“The first cold morning, the little pumpkins lined up at the corner market, (…) The old sorrow blows in with the scent of wood smoke”
— Marie Howe, from October in “Magdalene: Poems”

Product Placement
I'd rather be in outer space 🛸

shark vs the universe
Lint Roller? I Barely Know Her

Love Begins
taylor price
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i don't do bad sauce passes
Sade Olutola

roma★

blake kathryn
h
Monterey Bay Aquarium

Kiana Khansmith
occasionally subtle
tumblr dot com
sheepfilms

@theartofmadeline

#extradirty

Origami Around
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@smallflowersbreakconcrete
“The first cold morning, the little pumpkins lined up at the corner market, (…) The old sorrow blows in with the scent of wood smoke”
— Marie Howe, from October in “Magdalene: Poems”
solidarity
a multiverse of the same problems
I know the pic quality isn’t great, but the book is. Meg Burden weaves a beautiful story that will keep you reading for hours. Northlander is now on my top list of book recs. Give it a glance. It’s also cool because I’ve met her and she lives in my home town.
in this piece on shakespearean history plays by jean howard, they refer to the “dazzlingly chivalric hotspur.” clearly, they’re in love with him, but damn, me too.
“I love whom I love,” Prince Lir repeated firmly. “You have no power over anything that matters.”
— Peter S. Beagle, The Last Unicorn (via frickenlastunicorn)
I feel that there is nothing more truly artistic than to love people.
Vincent Van Gogh
The Gillette ad is not anti-male. It’s pro-male. It’s anti-rape, anti-violence, and anti-misogyny.
“A long-term study of children raised by lesbians found that these children were less likely to suffer from physical and sexual abuse than were their peers who were raised by heterosexuals. This is thought to be due to the absence of adult heterosexual men in the households (Gartrell, Bos, & Goldberg, 2010). Girls raised by lesbians tend to have higher self-esteem, show more maturity and tolerance than their peers, and are older when they have their first heterosexual contact (Gartrell et al., 2005, 2010). Children raised by same-sex parents seem to be less constrained by traditional gender roles; boys are less aggressive, and girls are more inclined to consider nontraditional careers, such as doctor, lawyer, or engineer (Gartrell et al., 2005; Stacey & Biblarz, 2001). Over the course of more than 20 years, scientists studied the psychological adjustment of 78 teenagers who were raised by lesbian mothers. Compared to age-matched counterparts raised by heterosexual parents, these adolescents were rated higher in social, academic, and total competence, and lower in social problems, rule-breaking, aggression, and externalizing problem behavior (Gartrell & Bos, 2010). There are fewer studies of children raised by two men, but gay fathers are more likely than straight fathers to put their children before their career, to make big changes in their lives to accommodate a child, and to strengthen bonds with their extended families after becoming fathers (Bergman, Rubio, Green, & Padrone, 2010).” ~ Martha Rosenthal, Human Sexuality: From Cells to Society, p.247.
“having gay parents will harm children”
I love that this is cited and sourced ahhhh. Actual researched support! So good.
Here’s Gartrell, Bos, and Goldberg’s paper since whatever link that was is broken.
Public Domain Day was yesterday, but you were probably hungover, so here’s how to download the tens of thousands of books that became legal to download for free in 2019.
Starting at midnight on January 1, tens of thousands of books (as well as movies, songs, and cartoons) entered the public domain, meaning that people can download, share, or repurpose these works for free and without retribution under US copyright law.
Per the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act of 1998, “corporate” creations (like Mickey Mouse) can be restricted under copyright law for 120 years. But per an amendment to the act, works published between 1923 and 1977 can enter the public domain 95 years after their creation. This means that this is the first year since 1998 that a large number of works have entered the public domain.
Basically, 2019 marks the first time a huge quantity of books published in 1923 — including works by Virginia Woolf, Agatha Christie, and Robert Frost — have become legally downloadable since digital books became a thing. It’s a big deal — the Internet Archive had a party in San Francisco to celebrate. Next year, works from 1924 will enter the public domain, and so-on.
So, how do you actually download these books?
It largely depends on what site you go to, and if you can’t find a book on one site, you can probably find it on another. For instance, ReadPrint.com, as well as The Literature Network (mostly major authors), and Librivox (audio books), Authorama (all in the public domain), and over a dozen other sites all have vast selections of free ebooks.
There’s also a handful of archiving projects that are doing extensive work to digitize books, journals, music, and other forms of media. A blog post from Duke University’s Center for the Study of the Public Domain listed some of the most recognizable works published in 1923, as well as links to download these books on digital archiving projects Internet Archive, HathiTrust, and the Gutenberg Project. The books include:
Edgar Rice Burroughs, Tarzan and the Golden Lion
Agatha Christie, The Murder on the Links
Winston S. Churchill, The World Crisis
Robert Frost, New Hampshire
Kahlil Gibran, The Prophet
Aldous Huxley, Antic Hay
D.H. Lawrence, Kangaroo
Bertrand and Dora Russell, The Prospects of Industrial Civilization
Carl Sandburg, Rootabaga Pigeons
Edith Wharton, A Son at the Front
P.G. Wodehouse, The Inimitable Jeeves and Leave it to Psmith
Virginia Woolf, Jacob’s Room
E.E. Cummings, Tulips and Chimneys
In total HathiTrust, a massive digital archiving project, has also uploaded more than 53,000 works published in 1923 that just entered the public domain. Over 17,650 of them are books written in English. Similarly, Internet Archive has already uploaded over 15,000 works written in English that year.
Project Gutenberg, which has over 58,000 free downloadable books, has digitized five works that entered the public domain in the new year: The Meredith Mystery by Natalie Sumner Lincoln, The Golden Boys Rescued by Radio L. P. Wyman, White Lightning Edwin by Herbert Lewis, The Garden of God by H. De Vere Stacpoole, and The Prophet by Kahlil Gibran. I’m going to be perfectly honest: I recognize exactly zero of those books. But like most if not all digital archives, Project Gutenberg had some books from 1923 available for download before January 1, 2019 (like Jacob’s Room by Virginia Woolf.)
If you’re interested in academic papers, Reddit user nemobis also uploaded over 1.5 million PDF files of works published in academic journals before 1923. Your best bet for actually finding something you want to read in there is to know which academic paper you’re looking for beforehand and check the paper’s DOI number. Then, search for the DOI in one of nemobis’s lists of works — one list includes works published until 1909, the other includes works published until 1923.
It’s worth noting that projects like Internet Archive and Project Gutenberg rely on volunteer efforts, so there’s going to be disparities in the number of books available for download depending on where you go. But over the next several days and weeks, it’s safe to expect many more books will become available legally and for free across the web.
“All great and precious things are lonely.”
— John Steinbeck, East of Eden
“Like most misery, it started with apparent happiness.”
— Markus Zusak, The Book Thief
i was talking to dany about the gummy bears picture and
a lot of places i have to go for work are legit Midwestern Gothic
they aren’t the Midwestern Gothic Aesthetic posts that feel like they were made by people who slept the whole way through here once while on a summer road trip in the backseat of their parents’ used silver ford taurus, posts with the same picture of a Hell Is Real sign, the harvest is ended and we are not saved, and slightly distorted photos of three girls in a cornfield
i mean, yes, midwestern gothic is absolutely something in the unending cornfields; it’s “hell is real” on a fading billboard; it’s bible quotes on marquee gas station signs underneath a notice about 99-cent eggs, missing several letters and a zero used in place of an o; it’s two locations of grandpa’s cheese barn - one which you can never find, and the other which is never open, even at two in the afternoon on a wednesday; it’s bored teenagers who dare each other to climb into condemned buildings, only to find the walls already covered in symbols and warnings (run); it’s rusted out trucks standing guard like husks of a past era on the side of the road as the grass grows around them, reclaiming them, eating them; it’s that there is always, always a lake
these things are very midwestern gothic
but
midwestern gothic is also time stretching and twisting along flat straight highways between the only cities everyone on the coast knows, how fifty miles takes over two hours, even at 75mph
it’s those highways all looking the same. the same cornfields the same soybean fields the same wheat fields the same alfalfa fields. rusting water towers rising from the tufted wheat, home of the warriors!. always the warriors, never the saints. it’s those fields hardened and frozen and covered in ice, and suddenly you can see those black ruler-straight roads cutting through the ice-white empty fields. those roads don’t exist in summer. you know not to turn down them in winter. the water tower blends into the grey sky, home of the warriors! floating in the clouds.
it’s small towns named for places elsewhere, and the strange sense upon welcome to london (or versailles, or paris, or cairo, or lima) that there’s a door in someone’s basement that leads to the original, a door guarded by a long-forgotten being dragged here across the sea against its will centuries ago
it’s neon lights in the long sunsets, and the smell of popcorn and cotton candy in the summer. everyone is in 4h. you don’t know what 4h is. you don’t know anyone who’s ever done 4h. everyone is in 4h.
it’s a ferris wheel that runs on the laughter of children. from the top of this ferris wheel, you can see the ferris wheel at the neighboring county’s fair. it’s night and empty and that county’s fair is next week, but you wave anyway.
(your friend pushes your arm down. something might wave back. you leave the fair, and it takes three days to get the powdered sugar from the fried dough off your fingers.)
it’s all those towns looking the same. the same square. the same cars. the same movie theater. the exact same courthouse on the exact same street. (it’s always market street, never main). the exact same diner across the exact same corner from the exact same courthouse, serving the exact same three-dollar burger.
it’s that three-dollar burger tasting amazing, too amazing. like it was made with powers granted by sacrifice to a forest god, whose home was torn down for soybeans.
it’s the same family owning that diner for two hundred years. the town was founded a hundred and fifty years ago. everyone in town has a story about that summer they slung milkshakes at the diner and got tipped in nickels by the county judge. he’s been the county judge as long as that family has owned that diner. he has a booth. he’s always in the booth. you’ve never seen him in the courthouse.
it’s four churches and not a single stoplight. it’s a used car lot in the middle of a field, which has the same inventory for decades and never sees a spot of rust. it’s mail pouch tobacco advertisements and quilt designs on every barn, like guiding lights toward somewhere you’re not sure you should go.
it’s that one guy whose house is falling apart around him, the corn has invaded the living room, but he’s been fighting the county’s imminent domain claim for twenty years. the county is about to give up. there’s a reason he’s on the land, a reason he needs to stay. a reason they need him to stay.
it’s a one-lane bridge over a rushing creek at night. the creek had no water in it last week. now it’s three inches below the bridge. a girl died on a bridge like this last summer, you have a pin from her memorial service on your backpack. everyone seemed to know her, but you never saw her before in your life. you honk and flash your lights, a plea disguised as a warning. something moves in the woods as you drive across the bridge. teenagers, you tell yourself. bored teenagers screwing with travelers. the bridge is twenty miles from anything.
it’s everyone knowing everyone in a one hundred-mile radius. it’s the one person in town who knows the ancestry and family lines of everyone in three counties. it’s grandparents on their death beds who have never once crossed county lines.
it’s snow that’s blowing so hard you can’t see six inches in front of you; it isn’t even snowing, it hasn’t snowed in days. it’s tornado sirens you ignore because the sky isn’t the right shade of green. it’s there being a right shade of green for tornadoes. it’s humidity that surpasses one hundred percent and still doesn’t rain. it’s driving down the highway and passing three thunderstorms and never feeling a single raindrop.
it’s weird and creepy and terrifying and i want more of the real midwest on this website.
i want more of small towns inhabited by hungry ancient fae who keep the town that has no money pristine and cute and Touristy in exchange for Something Else, i want more of tricksters who create mirages of gas stations and a mcdonald’s just over the next hill, i want more of weird shit like buying soda with gummy bears because this town doesn’t actually exist, your money isn’t good here.
less of the same “hell is real” image.
we know hell is real. we live here. there are more stories.
(though they may have been eaten by the crows)
make it gayer
‘The Scarlet Letter’, by Nathaniel Hawthorne