welcome to the zoo

orangutans are skeptical of changes in their cages

[redjennies]

can't believe they cheated us out of an hour of International Women's Day. smdh. this is the patriarchy at work, ladies.

[redjennies]

a man gets 24 hours a day for every 23 hours a woman gets.

[decamarks]

AFTER NEARLY 19 YEARS OF THIS STUPID WEBSITE

[blowery]

also, on web, we just launched an advanced search dialog that should help folks use all the new operators we added.

[sybilius]

So true....

[unusedpreparatorydrawing]

toast rack, 1927

designed by hukin & heath

[skepticalorangutan]

Having a nine month old is genuinely so fun. My kid is turning into such a hoot.

[atomic-chronoscaph]

Sesame Street (1979)

[bluebeardsbride-archive]

— Angela Carter, from The Sadeian Woman and the Ideology of Pornography, c. 1978.

[dearorpheus]

In many ways, women are death’s natural companions. Every time a woman gives birth, she is creating not only a life, but a death. Samuel Beckett wrote that women “give birth astride of a grave.” 

— Caitlin Doughty, from Smoke Gets in Your Eyes: And Other Lessons from the Crematory

[bluebeardsbride-archive]

— Samantha Hunt, interviewed by The New Yorker

— Claudia Dey, ‘Mothers as Makers of Death’

[imanwithoutbowie-deactivated202]

Continue✨ Keep going✨

[beaniebabyenjoyer-deactivated20]

[Video Description: A woman squats down on the ground in a parking lot next to a gray car. She looks directly at the viewer, gesturing enthusiastically as she speaks. She says:

“Are you having a bad day? You are not. You’re a bad bitch. Continue. Is your depression hitting hard? I know. Continue. You can keep going. You can do this. Continue. You can do it. You are a fighter. You are strong. You are smart. And you are wonderfully made. Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise. Keep going. Keep going. You can do it. Continue.”

In the built in captions for the video, the final ‘continue’ is written in all caps and surrounded by heart emojis on both sides. End Description]

[weirdlylyricalnotes]

Her name is Tega Orhorhoro. Here is her YouTube channel:

Tega Orhorhoro

Share your videos with friends, family, and the world

[skepticalorangutan]

where’d the little add to queue button go at the bottom of posts

that was the best part of the app

[knightofleo]

Seebangnow, “What’s your random song?“

[beemovieerotica]

[beemovieerotica]

hi i think every white theater kid and anyone who has ever seen a movie should watch this

[teaboot]

Holy shit

[skepticalorangutan]

Many things in this world are terrible.

But, here is what the view from our hospital room looked like right as the call was made that it was at long last time to start pushing. Just about three hours from the photo, Baby Boy was on my chest.

And, here is a sushi order — husband went and brought it back to postpartum later that evening for me, I had been dreaming of sushi, any sushi, for months.

So, many things. But not everything.

[skepticalorangutan]

I labored for 32 hours.

My narcissistic bitch of a mother is sending these when he is less than a day old, god forbid we sleep at all, or interact with the endless parade of providers on post partum, or prioritize our friends and family who gave a single shit about any of us during the pregnancy or at the very very least bought us some stupid junk off the registry or otherwise. No, yoo hoo, this bitch who was mostly just put out that I now had other priorities wants me to say “how high” when she says jump. Totally uninterested until he gets here, and then constantly messaging throughout labor asking the same dang questions over and over about why I’m still laboring as if asking again will get a different answer. Demanding constant updates and being whiny and annoyed when we decide to, you know, prioritize doing the thing over messaging her the same shit again.

Too bad her whole thing about being vaguely suicidal was mainly for attention.

Not something she’d ever see through.

[skepticalorangutan]

“37+2” as they say, D-Day approaches.

Today my mother tells me she’s “not sure she’s up to plane travel.” She “asks herself that every morning.” “Stay tuned for health updates.”

I had fully assumed she was never getting on a plane again, and that’s how I would handle/sidestep discussions about not letting her MAHA ass see baby until he has at least his 6 month vaccines. Horrified to learn that she believes she’ll be in any way helpful or wanted out here before that point.

But whatever, that’s why we moved a plane ride away. Hopefully she never musters up the wherewithal to get a plane ticket.

[skepticalorangutan]

Okay I know this is gonna sound pretty wild but I have a really good tip for you, learn from my experience and mistakes:

If they discover your beloved cat has a mass in their body, and they need to biopsy that mass, do NOT look up prognoses for cats with masses in that spot during your interminable wait for the biopsy results. Don’t do it!

[skepticalorangutan]

Yeah yeah the world is hurtling towards total collapse but have you ever done an entire laundry load of new baby clothes and isn’t it just something (until you think too hard again about the world baby is coming into)??

[skepticalorangutan]

The way

non-diabetics talk about the glucose test during pregnancy is insufferable. Makes me want to slap half my “bump group” in the face.

Everyone will stop drinking, eating deli meats, smoking without question for the good of the baby. But god forbid they have to watch their blood sugars for a few weeks, like I do for the rest of my life. Poor dumb things. “I did everything right. I exercise.” Okay, and you have a placenta doing what it wants right now. It’s literally out of your control.

They’ll share hacks about how to “pass” the test — which don’t work anyway, but if they did? and then you go right back to unmanaged GD tomorrow after passing the test, what, that’s fine??? Selfish. Unreal. If I said oh I’m not drinking this week it’s my alcohol test, and then after passing I was like, thank god, back to drinking throughout my pregnancy! people would think I was nuts.

Anyway, that is all I have to say for today.

[skepticalorangutan]

Another day another several, several posts of “I just failed my 1 hour glucose test and I am SOBBING” and pals I have absolutely zero sympathy anymore for these people.

Anti-fat bias all the way down. So wrapped up in their belief that their weight and health are inherently virtuous and strictly a result of their (therefore also virtuous) behaviors, and not mainly luck and genetics.

Now horrified and ashamed to be (TEMPORARILY! JUST UNTIL THEY DELIVER!) part of a group they have looked down on all this time as less than.

Comforted (somewhat, though not fully) by replies of “It’s not your fault mama!!~ It’s the placenta!!!!” but through it all, incapable of extending that same grace and logic, during or after pregnancy, to forever and ever diabetics.

So absolutely vile until the end towards pregnant diabetics, while being all “woe is me” about their GD diets — because *they* are good, *they* don’t deserve this “suffering” — and demanding you, diabetic, comfort them through their few blissfully short weeks of worrying about their blood sugar. Worrying the way, you know, you have to do every day and will continue to do forever. Worrying like has made your pregnancy feel like hard mode from day one, as all the things you thought you knew about your insulin resistance and responses, all the practice you have thinking like a pancreas, are thrown completely out of whack by — as you have pointed out to the GD girlies — your placenta, forcing you to re-learn on the daily the rules and how to keep within the right (and much more narrow than non-pregnancy) blood sugar targets.

Is this “pregnancy rage” I’m experiencing, or is this valid and justified loathing I have developed towards these horrible people lacking in empathy?

Would that the GD girlies had an ounce of the same grace and patience the diabetics have to extend back to them, day after day after day.

[literallyaflame]

love shakespeare. did a hamlet run tonight, looked someone dead in the eye to say “am i a coward?” during a speech and the fucker shrugged and nodded

[literallyaflame]

we literally ruined society when we invented the fourth wall. let’s bring back call and response. heckling, even. fuck you hamlet you dumb piece of shit kill your uncle or shut up

[hickeyknife]

"When we took Shakespeare’s “Measure for Measure” into a maximum security woman’s prison on the West Side… there’s a scene there where a young woman is told by a very powerful official that “If you sleep with me, I will pardon your brother. And if you don’t sleep with me, I’ll execute him.” And he leaves the stage. And this character, Isabel, turned out to the audience and said: “To whom should I complain?” And a woman in the audience shouted: “The Police!” And then she looked right at that woman and said: “If I did relate this, who would believe me?” And the woman answered back, “No one, girl.”

And it was astonishing because not only was it an amazing sense of connection between the audience and the actress, but you also realized that this was a kind of an historical lesson in theater reception. That’s what must have happened at The Globe. These soliloquies were not simply monologues that people spoke, they were call and response to the audience. And you realized that vibrancy, that that sense of connectedness is not only what makes theater great in prisons, it’s what makes theater great, period."

Oskar Eustis on ArtBeat Nation

[canadianwheatpirates]

I was in the front row of a Hamlet performance where the "Am I a coward?" was directed at me and I, being a no-impulse-control gremlin, hollered back "Yes!!" (they'd primed us ahead of time that audience interaction was encouraged). Hamlet got right up in my face as he kept talking and just kept going until I gently pushed him back; I forget what line it was on when it happened but he took the direction of the push and reeled away across the stage.

This meant that I had marked myself as someone willing to be fucked with, and so during the graveyard scene later he approached me again. "Here hung those lips that I have kissed--" he booped my mouth with the skull's "-- I know not how oft."

[shimmywhenyoucantbounce]

I have stories related to me from those at Blackfriars, the American Shakespeare Center (they play in a replica of the original Blackfriars, with modern safety conventions like lightbulbs in the chandeliers, but a great dedication to the way structure shaped the original work in the original Blackfriars. Their house is only about 45 ft deep (roughly 15 m I think), which is about the max distance two sighted people can be from each other and still make eye contact. They play with the stage and house equally lit, they talk to the audience, they enter from the audience, they whip up crowds from within the audience. It’s fantastic. But anyway, on to the stories.)

Hamlet. There’s a scene where Hamlet sees Claudius praying and debates whether to kill him now or wait (because if Claudius dies praying he will automatically go to heaven). The actor playing Hamlet was genuinely asking the audience the questions in the speech, and when he got to “and should I kill him now?” someone in the audience shouted “YES KILL HIM HE NEEDS TO DIE!” Hamlet took the entire rest of the monologue to that person, enumerating his reservations so persuasively that they started to nod in agreement.

Romeo and Juliet. In this production, the fight between Mercutio and Tybalt happens in several rounds, of which Mercutio won the first. Mercutio’s actor made the choice, upon his victory, to run down the audience with his hand out for high-fives. He decided this in rehearsal, so he had time to plan for the three responses people would probably give him: a) a high-five back; b) being stunned and not reacting; and c) the old “oops too slow.” What this Mercutio did not prepare for was the audience member who panicked and deposited their handful of M&Ms into his open palm. The way I heard it, Mercutio was still processing this when Benvolio came up beside him and stole the M&Ms out of his hand to eat them.

King Lear. Edmund has a speech in which he asks whether he should marry “Goneril? Regan? Both? Neither?” Again, the actor was legitimately asking the audience, and again he’d prepared for the audience to respond in favor of any of those choices. What makes it even cooler was that the next line is “Neither can be enjoyed while both remain alive,” which works as a response to any of those options. One night, though, Edmund got his answer as “KILL THEM BOTH AND TAKE THEIR MONEY!” To which he gleefully agreed, “Neither can be enjoyed while both remain alive!!”

[rionsanura]

#Oh I have SO many stories from peak audience moments at the American shakespeare center#I have been to plays there that legit felt more like rock concerts#And I don't even mean the parts of the show where the cast is also a live band and they play#Covers of songs relating to the show#Fair maid of the west with Ginna Hoben#We were all SO on her side we absolutely lost our whole shit any time she even entered or exited#Knight of the burning pestle where Rick would pick a random audience member to be his lady love he was fighting for every night#And one time (I saw it thrice) he picked an older lady#And there's a part of the show where iirc he like gets almost defeated?#And he calls out to his lady love to like inspire him to keep fighting smth like that#And she Got Up Out Of Her Seat and went over to him and kissed him on the cheek#And no one was expecting that least of all Rick#And we all lost our shit whooping and hollering#They did a hamlet where...I forget who was polonius that year but there's a line where he's like 'what was I gonna say again'#And he paused SO long on that line you were legit unsure if he the actor had actually forgotten it#And once someone in the audience called out the next line and he was like 'oh that's right' and carried on#It was scripted though there were other nights no one said anything and we all sat there#In wonderful horrid awkward silence#Until he resumed#Please go if you get a chance#And sit stateside (via @rootingformephistopheles)

[lb1205rb]

I was in a production of Hamlet in a small black box theatre, when a drunk guy came in from from outside, wandered onstage and started singing "We built this city on rock and roll." The guy playing Hamlet just went with it until the stage manager and crew could usher the drunk guy back outside. Then Hamlet continued with his next line, which was (no joke) "Now I am alone." Brought the house down.