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@writersdreamermind
I have started a Substack!
For all things dark, depraved and deadly, just a girl in eyeliner is my new substack exploring goth subculture (kinda) and my interests (most certainly). I hope you'll read along! xxx
from the graveyard of goth subculture (and other limbs). Click to read "just a girl in eyeliner.", by eithne shearer, a Substack publication
life (my cat) always finds a way (to sleep on my clearly-not-comfortable legs)
“…use things to have good days.”
the loading screen trying to convince me to use even one of my 3000 consumables
listen i'm not advocating for exotic animals as pets, but i really just feel like cheetahs are probably different
i feel like we need to give them another shot as housebeasts
this is a critter who wants greenies and then to take a nap on the couch next to me, and i KNOW it
cheetah in House perfec t size for put inside! inside very Soft and Comfort cheetah sleep soundly put cheetah in House. Put Cheetah In House. no problems ever in cheetah in ho use because good Happy and Satisfy for human where sleep. House yes a place for a cheetah put cheetah in house can trust cheetah for giveing good love to humans in house. friend cheetah
I mean, as someone who as worked in a zoo, this is fairly true.
Obvious disclaimer that you shouldn't have wild animals as pets.
But like, cheetahs are the only large cats that keepers will do free contact with. Hell, even most small cats don't get free contact. (Because small cats can be VICIOUS. They'll have a baby pallas cat wearing thicker gloves than when handling an owl. Because small cats can just be vicious.)
Like I think the only other cat at our zoo where I've seen free contact with was servals? Because I know they've used servals in shows to demonstrate their natural jumping ability. But I know servals can sometimes have a mean temper as well. Meanwhile they'll do the cheetah run and afterwards put the mic by the cheetahs and it's just like an engine with them purring. It's fascinating to watch when the message in every other large animal is "no free contact because it's dangerous even when they're born in captivity".
Legit if any wild animal could be adapted to a pet it would be cheetahs lmao. Only problem is they can be skittish and very anxious and that's why they're often raised around dogs in zoos to gain confidence.
congrats, i award you funniest take on this post
(ID: tags from url lost in life 3 2 1 that say “im sorry but im cackling at the thought of telling a cat “hey whats in your mouth?” and having to chase The Fastest Land Mammal On Earth”)
he's really having the time of his life 🥺 (insp)
WAKE UP DEAD MAN: A Knives Out Mystery 2025, dir. Rian Johnson
#a wonderful depiction of “he'll die a saint but she'll always be a whore” @ratfc
Let’s not forget to acknowledge Alexandre Dumas this Black History Month
The writer of two of the most well known stories worldwide, The Three Musketeers and The Count of Monte Cristo was a black man.
That’s excellence.
Let’s not forget that he was played on screen by a white man. And the fact that he was black is barely ever mentioned or the book he wrote inspired by his experiences.
Other things not to forget about Alexandre Dumas:
chose to take on his slave grandmother’s last name, Dumas, like his father did before him.
grew up too poor for formal education, so was largely self-taught, including becoming a prolific reader, multilingual, well-travelled, and a foodie, resulting in his writing both a combination encyclopedia/cookbook (which just— is fucking outrageous to me) AND the adaptation of The Nutcracker on which Tchaikovsky based his ballet
he also wrote a LOOOOT of nonfiction and fiction about history, politics, and revolution, bc he was pro-monarchy, but a radical cuss, and that got him in a lot of hot water at home and abroad.
even beyond that, he generally put up with a lot of racist bullshit in France, so he went and wrote a novel about colonialism and a BLATANTLY self-insert anti-slavery vigilante hero (which he then cribbed from to write the Count of Monte Cristo, the main character of which, Edmond Dantés, Dumas also based on himself).
(…a novel which also features a LOAD of PoC beyond the Count, and at LEAST one queer character, btw, bc EVERY MOVIE ADAPTATION OF ANYTHING BY DUMAS IS A LIE; seriously, at LEAST one of the four Musketeers is Black, y'all.)
famously, when some fuckshit or other wanted to come at Dumas with some anti-Black foolishness, Dumas replied, “My father was a mulatto, my grandfather was a Negro, and my great-grandfather a monkey. You see, Sir, my family starts where yours ends.”
for the bicentennial of his birthday, Pres. Jacques Cirac was like, “…sorry about the hella racism,” and had Dumas’s ashes reinterred at the Panthéon of Paris, bc if you’re gonna keep the corpses of the cream of the crop all together, Dumas’s more widely read and translated than literally everybody else.
and they are still finding stuff old dude wrote, seriously; like discovering “lost” works as recently as 2002, publishing stuff for the first time as recently as 2005.
ALSO IMPORTANT:
SWAG
I am absolutely ashamed to admit I had NO idea Dumas was black.
when this post first went around (a year ago apparently) I was like BUT WHAT ABOUT DADDY DUMAS THOUGH because basically
daddy general dumas was an immense fierce french warrior who was a 6 foot plus, stunningly gorgeous and charismatic Black gentleman
he invaded egypt
the native egyptians said “is this napoleon? this must be napoleon. we for one welcome our majestic new overlord”
then napoleon showed up
napoleon has all the presence of yesterday’s plain Tesco hummus
the native egyptians were like “… no… no, we’ve thought very hard and we’ll have General Dumas actually”
this did not make napoleon happy
in fact it made him jealous
napoleon felt so emasculated that he launched a campaign of revenge against General Dumas, including taking away his pension, that probably inspired a lot of Alexandre’s rather satisfying scenes in which fathers are nobly avenged and the money-grubbing villains are rubbed in the mud
I was never taught that he was Black either. WTF.
General Dumas (aka Thomas Alexandre Davy de La Pailleterie) looked like this…
…and like this…
…while “Napoleon has all the presence of yesterday’s plain Tesco hummus“…
:-D
I suspect Alexandre Dumas would have laughed at that, because besides looking like someone who laughed a lot…
…he was also a foodie.
He was also born in present-day Haiti. Back then, it was the French colony of Saint-Domingue.
General Dumas was also the highest ranking officer of African descent to have command of a European army. EVER.
His stuff is in the public domain, you can find them on Project Gutenberg here:
Project Gutenberg offers 73,007 free eBooks for Kindle, iPad, Nook, Android, and iPhone.
And for those of you who would like to try audio versions, this is what is on LibriVox, the free, volunteer run audiobook version of Project Gutenberg:
LibriVox
Tell me, Emma. Have I no chance of ever succeeding? My dearest Emma, for dearest you will always be, my dearest, most beloved Emma, tell me at once. I cannot make speeches. If I… If I loved you less then I might be able to talk about it more… but you… you… You know what I am. I have lectured you and I have blamed you and you have borne it as no other woman in England could have borne it. God knows I have been a very indifferent lover. But you understand me. You understand my feelings. Will you marry me?
EMMA WOODHOUSE & GEORGE KNIGHTLEY Emma.│2020
New York City's new mayor is unplugging a disastrous government chatbot that encouraged small business owners to break the law.
And the funniest part?
this framing really winds me up. no knock on mamdani, but a lot of these key changes are the result of a tremendous amount of unsung work by the DWCP and other agencies and lawmakers. he’s not flipping switches that other politicians have refused to touch, he’s arriving at the moment those switches are ready to flip.
there’s just something off about giving all the credit to a charismatic socialist and ignoring the collective work that made these things actually possible, y’know?
This is exactly what bothers me. Changes like this take hundreds of people and thousands of hours of work to pull off. Everyone wants to sneer at the idea that important things take time, effort, and money to implement, and use Mamdani as evidence that everyone who claims it can't be done in 5 minutes with some elbow grease is a scam artist and a liar, but it's flat out not true.
In Mamdani's own speech, he says:
"Under President Biden, the FTC took sweeping action to go after junk fees and they delivered change. Under Chair Leader Khan, they instituted a junk fees rule that they estimated would save Americans 53 million hours a year that they would otherwise spend searching for the true price that they would have to pay, or $11 billion in time savings over a decade. We are going to deliver similar action on behalf of the 8.5 million New Yorkers who call our city home."
Lawmakers and agencies have been working to eliminate junk fees since at LEAST 2023, when Gavin Newsom signed a bill banning junk fees in California. Biden then took up the work with the FTC, targeting hidden fees on live event tickets. Biden went on to work with the CFPB to remove junk fees on banks and credit cards. The CFPB is continuing this work, which you can learn more about over here.
Even with the Chatbot thing -- Mamdani didn't just turn it off. He (and especially his crew) worked up a report to show where funds were being wasted in city government, and then did a presentation on it where he pointed to the specific failure of the Chatbot. He still had to go through a process to prove why he was taking action, it just so happened that this was comparatively quick fix, on account of being one single program running on one single government website.
#stop ignoring the work #it has to get done #there is no loophole #there is no perfect person who can just make things happen #there are only people doing the work #and people continuing the work until it is done (via beezelbubbies)
Yes to all of this.
BUT, and this is important, there has to be a leader who wants to do the damn work and who wants these projects enacted.
Yes hundreds of people worked on these, but you wanna know why these things weren't happening under Mayor Adams? Because he didn't care. So he didn't order them to work on it. Because, and this is important, government employees arent going to work on a project unless ordered to. Especially when they've been assigned to work on something else.
Leadership matters. Anyone claiming otherwise hasn't been paying attention to the world the last few years.
I had a more sustinct version of this in one of my reblog tags, but basically yeah. People can do all the work they want, but when the person holding the reigns of the budget tells them the pound sand, that work comes to nothing but wasted effort. Both the hard effort of people on the ground floor and the coordination and cooperation from the people in power are needed for effective change. If one or the other is missing, we get what we've had the last couple decades: stagnation and regression.
Please for the love of all things good and true in the world, remember this!!! The progress DOES actually take time and budget! Drill it into your head as we go into the midterm election season!!! There are already people in the comments of this very post comparing Mamdani to encumbant Republicans because "he's just breaking things". That's not what is happening here!
Anyone who bleats about socialist Democrats being the same (or worse!) than conservative Republicans is either an idiot or a psyops. Block them, drown them out and remember that progress is a journey made one step at a time.
#beat it played on traditional chinese instruments #and saxophones
I was gonna like, describe the video but prevs tags already did that. Yeah, that's the video. It's definitely fun.
Shout out to the (many) times I got called an elitist gatekeeper for saying that the only real way to fully understand a work of fiction is to experience it firsthand and that summaries and reviews are not a replacement for that
Me, reading the first 80% of the post: What do you mean, "experience it firsthand"? How am I supposed to join the Hunger Games or go on the Odyssey?
Me, reading the final clause of the post: Oh, you literally meant that people have to read the book/listen to the audiobook in order to fully understand it. And people got mad. Oh dear.
To quote what a friend of mine said after she watched Jerry Maguire (1996) for the first time, having thought she knew what it was about because of its cultural ubiquity: “you miss a lot of a movie when you don’t watch it”
let’s be primitive horses with mama
111 Family Business is ingrained in my brain Gerry Keay you will always be famous in my heart
dear usamerican high schoolers looking for a way to resist fascism: sit through the pledge of allegiance.
no getting up. no looking at the flag.
everyone will be looking at you. you'll be sweating like a fucking hippopotamus. your teacher will sternly tell you to get up. you'll feel stupid and that maybe its not worth it because you're just a kid in a classroom. but I'm here to remind you that there are no real life consequences to detention. there are however real life consequences to resisting a thoughtless performance of nationalism.
not to talk tough but i have sat through every pledge of allegiance in my life, and that includes the bush administration's hyper-patriotic war on terror.
you can NOT be compelled to say the pledge, and that also means you can't be given the 'choice' of doing it or taking a punishment. being sent into the hall is a grey area.
if you are punishing for refusing, parents or a more sympathetic teacher (like say a history or english teacher) can step in to intercede with the principal. do not be afraid to escalate.
it is critical now of all times that you PRACTICE civil disobedience, starting small, sticking to it, and working up, this will help you learn how very much disobedience you can actually get away with in this life, which is actually a hell of a lot.
I’m not even an anti-internet person like I love the internet, I just get so frustrated with the passive way people have become accustomed to using it now. not actively seeking things out or engaging with communities, just turning their brain off & letting the algorithm feed them whatever it wants. & I can’t help but feel like that’s partially to blame for the current state of things (anti-“woke” backlash is easier to digest if you turn your brain off when online)
there are so many amazing things to do online… find recipes, look at your friends’ weird art, download PDFs, join a book club, learn a language or a new skill, look thru archives… so I just get frustrated that these things are being lost in favor of Consuming Content
enough paintings of saints where they're looking heavenward in ecstatic agony or down with love and mercy on their onlookers as they ascend. we need more paintings where the martyr is looking accusatorily directly at the viewer.
[touches earpiece] oops sorry guys i forgot that the catholic church is more interested in the performance of guilt than the reality of it. my bad for real.
