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One of my earlier embroidery animations, this was my second one. I made sure that the designs were very simple, since I wanted this to be fairly long. The tangled thread is just purposefully messed up French knots.

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“The 2015 DOJ report on the police reaction to protests in Ferguson, Missouri after the shooting of Michael Brown concluded that the violence in St. Louis County erupted only after police showed up at a peaceful protest with snipers, dogs, riot gear, and armored vehicles. The police presence “served only to exacerbate tensions between the protesters and the police,” the report concluded, and “defeated… the perception of procedural justice and legitimacy.” There’s plenty of academic research on this as well. The psychologists Clifford Scott and Steven Reicher have studied a generation of unruly crowds—from the 2011 London riots in response to a police shooting, to the 2019 protests and riots in Hong Kong, to soccer hooligans in the 1990s. They’ve found that crowds, especially protest crowds, generally tend to self-police when it comes to rioting and violence. Crowds with a shared interest, especially protesters, want to be heard and seen as legitimate. But once police begin to use force—particularly if it’s seen as excessive or arbitrary—the crowd begins to see police officers as a common enemy. The self-policing stops, and the violence spreads.”

—

‘Riotsville, USA’ Shows the Birth of Police Militarization

Study after peer-reviewed study has concluded that police provoke violence against protesters. It’s been this way for over fifty years.

Violence perpetrated by law enforcement is not a bug in the system. It is a choice that has been made consistently, at least as long as it has been studied.

Police choose to aggravate, incite, harass, and then brutally attack people of color and protesters. That choice is supported and defended at all levels of government, and the cycle continues.

All cops are bastards, because all cops participate in this system. The few who have spoken up against it have been fired, murdered, run off the force, or otherwise silenced.

Fuck the police.

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the Columbia University arrests are worse than they seem. They're arresting protesting students for trespassing. It goes without saying students cannot meaningfully "trespass" in the common areas of a university they attend. So Columbia University has suspended all student protestors from their institution, in the process revoking their access to housing, their belonging, and most crucially damaging their academic futures. We are witnessing full scale silencing and removal of anyone of conscience from the next generation of academia.

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i know it’s been said before, but it bears repeating: a big, big part of maintaining your confidence & self esteem as a creator is fully embracing the concept of “you don’t have to be good like them.  you can be good like you.”

for example, i’m not someone who’s particularly good at coming up with complex, elaborate plots or incredibly unique ideas.  it’s just not how i choose to write.  and it would be easy for me to look at someone with an elaborate, super unique plot & decide that because i don’t write like that, i’m not a good writer.  after all, unique plots are good, and my writing lacks those, so my writing must not be good, right?  well, no, actually.  i just have different strengths, like taking a simple premise & digging super deep into its emotional depths.  that’s what i do well & it isn’t any better or worse than people who do elaborate world building or come up with really creative and unexpected plots.

your writing is never going to be all things to all people.  it just isn’t.  inevitably, you’ll have to make creative choices that favor certain aspects of writing over others.  there is truly no getting around that & it’s honestly a good thing, because it means you’ve developed your own style.  but you’ll always encounter other creators who posses strengths that you don’t.  it doesn’t mean one is better than the other or that your writing isn’t good enough. 

comparing yourself like that would be like taking a piece of pizza & a cupcake & going “oh no, that cupcake is so sweet & my pizza isn’t sweet at all.” or “gosh, the garlic crust on that pizza is delicious and my cupcake doesn’t have ANY garlic.”  obviously your pizza isn’t sweet.  obviously your cupcake doesn’t have garlic.  a food can’t have every single delicious flavor at once.  the cupcake is good like a cupcake.  the pizza is good like a pizza.  so you don’t have to be good like them.  you can be good like you.

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Do not punish the behaviour you want to see

I mean, it seems pretty obvious when you put it like that, right?

But how many families, when an introvert sibling or child makes an effort to socialize,  snarkily say, “So, you’ve decided to join us”?

Or when someone does something they’ve had trouble doing, say, “Why can’t you do that all the time?” (Happened to me, too often.)

Or any sentence containing the word “finally”. 

If someone makes a step, a small step, in a direction you want to encourage, encourage it. Don’t complain about how it’s not enough. Don’t bring up previous stuff. Encourage it.

Because I swear to fucking god there is nothing more soul-killing, more motivation-crushing, than struggling to succeed and finding out that success and failure are both punished.

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A gray wolf (Canis lupus) in Yellowstone National Park, USA

by Sam

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In their defence, a lot of it is sand.

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shape-shifter

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"when i was your age, i was working three jobs to help support my family" and "when i was in college i was sleeping on a mattress on the floor and living off of soup"

YOU SHOULDN'T HAVE HAD TO DO THAT. NO ONE SHOULD HAVE TO DO THAT. I DON'T KNOW HOW TO EXPLAIN TO YOU THAT THIS ISN'T A CHARACTER-BUILDING LESSON, IT'S JUST BAD

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There's a post going around Tumblr about how if you're post-menopausal and have bleeding, you should get it checked by your doctor. I brought some minor bleeding I'd had up in a doctor visit earlier this year, prompted by that post, and this week, after a biopsy, I found out I have cancer. It's early stage and the survival odds at 5 years are 99%. I have an oncologist appointment and we may have caught it early enough that surgery alone will be sufficient treatment (no radiation/chemo).

So that post may have saved my life and it may have made my treatment a lot easier too.

If you get into menopause and then start bleeding again, really, get your reproductive innards checked out. The life you save may be your own.

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laios in ep 15

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hello tumblr i had a dream about a cat that everyone loved named Soupy so i wanted to draw her for you