I enjoy the concept of One Page TTRPGS. They seem like the sort of thing you'd find in a Young Ladies Handbook For Entertaining At Social Gatherings.

I found this really good audiobook from a small channel made of the 1930 unrevised book The Secret of The Old Clock. she does the voices for the characters (looking at the channel seems to be a professional narrator of audiobooks), its quite good.

Sometimes I see some variety of North American Little Guy (opossum, raccoon, etc. ) and I’m like “okay”

BUT THEN I start thinking about how excited somebody from not-North-America would be to see this Guy. Like, would an Australian be excited to see the only marsupial not from their country? Are there raccoons in zoos on the other side of the world that are regarded as unique and exotic creatures? Idk but it’s made me more excited to see Guys in my area.

it's me, i'm the person described in the tumbl

I went to a zoo in England this past summer, and there were crowds around the skunks, raccoons, and coyotes.

So, as an Australian, going to the zoo in China with a USAmerican and a Jamacian was an experience.

The first thing you should know about this experiences is I'm a fairly bush-raised child. Not entirely, but the vast majority of my school holidays were spent camping or on a property or otherwise out in the bush. (Not the Outback, although sometimes, but definitely the Bush. The great south-west forests, to be specific.)

I have seen more than my fair share of actually wild Australian wildlife. I am severely immune to snakes, spiders, frogs, kangaroos and wild foxes, rabbits and pigs (those shouldn't be in Australia, but they are. Also, if you ever see evidence of pigs in the bush, you leave immediately.)

So here we encounter jarring moment of dissonance the first.

We were walking past the kangaroo paddock and I'll admit I didn't even give it a second glance - it was a case of "Oh, kangaroos, how normal," And moving on. Didn't even register that they would be something to get excited about. It was literally like seeing a bird or the neighbour's cat.

Anyway, after awhile I noticed that I was no longer with my fellows because they were amazed by the kangaroos. They were staring, they were laughing, they were paying money to feed the fucking kangaroos like they were some sort of weird, special, exotic animal.

"Oh for fuck's sake, guys, they're just kangaroos!"

And then I realised I was with non-Australians and felt properly shamed.

We spent some (far too long of a) time with the kangaroos and moved on.

Anyway, as we were leaving we were walking through the American animals section and I've stopped dead in my tracks and squealed with excitement and raced over to an enclosure to coo and generally be a weird, animal-obsessed little moron. I'd never seen this animal in real life before but it was adorable and lovely and the cutest thing ever. And my Americas friends were looking at me like I'd grown another head because the animal that I was enamoured with and had never seen in person before, the animal that I was most excited about out of any that was there (including the baby tiger that I actually got to hold, guys)

The animal was a raccoon.

Your trash creature is someone else’s treasured encounter

When my father visited a Zoo in Germany, he was amazed to find people eagerly watching what appeared to be a large patch of dirt with holes in it. It took him a minute to realize that the exhibit was for prairie dogs and everyone was waiting to hopefully see one pop it's head out. Dad, who went to school in Eastern Oregon and regularly harassed the local prairie dog population there, had long known how to call them. So to amuse himself, he gave the high whistle he used to use at school and, sure enough, about 15 little heads popped up to see what was happening. What was happening was the local German patrons all losing their god damn minds

Times like these I remember that Malcolm X quote about healing and how it requires acknowledging the knife is there. Things like "this isn't who we are" and "this is un-American" and "what are we? [insert another country]??" reveal a deep seated denial of American history and state-sponsored domestic terror that I'm just not gonna entertain anymore from leftists over the age of twenty.

Every time I see some proshipper say "fiction has no bearing on reality" I just sit there and think of how minstrel shows' influence still has black people fighting against stereotypes to this day. I think about how so many war movies portray Indians and Arab people as terrorists, which justifies the white male soldier protagonist's destruction of their land and even coddles his feeling bad about it. I think about the submissive and docile Asian woman trope and how men in real life think it's okay to treat Asian women as objects thanks to those tropes. I think about the fact Twilight's portrayal of Indigenous people as werewolves, aka savage animals compared to the white, distinguished vampires and the bastardization of Quileute culture was so bad that there was a webpage created by the tribe debunking everything that Twilight said. Of course you'd say fiction has no bearing on reality when you haven't lived through what we have to face on a day to day basis.

Ursula K. Le Guin - A Wizard of Earthsea The Loosing of the Shadow

RAFIKI (2018) dir. Wanuri Kahiu Kena and Ziki long for something more. Despite the political rivalry between their families, the girls resist and remain close friends, supporting each other to pursue their dreams in a conservative society. When love blossoms between them, the two will be forced to choose between happiness and safety. (link in title)

its actually very funny to me that lynchs work has this reputation of being very weird and confusing and opaque and so when you watch it you kinda go in expecting to have to sus out a lot of subtle metaphor and symbolism and like certainly its got its fair share but mostly the thing people find so weird about it i think is that he creates these story worlds where the rules of reality are bent to allow for as much literal communication as possible. so much of his work is just characters telling you whats going on and what it means to them so bluntly that it like loops and sounds completely bizarre, like listening to someone describe a dream they had with perfect recall and clarity. it rules. i love being autistic actually.

and make no mistake it takes real skill to do this in a story without your characters coming off as one-note exposition machines. a line like "maybe thats all bob is. the evil that men do." hits because in context its an earnest response to the situation. that whole scene is like as close as anyone gets to looking directly into the camera and saying "this is what twin peaks is about" but it doesnt feel patronizing, it feels sort of like the characters are figuring out in real time the sort of story theyre in and trying to make sense of it alongside the viewer.

its tempting to sort of linger on the mystery of who or what is bob, what is the black lodge, etc, but at the same time they are literally telling you. its storytelling that like plays off of the audiences desire for a singular satisfactory answer where one doesnt really exist. you can tell someone straight up here is whats happening, here is the meaning, but you cant make them accept that and you spoil the experience when you go out of your way to try and convince them. lynchs work gets a lot of its power from his absolute commitment to giving you the story as he sees, exactly as he sees it, and then walking away.

tldr insert "elaborate on that" "no :)" meme

still at the time museum in lisbon

You mean like slavery?

Image Description.

Facebook post from Matt Norris.

Post reads like a conversation between 2 people:

Prison labor is a problem we need to address soon.

Convicts in prison should have to work like the rest of us.

No, we’re giving them 3 meals and a bed, at our expense, while they just sit around and watch TV. They should have to work!

Right. Like slavery.

It’s not like slavery!

Can they leave?

No.

Can they refuse work?

No.

So how exactly isn’t this slavery?

We DO pay them!

Do we pay in accordance with labor laws?

No. We pay them between 33 cents and $1.41/hour with a maximum daily wage below $5, then take up to half of that as room&board fees and victim compensation.

Right. So like slavery.

BUT.

No.

Image then links to this url.

Below URL image reads “fun bonus fact: enough of our labor market currently relies on labor at these depressed rates, that it has a substantial downward pressure on both wages and job availability in low-skilled sectors. Immigrants aren’t taking your jobs. Slavery is.

End description.

I’d also like to add it’s not just private prisons. It’s also private detention centers where ICE keeps the immigrants.

-fae

The constitution even acknowledges that it’s still slavery

a hefty chunk of items with that ‘made in america’ sticker are in fact made by prison labor at the very least anything that is a product of prison labor should be required to have a similar sticker to inform consumers they are taking part of this system, which is difficult to track because prison made manufactured goods include almost the entire uniform of a US soldier, road construction in most southern states, and agricultural goods sold in most stores

this…. looks familliar

Prison is just covert slavery and that’s why they wanna keep so many black people in there for the smallest offences.

This is insane

(Just to clarify, I’m not saying you’re wrong. I’m just giving you more information because you’re right, and I like your blog, and I want you to have sources in case you need them.)

It’s not even covert. It’s blatant and overt. It’s even called slavery in the constitution.

“Slavery is illegal except as punishment for a crime.”

People just don’t care because they think it’s all murderers and rapists, despite the fact that the number of violent criminals in jail is so small it might as well be negligible.

It’s literally slavery, just dumbass racists and capitalists don’t care enough to figure out why we’re calling it that.

-fae

Actually, no, I got something to add and it’s this video by Knowing Better on Youtube:

Slavery is baked into the US American system so much more firmly than anyone ever really acknowledges.

There’s a very good and very hard-hitting documentary about it on Netflix

Also… even if someone has committed a violent crime, enslaving them is… ya know… still a fucked up thing to do? How is that even in question?

The whole discourse of “well they’re not even all violent offenders” has this weird undertone of ‘if they’re good people they shouldn’t have to be slaves’ that horrifies me. Even if 100% of them were violent, Slavery. Is. Wrong. All humans have rights.

i would highly recommend “American Prison” by Shane Bauer. it’s a sickening read, by a journalist who went undercover as a prison guard and the things he saw and was made to do and did voluntarily. but extremely good, and in many ways necessary. he has some articles that are basically abridged versions as well, if you don’t want to or can’t read the whole book

Some of you think of Cops as kind of a symbolic figure representing "telling you what to do" & you're Posting things like "acab includes fandom discourse" and I thuink the 80% white website needs to remember the reason why we hate cops is because they kill people

We hate cops because they're a weapon for enforcing the state's interests through violence. Like, they kill & imprison people. The antis don't have a Quite Literal boot on your neck please god log off or talk to a Black person or something

To be SO fair like really generous there is something to be said for unlearning the habit of figuratively "policing" other people especially in the context of, like, not being a fucking snitch, "kill the cop in your head" etc etc, but can we not completely lose the plot re: what cops Are

WEIRD GIRL I LUV U FOREVER <3

youtube link

walk of shame (returning library books i haven’t read)

You've added to the library's circulation numbers, which can help when budget time comes around.

Remember when I posted months ago that I was working with my mom on a crocheted horta?

Well, she's done!!

She's been rounded for huggability and lives on my lap while I work

captured