When Toni Morrison said the grandeur of life is the attempt, not the solution… And how she went on to explain that it’s about behaving as beautifully as one can under completely impossible circumstances. The power that has, you know? It’s really just the making room for what breathes in the presence of the attempt. In the coming-to-be.
passed a memorial on my morning trot today. buckaroo about my age, lots of flowers. went to his instagram to learn his way and it was just packed full of photos with buds and good times. you strip away the body and all thats left is love. sad but also very beautiful and important
Alright, folks, I've seen a couple different approaches to this situation, and I think there's something to be learned from each of the below. I know some of them have a contested reputation, but all media sources have a bias and I will be including some context on those biases.
The podcasts I'm sharing are:
It's come up a few times on NPR as well, but not in enough detail for me to include. I will be linking Spotify, but these are all available elsewhere, though official transcripts can take several days.
i don’t think mordecai and rigby were ever gay for each other but i do think many times rigby would be like dude if i was a girl would you want to fuck me and mordecai is like dude that’s weird. no. and rigby is all bent out of shape about it and in the middle of the night when they’re both trying to sleep he’s like why wouldn’t you fuck me if i was a girl. i’m cute right? or am i ugly and that’s why i’m single… and mordecai is like fine whatever i’d fuck girl you. stop bringing it up now. & the next day rigby is like fuck off muscle man i’m not ugly mordecai said he’d fuck girl me & then a portal opens to an alternate dimension where they’re genderbent like that adventure time episode and the voice of god is like mordecai you must make good on your word. fuck girl rigby.
average Regular Show Episode.
Watterson pulled no punches
As someone who has personally had to take those calls, they do matter. It just doesn’t matter what you say in the call: the only way your calls actually reach the politician is a tally sheet of each call received on different topics. End of the day/week, the politician gets told “you had X many calls about people wanting you to do this, Y many calls about people wanting you to do this, etc.”
Individual calls matter little, but if they get tons of calls on one topic then they take it seriously. The example above was probably during a time where the office was flooded with so many calls at once that they took the phones off the hook, which actually means that calls are working especially well. When the phones are blowing up, everyone in the office notices.
The best call to your representative does not involve you making an impassioned and well-argued case, because you’re probably talking to an intern. The most effective call you can make takes 15 seconds: “I am from [place in your district] and I am very pissed about [topic].”
OI. PEOPLE IN THE THREAD. CAN WE REBLOG THIS VERSION PLEASE. DON'T STOP MAKING CALLS.
But also as another person further up says, don't let your activism start and stop with phone calls either.
DON'T TRUST ANYONE WHO TELLS YOU NOT TO PARTICIPATE
a very quick poem i just wrote, made from excerpts of texts my mum has sent me this year.
The devastating difference between how much time it takes to write something vs how fast people read it lol
you're falling in the trap!! it will be read by many people, many times, and it will live on in their memories. and maybe no single other human will match you in time spent dedicated to your story, but as a collective we will outlast you. acts of creation only grow when they are shared
This. Writing is not like dinner. It can be consumed many times
"For we each of us deserve everything, every luxury that was ever piled in the tombs of the dead kings, and we each of us deserve nothing, not a mouthful of bread in hunger. Have we not eaten while another starved? Will you punish us for that? Will you reward us for the virtue of starving while others ate? No man earns punishment, no man earns reward. Free your mind of the idea of deserving, the idea of earning, and you will begin to be able to think."
-Ursula K. Le Guin's The Dispossesed
this reddit thread of living your silliest life is so so good
Being a young adult is so strange. You enter a coffee shop. The 20 year old girl waiting behind you cried all night because she just came to a new city for university and she feels so alone. That 27 year old guy over there works a job he is overqualified for, he lives with his parents and wants to move out but doesn't know what to do about it. That one 24 year old dude already has a car, a house, and a job waiting for him once he graduates thanks to his dad's connections. The 26 year old barista couldn't complete his higher education because he has to work and take care of his family. The 28 year old girl sitting next to you has no friends to go out with so she is texting her mother. That couple (both 25 years old) are married and the girl is pregnant. The 29 year old writing something on her laptop has realized that she chose the wrong major so she is trying to start all over. We are not alone in this, but we are actually so alone. Do you feel me
Watched a great talk today about web/technology accessibility, and the speaker pointed out that yes, accessibility is important for people with permanent disabilities, and we should definitely care about that. But also accessibility helps EVERYBODY, because everybody will, at some point in their lives, find themselves in situations that accessible technology can help with. Here are permanent, temporary, and situational disabilities that accessible technology can help with:
Remember that whether something is disabling or not depends on the situation, the environment, the technology, etc. We’re ALL disabled at some point. It is important to support permanently disabled people, but it is also important to remember that accessibility helps us all!
everyone should attempt an artisan craft at some point in their life because it would cut down the number of comments questioning why handmade goods like ceramics or textile craft or woodworking are so expensive
and this is an unrealistic expectation, but I think the attempt should include seeing through to the end at least one "finished" item, no matter how clumsy or lumpy your first attempts might be. like to me, there's a huge difference in perspective between attempting to learn how to crochet or throw a pot for a few days, acknowledging that it's harder than it looks and giving up, versus committing to finishing that scarf or clay pot you started and working on it for weeks while you painstakingly learn from your mistakes and grow attached to your project while also simultaneously hating it.
once you finish the latter, your perspective changes from "why does this crocheted blanket cost $200" to "holy shit I can't believe they're charging $200 for this crocheted blanket instead of $2000" because you may have known crocheting is hard, you may have easily agreed with the idea that "handmade goods take time and effort" even before attempting a craft, but now you know firsthand the absolute time sink it takes to make things. like yeah dude, that one item took you 2 months to make and probably wasn't even an ultra complex item if it was the first thing you made, now imagine attaching an hourly wage to that time to calculate the cost (and this is ignoring every nuance of the artistic element and master crafters being able to work faster/charge higher because of their years and years of experience)
anyway this rant has been motivated by a comment I saw on someone else's ceramic post asking why a mug was $60 and they understand it's handmade but $60 just seems overpriced, and bro do you know how long ceramics take to make. that mug probably took at minimum 3 weeks between how long it takes to throw the mug, dry partially, trim the mug, dry fully, bisque fire, wait a day for the kiln to cool, sand and paint and glaze, glaze fire, wait a day for the kiln to cool, take product photography of the mug, write description and list the mug online for sale, im not even including the skill needed to complete all these steps without the mug literally exploding or collapsing while also making it an appealing piece of art, aaaaaaaaaaaaa
my fun fact addendum I'm adding to this is that unlike knitting, crocheting quite literally cannot be replicated by machine, so if you see "mass manufactured" crochet items on retail shelves for retail prices lol. they weren't mass manufactured and someone was underpaid for that
Edit 4/7/24: Check out this post I made instead and try and redirect your attention to getting people out of Gaza as quickly as possible, thank you!
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You can donate to the Palestine Children's Relief Fund for as little as $1.00.
There is a fee you can choose to apply to cover processing.
Which if you choose to do leaves you with a total of ~$1.35 (USD) depending on the type of card you have.
PCRF has a score of 97% on Charity Navigator.
Adults and children alike are currently dying in Palestine due to starvation. (World Health Organization Link)
The Gaza Strip is one of two places in the entire world that is categorized as Phase 5 (the highest phase) on the Integrated Food Security Phase Classification scale.
In case you lost it - a link to the eSIM donation guide. Even if you feel sick and powerless, you can at least do this. And even if you really, really can't donate, you can always at least share this and remind others.
Read, read, read. Read everything -- trash, classics, good and bad, and see how they do it. Just like a carpenter who works as an apprentice and studies the master. Read! You'll absorb it. Then write. If it's good, you'll find out. If it's not, throw it out of the window.
— William Faulkner.
You were the caretaker for the mythical beasts of the royal family. Yesterday they decided to replace you with some incompetent noble, before kicking you out of the castle. You then spent the night in a nearby forest. However today you were awakened by the beasts who chose to follow you.
I’m not good with people.
I never have been. I’ve tried, but I’ve never been good with people. I’m always saying the wrong thing, and usually I don’t know what the wrong thing was until a lot later, until I’m thinking about what I said. In the town I grew up in, I was known for being simple.
I don’t think I am, but I understand why they think that- I’m not good at making the words in my head match the words I say.
But I am good with animals. Always have been. Lots of people are, I’m not special, or anything. Mam taught me.
Animals speak their own language, and it’s a lot simpler to figure out. They’re not people, they don’t understand us. A lot of people who are bad at animals expect that. They think an animal should understand them perfectly. They think animals have human impulses, human urges, a human understanding of the world.
And they don’t.
