taylor price
Not today Justin
pixel skylines
Keni
Monterey Bay Aquarium
d e v o n
Xuebing Du
Lint Roller? I Barely Know Her
dirt enthusiast
Show & Tell
titsay
roma★
Cosmic Funnies
YOU ARE THE REASON
"I'm Dorothy Gale from Kansas"
we're not kids anymore.
shark vs the universe
🪼
tumblr dot com
styofa doing anything
seen from Malaysia
seen from United States
seen from Malaysia
seen from Ecuador
seen from Belarus
seen from Malaysia
seen from United States
seen from France
seen from United States
seen from France
seen from Romania
seen from Brazil
seen from Greece
seen from Italy
seen from United Kingdom
seen from Singapore
seen from Germany
seen from Malaysia
seen from Thailand
seen from Norway
@serialreblogger
FLY is a story about a boy who gets a second chance. Help his story take flight June 9th 11am EST on Kickstarter. Thank you for being the wind beneath my wings I hope this story lifts the world to a brighter place.
A coming of age story about Black kids who finally have power to fight back against systems designed against them.
Shout out to Call of the Netherdeep for the badass art of Bazzoxan.
25 years ago an unknown Chinese protester stood in front of a tank in defiance of the government. No one knows the identity of the man but he was given the nick name “Tank Man”. This is one of the most iconic photographs of the century.
It’s actually been 27 years now since the incident known as the Tiananmen Square Massacre occurred. The picture above, famously referred to as “The Tank Man” was actually taken on June 5, the day after the massacre. (Which honestly makes him the one of the bravest person, to go back and stand up to a regime after such a terrible event transpired)
So what happened? I’m gonna give the TL;DR version:
April 15, 1989. Hu Yaobang, a former Communist Party Chief dies.
Many people, including workers, laborer, students and some officials come to mourn. You see, those protestors were originally there to mourn, not protest.
Time passed and there were some hunger strikes, and protests, and a call for accountability and reform from the government.
Eventually, things went south, because the communist party doesn’t have time to deal with these sorts of “demands” and grievances.
Keep in mind, the people wanted not the end of the Communist Party, but for the party to stop with the official corruption, rule of law, and the gross monopoly of information and power.
Incidentally, China still suffers from all of these SAME problems to this day…
June 3, 1989. The massacre started at night to disperse the crowd. Many were shot, wounded, and killed.
June 4, 1989. Some of the parents of the protestors who never came home went looking for them. It was still total mayhem.
June 5, 1989. The iconic image of the tank man was taken. To this day, no one knows what became of this person.
Content Warning for video: blood
“Tell the world…”
I cannot stress how important it is that people remember and know about this event. Do you know how China responded? With lies and censorship.
Even now, in 2016, we do not have an official death toll on the Tiananmen Square Massacre, the Chinese government doesn’t even acknowledge the event as a “massacre”. And they weaves these cover stories of “counter revolutionaries trying to overthrow the government”. Therefore, the violence was necessary to ~protect~ the people. (Or some bullshit like that)
The amount of lying and censorship in China is, quite frankly, scary amazing. Tumblr, which somehow managed to fly under their radar, found itself being blocked in that country.
After all, tell a lie often enough and it becomes the truth.
And those who remember the incident in China? …………well, you tell me.
Please at least REMEMBER this tragedy. Untold innocent lives were lost, and a nation has been fed a lie for almost three decades now from their oppressive af regime.
I have never seen this video before.
What the fucking hell.
What the hell.
Tiananmen Square happened when I was seven, and let’s just say children have a really interesting way of interpreting information.
I just remember thinking it was a happy event, because all these people were out on the street, and at first the army were interacting with these people. And it almost looked like a festival because people were singing and talking, and hopeful. And then tv coverage for the events got cut off.
The blocking of the live coverage had all the adults anxious, nobody said anything for ages, I just remember my grandmother saying, “Just be glad your father isn’t in China, now.”
And that stuck with me to this day. Because yeah, if dad had been in China then he would have been in Beijing studying, he would have been on those streets with those other students.
It was the first time I knew that something horrible had happened to all those people I saw on the television. I don’t even remember how I knew that the army must have shot at the civilians, I just knew. Because when you grow up in China, especially in the 80s you knew there were things you don’t say, that you can’t express in a public forum, because that can get you and your family in trouble. You just knew, and it didn’t fucking matter if your were a child or an adult.
To this day I don’t remember how I found out what happened in Tiananmen Square, because the news covered it up, but people found out. My grandparents knew, my uncles and aunts knew. Extended family visited my grandparents, I remember people telling my mother not to mention my father’s name because my father was a Chinese Beijing University graduate, who had gone overseas. Because there were people who died in the protests that my dad knew.
And it was all just so frightening because nobody was telling me directly what was happening, but I just knew that all the people on the streets was probably dead.
Looking back on it, Tiananmen Square instilled in a me a life long distrust of governments, but especially the Chinese government. I’m ethnically Chinese but I never want to return to China, not even for a holiday, and this has been my attitude even before Xi Jinping took power. Because Tiananmen Square was a peaceful protest that ended up with the army using heavy artillery against their own people. How can you trust in a system, in a government like that? Because if my dad had delayed further studies overseas by two years he would have been one of those students, one of those fucking kids on the streets that would have died.
And you know, when the Umbrella movement was happening in Hong Kong I was deeply panicked and just anxious because I kept on thinking all those people, all those kids are going to be killed. And when that didn’t happen it was such a relief.
When I found out years later that Chinese people a few years younger than me didn’t know what happened in Tiananmen Square I was so fucking angry. I can’t even articulate the rage and the sheer tiredness of it all.
Dad and I talked about Tiananmen Square a few times through the years, broadly, politically, and at times with sheer rage on dad’s part. I don’t even know what I wanted to say, but just fuck this fucking regime.
I was In Hong Kong when Tiananamen Square Massacre happened. Hong Kong was still a British colony then and had full freedom of press, and its reporters were there recording live footage while trying to stay as long as possible when tanks rolled in and shots were fired, when students lay in blood and their fellow students piled the injured bodies on those wooden plank carts to get them to the hospitals, while asking the Hong Kongers who were there to support the movement to please remember that night and spread the story of the massacre far and wide, because they already knew they would be silenced, if not imprisoned or murdered.
That night, and in the upcoming months, Hong Kong was in perpetual tears, and in literal shock.
Hong Kongers were mostly Chinese, just south of the border with people traveling back and forth. It also shared a language, and so HKers could follow the whole movement and hear news that western media had little access to without the distorting effect of translations. And they followed very closely, because by then, Hong Kong was already scheduled to be returned to China in 8 years time. How the Chinese government dealt with the movement would be a sign of how it’d treat dissent, how it’d treat people who’re used to the idea and practice of freedom.
What they saw was deadly. Ugly. It broke the hearts of millions of Hong Kongers who trusted that The Chinese Government had left its Great Leap Forward, its Cultural Revolution days behind. Those who could leave, left. Everyday the airport was filled with families about to be torn apart, who decided to trade the life they had in one of the richest, most vibrant and freest city at the time with the unknown, just so their own children would have the freedom to speak their minds, to have a higher education and not to be seen as the enemy of the state because higher education always led to independent thinking, to questioning, to asking for a better government as those university students in Beijing in the spring and summer of 1989 did.
The heartbreak and fear was almost palpable in its intensity. Most HKers were refugees from China or 1st generation of them. Unlike the HK youths now protesting who are more generations removed, they felt much more connected to the people in China. They still saw themselves as Chinese, like those students in Beijing. They mourned. They cried and cried and cried. They wore black or white everyday like it was the death of their closest relatives. TV stations played these Tiananmen Square clips all day. I can still play many of them out of my memory, can still recite what the students and government officials said (for example, they didn’t use tear gas because they only had three), the songs played — I know every word of China’s national anthem for that reason; the students were singing it. They were patriotic. They demanded reforms because they wanted their country to do better. 8964 was and still is, etched in my psyche. It is just one of the long list of atrocities this government has done against its people, but this one, I was close enough to feel it.
China censored the June 4th Massacre quickly and thoroughly — if you believe China has censored queer material, for example, I’d say this — the extent of that censorship is not even close to what a true China censorship does. A true Chinese censorship is you can’t find the info, or a hint of that info anywhere. You can’t talk about it in a roundabout away. You can’t change some elements of time/place/person and pretend it’s fictional. It would literally ban the numbers 8,9,6,4 from search results, even though the searcher may really be just be interested in the numbers themselves. Whoever speaks of it may be sent to the police station for a “discussion”; their family would be sent, if the speaker is outside China; the speaker may be arrested, and may never be seen again.
The western worlds pretended to be enraged about the massacre for a while and soon forgot about it, kept its diplomatic relations with China and did business with its government as usual. UK returned Hong Kong to China as scheduled, on July 1st, 1997. The city has been the only place that insisted on the mourning the victims and had done so insistently, consistently for 30 years, holding a yearly candlelight vigil in Victoria Park until this year, when because of the protests, the Chinese government decided to not even pretend to honour the international treaty they signed that promised HK its freedom until 2047 anymore. They shut the vigil down in the name of the pandemic (there were <10 cases/day then). Still, some people risked being arrested to go to Victoria park and lit their candles.
The Chinese government fears HKers for this reason. They are outside their iron curtain / firewall but have always been close enough geographically, culturally and ethnically to know and more so, to care. And there’s nothing more a government like China’s fear than people who insist on remembering the truth. With the National Security Law in place in Hong Kong now, probably the yearly vigils can’t continue. To understand how insane that law is, by writing this reblog, by saying things that make you dislike the Chinese government, I’m already in violation of its Article 38. It doesn’t matter I’m writing it in a foreign country. It doesn’t matter I’m a foreign citizen. That law includes everyone on Earth.
Yes, that includes you. And you. And you. And you. They can arrest you for trying to overthrow the Chinese government if you pass the borders of Hong Kong.
Please help remember 8964 Tiananmen Square Massacre. That summer day, Beijing citizens asked Hong Kongers to please remember this event for them because they knew they wouldn’t be able to afford to remember it themselves. Now that Hong Kongers can’t afford to remember it anymore, I’m hoping that everyone who reads this to please remember it, for the students who perished only because they wanted their government to be better, for the Tank Man who, on his way home with his groceries, decided to stand in front of a tank all by himself because it was the right thing to do.
I mean, when people literally have to invent the date “May 35th” because “June 4th” is censored, you know that there’s something major that people in power don’t want to have discussed.
I was visiting a friend at his dorm in the USA where he and his roommates, all PRC Chinese academics in tech fields, were glued to the TV news. Ever been in the company of a dozen guys whose hearts were breaking?
I have a very rough idea in my head that I don't think I can clearly articulate beyond "And that concludes tonight's reports on German air forc—WHAT'S THIS? IT'S KING ARTHUR WITH A STEEL CHAIR"
IDK what this is about, but I want to know more.
This isn't exactly the same idea but it could be but there is more rattling around in here so:
The Blitz here manages to qualify as Britain's Darkest Hour, thus triggering the return of Arthur from the Realm Avalon.
He does not speak a lick of modern English. He speaks an unholy mishmash of Brittonic and Late Classical Latin.
(Honestly I can see the latter becoming a plot point if they manage to get their hands on a Roman Catholic priest to act as a translator. It wouldn't be a perfect arrangement, but probably better than anything else.)
Truthfully he probably gets mistaken for a madman.
Somehow manages to steal a Spitfire out from under the RAF's nose, proceeds to use it to bring down like half an enemy squadron on his own, then lands in a field in the middle of nowhere.
Police and RAF converge on his location on account of the whole "stealing a plane" thing. They eventually overwhelm him with sheer numbers, but he manages to knock out an impressive number of them in the process. I mean, come on. It's Arthur.
"a catholic priest" i mean yeah sure why not but JRRTOLKIEN himself was alive and a teacher at the time so go big or go home.
You know what sure why not let's just make literal real-life JRRT himself a character in this Arthurian return story, he deserves it.
@seajr DUDE
[image text: #jrr tolkien starring in return of the king]
It kind of fucks with me that somebody killed ötzi the iceman because ötzi himself is like whatever but the silent presence of human hands that drew back the string of the bow that shot the arrow that killed him is crazy. the idea that there were various people involved in that situation and while one of them has had his last hours painstakingly reconstructed and studied to no end, the others now only exist insofar that an arrowhead had to get into his shoulder somehow. imagine killing someone and then suddenly your entire existence is only a vague shadow implied by the fact that you killed them. much to consider
Testing the mummified bone marrow of ötzi to figure out his ancestry whole time there’s definitely another person, maybe more than one, standing in the room with us but I can never see or speak to them because I only know them through the assurance that they were there too in the form of one single arrowhead. I hate prehistory so much it’s unreal
I hate it too tbh
truth is there are many beautiful simple names in the world an unfortunately many of them are around me. Now you maybthink “but wont that surround you with the beauty of the world” and yes it does but the problem arises when you want to name a new original character and there's a perfectly lovely name BUT! Its the name of someone you already know in some way personally. Like heres my oc mary NO RELATION NO INSPIRATION CHARACTERS ACTIONS DO NOT REFLECT OR REFERENCE THOSE OF SIMILAR TITLE IN MY VICINITY. Heres luce because lucy is already the name of a friends chihuahua and whay if that dog thought it meant something
LUCY MENTIONED!!! 🗣️📣‼️‼️‼️💥🐕💥🐕💥💥‼️
Yuuuup this is a lucy post now👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍👍
Hello CBC!! Firstly just wanted to say I really appreciate your blog and, as a librarian, especially love your recommendations and reading lessons. I wanted to ask if you’ve heard of a newer book called “When Trees Testify” by Beronda L. Montgomery, a plant biologist from Arkansas. It’s part memoir, and part scientific/cultural analysis of trees and how intertwined Black history is with them. Wonderfully written and very informative!
https://app.thestorygraph.com/books/d77a0e75-a2c9-4bd2-84e5-c9aad70411ed
How the Word Is Passed meets Braiding Sweetgrass in a cultural and personal reclamation of Black ...
Ahhh I haven't!! This is dope, thank you for sharing!
they literally deleted all existing reblogs of that post from existence btw<3
and theyre tryin to delete it all again
Shout-out to aromantic people whose lives are so fucking busy that they periodically forget what day of the week it is. today is Wednesday, June 5th. Happy Aromantic Visibility Day.
It's always disappointing when a series makes a big deal about societal and structural problems in it's setting, making readers think it has interesting things to say about the subject, only to then resolve the problems by fighting The CEO of Racism, John Racist, so that all of society's problems would then get better because they promoted a new CEO.
Trying to do this myself and learning firsthand that the reason so many people do this is because if you stick to a theme of structural problems than it’s very very very hard to have any kind of narratively satisfying ending. The most obvious resolutions are, from most to least satisfying:
1. you go full-throated modernist and say “and then nothing the protagonists did actually mattered because we are all crushed into paste beneath the vast unfeeling gears of capitalism” (YES that is modernism and NOT postmodernism because we are LAMENTING the powerlessness, that the center cannot hold, that the individual facing the institution is like the romantic cavalry charge facing the rip of a maxim gun behind barbed wire).
2. the protagonists aren’t able to fix the world but they are able to chip away at some part of a larger, more intractable problem (if you portray this as a good thing then online communists everywhere will call you a neoliberal bootlicker and publicly fantasize about your violent death. If you don’t portray this as a good thing then everyone on bluesky will send you their Aaron Sorkin monologues. both outcomes are equally obnoxious and miserable)
3. your protagonists are so good at understanding the assignment that everyone just needs to give them total power to reshape the world and then they fix everything (you just did the CEO-of-racism thing with extra steps)
One might even make the case that the conventions of storytelling itself push back against most attempts to address and discuss structural problems. And if one really wanted to, one could make the case that this means the act of storytelling is in and of itself regressive and reactionary: ‘protagonist’ is merely the modern signifier of the proverbial Good King whose ill treatment by the Bad Boyars (antagonists) both excuses his abuse of authority while justifying his desire for even more authority.
To be clear, I’m not saying this and I think it’s stupid but there’s a one million percent chance you could become the next Žižek by sticking really hard to this line. The AI discourse still shows no signs of slowing down and if you fired off a shot like “all creative writers are fascist” into that you’d be doing big numbers overnight.
The idea of listening to no black music is bizarre to me. Even if it's not rap like no earth wind and fire? No reggae? No moonstomp? No ska? No classic jazz? No R and B? No disco??? No skindred? No jungle? No even like metal bands with a few black members? No gospel? Not even stuff like alors en dance? No blues music? No mo town? No jazz of any kind? No big band? No soul music? Not even a little James Brown?
not even yola or tanner adell or brittney spencer or tracy chapman or india.arie or chapel hart or the carolina chocolate drops or rhiannon giddens????
Or…
Hemlocke Springs (alt rock/new wave revival),
the Noisettes (indie),
Skunk Anansie (hard rock/metal),
Tamar Kali (rock/punk),
Valerie June (country/blues),
Santigold (indie),
Bloc Party (post punk revival/indie rock),
O Children (goth),
Lord Scary Black (goth),
Cemetery Sex (death rock)
a few more artists i love:
pleasure venom (post-punk/hard rock)
danny denial (indie punk/rock, queer)
big joanie (synth punk + some more melodic, blues-like tones)
shadow age (goth)
black pantera (rock, metal)
the 1865 (punk)
erzulie (punk, rock)
the rack (they describe their sound as “hard pop rock”, blends punk vocals and rock)
youth man (punk)
winter wolf (punk, metal)
the ire (goth, punk)
crystal axis (punk)
madame st beatrice (gothic, moody and melodic)
bastet (goth punk)
Pride Crows for @velvetfur! Enjoy~
awww the like button turns into a rainbow when you press it! that's so cute...hey staff what's with all the trans women you keep nuking?
i think we should be ridiculing them more for this. you don't get to try and go all "queer website" when your staff likes to go on nuking sprees targeting the trans fem users
would be remiss not to mention that the rainbow notably straight up just removed the trans flag colors from it. like they’re gone. it’s the progress flag minus the trans flag colors.
that’s not the whole flag, now is it
hey staff what the fuck
hey staff don't you think you're being too on-the-nose
HEY STAFF DONT YOU THINK YOU'RE BEING TOO ON-THE-NOSE
Nigerian Pride 🏳️🌈🇳🇬
I meant to have this out yesterday. Happy belated pride. :)
op this made me cry real bisexual tears lol 🥹 thank you for sharing!
all the food classification discourse is phenotype-based and no more sophisticated than ancient greek zoology.
"pizza is a flat bread with toppings baked on"?
let me guess: you define a man as a featherless biped, don't you plato?
no, we need the taxonomical model. food evolves and adapts and descends. it fills niches that cause it to diverge from its ancestors and converge with other, unrelated species. unlike most animals, food is capable of horizontal gene transfer, making taxonomical divisions less linear.
american pizza (Focaccius rotunda) is descended from an italian baked flatbread dish. deep dish pizza (F. r. patina) is a subspecies of american pizza which evolved in the american midwest. it is taxonomically unrelated to common species of casserole in the area (and casserole is not a taxonomic category but a polyphleytic grouping, much like fish and crabs)
"sushi is a burrito" yeah and a bat is a bird.
hotdog is actually genetically in the ramen clade for reasons scientists don't understand yet
Marie Curie's notebooks are crazy once you think about it. They're so radioactive they have to be sealed in a lead box. Imagine a world where atomic theory is forgotten and a dude just goes "yea there's a book that details the secrets of the universe, the machinations of the creation of existence down to its barest essentials, but if you get close to it you fucking die. The more you read it the more your body slowly disassembles into mush." like wat excuse me
