Building Wings

The story of Icarus does not teach us to know our limitations, but rather the limitations of wax. Build your own wings out of better materials. Hello, I'm Shiloh! This is my main account where I reblog anything I feel like and flirt with my gf a lot. I have other accounts, so if you want to see videos of me playing guitar + some other creative content, visit @helloimshiloh if you're interested in my art, you can find it at @shicolor and if you're a Queen fanatic, check out @news-of-the-weird (feel free to message me anytime, I love new friends!) 

[creativespacetime]

Written by Joeo

Image Credit: Cheezburger

@explore-blog @staff @scienceandfood @physicsphysics @mathematics-field-gbc @timelightbox @cosmologypsychology-blog @ms-mazariegos @generalinternetyouth @normalweirdoboy @vivilon @spaceeblack @c-s-o-l @blogdopastel @art @life @lady-yiyika-1929 @spaceaholicc @katenkahaik @coucou-ca-va @educational-gifs @malefica67 @tmifangirl24 @tobinatus1 @tremendouslydecadentfire @nature @jag4488

[compoundchem]

It’s October, which in the Northern Hemisphere means spiders are out and about – and there are plenty of spider webs about 🕸️ Here’s the science behind their elasticity and surprising strength in C&EN: https://ift.tt/3lb7yhA https://ift.tt/3ip3Te9

[detailedart]

Detail : Spring Scattering Stars, 1927, by Edwin Blashfield.

[gaphic]

‘pop’ is pretty heinous but like, I’ll accept it, yknow? it’s just the other half of ‘soda-pop,’ like how ‘cab’ and ‘taxi’ are the two halves of ‘taxicab.’ it’s fine. it’s chill.

but coke? that’s a fucking brand name! of a specific drink with a specific flavor! that shits RUDE, it’s CONFUSING, it’s DOWNRIGHT NONSENSICAL! fuckin misusing the art of language to confound your fellow man! the gall! learn some fucking respect

[saturniidae-served-cold]

No it just happens sometimes. Its like jell-o, kleenex, popsicle, scotch tape. It just happens.

[mothric]

But that’s not a good parallel at all. You can’t compare calling Sprite “coke” like a lawless heathen to the classic linguistic phenomenon of generic trademarks / proprietary eponyms, and I’ll tell you why:

‘Jell-o’ is a brand name under which multiple flavours of gelatin (and pudding/custard) are produced. There isn’t just “Jell-o” and then special “strawberry Jell-o”; the name has never denoted just one specific flavour.

‘Popsicle’ is the same as Jello, it was never a name for just one flavour of popsicle.  

‘Kleenex’ is a specific brand of tissues, but it’s not inherently that distinct from other tissues. They are all lightweight tissues used to blow your nose.

‘Scotch tape’ is used to refer to any tape that is like the original scotch tape, i.e., clear, thin, small, sticky on one side. We don’t call all tape ‘scotch tape’. Electric tape, duct tape, and packing tape are all their own things, and anybody who calls any of them ‘scotch tape’ has no regard for their fellow man and ought to be thrown into the sea.

MEANWHILE, Coca-Cola is a specific kind of soda with its own distinct flavour. When Coca-Cola makes other flavours, they’re called “vanilla Coke,” “cherry Coke,” etc. but “Coke” is still its own standalone flavour, a wholly other Thing apart from the “special” flavours the company produces. 

It would make far more sense if people used ‘coke’ the way we use ‘scotch tape’; that is, to denote only those sodas that are similar in appearance and taste to Coca-Cola (Pepsi, RC, Shasta Cola, etc.). I could see all of those being lumped in under a generic term ‘coke’. I could even see it being extended to all brown sodas, even though comparing Root Beer to Coke is like comparing a badger to a zebra just because they’re both black-and-white mammals. You’re on thin fucking ice but at least there’s still some semblance of logic.

But no. You southerners, who bask in your sun and heat and chew upon your wheat stems with the indifference of an armadillo in the face of oncoming traffic, you who revel in lawlessness and chaos, you linguistic delinquents who fear neither God nor man, 

you are really going to look at a list of drinks that includes such variety in taste and apperance as Sprite, Mountain Dew, Mountain Dew Code Red, Orange Fanta, and Dr. Pepper, and call it all “Coke.” 

You’re going to picture, in your mind, a clear, lemon-lime fizzy drink and request “coke.” And then when asked “what kind?” you will not say “Coke Zero,” “Diet Coke,” or “Cherry Coke,” no. You will answer “Sprite,” like an animal, like a feral possum who knows the ways of right and wrong and chooses wrong just to spite its creator. 

And then you have the gall to say it’s an eponym as valid as ‘Jello’. No. You tossed your logic into the dumpster fires of the underworld long ago, you cannot justify it now. You cannot tell me you don’t know your own crimes. “It’s all coke,” you say, and you taste the sin of it on your tongue, and you laugh. Know this, that you are inviting judgment upon yourself and one day you will be devoured by the sun.

[agardenandlibrary]

As a southerner, this is the funniest damn thing I’ve ever read.

[finnglas]

I’m from Alabama. Members of my family have ordered Coke, and when asked, “What kind?” replied, “Sweet tea.” Where is your God now?

[roguemortal]

Instructing Satan to boil everyone who does this in Coca-cola for eternity. Flat coke too.

[whitepeopletwitter]

[meetnategreen]

In 2016, over 75,000 mail-in ballots were left uncounted and discarded because they were received after  mail-in voting deadlines, which all vary by state, according to CBS news. 

Some states like California allow you to check with the Registrar of Voters on-line to verify both if a ballot has issued and if it was received to help prevent voting errors.

Remember, the most common forms of voter fraud are 1) gerrymandering, 2) voter suppression and 3) foreign participation through both lobbying and online misinformation. 

[someweirdjew]

OCTOBER 13. IT’S BEING DELIBERATELY SLOWED. OCTOBER 13.

[museumnelson]

Also know that in most states you can also drop it off either at a polling place or the county elections office too

[atypical-snowman]

The postal service is being deliberately slowed.

[deavydealer-deactivated20260306]

i’m not american but i’m still reblogging this

[official-lucifers-child]

please please please everyone who can vote make sure you’re registered and check when your ballot needs to be in. they are deliberately slowing things down so be careful and cautious about this, play it safe.

[whitepeopletwitter]

[littlestarlost]

I theorize that queer people might love the italicized “oh” moment in romance novels and fanfics because we experienced it in real life, when we realized we were queer. We’ve had that moment where all the pieces clicked together and suddenly everything makes sense. We’ve stood dumbfounded as a ton of little things suddenly stand out blazing in hindsight. We’ve realized how obvious it’s been, all this time, and suddenly everything seems different and terrifying and wonderful. We’ve had that seismic shift, learning something that can never ever ever be unlearned. And genuinely, the only thing you can really say is oh.

It’s part of our love language. I will use it in every fanfic I write until I die.

[thelastofmeforever]

I relate to this but I didn't know why until now

[31st]

i have to tell you something that will lower your entire opinion of me

[31st]

when i was 12 i made flyers for my fanfiction and handed them out a train station

[edgebug]

im blown away by the sheer confidence this act required. if anything my opinion has been raised. the poise. the fearlessness. the laughing in the face of death. i’m speechless

[amandaherzman]

flowers that bloom in the night

[hurglewurm]

this is a comic abt looking at the sun. don’t look at the sun

[dutchster]

Party Rock Anthem has the same BPM as Uptown Girl (x)

[richiefuckfacetozier]

This is my favorite thing to exist

[kaspbrak-eddie]

all the gays when this song comes on in the club

[moustachefreddie]

Visit Original Link

In the left ear, you’ll hear Bohemian Rhapsody from 1979. In the right, it’s 1986. 

I really tried

[moonlightchess]

I’m an atheist. I used to be extremely religious, mostly because I was thoroughly brainwashed, conditioned and indoctrinated since before I could really talk to be terrified of my grandmother’s church’s hell and demons (whom I was told were responsible for everything from my childhood epilepsy to my birth parents abandoning me, usually because of some grievous sin I’d committed. At like, 4 years old.) This post isn’t about my incredibly traumatic history with organized religion so I’m not really going to get into that, but the point is that I have long since lost all ability to accept anything I can’t prove or see, touch and hear. And believe me, I MISS it - I miss the security and comfort of faith, the fulfillment of feeling like I’m part of something so much bigger than me, the warmth of love from a god I used to be absolutely sure existed. I miss the sense of purpose and mission, I miss the identity. I can never go back and find those things in religion again, but my friend Adrian has. 

He’s a Catholic priest now, officially, he finished seminary recently. We met when I was in college and he was part of an outreach program from his church to help mend relationships between the local church presence and my college’s LGBT support group. Adrian is one of the kindest, gentlest, most optimistic and compassionate people I’ve ever known. He’s shockingly (at least to me) progressive for a priest, and I fully admit to grilling him when we first met, trying to root out his hidden conservative shittiness that I was sure lurked under the surface of his patient smile. I would try to trick him into admitting that he secretly thought gays were going to hell, or black people didn’t belong in the priesthood, or even things like his opinions on American borders or healthcare reform. Adrian shamed me with how incredibly understanding and tolerant he was of my constant barrage of attempts to prove he was as awful as the people who raised me and saw me in church every Sunday.

Once, when I was doing just this, he laughed and said, “Teddy. Jesus was black, science is real, and god loves gay people. There really are those among the clergy who know this to be true, and I promise I’m one of them. I completely understand why you’re suspicious though.” The thing that gets me is, knowing him makes the loss of faith hurt more than it would otherwise I think. I might have become someone like Adrian, had I not been exposed to the horrors and lies slithering under the shiny surface of religion early on. I wish I could know Adrian’s religion, his faith that clearly brings him so much peace and serenity and love for the world and everyone in it, even the worst of us. 

Getting to know him has scraped that old wound raw, one I thought I’d healed by embracing only the proven and logical and dismissing anything that demanded blind faith. If god were real, I told myself, he or she or they or it wouldn’t need or want to demand blind faith. Nothing worth believing in requires you to close your eyes and stick your head in the sand and ignore rationale. The justifications always grated on me too, the easy and convenient defense that “well, if my prayers aren’t answered it’s because god had a different plan, and if they were then that was also god, hooray!” It smacked of deliberately tailored comfort, a defense mechanism to protect our fragile human brains against the vast meaninglessness of reality.

But sometimes Adrian will text me and ask if I want coffee, he’s always up early in the mornings because that’s who he is and I usually am because I sleep like shit and I often have early work shifts. And when I meet him, sometimes it’s cool and brisk and pearl-gray and we’re in knitted scarves and boots and his collar isn’t visible under his layers but it is, it radiates all around him like a halo of his own and he sips his dark roast and tips his head back to look up at the quiet dawn blooming like he knows something I don’t, something he’s aching for me to find on my own because it’s the only way I will. In those moments, I remember the stirrings of faith, how it felt to wonder if maybe the violent, furious, terrifying god of my grandmother’s was a complete misinterpretation of the kind of god who was really out there, sharing those dawns and that coffee and that peace with us. I used to look for that quiet god in between all the screaming and shrieking in tongues and judgment and hellfire and horror and hatred of my family’s church, but I could never find them and finally I gave up. I told Adrian about this today, on my day off during our early coffee run.

“Of course you did,” he said. “They didn’t just demand blind faith of you, they yanked a blindfold around your heart and made you stumble through all their hellfire desperately looking for the living god. They had no right, and no one can blame you for escaping as soon as you could. They were screaming in your ears so loudly you couldn’t hear the quiet god whispering, calling you. That’s the tragedy of it all, really. They took god from you and left you deaf and blind in the cold, lost and scarred. God doesn’t scream or swing fists. God whispers, and waits.”

[tamehill-deactivated20220804]

made some wallpapers for my desktop & decided to share 😔✊ 

[chiaccherastronza-deactivated20]

This hotel bar is full of people,

The piano man is really laying it down,

The old bartender is as high as a steeple,

So why tonight should I wear a frown?

The joint is jumpin' all around me,

And my mood is really not in style,

Right now the blues flock to surround me,

But I'll break out after a while.

Yes I'm a million miles away,

I'm a million miles away,

I'm sailing like a driftwood,

On a windy bay,

On a windy bay.

I'm a million miles away,

I'm a million miles away,

But I'm sailing like a driftwood,

On a windy bay,

On a windy bay.

Why ask how I feel,

Well, how does it look to you?

I fell hook, line and sinker,

Lost my captain and my crew.

I'm standing on the landing,

There's no one there but me,

That's where you'll find me,

Looking out on the deep blue sea.

There's a song on the lips of everybody,

There's a smile all around the room,

There's conversation overflowing,

But I sit here with the blues.

This hotel bar has lost all its people,

The piano man has caught the last bus home,

The old bartender just collapsed in the corner,

Why I'm still here, I just don't know,

I don't know.

I'm a million miles away,

A million miles away,

I'm sailing like a driftwood on a windy bay,

On a windy bay.

I'm a million miles away,

A million miles away,

I'm sailing like a driftwood on a windy bay,

Send me away...

[soothifying-sounds-asmr]

Northern Ballad by Andrey Vinogradov

[cdn-apex-predator]

@northern-storms

[alpine-hoplite]

This song has vibes of drinking the night before battle with your friends, knowing that most of you wont make it

[itshybridqueen]

Three times she raised her arms to stars and sky, And three times wheeled about and three times splashed Her hair with moonlit water from a brook Three times she screamed, then fell upon her knees To pray: ‘O night, night, night! Whose darkness holds All mysteries in shade, O flame-lit stars, Whose golden rays with Selene floating near Are like the fires of day - and you, O Hekate Who know untold desires that work our will And art the mistress of our secret spells.

Medea in Ovid’s Metamorphoses (via itshybridqueen)