not to be positive on main but sometimes things really are ok. sometimes you really will be happy and safe and warm. sometimes you really will be giggly and blushy and full of love. sometimes the night is chilly and your home is cozy and your tea is perfectly steeped and your phone lights up with a message from someone you love. sometimes life really is quite lovely.
I’m pretty sure those are ptarmigan tracks, not those of a rabbit who got scooped up by something! They’re birds that hop through the snow and then leave those snow-angel imprints when they take off.
I’d also honestly be kind of surprised if a predatory bird swooping down on a prey animal just left nice clean imprints like that and not a bigger disturbance in the snow.
This took an interesting twist and i gotta say i am very fond of how it ended.
My son once came back from a record shop visit with his uncle and with wide eyes and excited smile presented me with a cassette tape. “Look what I found!” As though he’d unearthed ancient pottery at a dig sight.
I love it. I love when my kids discover something that I take for granted. I hear songs with new ears because they are in a state of wonder. My son played me “Paint it Black” the other day, I’m like yeah Rolling Stones so what? And then I see his face and that LOOK like he just discovered sunsets and he’s like yeah but listen to this part, listen to the guitar right here - and I hear a song anew. Like watching a puppy see a bird for the first time, and oh oh right yeah birds are fucking amazing, forgot about that.
#finally a comment that doesn’t have disdain for kids discovering old things #isn’t it cool that someone didn’t know Queen and they got to hear it for the first time? #isn’t it cool to witness that excitement?
I think this is largely why “react” channels on YouTube have become so popular. Watching someone experience something you love for the first time is exciting. Rediscovering that thing through their eyes is also exciting.
Seeing the notes on posts about the Burning Man Debacle™ and for fucks sake I am taking the phrase ‘eat the rich’ away from y'all until you can CORRECTLY IDENTIFY the rich
Rich is 'arrived by way of their private jet’, is 'dropped $500k on a submarine ticket’, is ’$500 is a rounding error’.
’$500 dollars for a nine day event they must all be rich white people’ no you reactionary rotten potato that is actually an entirely reasonable price for an entirely normal person to pay for an annual event! $500 over the course of a year is approximately equivalent to one big takeout a month! Being able to afford that doesn’t make you rich it makes you probably not poor! The 'rich or poor’ narrative is a false dichotomy that completely excludes the fact that 'richness’ or 'poorness’ is a SCALE! It’s not fucking categorical! You don’t one day magically flip a switch and go from 'poor’ to 'rich’ or vice versa you see incremental changes over time! Wealth distribution is a (these days, admittedly, rather wonky) motherfucking BELL CURVE! . The fact that capitalism is driving more and more people to either extreme of said curve is just evidence of a broken system, but it doesn’t change the fact that most people should have a decent amount of disposable income!
The fact that many people don’t have said disposable income doesn’t magically make the ones that do 'rich’ it makes everyone else poor. And the people at fault for the massive and growing percentage of people living below the poverty line are not the ones managing to stay above it, it’s the fault of the actually rich, the ones stealing our time and our health and our wages and our future in pursuit of a number on a screen. And the rich are the only people you’re helping by hating the people struggling slightly less than you.
When it comes time to 'eat the rich’ you’re going to be murdering dentists and librarians and scientists while the actually rich point and laugh from a safe distance as you solve their problems for them.
Some of you don’t care about change, you’re just hurt and bloodthirsty and want a soft target without having to learn anything.
squeeful:
#think of it this way #poor people can’t go to burning man #or maybe could every few years #not-poor people go annually #working wealthy get paid millions to perform there #the actual rich? #can buy the festival #but yeah that last line
When it comes time to 'eat the rich’ you’re going to be murdering dentists and librarians and scientists while the actually rich point and laugh from a safe distance as you solve their problems for them.
Not to be an extra downer, but OP is entirely correct and moreover, when you notice people from former communist bloc countries or for that matter from currently communist countries or those of us with more knowledge-base than a poorly educated squirrelviolently recoil from your “eat the rich” rhetoric?
It’s because this isn’t hypothetical to them. It happened. It is literally what fucking happened.
This is not an obscure risk. This is historically what has happened. And as with most things, the second that you add any other kind of axis of Otherness (the Black doctor; the queer dentist; the GNC librarian; the Jewish architect), the usual thing happens and the targeting becomes disproportionate.
Again. This is not hypothetical. Thisisliterallyhistory. Literally. The real meaning of “literally” in the case of some of those links. (Yes, every one of the wiki links above has hefty sources in the claims that you can follow back to the primary sources of the survivors and subsequent researchers.) This is “dekulakization”, aka “we will distract everyone from our own failures by targeting farmers who have slightly more comfortable lives than the other farmers and convincing everyone they are the problem” aka “one of the many USSR atrocities committed significantly on Ukraine.”
This is “round up all the PhDs and ship them to farm-labour concentration camps in the country because they are Enemies of the Revolution”. And even in the cases where the “actually rich” do die (instead of escaping and disappearing into comfort), shockingly it seems a new hyper-unequal elite arise, as untouchable and disproportionately powerful as the old “rich” were, because the second poster is also right and there have been times when that group became the dominant one and swept everyone in its wake and we have the fucking body counts.
And finally: while yes, the fee is in fact a barrier for many, if you think there are no poor people at Burning Man you have in fact not met that many Burners. Of the ones I know, that 500$ fee is often the largest chunk of money they have in their hands in the year, and two of them go based on crowdfunded “sponsorships” because Burning Man is their psychological home and they do better going, and their friends and acquaintances care.
The cost as barrier of entry is an active and continual conversation in the community as I understand it (one of many, many active and continual fights conversations) because it’s a pretty damn large group of people whose only uniting feature is “they go to Burning Man”. Some of them are insufferable smug comfortably-off twats playing at Primitive Artist; some of them are quite unnerving individuals whose touch with reality one often worries about; many are marginal artists whose only privilege is a sufficiently unstable life that they can uproot and head to the desert for the duration on the regular because it’s not like they could afford to keep that apartment at home anyway; and then many are just … ordinary people who like that kind of thing.
This isn’t fucking Fyre Fest, people.
Oh, so I can literally just turn up at the gates of the event with the clothes I’m standing and zero measurable abilities and no connections or knowledge of people, and I’ll get food and shelter and companionship for nine days plus a ride home?
Oh, no, I need “skills” and food and camping gear, and I need to know a group of burners first?
Shit, bro, that sounds like wealth to me!
The point of this is not HURFDURF EEET THU RICH, the point is that saying “all Burning Man costs is $500” is vastly overlooking the degree of resources it takes to actually go there and do anything. Not all wealth is dollars, and “barter economy” doesn’t mean you don’t need wealth. Sometimes “wealth” is “knowing people”, sometimes it’s “can do useful things”. And you can say “well yeah but I can’t put a dollar value on friendship” and I’ll say, you know how much it costs to rent camping gear for nine days, and how Being Part Of A Group Of Burners means you don’t have to do it? That’s the dollar value of your friendship, in the moment.
Every time I see a response like this I just have to sit for a minute and be amazed at people’s ability to self righteously exemplify exactly the thing I’m talking about.
Me: having a disposable income is not the same as being wealthy and people need to stop conflating the two
screenshotted person: explaining how people pooled skills and resources in order to attend,with a goal of helping people improve their own skills
You: being able to attend burning man makes you rich, because you have to have friends, and bring your own food and supplies, instead of having them provided to you for free. I am making a valid point and not just highlighting my failed reading comprehension.
Actually, question: if you could show up with zero supplies and zero skills and receive food and shelter and companionship for nine days free of charge… Where are those supplies and tents and whatnot coming from? If being able to afford such makes someone rich… Doesn’t that mean the function of this hypothetical socialist utopia comune is relying on *gasp* the rich???
*shrug* there’s only so many ways I can say “wealth isn’t just dollars”, dude.
I mean, I guess I’m sorry you find it so upsetting that Burning Man is a thing for wealthy people to do and always has been? I’m sorry that I Problematiced your Fave? Doesn’t mean that Burning Man is a thing that your average Burger King employee could totally go do if they wanted. Burning Man might not run on dollars, but it does run on money, and if you don’t have money you ain’t goin’.
Oh, and:
you know you just agreed with me that Burning Man is for rich people
like
you do get that you just did that, right?
I honestly don’t know what do with
Me: *explains a thing*
You: *asserts something factually incorrect; acts like this means you’ve made some kind of point*
But no, you sad excuse for a human, I did not agree than burning man is for rich people, I made the mistake of using something called sarcasm, something most people are able to identify based on context clues, but I suppose that’s a bit much to ask for someone incapable of basic reading comprehension, but hey
My sarcastic question about where the supplies would come from if useless lazy edeglords like you could show up with nothing and expect to get coddled is actually, say it with me, different to reality. Got it? It’s not real. You acting like me poking holes in your bizarre hypothetical example is the same as me making a comment about actual burning man is not so much proof of your superior arguing technique as it is evidence of your total dipshittery.
Anyway.
Me: having disposable income doesn’t make you rich, and nor does being able to bring your own supplies to a camping event
You: but it does, because I’m going to keep insisting that having disposable income does make you rich, and furthermore anyone not living in abject desperate squalor is clearly rich, and I’m going to take something you said about my own hypothetical scenario out of context and act like it was you conceding a point
I mean, wow
You might notice the words very, and abundance in this definition, and recognise that nowhere does it act like 'existing in a community’ is the same thing as 'wealthy’, but I suppose that’s too much to ask
Why are you so determined to hate burning man that you’re willing to make up word definitions so you can have a 'valid’ reason to hate it, rather than just doing what any sane person would which is to simply say that regardless of the financial status of the attendees you don’t like it? Seriously, you don’t need to make unsupportable and blatantly untrue statements to express your opinion when you can just say 'i hate burning man’
I don’t know what to do with someone so blatantly obnoxiously purposefully obtuse so I’m just gonna point out that the actually rich must love you for being so willing to do their dirty work for them. They adore when the people they’re exploiting and oppressing are too busy infighting to do anything likely to result in material change. Maybe if you keep it up musk will let you kiss his feet
getting teary eyed thinking about gerda gottlieb’s paintings of her wife after she transitioned
thing is, for a lot of these paintings it wasn’t “after” lily elbe’s transition. there was no after to it. the one op posted was painted in 1928. this was 2 years before lily legally changed her name and began undergoing revolutionary gender affirming procedures. unfortunately she died due to complications of an experimental uterine transplant in 1931.
up until that point, during the day lily continued to dress in masculine clothing and even attended galleries showing gottlieb’s paintings of her. which was kind of iconic. she got to stand in a room full of people who were marveling her beauty, not knowing she was right next to them. it must have been such a cute little secret for them as a couple.
here’s gerda and lilly together
not to mention that for most people there is no real “after” to a transition. especially for these trans historical figures who had to balance identity and safety at all times.
i think having a wife paint these portraits must have felt really amazing for lily. to be able to see herself through the eyes of someone who loved her. i’m very much seconding op on the getting teary eyed.
here are some of my favorite gottleib lily paintings
whenever someone is like weirdly hostile or needlessly rude to me online i just attribute it to the fact that theyre obviously just an alt account of the one person i cant stand. this isnt true but it means no haters exist in my eyes
That damn whale is sending me anon hate. Let’s kill it girls!
every once in a while i learn some wild new piece of information that explains years of behavior and reminds me that i will never truly understand everything about my ridiculous adhd brain
ok what the fuck who was gonna tell me this isnt normal
what the fuck you mean to tell me that the way that i comically slide around things wasn’t just me naturally shitposting
maybe the neurotypicals are just trolling us
THAT’S WHY I DO THAT?!?!?
So you’re telling me my loony tunes good balance except for when I sway for no reason is the adhd thing?
Autistic spaces are getting so much more hostile towards people with low empathy, and it sucks
There was a subreddit I really liked, people were chill, and then there was a sudden influx of people making posts like ‘Autistic people have empathy! Saying we don’t makes us seem like monsters! Thats not a symptom!’ And people making posts explaining that no, actually, some of us do have low empathy got attacked and told they were wrong or ableist? And it sucks, because its just so hard to find a place to exist where you can be seen as not evil? I don’t know, it just hurts a lot to be told that
This shot through my brain like a chain of firecrackers, so, without derailing the original post, I have some THOUGHTS to add about why this concept is not only hilarious (because it is), but also…
It. It kind of fucks. Severely.
And in a delightfully Pratchett-y way, I’d dare to suggest.
I’ll explain:
As inferred above, both Crowley AND Aziraphale have canonical Biblical counterparts. Not by name, no, but by function.
Crowley, of course, is the serpent of Eden.
(note on the serpent of Eden: In Genesis3:1-15, at least, the serpent is not identified as anything other than a serpent, albeit one that can talk. Later, it will be variously interpreted as a traitorous agent of Hell, as a demon, as a guise of Satan himself, etc. In Good Omens –as a slinky ginger who walks funny)
Lesser known, at least so far as I can tell, is the flaming sword. It, too, appears in Genesis 3, in the very last line:
“So he drove out the man; and placed at the east of the garden of Eden Cherubims, and a flaming sword which turned every way, to keep the way of the tree of life.” –Genesis 3:24, KJV
Thanks to translation ambiguity, there is some debate concerning the nature of the flaming sword –is it a divine weapon given unto one of the Cherubim (if so, why only one)? Or is it an independent entity, which takes the form of a sword (as other angelic beings take the form of wheels and such)? For our purposes, I don’t think the distinction matters. The guard at the gate of Eden, whether an angel wielding the sword or an angel who IS the sword, is Aziraphale.
(note on the flaming sword: in some traditions –Eastern Orthodox, for example– it is held that upon Christ’s death and resurrection, the flaming sword gave up it’s post and vanished from Eden for good. By these sensibilities, the removal of the sword signifies the redemption and salvation of man.
…Put a pin in that. We’re coming back to it.)
So, we have our pair. The Serpent and the Sword, introduced at the beginning and the end (ha) of the very same chapter of Genesis.
But here’s the important bit, the bit that’s not immediately obvious, the bit that nonetheless encapsulates one of the central themes, if not THE central theme, of Good Omens:
The Sword was never intended to guard Eden while Adam and Eve were still in it.
Do you understand?
The Sword’s function was never to protect them. It doesn’t even appear until after they’ve already fallen. No… it was to usher Adam and Eve from the garden, and then keep them out. It was a threat. It was a punishment.
The flaming sword was given to be used against them.
So. Again. We have our pair. The Serpent and the Sword: the inception and the consequence of original sin, personified. They are the one-two punch that launches mankind from paradise, after Hell lures it to destruction and Heaven condemns it for being destroyed. Which is to say that despite being, supposedly, hereditary enemies on two different sides of a celestial cold war, they are actually unified by one purpose, one pivotal role to play in the Divine Plan: completely fucking humanity over.
That’s how it’s supposed to go. It is written.
…But, in Good Omens, they’re not just the Serpent and the Sword.
They’re Crowley and Aziraphale.
(author begins to go insane from emotion under the cut)
I always thought that “woman pulls something out of her cleavage” was really just sort of a cliche historically
But nope
I’m reading this incredibly niche book about the history of pockets, and there is a picture of a pair of stays from the 18th century that someone sewed a giant pocket inside of
It was apparently a big thing for women who wanted to keep their money safe or to steal it off of other people and hide it quickly
ALT
