bmoreintentional @rkassman - Tumblr Blog

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louisegluckpdf

every time i sit down 2 watch a horror movie i think of that one tweet :/

louisegluckpdf

rb if you too sit down in ur room and watch horror movies alone

notahorseindisguise

tbh every sentence in this screenshot is fucking killing me

despazito

Nosy ass plant

teethsmoothie

isozyme

what is funny about ad Reinhardt and yves Klein? i want to be let in on the joke

so yves klein was a color field painter, also known as those guys who just paint a canvas blue, all blue, all the same color of blue, and sell it for a shitton of money. actually when it came to blue, yves klein was kind of The Guy.

BLUE

but back before all the fame and the blue, he made “yves peintures,” which was a catalog of his monochromes, pictured here:

the joke is that it’s bullshit! it’s just squares of construction paper glued on the page with little titles written below them. even the preface isn’t a preface – it’s just horizontal lines that he had a buddy of his sign with his name. one time yves klein and his art pals all hyped up a big big gallery show that he was opening. a solo exhibition! very exciting! all the critics and fancy motherfuckers showed up – three thousand people came. with great drama, they were led into a completely empty gallery. “welcome,” yves klein said. “I call it THE SPECIALIZATION OF SENSIBILITY IN THE RAW MATERIAL STAT INTO STABILIZED PICTORIAL SENSIBILITY, LE VIDE (THE VOID).” he was, in every way, a total fucker who loved bright colors and pranking the art world.

meanwhile, ad reinhardt – what’s ad reinhardt’s gig?

ad reinhardt’s gig is BLACK

more specifically, black-on-black grids of very slightly varying shades of black, applied in a very matte, powdery way that left the paintings with almost no sheen. it’s a pretty cool effect in person (if vantablack 2.0 had been a thing in the 50s, ad reinhardt would have busted a nut)

unfortunately, the way he did the paint makes the paintings incredibly difficult to maintain. if you touch one, the oils on your hands will immediately stain the painting, and it can’t be cleaned or repaired.

“no prob, bob,” ad reinhardt said to the flustered museum curators and collectors. “if you mess it up i’ll just replace it.”

“but what about our original ad reinhardt!” said the curators and collectors

“yeah i’ll replace it,” ad reinhardt said, “with the same original painting but not fucked up.” this caused some consternation

incidentally, he also made this small comic, which never fails to tickle me:

YOU, SIR, ARE A SPACE TOO!

one of my real favorite artworks in this vein is by robert rauschenberg, and i’m going to include the story of it because it makes me very happy. rauschenberg was an insane post-modernist – one of his most famous pieces includes a taxidermy goat with paint thrown all over it and a car tire around its neck, that kind of thing – and i love his piece titled “erased de kooning drawing”

so willem de kooning was the husband of elaine de kooning, who painted sick abstract expressionist portraits and was slamming hot

wow

willem was also an artist, and kind of a big deal in his own right, and friends with rauschenberg

one day rauschenberg calls him up like “hey i have an idea for a collaboration between us two art bastards. i need you to do me a drawing, in pencil”

and willem said “why”

and rauschenberg said “wouldn’t you like to know”

and willem said “why”

and rauschenberg said “because i’m gay, give it”

and willem said “that’s not a reason”

and rauschenberg said “fine, i wanna make a commentary on the value of art even after it’s destroyed and palimpsests and ephemerality and shit i guess, so i need a drawing by a famous dude to erase, and you’re famous”

willem de kooning said “okay” and proceeded to find the wettest, most difficult to erase grease pencil in his studio, which he then used to make several drawings until he came up with one he liked and sent it to rauschenberg

and to his credit, rauschenberg erased that motherfucker. he put in the effort. in a spectacular show of spite countering spite, he very nearly got rid of it all. look at this shit:

if that almost-blank piece of paper isn’t a work of art, i don’t know what is

paprikatupp

IRS Free Online Tax Preparation Feedback Survey

For anyone in the US, the IRS just dropped a survey asking if people would like to file for free. People should take the survey!

aethersea

this is quick and it is simple, and it looks like something the IRS is putting out so they can say "see, the public wants a free, easy tax filing service! please give us funding for this!"

the questions are basically "if you could file your taxes easily for free online, would you? would you rather do it with the IRS or with a private company? are you ok with the IRS spending $20 on processing your return (you still pay nothing, it is still free)?"

basically they're asking "do you want us to spend your tax dollars on making it easy for you to file your taxes for free?"

queermaddscientist

Get yourself a fabric store that will light your fabric on fire for you

No but legit I asked what the fiber content of something was and the guy didn’t know so he cut a chunk off and lit it on fire and felt the ashes and was like. Yeah this is mostly cotton with a lil bit of silk. And that was the moment I knew. This is it. This is the fabric store for me. Also that guy is marriage material. Not for me but damn some person is gonna be so happy with him.

rawringthroughthetwenties

Ok but this is actually one of the easiest ways to tell what something is made of! I did a textiles degree and one day as part of a class we all went outside with a pile of scrap fabric and set fire to the little pieces and recorded how they burned. We were given a chart that looked something like this to tell what each fabric was (it gets a little tricky is it’s a mix of fabrics though). Why did we do this? There is very little regulation in the textiles industry so a lot of materials are mislabelled as something they aren’t and sold for more than they should be, also sometimes people buy fabric second hand or discounted which doesn’t have any label at all. If you have a fabric you are having doubts about, cut a tiny piece off and do the burn test and you should know pretty fast what you are dealing with. Anyways your fabric store should be lighting things on fire because this means that they are actually checking what the fabrics are and aren’t trying to pass cheap stuff off as more expensive than it is.

queermaddscientist

Ooh! I knew it was a standard test but I hadn’t seen a chart as detailed as this thank you!

threetrenchcoatsinatrenchcoat

@capabletrinket

prokopetz

All animals are either Beasts or Creatures. This is usually consistent for a given species, but not always; for example, most dogs are Beasts and most cats are Creatures, but occasionally one will encounter a cat who is clearly a Beast, or dog who's an absolute Creature.

v3rb4tim

I want you to know, this has sparked quite the discussion amongst our hotel room. We've decided that Werewolf is the epitome of Beast and Gray Alien is the epitome of a Creature, and things can be categorized based on where in that spectrum they lie.

Seagulls are beasts, octopus are creatures, various fish have caused contention (as fish are wont to do in discussions of taxonomy), and now we're deciding if carnivorous plants can be categorized at all.

v3rb4tim

We've added the third category of Critter

prokopetz

Elapsed time between initial proposal of taxonomy and proposal of the addition of a wastebin taxon: 45 minutes.

victusinveritas

liminalweirdo

i'm not sure why this was posted without the link to the actual GFM but here it is

mattsmemes

omnybus

Teen LGBT Squad

Another Hometar Runner fancomic for pride month, this time starring the Teen Girl Squad.

This was mostly an excuse to make that “ow mein kampf” joke

afloweroutofstone

Documenting the Damage: 100 Harmful Policies from the First 100 Days of Trump's Second Term

The second Trump administration has had the busiest first 100 days of any US presidency in nearly a century. Since January, I've been keeping a spreadsheet documenting 900+ policy changes and political developments. I then bundled many of the most important changes into 100 topics areas and wrote a summary of each of them, providing a semi-comprehensive account of the tremendous changes to US politics which have occurred.

PDF version of the full report

Website version of the full report

Medium versions:

Introduction + Part I: Democracy and Government

Part II: Civil Rights and Liberties

Part III: Economy and Public Services

Part IV: Environment and Energy

Part V + Conclusion: Foreign Policy

ms-demeanor

Folks, this is an incredible piece of journalism reflecting a tremendous amount of research, effort, and thought.

It's completely free, brilliantly made, and I am incredulous that it had been so narrowly shared on Tumblr.

I am in awe of what Brett has done here. Please click through and read at least some of this because I think people are really missing out on what an incredible tool this is.

It's a quick reference, it's an archive (it's SO rich in sources and references), it's an explainer, and it is a point-by-point means of de-normalizing the trump administration to anyone in your life who thinks things aren't that bad.

ms-demeanor

Part of what both trump admins have done, and that the second one has been very, very successful at, is running a shock and awe campaign of things that are so overwhelming and awful that people check out because they can't maintain attention for the continual hammering of information. What Brett has done here is an absurd feat of attention, keeping on top of the tidal wave and breaking it down so that we can see the actions of the administration in plain black and white without the feeling of being pummeled by increasingly panicked news stories.

There are a ton of things to panic about, to take immediate action about, to be outraged about - you shouldn't feel guilty about missing an HHS rule change while you're protesting ICE or having your gender erased - but part of why this document is so impressive is that it DID keep track of those changes and rollbacks that are blips in the news cycle, and it did so pretty much in real time. The fact that it was completed so soon after the first 100 days is staggering, and it's so incredibly useful to have this as a reference NOW instead of as a retrospective five years after the fact.

Really. Seriously. This is so fantastic. Please take a look at it.

It's not comforting, it IS alarming, and it is nonetheless one of the most approachable and motivating in-depth pieces of political journalism I've ever seen.

liberalsarecool

You unlit candle.

shelteringyourdna-deactivated20

well look who it is. my old friend. the conses of my quences.

shelteringyourdna-deactivated20

do not 10k me stop that

ebonyheartnet

*clicks reblog* your old friend, the conses of your quences, sends their regards

marvelsmostwanted

There are people – some in my own Party – who think that if you just give Donald Trump everything he wants, he’ll make an exception and spare you some of the harm. I’ll ignore the moral abdication of that position for just a second to say — almost none of those people have the experience with this President that I do. I once swallowed my pride to offer him what he values most — public praise on the Sunday news shows — in return for ventilators and N95 masks during the worst of the pandemic. We made a deal. And it turns out his promises were as broken as the BIPAP machines he sent us instead of ventilators. Going along to get along does not work – just ask the Trump-fearing red state Governors who are dealing with the same cuts that we are. I won’t be fooled twice.

I’ve been reflecting, these past four weeks, on two important parts of my life: my work helping to build the Illinois Holocaust Museum and the two times I’ve had the privilege of reciting the oath of office for Illinois Governor.

As some of you know, Skokie, Illinois once had one of the largest populations of Holocaust survivors anywhere in the world. In 1978, Nazis decided they wanted to march there.

The leaders of that march knew that the images of Swastika clad young men goose stepping down a peaceful suburban street would terrorize the local Jewish population – so many of whom had never recovered from their time in German concentration camps.

The prospect of that march sparked a legal fight that went all the way to the Supreme Court. It was a Jewish lawyer from the ACLU who argued the case for the Nazis – contending that even the most hateful of speech was protected under the first amendment.

As an American and a Jew, I find it difficult to resolve my feelings around that Supreme Court case – but I am grateful that the prospect of Nazis marching in their streets spurred the survivors and other Skokie residents to act. They joined together to form the Holocaust Memorial Foundation and built the first Illinois Holocaust Museum in a storefront in 1981 – a small but important forerunner to the one I helped build thirty years later.

I do not invoke the specter of Nazis lightly. But I know the history intimately — and have spent more time than probably anyone in this room with people who survived the Holocaust. Here’s what I’ve learned – the root that tears apart your house’s foundation begins as a seed – a seed of distrust and hate and blame.

The seed that grew into a dictatorship in Europe a lifetime ago didn’t arrive overnight. It started with everyday Germans mad about inflation and looking for someone to blame.

I’m watching with a foreboding dread what is happening in our country right now. A president who watches a plane go down in the Potomac – and suggests — without facts or findings — that a diversity hire is responsible for the crash. Or the Missouri Attorney General who just sued Starbucks – arguing that consumers pay higher prices for their coffee because the baristas are too “female” and “nonwhite.” The authoritarian playbook is laid bare here: They point to a group of people who don’t look like you and tell you to blame them for your problems.

I just have one question: What comes next? After we’ve discriminated against, deported or disparaged all the immigrants and the gay and lesbian and transgender people, the developmentally disabled, the women and the minorities – once we’ve ostracized our neighbors and betrayed our friends – After that, when the problems we started with are still there staring us in the face – what comes next.

All the atrocities of human history lurk in the answer to that question. And if we don’t want to repeat history – then for God’s sake in this moment we better be strong enough to learn from it.

I swore the following oath on Abraham Lincoln’s Bible: “I do solemnly swear that I will support the constitution of the United States, and the constitution of the state of Illinois, and that I will faithfully discharge the duties of the office of Governor .... according to the best of my ability.

My oath is to the Constitution of our state and of our country. We don’t have kings in America – and I don’t intend to bend the knee to one. I am not speaking up in service to my ambitions — but in deference to my obligations.

If you think I’m overreacting and sounding the alarm too soon, consider this:

It took the Nazis one month, three weeks, two days, eight hours and 40 minutes to dismantle a constitutional republic. All I’m saying is when the five-alarm fire starts to burn, every good person better be ready to man a post with a bucket of water if you want to stop it from raging out of control.

Those Illinois Nazis did end up holding their march in 1978 – just not in Skokie. After all the blowback from the case, they decided to march in Chicago instead. Only twenty of them showed up. But 2000 people came to counter protest. The Chicago Tribune reported that day that the “rally sputtered to an unspectacular end after ten minutes.” It was Illinoisans who smothered those embers before they could burn into a flame.

Tyranny requires your fear and your silence and your compliance. Democracy requires your courage. So gather your justice and humanity, Illinois, and do not let the “tragic spirit of despair” overcome us when our country needs us the most.

Sources:

• NBC Chicago & J.B. Pritzker, Democratic governor of Illinois, State of the State address 2025: Watch speech here | Full text

• Betches News on Instagram (screencaps)

lou-wilham

Just a quick note from your friendly neighborhood bookworm/indie author

if you use kindle for the majority of your library, they will be shutting down the function that allows you to download your files and transfer them via USB on the 26th of February. Which doesn't sound like a huge deal, but this also means that if a book is taken off Amazon for any reason—like it being banned—they can scrape it off your kindle as well. So maybe backup your library?

whumpy-writings

How to Download Your Kindle Books (with screenshots)

From your Amazon homepage, click "Account & Lists" then click "Content Library"

Click "Books"

Find the book you want to download and click "More actions"

Click "Download & transfer via USB"

Click the button next to your device, then click "Download"

That's it! Your book file is now downloaded to your device. To my knowledge there isn't a way to bulk download everything, which means that your have to download books individually. (If anyone knows how to download multiple books at a time, please let me know!)

I use the free software Calibre to organize my ebook files. This video gives a good basic overview of how to download your ebooks from Amazon to Calibre, and also goes over how to use Calibre to transfer your ebooks to Kobo. I recently got a Kobo and have slowly been transferring my ebooks to it, and it is actually pretty easy!

If you're looking for ways to get ebooks without supporting Amazon, check out Smashwords, Bookshop.org, or see if your favorite author/publisher sells ebooks directly from their website.

Go forth and read!

gator-crusador

The artist Paweł Ponichtera seems to have inexplicably dedicated a massive amount of time and effort to hyper-detailed and hyper-accurate illustrations of chinchillas engaged in historical fencing, many with clear and specific reference to particular historical treatises. So, I give you: