I’ve moved!
Hey everyone! I’ve moved to different tumblr and not really posting here anymore (I will keep the blog up though)
Come follow me here now, if you like:
https://thebookshelfofrat.tumblr.com/
we're not kids anymore.

Love Begins
Cosimo Galluzzi
2025 on Tumblr: Trends That Defined the Year
Three Goblin Art
let's talk about Bridgerton tea, my ask is open

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Misplaced Lens Cap
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he wasn't even looking at me and he found me
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almost home
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will byers stan first human second

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@thecraftingrat
I’ve moved!
Hey everyone! I’ve moved to different tumblr and not really posting here anymore (I will keep the blog up though)
Come follow me here now, if you like:
https://thebookshelfofrat.tumblr.com/
Can we PLEASE take a moment to appreciate the goddamn AMAZING amount of craftsmanship that goes into making pro ballet costumes?
I MEAN …
COME ON PEOPLE!
GENUINELY FUCKING SPECTACULAR!
THE DETAIL!
THE BEAUTY!!
THE GORGEOUSNESS OF IT ALL!!!
Costume designers are some of the most awesomely skilled people on the planet and I feel like they very rarely get as much admiration as they deserve. Especially in ballet, because a lot of the time at least half the audience doesn’t get the chance to see how intricate and beautiful these pieces truly are. I want to thank the artists who put so much effort into making characters look amazing.
If we’re talking about specifically craftsmanship we need to talk about the people actually building these, not the designers. Yes these are lovely designs, but what you’re talking about is the work of the First Hands, the Stitchers, The Cutters, The Drapers, The Costume Crafts Artisans, etc. The whole costume production department.
“It’s very, um… you know… swordy.”
Screw Excalibur, you want Merlin’s mythical swordy sword of swordyness.
I love the fanart. I think it’s the purest expression of fandom. Um… Until it gets weird.
Also Joey: I dress as Geralt nightly.
Apparently this is the content i make now.
Rabenstein Castle -
Rabenstein Castle is a former high medieval aristocratic castle in the municipality of Ahorntal in the Upper Franconian county of Bayreuth in the German state of Bavaria.
© P. Eichler
I just remembered one time in like sixth or seventh grade (we had the same teachers and class both years so hard to remember which) somehow we got into a debate of “who is better, boys or girls?” and instead of stepping in to stop it our teacher formalized it and egged us on by providing thoughtful prompts and counters to each side and by the end each group had built a barricade of desks on either side of the classroom and we were throwing balls of paper at each other and screaming about personal hygiene while our teacher just watched and enjoyed a Baby Ruth candy bar.
This was the same teacher that got the cops called on our school like three times and would reward us for being good by spraying our hands with rubbing alcohol and setting them on fire.
He was the best teacher I ever had.
STUFF MR ROBINSON DID THAT WAS VERY GOOD:
One time Mr. Robinson closed the door to the classroom furtively and asked a student near the door to keep an eye on the door’s window in case anyone from the administration was coming.
He explained the next curriculum was one he had been explicitly disallowed from, but he didn’t know how we were going to cover the next portion of our history work fairly without covering it first. He said if any of us were offended by it or felt it threatened our beliefs to be discussing it, please talk to him and he would gladly find alternative work for us to do instead. But he asked if we would be okay not broadcasting too loudly to the administration (our parents were fine) about it.
At this point we’re on the edge of our seat. Forbidden curriculum? YES PLEASE.
“All right, do I have a promise from you you won’t tell on me to the principal?”
We, of course, promised.
“Good. Then let’s talk about World Religions.”
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(A side note here, if you ever have a not-forbidden courseload you want your students to really enthusiastically consume, I think pretending it’d forbidden will up interest levels immensely. The work was informative and we loved it, but the Secret Agent-ness of doing a SECRET ASSIGNMENTS and having SECRET PROJECTS and LOOKOUTS FOR THE FUZZ upped our investment in the material beyond description. Even if you DON’T have secret coursework, PLEASE DO THIS WITH YOUR CLASS SOMETIME. IT’S FUN.)
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At the start of the Great Gender Debate when someone would try to say boys and girls aren’t different and they can do whatever the other does, he’d super respectively ask them if they really thought that, or if they were saying it because they thought that’s what they were supposed to say, and encouraged us being honest about how we actually felt about the difference between between boys and girls and who was better.
Then lots of super fun shouting and throwing paper at each other and making desk barricades and more yelling.
(Keep in mind, this was 1999/2000. A lot of people didn’t even have internet at home. This was a small conservative town. Being trans or nonbinary wouldn’t have even been an option we knew about.)
Then he eventually stepped back into the fray of the Great Gender Debate and made us break down our points, which he had been taking notes of, on the white board and then had us carefully and intentionally refute or discuss them one at a time. Until we had reached a real and honest consensus that actually we’d been tricked into thinking gender was anything at all. Now when we said we thought neither was better than the other and being a boy or girl didn’t mean anything about what you could or couldn’t do, we fucking meant it.
One of our male classmates started wearing nail polish the next week and we told him it looked rad.
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One time it was a nice day out and even though we weren’t doing trig at that point he was like, “Wanna learn something cool? I’m gonna show you how to calculate how tall something is using shadows” and then we went outside and learned how to find out how tall things are by measuring their shadows and measuring the shadows of stuff we knew the length of, and then for fun we also independently worked out the world was round and how big it was.
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One of the times the cops were called on us it was because we were having a Hot Air Balloon making contest and people thought there were UFOs or spy planes.
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Another time we were just setting off dry ice bombs, lol.
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They changed the milk at lunch and we hated it and Mr. Robinson may have given us ideas about civil disobedience and direct action that led to the lunch room sit-in the schoolchildren ended up staging until they would switch the milk back. At the time it felt like he was being really cool, and he was, but thinking on it he may have also been using us as props to prank the administration and also give himself an afternoon off while all the administration tried to get a hundred 11-12 year olds to leave the damn cafeteria while we chanted about milk.
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We grew up in a town that was about 2% black. It was not uncommon for people living there to not know any black people at all.
One day Mr. Robinson told us we were going to be having a very important speaker come talk to us, and that he expected us to treat her with respect and deference. That she was one of the most important people we could be learning from, and we were honored to have her come to us. We all sat up, wondering who this important woman could be.
And he opened the door and it was one of the ladies who worked the front office, accepting our tardy slips and making us wait for the school nurse. A black woman, one of the only black people you’d find in the school.
She then sat down with us and talked to us about the racial history of our town. Explained to us what a Sundown Town was. Explained to us the racism she experienced growing up there. Explained the mistreatment of the police.
She wasn’t even that old. It struck us all. But you’re not even old. Is this still happening? Why didn’t you leave? Did anyone help you?
It was an incredibly powerful day.
When I went home to talk to my parents about it, they had no idea about any of it, even though this was the same town they had grown up in.
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Mr. Robinson would occasionally repeat this habit of special guests were not academics, just people who had lived in our town for a while, bringing in a lunch lady or a janitor, making us talk to them, learn our town’s history, learn to respect their jobs, learn manners and deference for the working class.
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One time he gave us bread, water, and ziploc bags and set us loose on the school to rub the bread on stuff, drip water on it, seal it, and watch what mold grew. The kid that got the grimiest piece of bread with the most enthusiastic mold would win.
We learned that many of the surfaces we consider the most dirty get the most regular cleaning, and so are in fact the least likely to produce mold. While many of the surfaces we eat off of and touch regularly are nasty as hell.
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Similar to the Great Gender Debate, one time he let class go wildly off course while we debated hotly for over an hour about The Lion King. I do not, for the life of me, remember the substance of this debate. I think The Little Mermaid may also have been a point of conversation? I just remember it got HEATED, and Mr. Robinson always thought these heated debates were REALLY ENTERTAINING and would quietly sit back and egg them on.
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One time he gave me detention and I cried through the whole thing thinking my parents were gonna kill me when I got home and instead when I got home my mom hugged me and told me how he’d called her and said I’d been really honest and showed moral fiber in standing up for a friend and taking the detention in the first place and she was really proud of me for being a good person or whatever and idk if he actually was impressed with my actions or if he saw that I was stressed about my parent’s reactions and wanted to mitigate that, but that was such a good move.
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IDK. I just have a hard time thinking of any teacher I ever had both as capable of chaotic dry amusement and completely upright righteous anger. He modeled for us what it was like to evaluate things based on merit rather than based on rules and expectations, and you felt that energy constantly.
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Plus like getting to set your hand on fire for good behavior is a way better reward than whatever dumb stickers or candies or whatever it is teachers usually use. “Behave and we will play with fire” is the BEST incentive.
Building a treehouse is the biggest insult to a tree. “I killed your friend, here hold him.”
“Friend”
Its more of I killed a potential enemy. Hold his dismembered corpse in victory.
Plants don’t wage war
Ever heard of blackberries?
Yes, plants do wage war
Mint and strawberries, too. They need to be quarantined or they will kill basically everything else.
I planted mint in the ground 2 years ago.
It’s currently fighting a bitter battle to the death against the raspberries attempting to invade from the east while trying to annex the patio.
Could go either way at this point TBH. Unless, of course, I take a shovel and the blowtorch out there and battle both back to within their original boundaries.
And anyone wondering if a blowtorch is overkill for weeding back mint has never actually planted mint.
This post did not go where I expected it to.
Our garden plot at my childhood home slowly got overrun by wild blackberries after we stopped managing it while my sister and I were in nursing school. And by overrun I mean it was like a 4 foot tall thicket of wild blackberries. It hadn’t been touched by humans in at least 4 years. I started the ultimately futile task of trying to clear this plot with a machete and discovered to my amazement a patch of mint several feet across underneath the canopy of blackberry, still fighting the good fight all those years later.
Ultimately it took two jars of homemade napalm and some creative fire placement to clear that patch but I damn sure saved that patch of mint. It earned the right to be there.
Yall mother fuckers don’t even talk unless you’ve had to wage war on kudzu (it’s an ivy strain directly from Hell) that shit doesn’t just wage war with other plants, it wages war with all living things on planet earth. It’s some gnarly ass Blood for the Blood God, Chlorophyll for the Chlorophyll Throne demon weed.
Can second the comments of Kudzu.
I forget where I read it but there’s this one tree that creates an extremely flammable substance that’s in both the bark and leaves. Dead trees become torches and crushed up leaves become dust-incendiary, all while the plant’s seeds are Giant Redwood levels of resilient to open flame. IE it has a goddamn scorched earth policy. It’s even more badass than plants that use toxins to starve other plants.
I’d like to third the comments on Kudzu. These are the battlefields:
See those weird pillars? Those were trees. See that strange lump in the middle? That was a house. Everything green you see in this photo is kudzu.
Kudzu is an apocalyptic nightmare
They smother every other living plant to death
Those trees under there are dead, they can’t get sunlight. Kudzu takes over and steals everything from these trees, and becomes them. It’s creepy as hell. These plants are basically straight out of a horror novelist’s wet dream tbh.
The bodies of everything the kudzu has slain.
What used to be a house
Someone attempting to drive a four wheeler through it, to give you scale
It’s an ornamental plant kept in check in china, but was introduced to north america where it immediately went rampant and began to spread incredibly fast like a disease, destroying everything in its wake
The ONLY thing that has stopped this curse from engulfing the united states is goats. Apparently goats love this stuff like no tomorrow. Everywhere we find it now, we just bring a horde of goats to cut it down. Everything is fine…. for now.
Kudzu is on time magazine’s top 10 invasive species to look out for.
This little buddy doing his part
Not to keep spamming this post but
“the growth of kudzu as it became a “structural parasite” of the South,[7] enveloping entire structures when untreated[11] and often referred to as “the vine that ate the South”.[13]”
“It has been spreading rapidly in the southern U.S., “easily outpacing the use of herbicide spraying and mowing, as well increasing the costs of these controls by $6 million annually”.[2]“
yall it’s been estimated this plant consumes 600 kilometers of the united states every year
it’s been suggested that we just start eating it to make it go away
Adding to the spam: yes, kudzu IS edible. In fact, all parts of it but the vine are edible. The leaves are supposedly great in salads or baked into quiche. The flowers supposedly are great in jam. The roots… Well, if you know how to cook other root vegetables, you know what to do with kudzu root. Feed this stuff to your livestock and cook it.
Eat it before it eats your house.
@solarpunkcast @solarpunkactionweek @solarpunkinspo @enviropunk feels relevant
In this world it’s eat or be eaten
Thread starts with the existential angst of building a treehouse. Ends with recipes on how to eat kudzu.
Posts that make you go ‘hm.’
thinking about how in ancient times, at least people knew that the lives their children would lead would....vaguely resemble their own???
People have always fondly reminisced about The Good Old Days and complained about Kids These Days, of course. But—and I cannot stress this enough—when my mom was born the Internet did not exist.
like I’m thinking about how I am a college student and during the pandemic, work, education, and relationships have been almost totally dependent on a network of technology that literally did not exist when my parents were college students.
When my mom was in college, she just wouldn’t have been capable of predicting what college would be like for me. I took a full semester of college from 5 hours away because I can virtually attend class through a pocket sized device that projects my image and voice into a shared virtual classroom where I can interact with my professor and other students. I wrote research papers without physical access to a library because I could read my college library’s books on my computer.
If you’re a Mesopotamian farmer, hitching his oxen to a plow, like...idk, man. I can’t picture myself at 40. I feel like a Mesopotamian farmer, trying to imagine his sons riding John Deeres.
It’s so persistently portrayed as this eternal, cyclical thing: Get a job, buy a house, get married and have kids, save for their college, send them off to college. This is the cycle of life. 2.5 kids, buy a house, have a steady career. Just as your father before you did, and his father before him.
Except they didn’t. His father before him didn’t do this, and your son will not live like you. This is not enshrined in tradition. This is not life. This is not how things are, or have been, or how they ever been. Look at it. This beautiful, ageless world of saving for your kids’ college and paying off mortgages and nuclear families. There is no way of life to pass down to your children, no tradition, nothing your father gave you that you can give to your son! You were born into a world that is unintelligible and inaccessible to the children you wanted to inherit it, and you and your children will both die in a world that is as foreign to you both!
I don’t envy the Boomer generation, nor do I have some kind of conceited disdain for them for not being able to adapt to now. So, so much of what defines our lives happened for the first time in their lifetime, and the absence of those things cannot be explained to us. Do you remember what it was like before television? Well...what is “it?”
It’s like our generation’s dim memory of childhood before Internet, and the vast, panicky knowledge that our childhoods were mostly full of a quality best described as the absence of internet, and there is no way to transmit that idea to the kids of today or explain it. We remember it, so, so clearly. It was real. But it’s gone. Annihilated.
There's a midrash that before he died, Moses was worried about what would become of the Israelite people after he was gone. God brought him forward in time to the schoolhouse of Rabbi Akiva. Moses listened to the discussion but could not understand a thing, and nearly despaired, until he heard a student ask Akiva, "how did you arrive at this conclusion?" Akiva responded, "it follows from what Moses taught." Reassured, Moses returned to his own time and died.
I taught this midrash last week to a class of about ten 3rd-8th graders whom I have been teaching since September and have never met in person. I asked them to continue the midrash: if Moses made a second stop in 2021, what would confuse him, and what would reassure him?
The youngest kids had a fantastic time imagining Moses trying to use an iPad, trying to understand that he was in a classroom, that we were doing remotely what he had seen Akiva do in person. The older kids wondered if he would be astonished at our level of literacy, or our coed learning.
When I asked what would reassure him they were momentarily stumped: it wasn't the first time this group has struggled to identify positives about their lives and experiences, except in a guilty "some people have it worse" kind of way. I reminded them of what reassured Moses in the schoolhouse of Akiva: knowing that what he taught had evolved from rather than superseded the traditions of our ancestors. "Who are we learning about right this very minute?" I prompted.
One of them acted it out: Moses peering suspiciously at his iPad, then exclaiming, "They're learning my Torah in there!" We are not unmoored, we are evolving. It is easier to see the changes than the things that remain constant, but I think there is value, whatever your cultural tradition, in asking "what would reassure my ancestors?"
one (1) flirty winter spirit
Jack has a magic staff with which he can control the elements of winter. Originally, he thought this staff was the source of his power, when really it was just a conduit for him to channel the magic of winter that had really been inside of him.
Tiny House Portugal
© Junior Carranca
he hop
Sproing boing boing
BOUNCY BOUNCY BOUNCY BOUNCY FUN FUN FUN FUN FUN
AND THE MOST WONDERFUL THING ABOUT TIGGERS IS THERE’S APPARENTLY MORE THAN ONE!
Snow leopards are my favorite.
Dolomites italy
© A. Jayashankar
Luxembourg Castle
© g. groebert
• Evening gown.
Designer/Maker: Adrian
Date: 1948