just jay @officialparkranger - Tumblr Blog

My wife and I have a little game we play called "Speaking From Ignorance."

To play Speaking From Ignorance, all you need is a phone with a voice recorder, and another person who knows considerably more or considerably less about a topic than you do. The topic can be anything: from "how to bake a quiche" to "what happens in the Peter Jackson Hobbit movies" to "who is Florence Pugh" to "how does the traveling salesman problem work." All that matters is that one of you has a firm grasp on the material, and one of you absolutely the fuck does not.

Then the person who knows about the topic turns on the recorder, and says to the person who knows barely anything: "Hey - tell me everything you think you know about [X]."

The speaker is then not allowed to ask any questions. Nor is the expert allowed to volunteer any information. The expert is allowed to pipe up with a faintly incredulous "Oh--really? Do you--do you think so?" from time to time, but for the most part, the expert's job is just to sit there and make encouraging sounds while the speaker digs their own grave.

This is never not funny.

The reason you record it is because, very often, the first thing the speaker wants to do after finishing the recording is find out how you actually make a quiche, or whatever. Then you both get to go back and listen to how wrong they were.

We have a small library now of Speaking From Ignorance recordings, and I'm going to be listening to them until I'm eighty.

contemptible-scoundrel

it's always two distinguished gentlemen saying precisely to each other

grox

Eat strawberrys and touch yo self disease

mangio-formaggio

petruchio

im literally always saying this

huffylemon

hell yeah baby

hellsite-yano

omtai

the shit you do to make a dying phone work when you dont wanna buy a new phone is amazing. my phone no longer charges unless i plug and unplug the charger exactly ten times & then flip the charger around then it works. I dont want to say i have to fuck the port a little bit first but i have to fuck the port a little bit first

bowelfly

Richard Scarry's Monastic Menagerie

burins

thinking fondly of this meme I made for a coworker years and years ago

burins

this is going around again and the tags are full of people talking about printing it out to put in their breakroom or cubicle or sending it to their coworkers, which fills me with great joy. vast diversity of professions represented also. zoos. labs. summer camps. restaurants. garden centers. libraries. schools. many reports from the brave warriors of assorted retail. a truth universally acknowledged: if there is a sign a customer will not read it <3 and they don't read emails either <3

genderoutlaws

An abandoned theater in Rochester, New York. Formerly a pornographic theater, then just a facade after the Walgreens next door gutted it to use as a warehouse. The Walgreens with it's shampoo and baby formula and half of the store locked in cages; the contradictions stare into you. You go because it is the nearest pharmacy, close in walking distance for you and your disabled loved ones.

The Walgreens shuts down and it too, is now just a vacant facade, next to a vacant facade. You stare into the large windows meant to advertise it's contents, now only showcasing absence. A wide open space with torn up floors. You think about how perfect the location could be for low income housing, for squatting, for anything other than standing as a constant reminder of the city's failures to her people. The parking lot is empty, save for the occasional cop car, to ensure no one uses the lot or the building for anything at all. The cop ensures the space will stay as useless as himself.

They add letters to the theater's marquee; a reminder and encouragement of surveillance. "If you see something, say something. In progress call 911, over and done call 311." They board up the doors, ensuring that the space will stay in it's intended form: empty, useless, an eyesore that reminds everyone of their place. The freshly boarded up door has been emblazoned with a message from those who lack.

"A man would shelter, if he could / in the nook behind this new plywood / the building, abandoned / the man is too / how I wish you'd imagine / that it were you."

numberonevirginiansimp

Pictured above is Rain, an artwork by Thurlow Small Architecture, hung from the M Street NE underpass in the NoMa neighborhood of Washington, DC. It’s one of three artworks in a series commissioned by the neighborhood to beautify the area.

And by beautify, I mean drive out the unsightly homeless.

Local law states that the homeless cannot encamp on, in, or under public art, so the NoMa Parks Foundation identified three underpasses uniquely situated out of the elements and targeted them for their installations. Now of course, it doesn’t completely deter souls seeking shelter, but it does empower law enforcement to harass them and drive them into more hidden, less comfortable crevices of the city. Out of sight and out of mind.

There is a cold, cruel beauty in the piece. It’s almost self-conscious in a way. Art weaponized against the viewer, designed to resemble the very element they are trying to escape. Rain.