As someone who goes outside a lot at work, I am often ensorcelled by fancy gear. I love insulated metal bottles and backpacks with five hundred pockets and a sternum strap. I snatch them up when I find them in thrift stores and on freecycle.
However: mad respect to my coworker who has been using these as his backpack and water bottle for years:
We're here, we're queer, we're really fucking tired so we're just gonna go straight to biting instead of feigning polite confusion if you're gonna be a bigot this time, just so you know.
the phrase "this machine kills fascists" has gone through enough layers of meaning that I think it's come all the way back around to where the funniest thing you could put it on would be a gun
There is a very specific kind of sadness in realizing your parents loved you, and still did not always know how to meet your emotional needs.
Because it is confusing. It would almost feel easier if there was no love there at all. But sometimes there was love. In the way they tried to protect you. In the sacrifices they made. In the ways they worried about you, cared for you, wanted a good life for you.
And at the same time, there were still things missing.
Maybe comfort did not come in the way you needed it to. Maybe your feelings were not always understood, or noticed, or handled gently. Maybe you learned to keep certain parts of yourself quiet because it felt easier than trying to explain them.
That kind of hurt is difficult because it does not always come from cruelty. Sometimes it comes from people who loved you deeply, but did not know how to emotionally connect in the ways you needed. People carrying their own wounds, limitations, fears, or ways of surviving.
And you are allowed to acknowledge both truths at once.
You are allowed to recognize their love and still grieve what you needed but did not receive. Those things do not cancel each other out.
Forgiveness, for a lot of people, is not pretending nothing hurt you. It is slowly accepting that someone can love you and still fall short of understanding you completely.
That does not make your pain dramatic. It does not make them monsters either. Sometimes it just means everyone was trying with the emotional tools they had, and some of those tools were not enough.
And I think many people quietly carry guilt for still feeling hurt by parents they know tried their best. But being loved imperfectly can still leave wounds. It makes sense that it affected you.
At the same time, you do not have to stay trapped only in anger forever either. Sometimes healing looks like understanding that your parents were human before they were parents. People shaped by their own experiences, their own upbringing, their own emotional gaps.
That understanding does not erase your feelings. It just softens the sharp edges around them a little.
You deserved emotional safety. You deserved gentleness. You deserved to feel understood, comforted, and emotionally close to the people raising you.
And if they could not fully give that to you, it is okay to mourn it.
But I hope you also know this: the love you needed is still something you can experience in your life. Through other people. Through chosen family. Through the way you learn to treat yourself now.
The story does not end at what you did or did not receive growing up.
You are still allowed softness after all of it đ¤
When people talk about all art being political (hard agree) they always talk about the content, themes, etc present within the art itself. Which obviously I get and obviously is a huge part of it. Of course. But Iâm personally always struck by the politics surrounding the more metatextual elements of the art; that is, stuff like access to the tools needed for the creation of the art. I mean the literal materials of which an artpiece is made. This is a low-hanging-fruit example but Iâm reminded of that Disney adult who tried to claim art isnât inherently political by being like âI just drew a stick figure on a napkin, is that political? đ¤Łđ¤Łâ & while I think there are multiple different angles from which one could criticize this blatantly pathetic argument, I remember being really struck by like⌠the flagrant âwasteâ of implicitly throwaway resources that many parts of the world just literally donât have and/or that carry with them deeply fraught histories of capitalist labor exploitation and destruction of natural resources. Like. Napkins?? The apolitical canvas that is paper napkins?
women are like diamonds: synthetically-produced women are not meaningfully different from naturally-formed women, and anyone trying to tell you otherwise is probably trying to justify keeping their women mines open
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 âTank Manâ. This is one of the most iconic photographs of the century.
Itâs actually been 27 years now since the incident known as the Tiananmen Square Massacre occurred.
The picture above, famously referred to as âThe Tank Manâ 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?
Iâm 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 doesnât have time to deal with these sorts of âdemandsâ 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 dayâŚ
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
âTell the worldâŚâ
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 doesnât even acknowledge the event as a âmassacreâ. And they weaves these cover stories of âcounter revolutionaries trying to overthrow the governmentâ. 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?
âŚâŚâŚâŚwell, 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.
Tiananmen Square happened when I was seven, and letâs 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, âJust be glad your father isnât in China, now.â
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 donât 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 donât say, that you canât express in a public forum, because that can get you and your family in trouble. You just knew, and it didnât fucking matter if your were a child or an adult.
To this day I donât 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 fatherâs 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. Iâm 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 didnât happen it was such a relief.
When I found out years later that Chinese people a few years younger than me didnât know what happened in Tiananmen Square I was so fucking angry. I canât 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 dadâs part. I donât 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.
this was submitted as a one sentence horror story, but it feels like it could be an old jewish joke, like the one about the two rabbis proving g-d doesn't exist or the saying 'people plan, g-d laughs'
Even more, it sounds like the beginning -- the set-up -- of the joke. Canât you hear Carl Reiner opening a bit with this line, or Shalom Aleichem using it to kick off a story?
Well I'm not quite an old Jewish man just yet, but let me give it a shot...
Losing confidence in Himself, G-d became an atheist. He decided to go down to Earth, to walk among humans and see how they found meaning.
He wandered the world until he came to a town, where he happened upon a pastor. "Come to our church this Sunday!" said the pastor. But G-d shook his head. "I don't believe in G-d anymore," he told the pastor sullenly. "And besides, I really shouldn't be working weekends." . . .
He continued wandering, and as night fell, he realized he had no money for a hotel. Walking down the darkening sidewalk, he passed many shivering folk, some young and thin, others old and worn and grizzle-bearded, looking not unlike himself. Just as the rain began to fall, he happened upon a priest. The priest looked him up and down, and said, "You look cold, my son. We're hosting a men's shelter at the church tonight; you can sleep there, and come to Mass tomorrow." This time G-d agreed. He slept well and was warm, and in the morning sat for Mass. They blessed him in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit, but he felt beside himself and decided to leave.
By this time G-d was quite hungry. He stopped by a deli, but still had no money, so all he could do was watch the fresh steaming bagels be made. On a bench outside the deli, a man was eating a bagel with lox. As he finished eating, G-d noticed there were still some scraps of food on the waxpaper. Unable to help himself, he asked if he could have the scraps, before the man threw it away. "Please sir, I'm so hungry. I'd just like that crumb of bagel there, and that little shred of lox. I think I could make a bisl of fish last quite a while." The man shook his head. "I cannot in good conscience give you my trash," he said, "But come inside, I'll get you your own bagel. I'd offer to get you coffeeâbut that's trash too."
So the man bought G-d some breakfast and sat with him on the bench. "Thank you so much," said G-d. "How can I ever repay you?" But the man just shrugged and said, "I'm a rabbi. Buying bagels I don't get to eat is part of the job description."
G-d thanked the rabbi again, and ate in silence. "Rabbi, can I ask you a question? I feel I haven't been on this Earth too long, but already I've seen much misery. How do you do it? How do you still believe in G-d?"
The rabbi pondered this. "I believe in joyful things. I believe in kindness, and people choosing to help each other. And isn't that a kind of godliness?" (G-d suspected there was a bit more to godliness than that, but he let it slide.) The rabbi continued: "I've prayed to G-d every day for the last 30 years, and I will every day til I die. And if He answers my prayers, all the better! But tell me, my new friend, what's your name?" G-d hesitated and said, "It's a little hard to pronounce..." The rabbi chuckled and said, "No matter. Say, it won't be anything like Shabbos dinner, but my wife is baking a delightful fig pie today, and I'd like to have you over for dinner to enjoy it." G-d nodded. "I do like figs..."
That evening, G-d sat for dinner with the rabbi, the rabbi's wife, and their four children. The meal was delicious, the rabbi's family was incredibly welcoming. Their conversation was friendly but never prying, and the children laughed and played with each other. Several times, the youngest child tugged on G-d's sleeve for his attention before her father motioned for her to go play with her siblings. G-d began to see what the rabbi had meant about the joyfulness of life.
At the end of the night, G-d stood up to leave, and felt renewed. The rabbi said, "My friend, don't leave us so soon!" And G-d replied, "I will always be with you, for I am the Lord Your G-d." And they understood it to be true.
He had done this sort of thing a few times before and generally knew how it went. As expected, the rabbi and his family fell to their knees, weeping with joy and awe. He did not expect the youngest child to walk right up and tug G-d's sleeve again. He smiled graciously down at her, and she looked up with the wonderful bright eyes of a child who understands nothing but the urge to play. In a high voice, she said, "Knock knock!" G-d couldn't help but laugh. "Who's there?" He replied cheerfully.
Suddenly from across the room, the rabbi swore loudly and rudely. Dismayed, G-d asked, "What troubles you?" He saw the rabbi was trembling, half in rage and half in embarrassment. "I'm sorry Lord! Thank you for this, thank you so much for gracing us with your light, Baruch Atah and so on, it's just..." The rabbi swore again. "Thirty years of daily prayer, Lord, and a KNOCK-KNOCK JOKE is what you'll answer?"
hey captain-acab, this is the highest compliment i can bestow: it would not have surprised me had i found that story in a book of traditional fables in the shul library
Look, someone has to be the first to make up any traditional Jewish story, why not @captain-acab? If we all keep telling it, then in a generation or two it'll be traditional.
Okay but you forgot the best part! During the scene where Aragorn, Gandalf and the other Main CharaktersTM ride ahead to go shout at the gate (and talk to the mouth of sauron in the extended edition) they were very firmly told only to ride up ahead âthis farâ because that area was cleared and beyond that it wasnât.
But. Viggo Mortensen is absolutely mad and lead them justâŚ. a bit farther than that. Everyone else was very scared they might blow up any second. Viggo said it âadded a little extra tensionâ.
Viggo was just Like That⢠for the whole trilogy, taking method acting to extreme levels:
he would spend multiple days walking overland to locations in full pack, sword, & armour when everyone else was travelling in trucks
refused to use any prop swords that werenât actual steel
basically lived in the forest in-costume, sleeping rough under the sky, even fishing & foraging for his food when possible
often spent hours in the barn just bonding with the horses. He adopted the horse he rode, Uranus, after filming ended
repaired all his own gear by hand, which was often since he never took it off
had a tooth knocked out during filming but had the crew simply glue it back in place so they could keep filming
the instructor who taught everyone swordplay said Viggo was the best swordsman he had ever trained
carried his sword literally everywhere & practiced non-stop, resulting in the cops being called when locals reported âa wild man swinging a sword around his head" outside a gym in Wellington
an orc actor fucked up & accidentally threw a dagger directly into Viggoâs face, but Viggo just deflected it with his sword. They kept that shot
infamously broke 3 toes kicking that helmet but stayed in-character & sold his very real scream as part of the scene. They also kept that shot
Viggo insists on doing his own stunts; in The Two Towers where Aragorn is unconscious & floating down the river, the strong current pulled him underwater for so long that a rescue team had to go in to save him. Viggo survived by grabbing a boulder on the riverbed and pulling himself to the surface
Itâs probably more accurate to say that Aragorn played Viggo Mortensen in the off season, so Iâm 100% unsurprised to hear he put a whole crowd of fellow actors in genuine mortal peril for a 12% increase in authenticity
Anyway one of the best things you can do for engaging with political discourse is to stop viewing different analytical frameworks as competing teams or a decorative element to add to your bio, and instead view them as what they are: Methods of interpreting stuff that happens in the world, some more reliable than others, some more tailored to specific situations than others.
And then also recognize that sometimes individuals deploy those frameworks badly.
Which in turn means that when you see an absolutely shit take from someone who's usually spot-on with their analysis inside their preferred framework, you can just go "oh, they're outside their domain of applicability, what a shame" and move on with your day.
A big one to avoid is taking the knowledge from a framework meant for analyzing large-scale power structures, learning about how those affect material conditions at population levels, and then starting to go "ohhhh am I being Bad At The Framework if I try to change my material conditions with individual actions" to which the answer is... no. That's just outside the scope of the framework.
That's all to say that when you see someone from any branch of feminism starting to slip into "gals, is it heteropatriarchal if we do lesbian BDSM" you can just laugh to yourself and go "haha, she's individualizing the systemic analysis" and move on instead of trying to formulate a Theory Of How Being A Good Girl For Dommy Mommy Is Actually Super Feminist to counter.
blakekathryn
tangentwithtanner
