Marlene Dietrich, Desire, 1936

i got a 100% on this bostonian-to-english quiz but i grew up near boston..... i'm curious what you guys get. there's a couple things in here i didn't even know are regionalisms + a couple things i hadn't heard before but could parse pretty easily from context. tag/reply with what you got and if you're familiar with the area or not!

#didn't know these were regionalisms? i've never heard any of these phrases in my life (via @worldwarthree)

GENUINELY before today i thought fluffernutter and american chop suey were part of National American Culture (TM). i was so puzzled by those questions that i googled both bc i was like "ohhh, this quiz maker thinks some american things aren't as widespread as they are..... they're assigning regional markers to things that aren't regional...... every american will instantly recognize these...."

and then i discovered both of these things are, in fact, particular to the new england region.

& went. What.

This summer, I will have been married to a man from Massachusetts for 25 years. You learn things.

I…know a lot of people from Boston?

My kids did better on this than they did on the Boston one. For some reason.

yaaaaaas

I need to add this to a pile of evidence I can pull out for people when they say "USAmericans all have the same culture" cause what the hell.

Luigi Ghirri, Cielo

heres my challenge to everyone for next month, for black history month. any time you want to draw inspiration from art, like poetry, music etc, pick a black artist. web weave with langston hughes and james baldwin and jamaica kinkaid and hanif abdurraqib and derek walcott and set your edits to meghan thee stallion and beyoncé and eartha kitt and coltrane and invoke basquiat in your art and it can be fanworks or original stuff and importantly, it doesnt have to be about race. obviously be cognizant of the context of the art youre using because a lot of the artists i mention specifically create art about racism but like. take your white doomed yaoi ship and make a webweave to poem by langston hughes. set an edit to body by meghan thee stallion. engage with black art in all contexts.

you can reblog this. other people should also be exposed to this idea.

Writing would be so much easier if I didn't have youtube or computer games Right There.

"Derin you can get timed apps to block -- " No. I don't want to block them. They're too fun.

Me when I block myself from my games.

in Beauty and the Beast: Belle's Magical Christmas there's an evil pipe organ voiced by Tim Curry. many of you will remember this. however, i think many of us (including, embarrassingly, myself) overlooked that he is a magic pipe organ. huh. none of the other servants got magic powers. why does that guy have magic powers now? did the enchantress like him? did her magic interfere with his own pre-existing sorcerous powers? was the existing pipe organ magical and when he was meshed with that pipe organ he got some part of the powers it already possessed? i ask this because he also has my favorite motivation of any DTV disney villain: he wants to stay an evil pipe organ that can do magic. i fuck with that honestly.

everything about this makes sense. it's a midquel. given the structure of the existing movie, it's hard for the villain to be someone from the village. it would also be a bit awkward for it to be a stranger because the whole story is predicated on it being wrong to turn strangers away (the enchantress). so you have to have someone inside the castle, i guess. disney writers sitting around thinking, ok though. but if it's someone in the castle, they're all on the same team, right? they want Beast and Belle to get together so they can be human again. the reason they're working together even with meaningfully different personalities is because they are united in common cause. So, you need someone who doesn't want to return to their former form.

this is how you get Forte, explained elegantly thus:

alright so his motivations check out. If he's just an organist he's going to get old and he could easily be replaced. there's no security in his world. thanks to the enchantress, he now IS the pipe organ. by the way the internet summarized this to me as a man who wants to "remain in organ form". we recognize this as classic pervert behavior.

anyway though! magic! what's that about

i get being a weird organ pervert who wants to stay an evil pipe organ forever. anyway with the addition of magic this is an easy choice (evil magic pipe organ voiced by tim curry; ideal lifestyle and absolute jackpot win). but WHY!! why is he also a witch! did you make a saucy little face when the Prince threw out the enchantress and you two locked eyes and she was like can you Believe this guy and you were like Oh i Know, like Don't Even Tell me About It and she was like yeah you can be telekinetic!! evil pipe organ

anyway hashtag #lifegoals!

Full-time court musician, part-time pervert and magician; sounds like your average Enlightenment-era intellectual to me. Probably writing a picaresque novel or two on the side and keeping up a lively correspondence with Benjamin Franklin.

Vincent Price -

House of Wax (1953) dir. Andre De Toth

So if you follow me (and aren't just stopping by because you saw one of my funney viralposts), you probably know that I've been writing a bunch of fanfiction for Stranger Things, which is set in rural Indiana in the early- to mid-eighties. I've been working on an AU where (among other things) Robin, a character confirmed queer in canon, gets integrated into a friend group made up of a number of main characters. And I got a comment that has been following me around in the back of my mind for a while. Amidst fairly usual talk about the show and the AU and what happens next, the commenter asked, apparently in genuine confusion, "why wouldn't Robin just come out to the rest of the group yet? They would be okay with it."

I did kind of assume, for a second or two, that this was a classic case of somebody confusing what the character knows with what the author/audience knows. But the more I think about it, the more I feel like it embodies a real generational shift in thinking that I hadn't even managed to fully comprehend until this comment threw it into sharp perspective.

Because, my knee-jerk reaction was to reply to the comment, "She hasn't come out to these people she's only sort-of known for less than a year because it's rural Indiana. In the nineteen-eighties." and let that speak for itself. Because for me and my peers, that would speak for itself. That would be an easy and obvious leap of logic. Because I grew up in a world where you assumed, until proven otherwise, that the general society and everyone around you was homophobic. That it was unsafe to be known to be queer, and to deliberately out yourself required intention and forethought and courage, because you would get negative reactions and you had to be prepared for the fallout. Not from everybody! There were always exceptions! But they were exceptions. And this wasn't something you consciously decided, it wasn't an individual choice, it wasn't an individual response to trauma, it wasn't individual. It was everybody. It was baked in, and you didn't question it because it was so inherently, demonstrably obvious. It was Just The Way The World Is. Everybody can safely be assumed to be homophobic until proven otherwise.

And what this comment really clarified for me, but I've seen in a million tiny clashing assumptions and disconnects and confusions I've run into with The Kids These Days, is that a lot of them have grown up into a world that is...the opposite. There are a lot of queer kids out there who are assuming, by default, that everybody is not homophobic, until proven otherwise. And by and large, the world is not punishing them harshly for making that assumption, the way it once would have.

The whole entire world I knew changed, somehow, very slowly and then all at once. And yes, it does make me feel like a complete space alien just arrived to Earth some days. But also, it makes me feel very hopeful. This is what we wanted for ourselves when we were young and raw and angrily shoving ourselves in everyone's faces to dare them to prove themselves the exception, and this is what I want for The Kids These Days.

(But also please, please, Kids These Days, do try to remember that it has only been this way since extremely recently, and no it is not crazy or pathetic or irrational or whatever to still want to protect yourself and be choosy about who you share important parts of yourself with.)

There is an additional layer to this thought, that only occurred to me this morning: it wasn't just queer people making this assumption that everybody was homophobic until proven otherwise. It was everybody. Which meant that homophobes were really, really comfortable with loudly and publicly sharing their views, because they assumed they were always in company that shared those views. And they tended to, as a rule, face far, far fewer social consequences for that than people did for existing and being known to be queer. I've seen commentary on a gifset of Anita Bryant (famous homophobic crusader) getting pied in the face on live national television that basically said the same thing: the moment the pie hit her proved to an audience of millions that, not only was that not always the case, but that the queer person you professed to hate might be in the room with you.

The general shift from social sanctioning of explicit, say-the-quiet-part-out-loud homophobia to it being widely regarded as kind of cringe and shameful has been due to a long, violent, constant, concerted effort on the part of queer people and those who love us. And I can never, ever take it for granted. I hope you won't either.

Another Gen Xer chiming in. A while back I saw a Tumblr post asking something like, "How many LGBT kids were in your high school?" and it made me feel old because the very concept of being out in high school came long after my time. I grew up in rural New York, and I found out in our mid-twenties that one of my best friends was gay and had never told me. And I completely understood - I knew that he knew I wouldn't have a problem with it, but what if I had inadvertently let something slip, or even given an unconscious hint or clue, to somebody else who did? His own father had threatened him with violence if he ever mentioned it in his presence, and his own mother didn't speak to him for a year when she found out. It was a different world. This is why queer kids ran to the cities, and still do in many cases.

Eve Arnold (Magnum Photos) - A Black girl and a white girl apply makeup in the ladies room before an ‘integration dinner party’ during the civil rights strikes, Virginia, US (1958)

Eve Arnold was the first female photographer who was accepted to Magnum (as a nominee in 1951, and in 1957 as the full member of this legendary collective).

commission for @faintedincoils

data and spot!!!!! 🐈✨

Amazing architecture in Jaipur, Rajasthan, INDIA

I’m gonna get you >:)

Cemeteries are not wastes of space. Historical cemeteries ESPECIALLY are not wastes of space. The fact developers are continuously foaming at the mouth to destroy them and put a strip mall up in their place should make you even more determined to help maintain them. In urban areas, they are a haven for wildlife. They are a green space. If you are too afraid of death to utilize them for that purpose, that is on you.

My brother is buried in a beautiful old city cemetery, but I don't plan to be. I have a few reasons for this, one of them being that I don't really want to use more land. My mother has given her OK for me to have a cenotaph placed as a footstone on his grave when I go, so we can be remembered there together as a family. As a lifelong lover of cemeteries and funerary art, I find it comforting to think of leaving a mark there even if my remains will be returning to the earth somewhere else.

Digging up cemeteries is how you get haunted houses and towns.

They moved the stones but not the bodies! WHYYY?