that’s my baby and it’s his day

@theartofmadeline

shark vs the universe
Cosimo Galluzzi
Xuebing Du

JVL
cherry valley forever
KIROKAZE

pixel skylines
Jules of Nature
Lint Roller? I Barely Know Her
todays bird
Sade Olutola
Acquired Stardust
wallacepolsom

Product Placement

titsay

izzy's playlists!
Three Goblin Art
Misplaced Lens Cap

#extradirty

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@theotherhufflepuff
that’s my baby and it’s his day
Nice people make the best Nazis. Be mean, be tough, have a fascist tooth/skull collection.
2024
The City of Vancouver versus Lenny Bruce.
At the gate for my flight home from visiting friends and there's a woman here with a service Shiba Inu. No pics because he has a Do Not Disturb vest and taking pics of strangers is illegal but I need to stress how ON DUTY this animal is. Ears up. Eyes doing Lazer scans of everything. Examining everyone who passes within 10ft like a security guard. Ass planted on her feet. I have never seen a dog with such intense chivalric guardian energy before. He has tiny eyebrows and they are FURROWED with concentration.
Man behind me having unhinged phone conversation. There is an internationally famous dairy in the area I was visiting and he was commissioned by the lady on the other end of the phone to collect specific cheeses from there. The lady is very high strung about the type and condition of the cheese.
The man does not know from cheese. The man "ain't never seen no cheese but orange before" and "I showed ya list to the cheese lady so if it's wrong it's her fault ok?"
I am 80% sure she sent him there for a really specific bleu cheese, 40% sure he does not have the very specific bleu cheese, and 100% sure he's done with her shit.
Our flight is delayed.
He does not have the cheeses in a cooler, just a regular backpack.
I need to emphasize that there is no cooler bag in the backpack. He has Jansport backpack that is jam-packed with cheeses. There is apparently $405 dollars worth of cheeses in that backpack, which I know because he has been trying to get the lady to venmo him the expense, which she has failed to do. It is unclear whether his relation to the lady is romantic, familial or what, but I'm leaning towards "what".
Two more people have joined us. One is a very elegant man with a perfect manicure in a tailored business suit, the other is a neon-haired person of indeterminate gender wearing a fox kirigumi. The Shiba Inu has been staring at the latter for three minutes now.
Uh oh.
Cheese man has been demanding payment because apparently he went like six hours out of his way and paid with his own money and between the cheese and price of gas, he is pretty sure he does not have enough money in his account for an Uber home.
The lady is FLABBERGASTED that he is demanding payment at all, as she was under the impression he was doing this for her out of the goodness of his heart.
He's not having it. He's insisting she told him she would pay him back- he would have gotten her maybe one cheese somewhere closer to his business in the area out of love, but he went out of his way because she agreed to pay him costs+ extra to cover it.
HE RECORDED THE CONVERSATION IN WHICH SHE PROMISED TO PAY FOR THE CHEESE, SHE'S THAT MUCH OF A FLAKE.
I am about to offer this man cash for some of these cheeses because our flight is now more delayed.
"YOU ALWAYS DO THIS! YOU ALWAYS DO THIS AND I FALL FOR IT EVERY TIME! NO! NO! FUCK YOU! IF YOU'RE NOT GONNA PAY ME, YOU DON'T GET FANCY CHEESE."
"OR ELSE WHAT?"
"I'm gonna-? THE BABY SHOWER? MONICA CAN'T EVEN HAVE THIS CHEESE SHE'S PREGNANT!"
"The cheese lady asked if it was for someone because the mushrooms or whatever in the cheese are dangerous for the baby or something?? You wanna poison Monica?"
"WHY WOULD I LIE ABOUT THAT?"
"YEAH OF COURSE I GOT THE CHEESE, THATS WHY I DON'T GOT MONEY FOR UBER!"
"YEAH, GO TELL! GO TELL MOMMA I STOPPED YOUR STUPID ASS FROM KILLING MONICA OR THE BABY! FUCK!"
*hangs up phone*
*head in hands, borderline hyperventilating*
The man in the three piece suit is in the chair next to him. He waits a moment, then reaches into his carryon and pulls out an entire bottle of wine with the TSA pre check sticker on it, and taps cheese guy on the shoulder.
"If your friend doesn't want it, would you be amenable to having it right now?"
Naturally, I have volunteered my box of wheat thins and offered to buy one of the harder cheeses which should be fine if it makes it home.
Meanwhile, Kirigumi has noticed that the Shiba Inu is staring at her and is correctly intimidated.
1. This is some fucking great Camembert. I have compensated cheese guy accordingly. So have like six other people. He's recouped like half his losses.
2. Cheese guy is crying a little about the cash and opening up about his problems. The cheese lady is his younger sister. Suit guy is being very generous with his Pinot Blanc. We are having a picnic/improv family therapy session.
3. This is apparently the latest in a long string of his sister asking for something and then flaking when he asks to be paid back. Started with paying him back only some of what he was owed, then claiming something she paid for him was of equal value when it was not, then recently telling him his memory is wrong and he said it was a gift or that he'd do it for free.
"Yeah, the specific thing of trying to convince you your memory is unreliable is called gaslighting and it's really fucked up." I say
"yeeeeah. The other stuff I forgave because she's never really had a good job so she can't pay me back all the time but at least she was making an effort y'know? But that was. That was over the line."
"If you haven't already, check on the rest of your family's finances. My brother started trying to gaslight everyone when he started stealing from our parents." Says Pinot Blanc.
4. Shiba Inu Lady has purchased a cheddar. Apparently, the dog's name is Donut, and he's her service dog because she's severely visually impaired.
"Oh, he's a guide dog?" Asks cheese guy.
"oh, no." She laughs. "He's too short, and the way my eyes are, it's easier for me to navigate with a cane. No, the problem I have is that some morally impaired people see the cane and think they can get away with stealing my bag or assaulting me because I wouldn't be able to give a description- which is wrong, but rather than deal with that I got Donut, and he helps me by howling at anyone who gets in my personal space and biting anyone who grabs me!"
"Uh." Says Kirigumi. "He's been staring at me do I need to back up or..?"
"Ohdear! No, no- He wasn't looking at you! He loves cheese but he knows he's not supposed to beg so he decided the way to deal with something he wants but can't have is to stare in the other direction."
"OKAY!" Says Kirigumi. "I'm wearing fox pajamas and thought like. He thought I was another dog or something."
"No, no- he doesn't care about dogs, and you get a warning before he goes for the calves. Very helpful, when I was living in Italy!"
"Oh what part? I have family in Tuscany." Says Pinot.
"Does he want a cheese? There is still so much cheese." Says cheese guy.
Plane may be arriving. I am paying for in flight WiFi to keep y'all updated.
1. Cheese guy has sold all but two or three cheeses that he an Pinot are going to eat on the flight.
2. I know they're planning to continue because Pinot talked to the gate agent so he and cheese guy can sit together and talk about family drama and cheese.
3. Pinot has been teaching him about different types of cheese and how to enjoy them.
4. Cheese guy apparently repairs computers and other technology devices for a living and is currently doing the software version of scraping barnacles and other crap off Pinot'macbook.
5. Pinot is now convinced that cheese guy is the smartest and most interesting man in the world.
Ok so the Wifi wasn't working on the plane (also like, nonstop turbulence) and also they got seated in a different row from me, but:
Now that I've heard the word aloud, and they are an astrophysicist. Who correctly believes in being comfy as fuck on planes. They are also familar with the concept of a meet-cute and is rooting for them too.
Got to walk the nice lady and her Tactical Assault Shiba to her next gate because it was on the way out and talk for a bit. Donut is called that not because he is the color of a Donut (which he is) but because he likes to sleep curled up in a perfect circle. He has a sister who does the same thing named Bagel.
Lost track of Pinot and Cheeseguy for a bit but when I saw them again at Baggage claim, Cheeseguy was holding both their jackets, and Pinot was on the phone to his hotel about "Well do you have any rooms with TWO beds?". The rest of the call indicated that yes, there were rooms with two beds, but Readers, I Had A Moment.
:)
Anyway, it's 2AM, I need to sleep, if you feel like supporting this kind of hard-hitting reporting, I have a Tip Jar!
when a pelican bites you there's no malice in their eyes. they aren't upset at you. they are just hungry and want to see if you fit in their mouths. and if you don't then it's no problem and everything is fine. and if you do then well i guess your fate is sealed but that's ok it's a beautiful animal
Okay, see, I knew about the capybara gif:
But I didn’t know that they really are That Dense, All The Time. The same way sharks will bite anything that might be a seal, just in case, these birdbrains will apparently test just about anything for beak size.
Behold a short list of bad ideas:
Human foot is not food, bird.
That is clearly bigger than your entire body.
...You do know what a bear cub is, right? Right??
That is a BICYCLE SEAT.
That’s it; arrested for bird crimes.
The left never radicalized, the center has just been dragged further and further right until we became radical by not moving.
When I was 10 I asked my dad to explain politics to me and when he was done with his shockingly nuanced description of the American bipartisan system he asked me how I would structure the government if it was up to me. I described a world where everyone was paid what they needed, had a house, and enough food. He said, "Void-juice that's great, but you should know most people call that communism".
I've told this story on here before but @void--juice's story made me think of it again... My dad worked for NASA and he did a lot of work on the telescopes that went up in the late 90s/early 2000s. I was a curious kid and I knew his work really mattered to my dad so I was always asking about when things were getting launched. Often the answer was "we're waiting on Congress for funding" or similar. And one time... I was probably about 10 years old, I said "well... I guess that makes sense. I'm sure going to space is one of the most expensive things we do." And my dad looks at me... I'll never forget the look on his face. He goes "What do you think the most expensive thing we do as a country is?" And I hemmed and I hawed because I was sure it wasn't the space program even though I was sure that had to be in the top three. My first guess was education. Everyone had to go to school. Nope. Roads? Bridges? Cars were everywhere. Nope. What about... things like electricity? Phone lines? Cable? Nope. "The military. By a factor of ten at least." I was gobsmacked. It was peacetime (at least by most reckoning... this was post-Gulf War and well before 9/11). What the hell was the military doing being so expensive if we weren't doing anything with it? So that was the moment I became a "radical." Because that was absolutely stupid and continues to be.
“If you want to understand any moment in time, or any cultural moment, just look at their vampires,” says author Eric Nuzum. Our vampires are not like the remorseless Victorian vampires, who had a taste for the blood of babies and did not seem to feel badly about it. Our vampires are conflicted. Some of them go hungry rather than feed on humans, and some of them drink synthetic blood. “Almost all of these current vampires are struggling to be moral,” the journalist Margot Adler observed […] “It’s conventional to talk about vampires as sexual, with their hypnotic powers and their intimate penetrations and their blood-drinking and so forth,” she reported. “But most of these modern vampires are not talking as much about sex as they are about power.”
Power, of course, is vampiric. We enjoy it only because someone else does not. Power is what philosophers would call a positional good, meaning that its value is determined by how much of it one has in comparison to other people. Privilege, too, is a positional good, and some have argued that health is as well.
Our vampires, whatever else they are, remain a reminder that our bodies are penetrable. A reminder that we feed off of each other, that we need each other to live. Our vampires reflect both our terrible appetites and our agonized restraint. When our vampires struggle with their need for blood, they give us a way of thinking about what we ask of each other in order to live.
— Eula Biss, On Immunity: An Inoculation
@blood-blindfolds-and-butterflies
there’s something endlessly hilarious to me about the phrase “hotly debated” in an academic context. like i just picture a bunch of nerds at podiums & one’s like “of course there was a paleolithic bear cult in Northern Eurasia” and another one just looks him in the eye and says “i’l kill you in real life, kevin”
I heard a story once about two microbiologists at a conference who took it out into the parking lot to have a literal fistfight over taxonomy.
have i told this story yet? idk but it’s good. The Orangutan Story:
my american lit professor went to this poe conference. like to be clear this is a man who has a doctorate in being a book nerd. he reads moby dick to his four-year-old son. and poe is one of the cornerstones of american literature, right, so this should be right up his alley?
wrong. apparently poe scholars are like, advanced. there is a branch of edgar allen poe scholarship that specifically looks for coded messages based on the number of words per line and letters per word poe uses. my professor, who has a phd in american literature, realizes he is totally out of his depth. but he already committed his day to this so he thinks fuck it! and goes to a panel on racism in poe’s works, because that’s relevant to his interests.
background info: edgar allen poe was a broke white alcoholic from virginia who wrote horror in the first half of the 19th century. rule 1 of Horror Academia is that horror reflects the cultural anxieties of its time (see: my other professor’s sermon abt how zombie stories are popular when people are scared of immigrants, or that purge movie that was literally abt the election). since poe’s shit is a product of 1800s white southern culture, you can safely assume it’s at least a little about race. but the racial subtext is very open to interpretation, and scholars believe all kinds of different things about what poe says about race (if he says anything), and the poe stans get extremely tense about it.
so my professor sits down to watch this panel and within like five minutes a bunch of crusty academics get super heated about poe’s theoretical racism. because it’s academia, though, this is limited to poorly concealed passive aggression and forceful tones of inside voice. one professor is like “this isn’t even about race!” and another professor is like “this proves he’s a racist!” people are interrupting each other. tensions are rising. a panelist starts saying that poe is like writing a critique of how racist society was, and the racist stuff is there to prove that racism is stupid, and that on a metaphorical level the racist philosophy always loses—
then my professor, perhaps in a bid to prove that he too is a smart literature person, loudly calls: “BUT WHAT ABOUT THE ORANGUTAN?”
some more background: in poe’s well-known short story “the murder in the rue morgue,” two single ladies—a lovely old woman and her lovely daughter who takes care of her, aka super vulnerable and respectable people—are violently killed. the murderer turns out to be not a person, but an orangutan brought back by a sailor who went to like burma or something. and it’s pretty goddamn racially coded, like they reeeeally focus on all this stuff about coarse hairs and big hands and superhuman strength and chattering that sounds like people talking but isn’t actually. if that’s intentional, then he’s literally written an analogy about how black people are a threat to vulnerable white women, which is classic white supremacist shit. BUT if he really only meant for it to be an orangutan, then it’s a whole other metaphor about how colonialism pillages other countries and brings their wealth back to europe and that’s REALLY gonna bite them in the ass one day. klansman or komrade? it all hangs on this.
so the place goes dead fucking silent as every giant ass poe stan in the room is immediately thrust into a series of war flashbacks: the orangutan argument, violently carried out over seminar tables, in literary journals, at graduate student house parties, the spittle flying, the wine and coffee spilled, the friendships torn—the red faces and bulging veins—curses thrown and teaching posts abandoned—panels just like this one fallen into chaos—distant sirens, skies falling, the dog-eared norton critical editions slicing through the air like sabres—the textual support! o, the quotes! they gaze at this madman in numb disbelief, but he could not have known. nay, he was a literary theorist, a 17th-century man, only a visitor to their haunted land. he had never heard the whistle of the mortars overhead. he had never felt the cold earth under his cheek as he prayed for god’s deliverance. and yet he would have broken their fragile peace and brought them all back into the trenches.
much later, when my professor told this story to a poe nerd friend, the guy said the orangutan thing was a one of the biggest landmines in their field. he said it was a reliable discussion ruiner that had started so many shouting matches that some conferences had an actual ban on bringing it up.
so my professor sits there for a second, still totally clueless. then out of the dead silence, the panel moderator stands up in his tweed jacket and yells, with the raw panic of a once-broken man:
WE! DO NOT! TALK ABOUT! THE ORANGUTAN!
@posturingsimpleton
OMG
Ok that one wins
[ID: text reading: ‘The Milton scholars screamed and argued about how the serpent was supposed to move before it crawled on its belly. Dr. Matthews, enraged that Dr. Goldstein could believe the serpent bounced around on the coiled end of its tail, flipped over the conference table. “Satan is not a fucking pogo stick!” he howled.’]
These are so fun to make
@thedisablednaturalist @fagtabulous
Ask and you shall receive!
Love your additions! Birds got that drip
Oh yeah should probably add this one too-
I've never done this before
Sorry this is the best post I've seen in a while
I'll leave this post alone now
This is way too much fun
I'm not done yet I suppose
How we weigh an octopus!
put the octopus in the basket
put the octopus in the basket
put the octopus in the basket
weigh the bas--
put the octopus in the basket
weigh the basket
put the octopus in the water
treat!
“ Black Knight “ // Willem Span
Music: Austin Farwell - Once Upon a Time
I’m a very messy person who tries VERY HARD to keep a clean home. It’s probably ADHD. Anyway, the best advice I ever saw about it was:
“Instead of changing your habits to keep clean, look at where the clutter is. Now put a bin under it.”
I tend to remove my socks at the computer and then there’s a mountain of socks on the floor? I put a small bin and now it looks tidy. There are piles of junk mail on the table near my front door because I can never bring them to the recycling bin? I put a smaller recycling bin there. Etc etc.
Another trick that helps me immensely are BOXES.
The bathroom sink is covered in small bottles and all sorts of products? I got small plastic crates and I put them over the toilet lid, one for my stuff, the other for my roomate’s. The linen closet is just piles of things that fall when you open the door? Baby I just got a bunch of baskets and I will separate them by function.
I have baskets and small boyxes for: my cleaning products; my bird’s toys and stuff; my workout accessories; my meds and daily skincare products; my tools; and pretty much all my art stuff.
It still takes some effort to keep everything in its place, but having everything in a box still looks tons better than having everything on the counter, and it’s so better for the mental health.
After YEARS of a perpetually messy room with clothes all over the floor… I cleared off two shelves of my bookshelves. Clothes go there if they aren’t ready for laundry yet.
One change, and my floors are clear. And because they’re clear, they’re easier to keep clean.
One of the principles of design is that you have to design things according to how human beings act, not how you think they ought to act. That goes for designing your own space as well: organize for the you that you are, not the you that you think you ought to become.
Wheat fields are more mystical than fields of other crops. You are 7,000 times more likely to meet an old god or see a portent of doom in a wheat field than in a field of like… soybeans.
For your consideration: cornfields
Cornfields are less mystical than wheat fields but more mystical than soybean fields. Two-bit monsters congregate in corn fields to eat people, but their power is nothing compared to the things that manifest in wheat fields.
Have been in both wheat and cornfields; can confirm. Cornfields host monsters who eat people. Wheat fields attract old gods.
I have a theory that this is because the notions most of us have of “old gods” are pretty intrinsically European, and wheat was (and is) the staple crop of European life. It is quite literally tied to the ancestral rituals and beliefs of most white people. Odin, the Morrigan, and even Zeus are actually linked to a set of peoples who cultivated wheat.
Meanwhile, corn (maize) is a crop native to the Americas. It features in the white cultural imagination in a very different way. Corn is a motif seen not in our ancestral myths, but in a much newer genre: the American Gothic. With its focus on the tensions between man and nature and—perhaps more importantly—the United States’s history of genocide against its indigenous population and trade in enslaved Africans, the American Gothic is VERY preoccupied with agriculture. Our monsters come out of corn fields because corn is a symbol for not only what we did to the Native Americans (who were the first to grow the crop), but of what we are doing to the very land itself. Corn is a monument to our cultural sins.
Meanwhile, I suspect that corn features very differently in the imaginations of people of color. If you asked a Native American person or a Latinx person what sort of mysticism they associate with corn fields, I imagine their answer would be very different than ours.
TLDR: White people associate wheat with our ancestors’ gods because our ancestors grew wheat. We associate corn with terrible monsters because it is a literal sign of our own monstrosity.
Native American here, can confirm that small plots of corn feel safe and homey; ideally they should be interplanted with other crops. You find turkeys and possums and raccoons in the corn. It might tell you important knowledge.
However.
Giant monocultures of corn, where the corn grows unbroken for miles and miles, not near human habitation, devoid of local wildlife, just corn on corn in the soft wind? Corn mega monocultures? Those sound like screaming.
“monocultures attract people-eating monsters” is not the take I expected to see today but I’m glad I saw it
The anthropological analysis and discussion on folklore is spot on. 10/10
Corn lore