I was meeting a client at a famous museum’s lounge for lunch (fancy, I know) and had an hour to kill afterwards so I joined the first random docent tour I could find. The woman who took us around was a great-grandmother from the Bronx “back when that was nothing to brag about” and she was doing a talk on alternative mediums within art.
What I thought that meant: telling us about unique sculpture materials and paint mixtures.
What that actually meant: an 84yo woman gingerly holding a beautifully beaded and embroidered dress (apparently from Ukraine and at least 200 years old) and, with tears in her eyes, showing how each individual thread was spun by hand and weaved into place on a cottage floor loom, with bright blue silk embroidery thread and hand-blown beads intricately piercing the work of other labor for days upon days, as the labor of a dozen talented people came together to make something so beautiful for a village girl’s wedding day.
What it also meant: in 1948, a young girl lived in a cramped tenement-like third floor apartment in Manhattan, with a father who had just joined them after not having been allowed to escape through Poland with his pregnant wife nine years earlier. She sits in her father’s lap and watches with wide, quiet eyes as her mother’s deft hands fly across fabric with bright blue silk thread (echoing hands from over a century years earlier). Thread that her mother had salvaged from white embroidery scraps at the tailor’s shop where she worked and spent the last few days carefully dying in the kitchen sink and drying on the roof.
The dress is in the traditional Hungarian fashion and is folded across her mother’s lap: her mother doesn’t had a pattern, but she doesn’t need one to make her daughter’s dress for the fifth grade dance. The dress would end up differing significantly from the pure white, petticoated first communion dresses worn by her daughter’s majority-Catholic classmates, but the young girl would love it all the more for its uniqueness and bright blue thread.
And now, that same young girl (and maybe also the villager from 19th century Ukraine) stands in front of us, trying not to clutch the old fabric too hard as her voice shakes with the emotion of all the love and humanity that is poured into the labor of art. The village girl and the girl in the Bronx were very different people: different centuries, different religions, different ages, and different continents. But the love in the stitches and beads on their dresses was the same. And she tells us that when we look at the labor of art, we don’t just see the work to create that piece - we see the labor of our own creations and the creations of others for us, and the value in something so seemingly frivolous.
But, maybe more importantly, she says that we only admire this piece in a museum because it happened to survive the love of the wearer and those who owned it afterwards, but there have been quite literally billions of small, quiet works of art in billions of small, quiet homes all over the world, for millennia. That your grandmother’s quilt is used as a picnic blanket just as Van Gogh’s works hung in his poor friends’ hallways. That your father’s hand-painted model plane sets are displayed in your parents’ livingroom as Grecian vases are displayed in museums. That your older sister’s engineering drawings in a steady, fine-lined hand are akin to Da Vinci’s scribbles of flying machines.
I don’t think there’s any dramatic conclusions to be drawn from these thoughts - they’ve been echoed by thousands of other people across the centuries. However, if you ever feel bad for spending all of your time sewing, knitting, drawing, building lego sets, or whatever else - especially if you feel like you have to somehow monetize or show off your work online to justify your labor - please know that there’s an 84yo museum docent in the Bronx who would cry simply at the thought of you spending so much effort to quietly create something that’s beautiful to you.
YES YES I NEED THIS SIGN IN EVERY SINGLE PARK PLEASE
This is my daily struggle, I had so many arguments with people with off-leash dogs (in a mandatory leash area!!!). Thanks to this behavior I'm struggling with Kim being anxious/aggressive with other females as she often gets involved in unpleased interactions with free females while on leash. And every single time that I ask for the dog to be at least recalled, I'm being called names and insulted of course.
Also 9 out of 10 their dog isn't really that friendly at all.
it's actually terrifying how quickly the concept of self care (originally a radical concept rooted in the black panther party's efforts to support other black ppl living through racism) became another tool of self-management which is viewed as both a moral obligation + an individual responsibility. businesses + employers + other institutions now easily wield it as a progressive way to say "if you're upset about xyz, make yourself get over it". "we are going to treat you like shit + you need to learn how to cope with that or else you're doing something wrong"
i have seen job listings where "ability to practice self care" was listed as a requirement for employment. as a case worker, we were repeatedly drilled on "self-care" as a response to unconscionably high case loads, traumatizing experiences, dead end job obligations, + poor living conditions due to subpar pay/high stress. my clients would go to appointments regarding their evictions, food insecurity, active domestic violence situations, etc + receive tips on "self care" without any tangible community, legal, or structural support to follow.
everyone absolutely deserves to care for themselves + it is useful to circulate affirmations + advice on how to do this. this should happen within communities, through a sincere concern/love for one another, as a way of helping everyone live the best life possible while we work towards total liberation. it should not be a replacement for caring for one another!!! it should be one of many ways of caring for one another!!!
With the Titanic tourist submarine gone missing I would once again like to say that every single person on that ship that night got their family torn apart in some way. Survivors had to sit in lifeboats and listen to their love ones die in the water. Many survivors went on to have severe mental health issues and committed suicide. After the incident the White Star Line sent out bills to living relatives of their deceased employees making them pay for the uniforms that their loved ones had died in. The people in Halifax who had to recover the deceased bodies were traumatized for life while also paying for funeral services for unclaimed bodies with money out of their own pockets.
I 100 percent believe that it’s important to study the ship as it continues to deteriorate but in no way should it be used as a fucking tourist attraction and the fact that it’s gotten to this point is straight up disgusting. If one things goes wrong down there that it’s your dead. Simple as that.
Robert Ballard who discovered the ship has even said that he has regrets about discovering the ship because of the damage that submarines have caused to it.
the man trained by the shimotsuki since childhood, the mind behind the three sword style, the demon pirate hunter, vice captain of the Strawhat Pirates,
easily stopped with a hand on his shoulder by his captain (currently in a silly hungry vibe)
I want to be raped so bad like I wouldn’t even care if it’s in public. Use all my holes while people are passing by. Letting them know I’m being used and abused by some random stranger. Even better if he cums inside of me multiple times telling me that I deserved to be raped because I’m such a slut going out in public without a bra or panties !!
My take on a Sonadow fankid! She actually existed for a while now, but the trend gave me motivation to finally draw her!
Most sonadow fankids are purplish and tube-grown, so I decided to make her neither!
Background for the story under cut, in case it gets long!
So in this AU, stories from the more recent games happen when Sonic and Shadow are at most around 20 years old. Back then Sonic was rambunctious and reckless as we know him to be, and Shadow was a depressed, traumatized emo kid. While at first they were rivals as depicted in the games.
Over the years tho, just like their friends, the two matured. They started getting along a lot more, and became official friends, which eventually lead to dating. They both were afraid of getting serious though, so they took things slow and casual. Due to some of their unresolved issues, they couldn't get any closer. But not for much longer.
Some of it has been brought on by a Particular Event, and some of it due to restructuring how they go about saving the world, but things changed. As Forces has shown, putting so much responsibility on One Guy isn't wise. Sonic felt so quilty for failing, but it never should've been his job alone, so they created an organization, to share the load more evenly!
The org became global, with local groups of heroes being recruited all around, meaning that now the characters we know and love now had more time to take care of their personal lives.
While for some the change hasn't been much, Sonic, and to a lesser extent, Shadow, struggled quite a lot. Many of things happened in between, but eventually both of them grew to quite enjoy the domestic life.
They moved in together, and started taking things to the next level, now that both have done some healing and therapy. They found that they get along quite great. After a bit longer, they decided to start a family :)
Shadow came up with the name. He wanted to honor his sister's memory, but Mar-Mar was also a symbol of all his progress. He did go to therapy to make sure that he can handle them sharing a name, to see if it's a good idea, and well, it was!
She's now 4 and very loved, and her dads love each other very much as well. For a certain Sonic though, things won't go so great.
-> Glaze your art if you have the access to Glaze. the computing power for it is insane, it sucks, I know. cook dinner while your art glazes or go on a walk.
-> if you have the power necessary to use Nightshade, use it too.
-> data sharing has to be turned off individually for every blog. go do that
-> if you are on desktop, go to Account and choose a blog. on the right side menu, select Blog Settings. the setting is at the bottom under Visibility. I recommend turning it on even if you do not trust that your data will not be used for training AI models
-> please do this even if you are not an artist/don't post your own images! the wording wasn't clear on whether reblogged posts will be included in scraping, and given the other info coming out, it is likely that it might be
fav part of gideon the ninth is for the first pre-canaan house chunk of the book, she's all "ugh I'm so normal surrounded by all these weirdo goth freaks when I blow this popsicle stand everyone will see how cool and normal and charming I am" and then she gets to canaan house and realizes that while she might have been a normie jock in the ninth house she is not exempt from being a goth weirdo who hides important doors behind tapestries and sneaks around in the dark so she doesn't have to talk to people. like we talk about her being a jock forced to be goth but nature v nurture babey she's not shedding that bone freak skin anytime soon