane 🩵
let's talk about Bridgerton tea, my ask is open

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@myofficeisablanketfort
[ID: A drawing of a red kite with white, black and green bows on its tail. The caption says "No amount of propaganda should convince you that some children don't deserve to grow up. End ID]
op's tags say the artist is Henry James Garrett
theres a lot of jobs i think would be cool to automate but the people being automated out of a job are given no alternatives because this is being done for the employers benefit not the employee. so we're in a weird situation where im lookin at jobs that i really dont think any person should be forced to endure and still having to go "well i guess id rather a human do it than a robot" which kind of sucks major ass actually. why am i on the side of employment. god damn it.
europeans be like “omg north americans are so racist it’s horrible” and then elect fascists
I would like to emphasize that I agree with all of these tags by the way. My post wasn't aiming to pin all of Europe's grotesque racism on the new elections.
A few weeks ago I was at a board game night with some of my old classmates from various mainland European countries. They started talking about how horrible Trump's treatment of immigrants is and how they're so glad to be in Europe where nothing like that is happening right now. I asked them what they thought about the fact that their own governments were complicit in turning the Mediterranean into a mass grave of asylum seekers, and some of them legitimately didn't even know and were surprised to hear that their own governments had enacted policies that caused the deaths of thousands of asylum seekers.
Even here in Iceland, almost nobody has been talking about the fact that some of the far right populist parties have legitimately been talking about wanting to establish detainment camps to keep asylum seekers in.
Additional readings:
Greece suspends asylum applications for migrants from North Africa by Laura Gozzi (BBC).
Greece passes draconian legislation with prison terms for rejected asylum seekers by Helena Smith (The Guardian).
Greek coastguard threw migrants overboard to their deaths, witnesses say by Lucile Smith and Ben Steele (BBC).
Bill on Detention Centres for Asylum Seekers Published by Jelena Ćirić (Iceland Review).
Italy sends 40 rejected asylum seekers to Albania by Karl Sexton (DW).
Record number of migrants, refugees reached Canary Islands by sea in 2024 (Al Jazeera).
Portuguese government announces major migrant expulsion plan by ANSA (InfoMigrants).
This post is a few months old now, and the bit about Iceland is now outdated, because Alþingi (the Icelandic parliament) passed the bill approving the detention center for asylum seekers. It will be legal to handcuff and detain children there.
Never let anyone from Europe feed you the lie that racism and fascism are unique to North America in the 21st century.
This post made racists angry enough to harass me over it, which all that's going to do is make me bring this post back and reblog it more.
And let us never forget which country was the template for all of the current wave of immigration detention, both in Europe, and in the US - that's right, it's good ol' Australia! We've had immigration detention since 1992 (installed, one should note, by Labor PM Paul Keating), with no limits for how long you can be detained for. We then created a new form of visa for "genuine" asylum speakers called a "temporary protection visa" - which, you might note from the name, had the basic idea that as soon as your country no longer wanted to kill you, back you go! We started outsourcing our detention centres to other pacific islands like Nauru, all the better to stop folks from turning up and protesting at the detention centres!
It's important to note that it wasn't until 2023 that our courts agreed that detaining a non-citizen indefinitely when there is no real prospect of removal is unlawful, and those who were in long-term detention were finally released. We still have immigration detention in Australia, we just set a time limit on how long they can stay in detention. Guess who still has some of the longest immigration detention periods in the world?
Friendly reminder that 1200 calories is the recommended amount for a 5 year old
this hit me.
another fact is that 500 calories isn’t even enough for a new born.
why did I go so long convinced that going over 500 in a day was the end of the world?
Another friendly reminder that the United States used 1,000 calorie diets as torture for political prisoners and justified it using the diet industry.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/04/17/bush-torture-memos-commer_n_188190.html
In a footnote to a May 10, 2005, memorandum from the Office of Legal Council, the Bush attorney general’s office argued that restricting the caloric intake of terrorist suspects to 1000 calories a day was medically safe because people in the United States were dieting along those lines voluntarily.
“While detainees subject to dietary manipulation are obviously situated differently from individuals who voluntarily engage in commercial weight-loss programs, we note that widely available commercial weight-loss programs in the United States employ diets of 1000 kcal/day for sustain periods of weeks or longer without requiring medical supervision,” read the footnote. “While we do not equate commercial weight loss programs and this interrogation technique, the fact that these calorie levels are used in the weight-loss programs, in our view, is instructive in evaluating the medical safety of the interrogation technique.”
Another another friendly reminder that the Minnesota Starvation Experiment subjected adult men who were VOLUNTEERS to 1,560 calorie diets and the psychological effects were so profound that one volunteer cut three of his own fingers off and could not remember why.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minnesota_Starvation_Experiment
These men were volunteers who knew exactly what they would be going through and when it would end, and who believed they were doing it for a good and moral reason (the research was used to help rehabilitate victims of starvation and famine at the end of WWII).
And these are the things we are expected to engage in FOREVER to stay at a “healthy” weight.
Reading about the Minnesota Starvation experiment was my wake-up call. It was what kicked me out of my eating disorder. The guy missing three fingers, whatever his name was, he was the last straw for me.
Scared me so fucking bad I stopped restricting my food that day, and never went back to it.
Just bringin’ this back around like I sometimes do.
Wow. This really hit me hard.
EAT
Fun fact– calorie restriction exacerbates symptoms of pretty much *every* mental illness.
Anorexia has ~16% mortality rate, slightly higher than acted upon suicidal ideation. It’s more lethal than actively trying to kill oneself and this is why.
Remember that “calories” are a measure of the “energy” you get from food and not specifically a measure of fat or sugar or any one thing. A single calorie is the amount of heat it takes to warm water by one degree Celsius. Using it as a measure of a “healthy diet” is batshit gibberish.
More reading https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Minnesota_Starvation_Experiment
https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-25782294
This article poses a response to one argument supporting the force feeding of political prisoners. This argument assumes that prisoners have
I cant believe this tweet is how I find out
now all the things you guys have told me about american high schools are starting to make sense
holy shit.
You're not really supposed to say it this way, because its considered crass, but here in the US children are culturally and legally considered essentially the property of their parents.
Note that its considered more crass to point this out than it is to treat children as property in the first place.
It pisses me off when people only count people killed outside of concentration camps for ice kill counts. No ice hasn't just killed 4 people this year. People have been dying in concentration camps and no one's said anything about it. They should count too. We should remember them too. They're victims just like everyone else.
Car-centric infrastructure pisses me off but it also pisses off car owners and they don’t even realize it.
Do you hate traffic? Yeah. It’s because of all the cars.
Do you hate noise? Yeah. It’s because of all the cars.
Do you hate so many people under the age of 30 dying? Yeah. It’s because of all the cars.
Do you hate lung and heart diseases? Yeah. It’s because of all the cars.
I’ve hear about how having cats makes you immune to hauntings, ghosts, spooky midnight noises etc but. for years I’ve been dealing with a panic response to unexpected nighttime noises, major enough that the adrenaline can keep me from falling back asleep for hours.
A few weeks of living with a cat and my brain’s been reprogrammed. last night at 4am the furry little shitmuppet broke a vase & I only woke up long enough to call her a rat bastard & roll over back to sleep
Oh shit. This totally made me realize that it must have been my cat that killed my fear of the dark. I used to be intensely scared of walking into dark spaces. Hated any area where I had to turn a light off before I could turn another one on.
Enter my mostly black demon who likes to jump out of dark spaces at me.
Now I can just walk through dark rooms with no anxiety. I’m now used to the darkness taking physical form and jumping at me. At this point if a monster did jump out of the darkness I’d instinctively reach for the cat treats to offer it.
holy crap what other fears do cats make you immune to?
I’m no longer scared to dangle my foot over the bed bc of demons with sharp claws & glowing eyes, i’m scared to dangle my foot over the bed bc of one specific small furry demon with sharp claws & glowing eyes
#fuck off beelzebub my cat has dibs
My cats are legit part of my grounding strategy for when I have sleep hallucinations. As part of my sleep paralysis, I “see” corpses in the bed next to me on a frequent basis, or shadow men lurking in the doorway; if there is a cat blissfully, softly snoring at the foot of the bed, I know I am safe, despite what my brain is trying to conjure.
the sound of my door opening slowly, but theres no one there. my cat. somethings clawing at the walls, glass or window screens, cats. somethings fucking licking my toe in the middle of the night, my fucking cat again. nothing can hurt me its all cat
Unearthly noise? Cat.
Movement out of the corner of your eye? Cat.
Objects moved? Cat.
Inexplicable smells? Cat.
Corpses (small)? Cat.
Ectoplasm right in middle of the room, which you won’t notice till you step in it? Cat.
Do cats make the ghosts go away? Nah. They just make you stop being scared.
Do cats make the ghosts
go away? Nah. They just make
you stop being scared.
Beep boop! I look for accidental haiku posts. Sometimes I mess up.
My cats got rid of my fear, not because I assume every noise I hear is from them, but rather if my OCD is telling me not to look outside because someones out their waiting for me to see them so they can kill me, I know they aren’t actually there because my cats aren’t reacting.
Until they do some stupid shit like staring at my vent for 2-3 hours without moving at all for seemingly no reason what so ever
I don’t think adding nonbinary to Victorian’s gender system would’ve fixed their weird sexism. If anything I think it would’ve made them weirder and sexismier
Someone needs to write a satirical etiquette book in the style of a Victorian with rules for Ladies, Gentlemen, and Honorables in Polite Society.
Oh please someone do this
It would go something like
Of course, fashionable Honorables may be consternated by the proper open collar blouses as there is no way to tie a bow or cravat around it. In such cases a bow may be worn upon the top hat. Or a slim ribbon may be tied around the bare neck, however, given the salacious reputation some hold for such an accessory, that is best left to married Honorables.
YES. the way this hasn’t left my mind….Like okay they’re still Victorians. They’re still sexist and homophobic. My thought for this alternate history is third gender people are expected to only marry into already married couples. And they’d probably throw in a lot of Christian Holy Trinity and Mary Joseph God imagery to religiously validate triads.
Or three people (of all different genders of course bc again. They’re Victorian) could marry all at once but the courting situation would be a nightmare.
My question is,,, would Honorables have a dowry?
First thought: coverture. Coverture is the legal idea that a married couple is one entity, with the wife not having an actual legal identity of her own. This is why there's the old-fashioned convention of women taking on their husband's entire name (e.g. "Mrs. Robert Smith"), why men could control any inheritance or money their wives had, and also the origin of some now-obsolete laws (like making it impossible for a wife to sue her husband for damages, because it's as if she was suing herself).
This is why it was so important for women to marry well: even if you worked as a married woman (and many women did), your money wasn't actually yours. It's one thing to have to live with a drunk asshole; it's worse to have that drunk asshole be the sole person who decides if that paycheck goes towards rent or more booze.
So, having a trinity/three parts of one whole entity would totally fit Victorian ideas of coverture. I think you'd still have it be men > everyone else, because they'd expect some kind of hierarchy, and even within the Trinity, God is still the leader.
Second thought: separate spheres. The Victorian era was very heavily focused on men being involved in the "dirty" business of work/politics/etc., and women being more morally pure and better suited to the domestic sphere (the whole "angel of the house" thing). Obviously this wasn't actually or practically true a lot of the time, but it was the aspired-to standard, the thing you'd measure people against to say if they were acting appropriately as members of their gender or not.
So you'd need a third sphere for Honorables to inhabit that is completely separate from the work/domestic dichotomy, or create an entirely different three-way dichotomy. Basically, you'd need a thing to point to, like "X is very ladylike" or "Y is not manly," but for Honorables.
So, extrapolating:
You'd still have "Mr. and Mrs. Robert Smith," it'd just be, "Mr., Mrs., and Mx. Robert Smith" (differentiating by title, not by first name). I could actually see there being a different title for unmarried vs. married Honorables, like Master vs. Mister or Miss vs. Madam/Missus. Mix vs. Max, maybe?
I think Honorables would definitely need to have some kind of dowry. It actually might be even more necessary, because unless the guy is insanely wealthy on his own, you're going to need enough money to support three people, not just two.
I'm having trouble coming up with a third sphere, but whatever that third sphere was, you'd need to heavily police it. "You can't do X, that's for Honorables" has to be part of the culture. And you'd need to police it with as much weird pseudoscientific and/or religious justification as possible. Like, you need "women's brains physically can't handle the strain of learning math" but to explain why Honorables can't swim, or whatever.
Non-leadership admin, teaching, and academia as the third sphere.
The idea of who should be in charge of household accounting has always waffled between a man’s job and a woman’s job. Is teaching the realm of governesses and school mistresses or lecturers and professors. Academics are too weak and frail to be masculine but too logical and rigorous to be feminine.
Clerks and accountants and secretaries and teachers and scholars.
I can see it becoming a Mind (Honorable) Heart (Woman) Soul (Man) kind of separation, all three together making up the body. Women are suited for feelings, nurturing, caring. Honorables are suited for the pursue of pure knowledge, but lack the Will to put it to any practical use. Finally men are the one leading force that brings all the parts together and leads it into an action.
Thus, men, even if they're unqualified on whatever area of knowledge they're dealing with, and even if they have no understanding of their or other people's feelings whatsoever, still possess an inherent and intangible quality that makes them the only part truly suited for decision making.
Woman: Caretaker
Honorable: Assistant/Advisor
Men: Leader
Just gonna leave this here....
@animate-mush
“Shane, how does it feel to be back on Montreal ice?”
The corollary of needing to be willing to frame arguments in terms of moral precepts you don't necessarily share is needing to be aware of subtext. Yes, it's easy to get a certain stripe of hyper-conservative folks to agree with anything you please by framing it in terms of opposition to Big Government, but a large part of that is because when you say "Big Government", what they hear is "Jews". You didn't hack their brain with magic words, you just didn't realise what you were saying!
In a fascinating turn of events, my Most Pragmatic Sibling, reader of exclusively nonfiction, interested only in historical northeastern politics, fish recipes, and his dog, who in his bid to "opt out of frivolous nonsense" has worn only the same 3 pairs of identical cargo shorts and 5 free promotional tee-shirts for the last nine years, has recently come to understand that fashion, trends, and fads, are- as difficult as it is to grasp- direct expressions of a given population's political and socioeconomic environment
I, local family's resident literature fine arts and weird dead animals dork, have been having ENDLESS fun at his expense on this
(We both enjoy writing)
We have, since this monumental epiphany, essentially had the same conversation nine times in a row now, and I am genuinely never going to get sick of it. I hope he keeps texting me questions forever
Him: Wait but THIS stupid ugly thing was super impractical, so how come everybody wanted to wear it all of a sudden
Me: Well I'd have to do some research to be sure but if it didn't have a practical purpose and it wasn't a spiritual thing then my best guess is that it was either a novelty that had suddenly been introduced and found appealing, or it came to represent an important facet of the culture that suddenly gained relevance
Him: So why did it stop
Me: Fashions swing from one extreme to the other. People seek out what is desirable and unique, which is almost always unique because it's not produced or available very much. If enough people jump onto that bandwagon, demand goes up, so whoever can invent a way to get more or make more will make a killing. Once this innovation meets demand, the rhing will become commonplace, and no longer new or exciting. If it happens to be perfectly suited to a particular niche or image then it will become timeless as long as that niche or image is relevant, but the majority will move in the opposite direction once they hit the greatest possible extreme.
Him: That's stupid
Me: War is stupid. Ask grandma why she doesn't throw out old nylons and keeps turning old rags into bath mats
Him: (nodding sagely)
how it feels to message a friend who's having Problems that you can't do anything to help with.
#i appreciate how genuine and non-judgemental this comic feels #like left one is not upset at right one for caring while being powerless #and right one seems genuinely distraught and not performative
I'm glad the facial expressions are coming across accurately! It can feel so absurd to say gosh I hope the torment maze removes some fire and rusty nails soon, but alas, sometimes that's all one can do.
Also sometimes you and your friend are both in Torment Mazes, different ones, and while yours is way hotter, you know that your friend's has just so many more rusty nails than yours does, and so you and your friend vent to one another about your respective Torment Mazes and sympathize in a way that makes very clear that it's not a Torment Maze Olympics, there is no competitive element about whose Torment Maze is worse, and you both just genuinely wish the other to be freed from their Torment Maze as soon as humanly possible
SGKSGKSGK MA’AM
1) This is hilarious
2) Her work is all really awesome! And she’s got a ton of short stories available for free online. Some of my favorites:
“Bluebeard’s Wife” -- what would happen if a woman Bluebeard married just didn’t look in the room?
“The Dryad’s Shoe” -- an aroace Cinderella who has zero interest in the ball or the prince but does love gardening
“Jackalope Wives” -- takes the skinshifting conceit of selkies and applies it to jackalopes (folkloric horned rabbits) in the American Southwest. Also stars the absolutely iconic Grandma Harken, whose left to clean up the mess when her grandson tries to catch himself a jackalope wife. This one won a bunch of awards and there’s an audio version read by LeVar Burton.
“Sun Moon Dust” -- a young farmer inherits a sword bound to the souls of three warriors, all ready to teach him to be a hero... but he has no desire to be anything but a farmer. A very sweet M/M story!
The rest of her free fiction is linked to on her site. She’s also got some great novellas and novels, including a f/f “Snow Queen” retelling!
omg she wrote "The Seventh Bride" which I love you tricksy woman!!!
omg she wrote
“The Seventh Bride” which I love
you tricksy woman!!!
Beep boop! I look for accidental haiku posts. Sometimes I mess up.
This month people have been tearing Flock cameras off their poles.
This month people have been tearing Flock cameras off their poles. Perched above public streets, they are birdlike things, weatherproof, and they photograph every passing car and file it in a searchable national database. Somebody cut two of them in half at Washington Avenue and Westcott in Houston, spray-painted the wreckage, and left an American flag on one of them. Police were notified on the morning of the Fourth of July. Somebody severed a camera in Rutherfordton, North Carolina. The police department posted the photograph itself and collected more than twenty thousand comments. “Not all heroes wear capes.” “Give them a medal.” Here is what the cameras do when nobody cuts them down. Cops use them to hunt immigrants and to follow ICE targets across state lines and to find women who ended pregnancies in states where that is a crime and to watch exes and to watch women they want, without a warrant and without a judge. A cop types a reason in a box and the box does not check. A man in Burleson, Texas, told deputies his girlfriend had taken abortion pills. He showed them the photographs, the FedEx envelope, the instructions. Deputies opened a death investigation into a non-viable fetus, and the district attorney told them the state could not charge her, and they searched anyway: 83,345 cameras across 6,809 networks, a month of everywhere she had been. The reason they typed was had an abortion, search for female. The search reached Illinois and Washington, where what she did was legal. They found her in Dallas. She came into the sheriff’s office a week later, and they thought she had come to explain the fetus, and she had come to report that the man who called them had put a gun to her head. A sheriff in Jerome County, Idaho ran his wife’s plate more than seven hundred times in three months. He typed the same reason every time. Test. The attorney general found nothing to charge him with. He retired in April. The Institute for Justice counts at least twenty-two officers who used the system to track people they were romantically interested in, and calls that almost certainly an undercount. And the cameras keep falling.
Become ungovernable.
Something I had to unlearn: giving your character a tragic backstory is not the same as giving them a wound. A backstory is just information. A wound is the thing that makes them flinch at something totally unrelated fifteen chapters later and the reader goes "oh." If the backstory doesn't leave a nerve ending somewhere in the present-day plot, cut it. Nobody needs the trauma. They need the flinch.
that was everything I was hoping it would be. marvelous
I love this because you know exactly where it's going and you're not disappointed
I was so looking forward for the Jupiter gravity and it didn't disappoint and THEN THE SUN GRAVITY MADE ME HOLLER
i think you could reach escape velocity on pluto by just jumping really hard
THWE DRAMATIC PAUSE IN THE SUN GRAVITY HAD ME