The grace of a collapsing cathedral (Posts tagged ref)

normalcei

coshayphinelove

I know I haven't posted regularly on this blog in years but I'm not seeing a whole lot of posts on this site about what's happening in Minneapolis right now. And the posts I am seeing are not covering the scope of it. I'm genuinely surprised because tumblr is usually where I find out about things organically through my feed. So I'm making a post about it.

A brief summary of events, from someone who pays attention and also lives here, best taken with a grain of salt and some fact checking:

2020: George Floyd is murdered by Minneapolis police. There are weeks of protests about it. It makes national news. Protests happen in DC. The infamous Trump and his bible photo shoot happens.

2024: Gov. Tim Walz is Kamala Harris' running mate in the presidential election. He starts the "they're just weird" thing. Is folksy, Trump personally hates him.

November 2025: ICE starts showing up to "crack down" on "illegal immigrants" in our Somali community. I may remember the numbers wrong, but something like 90% of our Somali neighbors are either naturalized or were born here. People distribute ICE whistles and are on high alert. Localized to the twin cities.

December 2025: Nick Shirley is paid by a bunch of MN Republicans to do an exposé on daycare fraud. I didn't hear much about this. All I really know is this was an ongoing investigation that MN officials were already taking care of and some of the guilty parties have already gone to court from a COVID era food assistance program. Mostly, if not all, legal US citizens. He did a really bad job at doing journalism and just showed up to day cares with a camera crew and went "YUP nobody's here" as if they weren't in lock-down procedure because some fuck ass white men showed up with camera equipment that could easily be mistaken for guns. I believe. I will fact check all of this and will correct myself in a reblog if necessary. (source but not all the details that I remember hearing about but they said there was no recorded evidence of fraud)

Conservative internet explodes. Kristi Noem sends a mess of agents. I know it's more than a thousand more. They call it Operation Metro Surge. They are going everywhere. There are protests. People try to interrupt the arrests. It's a lot.

1/7/2026: Renee Nicole Good is shot by an ICE agent in the middle of a protest. A few blocks away from where George Floyd was killed. Broad daylight. In front of a crowd. While she was following instructions to turn her vehicle around. Jonathan Ross, the piece of shit Nazi who did it, was recording on his phone the whole time, switched his phone to his non dominant hand so he could more effectively shoot her in the face from 2 feet away. Claims self defense, several angles immediately disprove him. He releases his video, he calls her a "fucking bitch" as her corpse drives away. Does not help him at all. (source) He has not been seen since. Some photos/reports exist of a bunch of agents showing up to his house and taking some tubs and art away. His wife is an immigrant. (source but it's the daily mail so grain of salt.)

Not hours later they go raid a school and tear gas a bunch of kids. (source). Minneapolis has switched to distance learning. I'm not sure about St. Paul.

The last week: There are up to 3,000 ICE agents here. Keep in mind Minneapolis and St. Paul only have 600 or fewer police officers each. So these dudes are roaming in packs. It's 2-4 dudes to a car and 2-5 cars per pack. People are "commuting with" ICE agents to honk and alert people that they're there. People are going on patrols with their neighbors.

ICE is no longer asking "are you a citizen." They are simply walking up to you and taking you into custody. They are going door to door. They have started just breaking the door down if you don't comply. They are driving recklessly to just grab pedestrians and drivers alike (source). People are afraid to go get groceries. It's all over the state. I am learning names of cities in places I thought were just factory farm land and I've lived here my whole life because they're doing raids there. I had to text my family in the suburbs because I saw reports of my small little hometown an hour away getting door knocks today.

It's insane and I am not doing it justice. There are thousands of masked federal agents roaming around all of Minnesota with no warrant or specific goal. They are just trolling around looking for people. They are detaining anyone and everyone. They are beating people. They are pepper spraying people. They are kidnapping people. They are acting unconstitutionally, aggressively, and unpredictably. They are creating situations that are dangerous so that they can try to justify beating or shooting their way out. I will run an errand and then get fed a tiktok that was shot from the Cub Foods that I just left and there's 20+ ICE vehicles parked there now. They're taking people from work, from day care, from schools, from shopping centers.

Iceout.org tracks ice sightings. This is a screen shot with the date set to 12/1/2025.

And from today.

They have cut off SNAP and WIC benefits. Just for us. Not any other state, just Minnesota. They're saying it's because of fraud but I think it's because they hate that we use federal funds to give free breakfast and lunch to every public school student.

And this is breaking just now, 1/13/2026: the DOJ is trying to investigate Renee Good's widow. 4 people have resigned about it. (source). I don't even want to read the article to see what they're saying.

So that's a brief history.

Unicorn Riot is doing a lot of good reporting and they don't seem to have the spin that a lot of local news stations will have where they downplay everything. This article specifically goes into a lot of the specific instances of brutality.

It's also a rumor on TikTok that all of the videos of ICE and protests and the such and the like are being geo locked. So my feed is all footage of people being detained and talking about the "commuting" they're doing and what they're seeing but people outside of the state are not seeing it. So if you're also on that infernal app, try searching for Minneapolis or Minnesota and see what you see. I'm kind of curious if this is true. Because I've been living and breathing ICE and doomsday prepping content for a week. I'm sure those two topics aren't connected.

I don't really know what my goal with this post is. I'm tired. I'm in the first ring of suburbs, so it's been pretty quiet. But I have friends in south Minneapolis. And I'm worried for them. And I know it's a matter of time before my quiet pocket is affected. Because they're coming door to door.

Pay attention to Minnesota, I think an example is being made of us.

crafting-and-tea

I've been monitoring this closely because I have friends in the area, and because I think every city in the country is at risk of having the feds come to do what they're doing in Minnesota, and we all need to get ready.

There are some Twin Cities activists who have been very clearly laying out what they're doing, and why it's effective at slowing down ICE. It sounds like all you really need, is neighborhood group chats where people can let one another know when and where ICE is present, and then people show up, start recording, and blowing whistles, and then ICE will leave again more often than not. This VERY SHORT thread by a Twin Cities activist outlines what to do and how it works.

Will Stancil (@whstancil.bsky.social)

Getting a lot of messages. A lot are like "Can I come help?" (appreciated, but unless you know the area very well, probably not THAT useful)

Bluesky Social

Also: Minnesota Public Radio has been doing great coverage of what's happening, and the local NBC affiliate has some excellent interviews with activists who were arrested and detained for hours.

And finally, some good news: the courts restored SNAP funding.

ref praxis

narcoticwriter

toboldlynerd

self care ref

averaillisa

animentality

ref endorsed motivation self care getting things done

desm-doodle

kiriano asked:

Hi there! Came across your blog and I have to say I'm very impressed by how flowy and dynamic your art style is! :D

Do you have any tips on how you generally do composition and add movement to your pieces?

desm-doodle answered:

Hello and sorry for the late response! (I forgor to check my inbox 💀)…here’s a kinda long guide for how I do composition :)

First off, I think about the composition in terms of big, simple shapes. (Btw this is a great exercise to do if you’re learning composition - take a drawing and break it down into a handful of simple shapes!) As you can see I try to make these shapes skewed, or diagonal, or tilted, or curved in some way…this makes a composition feel more dynamic.

I also think a lot about value - I usually plan out my composition in black and white before adding color, and try to keep my focal point the area of highest contrast (either light on dark, or dark on light…you may need to find creative solutions or “cheat” a little by adding out-of-frame light sources to make this happen!) Though, remember that humans are naturally drawn towards faces, so if your focal point is a character’s face, you usually don’t need to go too extreme with the contrast to still catch the viewer’s attention.

When it comes to adding movement, I try to give the whole scene a line of action, as you would with a character. A focal point that stands out on its own isn’t always enough to be interesting - by arranging elements in these drawings to point along a spiral path, it guides the viewer to look all over the image, not just one area.

If your drawing has a lot of straight or parallel lines, it can be helpful to break up the uniform motion with perpendicular elements as well.

And lastly, something I’ve only just started dabbling in is using perspective to enhance storytelling. In the sunflowers drawing, having the sun just above the vanishing point guides your eye towards it, just like it attracts the birds and the character’s gaze. (Which, now that I’m analyzing it, maybe the composition could be strengthened even more by having the sun be directly at the vanishing point). The spiral clouds also add to the hypnotic effect of the sun.

And in the fish market drawing, the forced perspective puts you in the position of the cats, looking from the ground upwards towards the character (and his fish!) This has the added bonus of making the cats look bigger than the character, creating the sense that their presence is the dominant force in the image and is perhaps a bit overwhelming from the character’s POV.

The storytelling aspect of composition is something I’m still working on, and is very challenging to incorporate! If you’re still figuring out composition, my advice would be to focus on finding something that “looks nice” first, even if you don’t quite understand the “meaning” of the composition. Once you get more comfortable with arranging elements in an aesthetically pleasing way, then you can shift your focus to “saying something” with the composition.

Hope this helps! If you or anyone else reading this have additional questions, feel free to comment them below :)

ref composition art

stormy-seasons

ceaselessbasher

Me upon discovering an online game that helps you learn git: haha I've been using git for years now, I could skip ahead many levels, methinks hahaha no, no, I'll be humble and start on level 1

Me on level 5: You can do what??? There are commands for what???

beedesigns

For those that need the link and haven't got the reblog hitting their dash: https://learngitbranching.js.org

git ref

madam-melon-meow

san-sebastienne

Dashiell Hammett, who basically invented the noir genre (think: The Maltese Falcon, The Thin Man) hung out enough in the queer scene in San Francisco in the 20s-30s that he picked up some contemporary queer lingo that he folded into his stories. In The Maltese Falcon, there’s a scene where the wildly gay-coded villain shows up at a meeting with a skinny little blonde with a bad attitude and a gun in tow, and detective Sam Spade tells him to “leave the gunsel outside” — gunsel being contemporary gay slang for a young, effeminate man who probably bottoms (from the Yiddish gansl, meaning gosling). Basically, he’s saying “I’m here to talk to you, not your twink.”

However, a lot of writers mimicking Hammett did not know gay lingo or Yiddish, saw the word “gun,” and assumed “gunsel” meant “scary bodyguard with a gun.” They took off with a word they didn’t understand and spread it so fast that it’s now basically impossible to read a noir story written between 1930-1960 without someone accidentally being called a twink at least once. Look out for it next time you’re reading Raymond Chandler or his ilk, I guarantee you’ll find it.

noir dashiell hammett ref

umaruspeaks

cleaning with ADHD is a nightmare. it’s an endless cycle of finding a half-finished chore and stopping the one you were already working on, then remembering that something else needs to be done and getting started on that, then finding half-finished chore and

jumpingjacktrash

i have the solution! i call it ‘junebugging’.

have you ever seen a junebug get to grips with a window screen? it’s remarkably persistent, but not very focused. all that matters is location.

how to junebug: choose the location you feel you can probably get some shit done on today. be specific. not ‘the bathroom’ but ‘the bathroom sink’. you are not choosing a range, you are choosing a center; you will move around, but your location is where you’ll keep coming back to. mentally stick a pin in it. consider yourself tethered to that spot by a long mental bungee cord.

go to your location. look at stuff. move stuff around. do a thing. get distracted. remember you’re junebugging the bathroom sink and go back there. look at it some more. do a different thing. get distracted. get a sandwich. remember you’re junebugging and go back to the bathroom sink.

nt’s will go crazy watching you, and if they demand to know When You Will Be Done you will probably have to roll them in a carpet and stuff them up the chimney. you’re done when you feel done, or you’re too bored to live, or it’s bedtime, or any number of other markers, you get to pick. but the thing is, by returning repeatedly to that one spot, you harness the ‘hyperactivity’ part instead of wasting all that energy battling with the ‘attention deficit’ part.

not only will the bathroom sink almost certainly be clean, and probably the mirror and soap dish too, you might’ve swapped in a fresh toothbrush, a new soap, you might’ve unclogged the drain – you will probably also have cleaned or fixed up several things in the near vicinity, or in the path between the sink and where you get the fresh toothbrush, or maybe you did your grocery shopping cuz you were out of soap, or maybe you couldn’t find a clean hand towel and ended up doing laundry.

this is good. you got shit done! it wasn’t necessarily Cleaned The Bathroom in the way nt’s think of it, but screw ‘em. things are better than they were.

plus you worked off enough energy to be able to sleep. which is not small potatoes when living the ADHD life. :D

spoonie-living

Don’t let the adorable name fool you—this is some Seriously Good Advice. May be useful for brain fog and depression, too!

flavoracle

Reblogging to save my fellow ADHD peeps from the Sisyphusian curse of cleaning with no focus.

adhd getting things done executive function ref

troubled-pasta

bolasaurus

Got sick and tired of losing my scissors, needle, and stitch markers. So VOILA! I present: the modern-day chaterlaine necklace.

Made with a clover circular cutting pendant, claw clasps, o-rings, and some waxed cord. Try hiding from me now, you little bastards!!

bliss-bliss-bliss-bliss

Ohhhhh this is sooo fuckin cooool

I didn't even know a cutting pendant was even a Thing

I have to make one

bliss-bliss-bliss-bliss

Oh, for those who don't know, this is a typical chaterlaine:

It was like a decorative and often very elaborate chain of useful knicknacks, because women have always wanted to carry sharp tools with them without tearing up their pockets or stabbing up their thighs. It's sort of like a foot-long charm bracelet, but the charms are useable notebooks and tweezers and stuff.

I'd never heard of a pendant chatelaine, let along a circular cutting pendant. I LOVE

bolasaurus

I HIGHLY recommend making one! One of my friends asked me if I would sell them. My answer was a resounding NO! They're way too easy to make, and making things is more fun.

You can get everything from local craft shops apart from possibly the pendant. I got mine from Clover as I like the brand, but there are so many other places that make them. Just search online for 'circular cutting pendant' or 'yarn cutting pendant' and there will be tons of options!

The clasps are basic lobster jewellery clasps. Two are attached to a jump ring. One clips to the cord, the other to whatever you want to attach. Minimum of two clasps on the ring is important. This means you can remove the whole section from the necklace, or just take off the item itself off one clasp, leaving the other clasp on the cord. I only needed two sections, but you can make as many as you like!

2mm waxed cord fit the clover pendant perfectly, but you could use any cord, nylon, leather, whatever you like. The closure is a simple sliding knot to allow it to be worn higher up the neckline when not in use.

Hope you have fun making one!!

ref chatelaine craft

emmebearpaw

redladydeath:
“unbfacts:
“Long before the introduction of color film, a Russian chemist and photographer named Sergey Prokudin-Gorsky used an innovative technique. He took three individual black and white photos, each through a colored filter (red,...

Source: Wikipedia

photography ref

sam-keeper

I haven't quite figured out how to talk about it without coming off like a crackpot, cause I know how "this porn comic is as ambitious and should be as medium defining as The Invisibles or V for Vendetta" sounds

but you can get The Unsinkable Ship of Fools for just $10 today. and you should.

The Unsinkable Ship of Fools

Cum one, cum all! Jump aboard the Ship of Fools for your final ride. An ensorcelled train hurtles through the night, with no stops and no h

Iron Circus Comics

sam-keeper

you gotta at least consider this shit, because I've got a bunch of flat brained swerfs who hate porn but are indifferent to the epstein files blowing up my mentions, and I think everyone normal owes it to me to appreciate a pornographie in honor of my having to put up with this horseshit.

liminalchasm

it's $6 during their cyber monday/small business saturday sale this next few days. 264 pages of DRM free graphic novel porn is an incredible deal

i'm picking it up plus some of the publisher's graphic global fairy tale anthologies (i saw a snippet of the girl who married a skull some years back and liked the art, but never picked it up... it happens to be on sale while i'm here! and there are more!)

liminalchasm

i just binge read it. this porn comic IS as ambitious and should be as medium defining as those big names. fucking delicious. finally some good fucking food. you gotta read this one and i'm not sorry. the porn is great and the characters are an absolute joy and the story is like. i want to eat it its so good. the Themes. the Art. the paneling and coloring on this thing is gorgeous beyond all reason and . i want you to read this. it is 6 dollars right now if you can pick it up please do. im gonna re-read it many times i can already tell.

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The grace of a collapsing cathedral (Posts tagged ref)

See, that’s what the app is perfect for.