Artblog: @alexskyline

Funny jokes side blog. She/her

[solarsyrup]

the unimaginable power of saying "huh, guess that's not for me" and moving on with your life

[blackwoolncrown]

all millenials have absolute permission to be ~wacky~ bc we are all driven insane by the fact that we were the ONLY generation to have access to certain technologies and we sound fucking crazy trying to explain it to people

everyone before us lived in the pre-digital age.

everyone after us lived in the enshittified post .com era

we and we alone were juuuust aged right for the point in time where we had sick ass gumdrop looking computers and phones of all shapes and sizes and you could go out in the world and be human and imperfect without some chode recording you

fucking hell

shit was free and gmail was, actually, simple and reliable.

[blackwoolncrown]

the internet was *so cool*

now they want you to pay for Youtube and show your ID to watch it

[a-book-of-creatures]

Is it socially acceptable to use opaque watercolors, or is that considered gouache?

[myfootyrthroat]

I wish there were a better way to talk about some hot button issues without pushing the hot button.

[myfootyrthroat]

"The bus stops on my route are usually full of people freebasing, so if the weather's bad, people waiting for the bus end up standing in the rain."

Oh, so you think they should just go to jail? That addicts deserve to suffer?

"No, but now we don't have functional shelters for people using transit, which discourages use. It's two problems."

[myfootyrthroat]

Or someone in a local subreddit was asking what resources were available because someone in their apartment building was having a mental health crisis. This involved screaming racial slurs into the poster's door at all hours, vandalizing their car, and leaving them letters about how they knew the poster had bugs/spies in their apartment and various threats if they didn't "stop".

Most of the responses were "The police would probably just shoot them" and "Actually mentally ill people more likely to be *victims* of violence than to cause it", which is all well and good. But I also don't think that the person asking should have to live with someone screaming racial slurs into their door at 2AM or vandalizing their car? Again, we have 2 problems here.

[jessicalprice]

This:

This.

I got this from a former therapist, no less. I had been working from a coffee shop and a man came in, yelling about *bitches* and swearing at the girls behind the counter. He had a walking stick that he was pounding on the floor and at one point started hitting the counter with it.

He was between me and the door, it was stressful, and when he moved, I got myself out of there.

And I was talking to my therapist about it (I was seeing her for some pretty intense anxiety and PTSD (as in my doctor was like ‘your cortisol levels are at like active-combat-deployment levels, we gotta get those down’)), about how a day later I was still jittery about it.

And she gave me the “don’t be judgmental, most mentally ill people are harmless,” and I was like “lady, this one was ranting about women and BRANDISHING A WEAPON, I’m not going to stick around and wait to find out whether he’s actually harmless.”

And I think there’s a key component there that we don’t know how to talk about:

- most mentally ill people are harmless and more likely to be victims of harm

AND

- some forms of mental illness can cause people to behave in ways that seem threatening because they resemble what a person who doesn’t have that form of mental illness might do if they were in the grip of the sort of overwhelming anger that has a significant chance of becoming violence

Like, in general, if a human being starts screaming at you, you are in danger, and all the At A Population Level statistics in the world don’t make being afraid in that situation irrational, and unless you have training in handling crisis situations, you should probably get yourself away from them if possible or call someone for help if you can’t.

[mothnem]

Mentally Ill People are often unfairly demonized and they can threaten harm to others are not contradictions.

[pitbolshevik]

the mercedes clr incident at le mans is one of the only racing crashes i feel comfortable laughing at because a) nobody was seriously injured and b) it is a little funny that mercedes watched their car do That and were like "okay. uh. you know what we're just never doing le mans ever again"

[pitbolshevik]

mercedes watching their car do this: huh. maybe we're not good at endurance racing.

[pitbolshevik]

my tags were correct, it did in fact do it twice

[pitbolshevik]

for anyone wondering why this happened the short answer is that the driver was using a racing technique called drafting where you drive directly behind a car. the car pushes air around you and creates a slipstream enabling you to go faster. unfortunately this also gets rid of your front downforce which doesn't usually result in the car doing THAT, but the way the CLR's body was constructed, with its dramatic overhangs and short wheelbase, made it very unstable and extremely sensitive to aerodynamic changes

[matomai]

Why did he pose like that bruh 😭

[eraserheadadult]

the situation with harry potter is kind of unprecedented in some ways imo because it is maybe the largest media franchise in history to be created & owned by a single person who still has direct creative control over it. who is also a billionaire with significant cultural/political influence. like the usual "no ethical consumption under capitalism" type excuses shatter on impact when the bigoted author in question is logging onto twitter every day saying explicitly that when you buy the tim hortons ravenclaw donut she is using your donut money to fund the genocide of trans people. like with big franchises usually there's at least a little more diffusion of responsibility than this

[sometiktoksarevalid]

[sunderedstar]

[graybraids]

best yard sale find ever:

[pmamtraveller]

Mammal in a Sunday Dress, by Georgina M. Cox, 2026

[originalaccountname]

Mammal in a Sunday Dress explores the uneasy relationship between femininity, civilisation, and the animal body. At first glance, the figure appears modest and withdrawn. Her posture is composed, her gaze seemingly lowered towards her bare feet, recalling the conventions of nineteenth-century portraiture where women were often depicted as passive objects of observation. Yet as the viewer moves closer, the illusion collapses. Her eyes are not lowered at all. She is looking directly back. The delayed eye contact transforms the encounter. The viewer approaches believing they are safely observing a woman; instead, they realise they have been observed themselves. The work refuses the traditional power dynamic of portraiture, denying the comfort of anonymous spectatorship. Looking becomes a reciprocal act. For Cox, the painting considers humanity's persistent desire to separate itself from the rest of the animal kingdom. The title quietly undermines this distinction. A "mammal" is not another creature—it is us. The Sunday dress, rich with cultural associations of femininity, morality, and respectability, becomes an attempt to distinguish ourselves from nature. Yet clothing cannot alter biology. Beneath lace and ritual remains the same vulnerable animal body. The work also reflects on the historical relationship between women and nature. Across art, religion, and philosophy, women have repeatedly been positioned as closer to instinct, emotion, reproduction, and the body itself, while men have been aligned with reason, culture, and civilisation. Mammal in a Sunday Dress does not reject this comparison. Instead, it questions why proximity to nature has so often been treated as something lesser. Chiaroscuro isolates the figure within darkness, allowing the luminous dress to symbolise the performance of civilisation while the bare feet quietly return the body to the earth. Neither is presented as more truthful than the other. The painting exists in the tension between performance and instinct, refinement and biology. Mammal in a Sunday Dress ultimately asks a simple but unsettling question: if every layer of culture were stripped away, what would remain? Not a king. Not a saint. Not a gentleman or a lady. Only another mammal, looking back.

source

[thebellekeys]

europeans be like “omg north americans are so racist it’s horrible” and then elect fascists

[thebellekeys]

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.

[dailymanners]

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.

[barishal]

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).

[dailymanners]

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.

[dailymanners]

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.

[samijen]

Shop Reopened!✨🍀⚔️

https://samijen.etsy.com

Added a bunch of new goodies~ Get free shipping on orders over $50 with code "50SHIP" Also running a small sale on some older stuff. Lasts until the end of the month! 💖

[yellbug]

art by LILAH i found laying around in the children's area of the bjork exhibit that was so awesome that i almost stole it and took it home with me but i didn't because i thought there was a slim possibility that if i left it there someone would be able to show it to bjork & if i were the subject of this drawing it would make me shriek with delight

[homunculus-argument]

We need to isolate and start selectively breeding the plastic eating bacteria so we can optimise their efficiency, and then somehow splice their DNA into the gut bacteria of an obligate carnivore, so we can put it in our cats gut biomes so they'll finally be free of having to choose between whether they want to eat plastic or whether they want to live.

[deoxyribonucleicacids]

As a geneticist and microbiologist who has worked with plastic-degrading microbes briefly, this is theoretically possible. The most difficult parts would be finding a microbe that could take plastic in it's unaltered (or slightly stomach-acid degraded) form.

For my project, we were trying to identify microbes that could use partially treated plastic as a food source and break it down further. The carbon bonds in our daily plastics are really hard to get at and break, hence the bad degradation, so breaking some of those bonds through heat and chemicals first can help microbes get access to them. Once we identify a microbe that can do this, we could test giving them slightly less degraded plastic to live on until they develop a way to eat it and go until they either get back to normal plastic or hit a wall where the microbe can't progress anymore (which may be likely).

An alternative approach to breeding (although you don't 'breed' most microbes since they reproduce asexually but instead find strains with mutations that lead to desired changes) would be trying to predict an enzyme that could break the bonds in plastic, engineering it, and putting it in microbes to test if it works. On one hand it could overcome any natural halt selection has but would be initially harder to discover.

The best solution would probably be to find the microbe that can eat the partially degraded plastic, figure out what enzyme is doing the work, then see how the enzyme could be improved to work through plastic in its default state.

Once you have that, the next consideration would be what byproducts are created from eating plastic? Part of the project was hoping that the microbe that could eat plastic would produce a useful byproduct that could be harvested, as an unfortunate reality of our current world is that if it's not profitable it probably won't take hold. But if we wish to put this in a living organism, we need to make sure it won't produce a harmful byproduct, or if it does, then ensuring the organism can quickly turn it harmless before it builds up.

Once all of that is figured out, the next hardest thing would be ensuring that whatever gut microbe you put the plastic eating gene in continues to express it. Since plastic is so hard to use it would probably prefer to use any glucose lying around first, and if that runs out then switch to eating plastic. We could try removing its ability to eat glucose (or whatever other compounds it lives off of), but then it would be less competitive in the gut environment and would require a steady source of plastic in order to not die off.

Although, I assume cats (and some people) would not find that a challenge.

[homunculus-argument]

...holy shit.

the only research I did for this post was 30 seconds to double-check on wikipedia whether or not bacteria have DNA.

[skinks]

I love that thing when people get a little bit tongue-tied and garble what they’re trying to say so they make a little “blegh” 👅 noise and start over. verbal reset button. hitting the top of the tv to unscramble the signal

[indolentjellyfish]

as per request, banana for scale

[depsidase]