hello darlings, some of you know about my service dog quincy from various posts and photos. very sadly, he has recently been diagnosed with carcinoma and we don’t yet know about treatment, but he will need our help. he has been my service dog for six years and we’ve had many adventures together, and i hope we will still have more.
thank you for reading and sharing; we both love you madly.
Plato makes up Atlantis as an allegory and over 2,000 years later people are still looking for it. You might as well be looking for Narnia.
Plato: Luxury and unlimited power are forces that corrupt human beings and lead them to being colonialist and stupid. The gods will punish Athens if we continue to exploit others for our own gain. I have invented this society as a parable to illustrate my point because I tend to use metaphor for a lot of things.
Everyone: But where are you hiding it though
Plato: I’ve purposefully included details like a mud shoal west of Iberia that doesn’t exist and references to a volcanic eruption that we all have cultural memory of as an obvious indication that I made this up. Are you paying attention? It’s a metaphor. I’m using literary references. You can go west of Iberia yourself. It’s not there. I explained where it is and it’s not there. You all know it’s not there. Please stop it with the luxury and exploitation. That’s my main point here.
Everyone: Yeah but where is it though
Plato: Orichalcum is just a fancy looking metal. It’s kinda like fancy copper. I made it up for this fake parable city.
Everyone: So it’s magic, then.
Plato: I want Athens to be a bit more like Sparta.
Everyone: Where’s the magic metal
Plato: I just think that greed is bad, generally. We should stop doing that.
Everyone: Where are you hiding the magic metal???
I just bought some copper from this dude, get off my back.
When I was a kid, my dad hated when I hung up anything on my walls. My art, band posters, movie posters, anything. Not with taxks, not with tape (it “ripped the paint off”) not with anything. At one point in 5th or 6th grade he came in my room and found me hanging up a Diary of a Wimpy Kid poster with tacos and he was like “EVERY HOLE YOU PUT IN THE WALL TAKES $10 OFF THE VALUE OF THE HOUSE.” so when I was mad at him, I’d insert tacks into the wall in places he couldn’t easily see just out of spite. Whoever owns the house now is probably wondering about it.
bro didn’t even know you could just fill holes with toothpaste 💀
I know this is about an owned house (that you should be touching up and repainting the walls of before reselling anyway???) but for ppl who are paranoid about putting holes in rental walls: don’t be. Put up posters. Shelving if you need it. Have hanging plants. Invest in a studfinder. Spackle kits are cheap and everywhere now, or you can use white toothpaste, glue, or even soft air-dry clay to fill holes. Scuffs and rub marks are considered normal wear and tear and landlords can’t charge you for them. Most places will have you fill holes but will have to repaint between tenants anyway, so even if the spackle doesn’t match the walls, it’s not a big deal. Check your state laws about what is considered normal wear and tear. Most states have laws covering everything from paint to flooring. For instance, in my state, carpet that is 3+ years old is considered past its normal life cycle and therefore any damage to it cannot be charged for because the landlord/management is expected to put in new carpeting.
Before any move-out, check local laws considering paint, flooring, light fixtures, appliances, etc. Landlords and management companies make BANK on people not knowing that they’re paying for paint rubs that they’re painting over anyway and carpet that has been paid for 6 times over.
Reminder: they’re never ever ever ever going to give you your security deposit back no matter what you do. have fun with life.
Actually, if your landlord isn’t giving your security deposit back without good reason (in new york, they gave to give you a itemized receipt listing why they deducted from it) bring them to small claims court. Don’t let the bloodsuckers get away with your money.
Our last landlord tried keeping all the deposit and charging is for more. When we moved in, I took a whole lotta pictures. I took pics when we moved out and did my research regarding local laws and looked at how frequently tenants win in small claims court here. Over 80% of cases are in favor of tenants.
So I wrote a very professional letter to the landlord and property management company. I provided this information and sent a CD with copies of before and after pics of the place with notes, like the place hadn’t been cleaned before we moved in, there was a hole from the second bathroom to the outside, large enough to fit a fat raccoon, husky fur everywhere, nails, hooks, and tacks in the walls, footprints on the ceiling, human hair on the walls and ceilings of the main bathroom.
I informed them they had 60 days to return our deposit or we will take them to small claims court. Local laws state that if a tenant wins, we receive 3x the deposit, and the landlord pays all court costs and fees. 58 days after sending the letter, we received our deposit with an apology for “confusion.”
These people are dependent on ignorance. Be aware, be knowledgeable, and make them afraid.
What i’ve been learning thru my research is that Lawn Culture and laws against “weeds” in America are deeply connected to anxieties about “undesirable” people.
I read this essay called “Controlling the Weed Nuisance in Turn-of-the-century American Cities” by Zachary J. S. Falck and it discusses how the late 1800’s and early 1900’s created ideal habitats for weeds with urban expansion, railroads, the colonization of more territory, and the like.
Around this time, laws requiring the destruction of “weeds” were passed in many American cities. These weedy plants were viewed as “filth” and literally disease-causing—in the 1880’s in St. Louis, a newspaper reported that weeds infected school children with typhoid, diphtheria, and scarlet fever.
Weeds were also seen as “conducive to immorality” by promoting the presence of “tramps and idlers.” People thought wild growing plants would “shelter” threatening criminals. Weeds were heavily associated with poverty and immortality. Panic about them spiked strongly after malaria and typhoid outbreaks.
To make things even wilder, one of the main weeds the legal turmoil and public anxiety centered upon was actually the sunflower. Milkweed was also a major “undesirable” weed and a major target of laws mandating the destruction of weeds.
The major explosion in weed-control law being put forth and enforced happened around 1905-1910. And I formed a hypothesis—I had this abrupt remembrance of something I studied in a history class in college. I thought to myself, I bet this coincides with a major wave of immigration to the USA.
Bingo. 1907 was the peak of European immigration. We must keep in mind that these people were not “white” in the exact way that is recognized today. From what I remember from my history classes, Eastern European people were very much feared as criminals and potential communists. Wikipedia elaborates that the Immigration Act of 1924 was meant to restrict Jewish, Slavic, and Italian people from entering the country, and that the major wave of immigration among them began in the 1890s. Almost perfectly coinciding with the “weed nuisance” panic. (The Immigration Act of 1917 also banned intellectually disabled people, gay people, anarchists, and people from Asia apart from the Chinese…which were already banned since 1880.)
From this evidence, I would guess that our aesthetics and views about “weeds” emerged from the convergence of two things:
First, we were obliterating native ecosystems by colonizing them and violently displacing their caretakers, then running roughshod over them with poorly informed agricultural and horticultural techniques, as well as constructing lots of cities and railroads, creating the ideal circumstances for weeds.
Second, lots of immigrants were entering the country, and xenophobia and racism lent itself to fears of “criminals” “tramps” and other “undesirable” people, leading to a desire to forcefully impose order and push out the “Other.” I am not inventing a connection—undesirable people and undesirable weeds were frequently compared in these times.
And this was at the very beginnings of the eugenics movement, wherein supposedly “inferior” and poor or racialized people were described in a manner much the same as “weeds,” particularly supposedly “breeding” much faster than other people.
There is another connection that the essay doesn’t bring up, but that is very clear to me. Weeds are in fact plants of the poor and of immigrants, because they are often medicinal and food plants for people on the margins, hanging out around human habitation like semi-domesticated cats around granaries in the ancient Near East.
My Appalachian ancestors ate pokeweed, Phytolacca americana. The plant is toxic, but poor people in the South would gather the plant’s young leaves and boil them three times to get the poison out, then eat them as “poke salad.” Pokeweed is a weed that grows readily on roadsides and in vacant lots.
In some parts of the world, it is grown as an ornamental plant for its huge, tropical-looking leaves and magenta stems. But my mom hates the stuff. “Cut that down,” she says, “it makes us look like rednecks.”
Invasion ecologists are taking seriously how many of our commonly-used terms reinforce xenophobia.
I had a discussion with someone I work with about the term “pioneer species” and the rather inaccurate and questionable colonialism-tied implications.
I prefer “disaster species,” but “pioneer species” is still the typically used term.
My Appalachian ancestors ate pokeweed, Phytolacca americana. The plant is toxic, but poor people in the South would gather the plant’s young leaves and boil them three times to get the poison out, then eat them as “poke salad.” Pokeweed is a weed that grows readily on roadsides and in vacant lots.
Okay wait. Wasn’t there that post about the word “pokemon” being used in the early 20th century or something? About how it meant someone who was really slow or something?
Either I’m misremembering it, or there may be a connection here…
Pokeweed comes from an Algonquin word translating to “dye plant” so it’s probably not related.
Wait wait wait is that why USAmericans would rather do all the nonsense involved in importing fucking quinoa rather than like… this is why amaranth is classified as a noxious weed in so many places, isn’t it? Because a hardy pseudocereal that just grows wherever would like, help poor people not fucking starve? And while there are native amaranths in a lot of the US, it’s pretty damn cosmopolitan, so many immigrants would know what to do with it, because there was also amaranth where they lived before?
A lot of the way we live is focused around avoiding the aesthetic appearance of poverty, yeah.
So, it seems what you’re saying is more or less: If people could even partially live off the food growing in their neighborhood, they wouldn’t be as exploitable. If they worked together to build a community farm that built solidarity and diversified nutrition, they would be even less exploitable. So the exploiters use laws and propaganda to avoid such things as much as possible.
So maybe we should be doing more sustainable farming, community gardens, homegrown fibres, and generally more pleasing and diverse environments in our “lawns” (while doing due diligence to ensure that we aren’t causing inadvertant ecological problems)?
That is punk as hell. I am getting many ideas and many questions. Maybe I’ll do research and post something when the Texas heat dies down enough that I can think.
Absolutely.
I haven’t been able to read about it in much depth yet but there’s this concept called food sovereignty which is basically people especially marginalized people having agency over their food systems instead of relying on Corporation which controls their resources
I think gardening and knowing plants and growing food and useful plants as part of a COMMUNITY is very powerful because it creates a kind of safety net that you can partly rely on for your basic needs instead of depending on the whims of Corporation
Kaitlin Smith of Outdoor Afro & Storied Grounds in Boston has a whole historical tour about this, but a lot of anti-foraging laws and policies came into effect in the US following the abolition of slavery, when migrating, poor Black families would have to rely on wild plants to survive.
(Kaitlin also has a talk about how Black enslaved people in the US grew their own abortifacient plants for… the exact horrifying reason you might think. If you are in the Boston area and a Black person or close loved one to one, her tours are for you! Go check them out.)
Also if you’re in the Midwest, Alexis Nikole Nelson AKA @blackforager does really videos about plants, foraging, and the history of racism against black and indigenous people in the US
Describing my own writing that I accidentally misplaced before posting it anywhere as “lost media” because, you know, technically
This is the digital equivalent of the underside of a refrigerator.
Lotta folks in the notes trying to offer helpful suggestions who are clearly still in the stage of their life where they know where all of their archival storage media is physically located.
I give you this classic from bash.org’s Top IRC Quotes list:
There was a place I was doing on-site network support for about fifteen years back that had a server that was acting up, but nobody knew where it was physically located, and a cable trace failed because the cat 5 disappeared under a baseboard and just plain never came out the other side. It was eventually determined that they’d somehow pulled a Cask of Amontillado: the door to the server closet had mistakenly been drywalled over during some past renovation, and nobody noticed because the affected server had never gone off the rails badly enough to require physical servicing until just then.
One of my favorite thing I’ve learned about animals studies is that you should avoid using colorful leg bands when you’re banding birds because you can accidentally completely skew the data because female birds prefer males with colorful bands
Apparently if you put a red band on a male red wing blackbird his harem size can double
So like you can completely frick up the natural reproduction of a group of birds by giving a guy a bracelet so stylish that females CANNOT resist him
Me, putting a red bracelet on the leg of a male red wing blackbird: ON GOD we gonna get u some pussy bro
I remember reading a study where researchers realized that female birds of a certain species preferred males with a darker breast. So they created what they literally called a “Super-Sexy Male” by catching a male and coloring his chest with a marker. They then ran dna tests on the eggs in the area.
Previously when the researchers had run these tests, they found a certain amount of infidelity was common for these birds. Somewhere around 10% of eggs were fathered by males who were not the primary mates of females.
After the advent of the Super Sexy Male, however, stuff got crazy in bird world. Infidelity skyrocketed, with upwards of 25% of ALL EGGS in the area being fathered by this specific male. Furthermore, his mate’s eggs were 100% his.
This is just insane to me. Just imagine you’re living your bird life when suddenly somebody scribbles on Dave’s chest and the ladies can’t stop throwing themselves at them. It’s stupid that we theoretically can wreck this kind of havoc on an ecosystem.
unfortunately I’m watching supernatural and someone on screen said ‘there are No Wolves in pennsylvania’ and I was like. what a bold incorrect statement. where did they possibly get that idea from. so I googled it…google is insisting there are no wild wolves in pa?? except I’ve Seen wolves here?? there used to be a wolf that would hang out in my backyard and roam around the neighborhood?? like Everyone knew about this wolf we assumed he lived on the golf course and would come to our yards if he got spooked by golfers (very quiet block). like we all thought he just lost his pack or whatever so people just gave him a wide space and let him chill, he didn’t try to break into any houses or attack any pets but this was definitely. a wild wolf. where. where did he come from what do you MEAN there aren’t wolves in pennsylvania I’m literally spiraling right now
still feeling so gut-punched over this
To be fair, PA also said “we did not reintroduce mountain lions, they are not there, you’re seeing really big house cats, please keep coming to the parks and camp sites and ignore that video, that was totally not a mountain lion, someone took last week”
okay I’m sorry but this came up on pinterest and I Screamed
you are the state of Pennsylvania (allegedly)
i just showed this to a friend from pennsylvania and 1. theyre losing their mind bc theyve seen mountain lions which prompted them to look it up which leads me to 2. this fucking bonkers article
[caption: “We’ve been here 45 years and I’ve probably been told by people at least 100 t imes that they’ve seen a cougar or mountain lion,” said owner Vince Hall. “I kind of doubt they saw a cougar, but I’m not God.”]
PA: I can’t believe we’ve lost all our native apex predators Citizens of PA: there’s a mountain lion right there PA: sometimes we can still hear the sound of them scaring away tourists
…PA has fucking EMUS and you want me to believe we have no wolves or mountain lions?
As a regretful born and raised Pennsylvanian, we have wolves, coywolves, mountain lions, lynx, and coyotes. Not a single person in authority will admit to there being anything but coyotes and lynx. If you see a cougar, they will tell you you saw a lynx. If you see a wolf, they will tell you you saw a coyote. Ignore the massive differences in sizes. No one knows what a coywolf is but we have them. I have seen a cougar with my own two goddamned eyes. There is an entire nature park whose main attractions are the cougars and wolves (and bison but we’re not talking about them) - it’s called Penn’s Cave, it’s been there forever. Everyone I know has seen a cougar or wolf at least once in the woods.
So what I’m getting at is don’t trust the government.
“the state of Pennsylvania is gaslighting its citizens about the native wildlife”
My spouse was born in PA (Bethlehem, Mt Sinai) and he is enjoying this entire thread, which we might show his cousins who live in Philly and have seen the These Aren’t Cougars.
As someone who still masks at the grocery store, on public transportation/in Ubers, etc. I think we are better served by acknowledging the fact that wearing a mask regularly is not a zero-cost decision. It’s annoying, it can be really hot, it can make it harder to communicate, it can fog up your glasses/sunglasses, it can make you break out, if you wear it long enough it can make the back of your ears hurt. There are a lot of very real reasons why people don’t want to wear a mask, especially for long stretches of time.
It’s still the right thing to do, and people should continue to mask, especially indoors/in crowded spaces. But when we talk about masking as though we can’t possibly imagine why anyone would ever not want to mask beyond misguided rugged American exceptionalism, we just sound out of touch and holier-than-thou.
Mask! It’ll help protect you! It’ll help protect your loved ones! It’ll help protect the most vulnerable in society! But feel free to complain as much as you want while doing it.
i hate the “on average a user only sees 25 posts per session so they have to be good and varied” bullshit on that staff post. if i open tumblr and the 25 posts i see are nothing but a single mutual mass reblogging their favourite thing that i couldn’t care less about. well. that’s what i enjoy
If my beloved mutual needed to reblog a thing 25 times then by all things sacred I am going to read it once and then scroll past it 24 times as they intended me to!
I see Hollywood is now very into the idea of buying something once and then owning it forever and being able to make infinite copies. Which. Isn’t quite the message they imparted upon me in my childhood. In the spirit of their own long-held stance:
Everyone in your world can teleport within 10 feet of the person they love the most. Your best friend wonders how you always seem to be there just when they need you.
State Farm puts out a series of joking commercials. The punch line being that of all the people in your insurance agent’s life, you’re the one they care about most- you’re the person they can teleport to.
It’s bold of them to joke about something so controversial. After all, who your ‘port is can make or break a relationship. Study after study has been done on the ‘port between parent and child and psychiatrists are always analyzing your ‘port history.
The commercials are tacky, too. They make fun of the power inherent in a person’s greatest love. That’s what a ‘port is, after all, your love for someone being strong enough to take you to wherever they are. All in all State Farm’s “good neighbor” commercials leave people shaking their heads and laughing uncomfortably.
Caitlyn’s not laughing when a man brings a gun to her school.
Her class is on the yard and there’s no warning- he’s just there, with a gun, and her kids are frozen.
Mickey’s too close too close and not moving and the man is turning the gun towards him. Mickey’s only 8 and he drives her nuts most days. He cries and screams and he runs away and he makes things up and he loves his mom and his sister and he cried when Caitlyn got stitches and she loves him she loves him she loves him.
She feels a moment of disorientation and suddenly she’s between the man and the boy.
She doesn’t hesitate, just wraps herself around Mickey. Then she closes her eyes and reaches inside herself for the first-easiest-always, thinks I love you I love you I love you and feels the shift of the ‘port.
And her eyes land on Zeke, who is jerking to his feet in shock, and she feels a huge wave of relief. Zeke’s been her ‘port since they were months old and her aunt got up one morning to find two babies in the crib instead of one. These days they usually plan their visits and Caitlyn’s never brought a kid before, so Zeke has questions in his eyes.
Before he can voice any, she’s pushing Mickey towards him and gasping out “I have to go back-”
And she’s thinking of the next closest kid, Jasper, one of her rough and tumble boys, he’s so big, 8 years old and almost as tall as her, Jazz is learning to control his temper and his energy but there’s a sweetness to him that comes out at the oddest moments. It’s easy to declare I love I love I love and then she’s grabbing Jazz and sending herself back to Zeke’s shelter.
He’s a little more prepared this time, reaching out to steady her and guide Jazz away while she turns her thoughts and heart to the next kid.
And she’s gone and grabbing Topher, her sweet boy who listens and cares and tries, and they’re back to Zeke.
And she’s gone and grabbing Zornitsa, her scampy little comedian, and back to Zeke.
And she’s gone and grabbing Ariel and Kaho and Clarissa, her gymnast trio with their fierceness and their determination, and back to Zeke.
This time she thinks to shrug her backpack off and gasp out “There’s a list- in the emergency folder-”
And then she’s gone again.
When she reaches for Heidi, her zippy little miss who won’t touch fruit and loves worms and has grown so much, that she lands inside. She pulls Heidi and Adela into her arms and shifts back to Zeke.
Her kids are away from the man with the gun and she feels shaky. She takes a couple breaths, bracing her hands on her thighs. Then she thinks of passion-dedication-exasperation, guide and guidee, and wraps that all around her I love I love I love.
The next moment she’s in a closet turned office made all the smaller by the crush of people in it. She looks up at her boss as several kids stifle startled yelps and Colin looks back with wide eyes under his tangled mop of curls.
“What-” he starts to ask.
“Third grade was on the yard, there wasn’t time to get indoors, but I think I got them all safe,” Caitlyn tells him.
“How?” he asks.
“Like this,” she says, voice tinged with hysterical laughter.
She wraps her arms around Carmela, Elizaveta, Winona, and Joanna and reaches for Zeke. She drops the girls off and goes back to Colin, who goggles.
“I know you need to stay on site, but I thought you should know that I’m evacuating our kids,” Caitlyn tells him.
Colin shakes off his astonishment and squares his lanky shoulders.
“Can you get to kinder?” he asks, eyes lighting up.
“Yes,” Caitlyn says, “with Nancy there that will be easy.”
“Get them all out,” Colin says, “and tell Nancy to start listing who is safe, have her message me.”
“Will do,” she says with a nod. She grabs the three remaining kids and takes them to Zeke.
She thinks of Nancy then, they have different classes this year but they’re still brain mates, still the team, and it’s easy to wrap finishing each others sentences and communicating without words around her I love I love I love.
Nancy startles when she appears, and several of the babies scream. Team Kinder moves into action, hushing and calming. Nancy just waits, meeting Caitlyn’s eyes.
“Colin sent me, I’m evacuating you guys,” Caitlyn explains. “I can take as many as I can hold at a time. How do you want to do this?”
Nancy nods once.
“Start with Mr. Mason and Bashir and Rafael,” Nancy says. “I’ll have the next group ready when you get back.
Caitlyn nods and grabs them.
Things go pretty smoothly after that. Nancy sends kinder off a group at a time and then quickly takes control of the chaotic crowd that Caitlyn has already saved.
Caitlyn moves on grade by grade, finding her way to the colleagues she is so so grateful to work with.
By the time the cops secure the man with the gun, the school is empty, everyone 150 miles away.
When they ask later how she did it she looks right at them.
“Love is love,” she says, “there’s no such thing as more or less,” she shakes her head slightly, “it’s not quantifiable, there’s no scale that can measure it, love is.”
Wow
It’s not nice to make me cry in the middle of a restaurant
Graphic design is my passion. :D Might adjust the title font or the background pattern color, but I’m liking how the “svichwurm” came out. Bless her mythical little heart.
I’ve uploaded the proof copy to Lulu and ordered a print of it. As of now I’m on track for it to go on sale on August 16th (Reclamation Day!) but even accounting for delays, it should be good to go by the end of August or early in September. Exciting!
[ID: A cover image for Dinner At The Palace, my new book of short stories; the title is in a very “diner menu from the 80s” style font, and below that it reads “The Shivadh Short Stories”. There is a fuzzy, very light green patterned background, and below the title and subhead is the Welsh dragon, tinted brown-green to resemble the mythical Svichwurm from one of the stories.]
Editor & fan of AJ Aalto's "Marnie Baranuik Files"
Social Justice Tank. #Meathead Side of Tumblr. Leverage & Discworld fanfic, Powerlifting, Puns, Filk, Dramatic Readings, and Dad Jokes
