almost home
occasionally subtle
"I'm Dorothy Gale from Kansas"
No title available
Monterey Bay Aquarium
let's talk about Bridgerton tea, my ask is open
ellievsbear
YOU ARE THE REASON
Product Placement
Peter Solarz
if i look back, i am lost
NASA
#extradirty
I'd rather be in outer space 🛸
Janaina Medeiros
DEAR READER
Keni
pixel skylines
trying on a metaphor
i don't do bad sauce passes
seen from T1
seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from Malaysia
seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from Germany
seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from Ecuador
seen from Ecuador
seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from Malaysia
seen from Mozambique
seen from United States
seen from United States
@skeetsk
I know I never post my own stuff but this project took me like three months and I'm so proud of it!!
edit: pattern was found on ravelry!
Do you fancy a wall hanging that symbolises the weight of responsibility on you as a ruler and the enemies waiting in the wings to skewer y
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.
Uncropped photo shows the long, long line of tanks.
Four years ago:
Microsoft's Bing search engine showed no image results for the famous Tiananmen Square protester.
May 35th, 535, and VIIV have all been blocked search terms in China.
Chinese social media users resort to clever tactics to escape the Tiananmen Square massacre anniversary censorship dragnet.
The uncropped picture linked above, in case the post is deleted.
cloth gown gridlock
Mammu! Finius and Ferbingetorix built Rome in a day!
I feel like this also implies that rome is somehow being destroyed by the end of the day
The Emperor Constantine loves Finius and Ferbingetorix's "New Rome" so much that he makes it his new capital and names it after himself.
Yeah that checks out.
What's the doofenschmirtz contraption/scheme of the day?
Doofenric the Ostrogoth (insert jokes about his daughter Vanessa being "Goth" but in the modern sense) invented a City-Mover-Inator to move Rome across the Danube so his Germanic confederation could sack it.
Thankfully, Agent Pericles stops him by redirecting the Inator to Finius and Ferbingetorix's New Rome instead, moving it to the Bosphorus.
While Pericles and Doofenric are fighting over the controls of the Inator, it gets accidentally changed to paint remover mode and then fired at a random direction.
Somewhere nearby a painter just finished coloring the statue of the emperor when suddenly all the paint gets removed.
Painter: Aw...
Painter, giving it a second look: Hmmm... 🤔
Candysseia: What animal even is Pericles?
Finius: We named it "platypus", meaning flat-foot.
Ferbingetorix: On account of his feet being flat.
Candysseia: And where did he come from?
Febingetorix: We have no earthly idea.
Doofenric the Goth: Pericles the- wait, what animal even are you, Agent Pericles?
Pericles: *hands him papyrus*
Doofenric: *reading* A "platypus", meaning flat-foot... oh, on account of your feet being flat!
To be clear, the Emperor Constantine looks like Roger Doofenshmirtz.
Also, I agree with everybody who says that Greco-Roman Candace's name should be Candassandra (since nobody believes her warnings).
phineas and ferb heritage post
WE'RE JUST LOOKING
by Alex Andreev
Eden Kalif, Good Cats
I love characters who would die for each other but will not, under any circumstances, communicate a single honest feeling.
the thing about getting out of the torment nexus is that you do start thinking "man if you ignore the torment i used to have a lot of fun in the torment nexus"
There is absolutely a platonic explanation for that
But I will also entertain the non platonic for my own edification do u understand
Listen I'm not going to tell you not to invite the Hero over for dinner or anything, I mean you can probably get him to run a bunch of annoying errands for you if you frame it as a quest, and feeding him for his trouble is frankly the least you can do. I'm just saying, don't use any of the fine china. The guy will steal anything that's not nailed down, this is a fact. Also if you invite him into your house once you can reliably expect he's just gonna show up there whenever he feels like it later on. Sometimes he'll sleep in your bed. Yeah I mean being a Hero is tiring work so I'm not gonna hold it against him but it's for sure a Thing. Also do not invite anyone else whose good opinion you are concerned with, there are decent odds he'll show up in full plate, nearly naked, or possibly dressed in cabbage armor. No I don't know what the cabbage armor actually is. At this point I'm too afraid to ask. It might in fact be made of cabbages and I don't know how to process that.
The thing about the Hero is that he's great. If you got rats in your basement or goblins in your fields, he is your man. The gods made him many things and not a one of them are ordinary. I once saw him shove an entire whole dressed ham down his gullet in the middle of a fight. He will drink anything, and I mean including things you wouldn't ordinarily consider a liquid. One time I swear I saw him riding his horse across a bridge and the horse just, it just, I don't even know what happened one moment it was a normal horse and the next the Hero was standing on the bridge and that animal was flying sideways off into the sky and carrying on to the far horizon.
That's just his way I suppose.
He's a good man though. I won't hear a word against him. Every eccentricity he more than makes up for in keeping this village safe. Dawn 'till dusk he's out there. Sometimes I wonder if he even sleeps. I mean, I mean I'm not actually sure he does? At least not every night. Obviously he does sleep but I swear I've seen him run miles and miles without pause and carry on as if he's not even winded.
Unless he tries to sprint. He can only do that for thirty seconds, then he starts panting and staggering and it's really kind of concerning in fact.
He can carry more goods than even the best pack mule in town, though! As long as you don't mind him being his way about it. I'm not sure where he puts it all, but he can take any number of things, and it doesn't seem to even stagger him. Until he hits his limit. Then he just stands there, not moving at all, until he drops something right on the ground at his feet. But as soon as he decides what to drop, he'll be right off again!
The Hero is a generous soul. If you ask him for something, he'll probably bring it right to you. It might take him a while. It can be hard to say how long. Sometimes he gets on it right away, barely an hour will pass before he's back with even the most rare plants or monster parts or lost items. Sometimes weeks and even months go by before he'll turn up with the book you asked him to fetch from the library just two doors down. But I mean, he's a Hero, I'm just happy he makes time for us little folk at all.
He's usually pretty prompt with my own requests, which is good of him. I can't say that it's favoritism, I think that's just his nature and I've been lucky enough to catch him at the right times.
I don't know who told him I like mince pies, though. He always brings me one. It's very kind of him, and I don't have the heart to explain that I hate mince pies, in fact, so I just take them and pass them along to some of the less fortunate neighbors. Keeps everyone fed. I suppose in that light I do like mince pies, though!
Truth be told I'm just happy to talk to him every day, even when he's taking an odd turn. A few times he's woken me up in the dark of night, just minutes before midnight, looking like he must have fought a whole pack of orcs and carting around some bloodstained trophy, just to make sure he's said his hello to me for the day. It was frightening the first few times but you get used to it.
Don't ever try to help him fight, though. That's key. I know it might seem like the neighborly thing to do but the fights that man gets into are the business of gods and wizards, not humble village folk. I've seen what happens to people who get stuck in the crossfire and there's no sugarcoating it, if you're lucky it'll be a quick death. Just stay well back and let him do his work, and maybe keep a reward handy for when he's done. That's all he ever seems to want.
Would you rather have a Phineas and Ferb summer or a Gravity Falls summer?
would you rather have endless fun forever or have satan attack you every day
The Twink market is oversaturated, we need more fat hairy men NOW
everyone shut da fuck up this is the only thing that matters
yeah yeah rainbow capitalism is bad and whatever but like. when I was a child, being pro gay was not the popular or lucrative choice. I'm happy that times have changed.
I miss rainbow capitalism. I do. I miss when it felt like public opinion was still pro gay. I understand it was always an empty gesture, but it mattered in a sense of knowing how socially acceptable being queer is. If that makes sense.
everyone be quiet. marsha with her snoopy.
