Faith

Art by Suspiria Vilchez

Thank u comrade tyranitar

that is godzilla

I think it’s incredibly fucked how capitalism discourages learning for learning’s sake. People will have interests they’ve spent years researching then say it’s “useless knowledge” bc it didn’t go towards a college degree and isn’t part of their job. Learning is never useless! Your brain is growing and developing throughout your whole life! People would never have epiphanies or sudden lightening strikes of creativity if they weren’t learning new things! That goes double for topics like science, politics, and history, which inform your understanding of the world you live in!

At the annual Houston RenFest we’d always get one or two furries that walk around and every time the general reaction from the medieval roleplayers is akin to  “BEASTS? BEASTS THAT WALK LIKE MAN? FOUL!” 

Last time I went a furry volunteered for an impromptu conversion/exorcism and a guy dressed as a monk gathered a bunch of people and using a Gatorade bottle performed an entire catholic christening while reading off the instructions on his Ipad. When the furry was fully “converted” he removed the head of his costume and everyone in the crowd pretended to freak out and say shit like “GlORY BE HE IS SAVED” “CHRIST HAS BROKEN HIS CURSE”

That’s the best crap i’ve heard in months

have I mentioned that i’m fucking in love with humankind

Ralph Goings (American, b,1928), Flowered Table Top, 1978, Watercolor and graphite on paper

Watercolour and graphite on paper…!!!

Funny thing, though. I’ve posted a similar pic of a water-glass with condensation which looks even more “photorealistic”, yet impressed me less. Both must have taken a similar amount of work and skill, but the water-glass looks SO photo-real I suggested it might as well just be a photo.

This, however - to my eyes anyway, YMMV - is like a close-up-and-crop from a Norman Rockwell painting, and because of that, I like it better.

In fact YMMV about the entire subject, because Art is such a subjective thing. :->

The Amazon quite literally cannot exist without the Sahara.

Sands from the ancient deserts of Chad are blown across the Atlantic to fertilize the nutrient poor soils of Brazil.

Source

Dust from the Gobi, in turn, provides redwoods with the fuel they need to become the tallest trees on Earth.

Our entire planet is connected. Just as the elephant needs the maggot, Eden needs the wasteland.

Deserts feed forests, true, but they are also carbon sinks in their own ways! Ways that are as yet poorly-understood -- but we know that, for example, the roots of mesquite trees can penetrate hundreds of feet deep in search of water. In doing so, they transport carbon deep underground, where it reacts with calcium to form caliche, deposits of calcium carbonate. In this mineral form it can remain buried practically indefinitely -- in contrast to the biological carbon sinks of forests, which cycle carbon back into the atmosphere on a much shorter (though still long) time-frame. When desert plants convert atmospheric carbon into sugars, that carbon too is buried in dense reserves among the symbiotic fungal networks of their roots; this glomalin, while not unique to deserts, stores a full third of the world's soil carbon

But --

Why must deserts serve forests to be worthwhile?

Why must deserts be carbon sinks at all to be valued?

Deserts are beautiful, rich and unique ecosystems, with communities and histories all their own

The fact that they appear sparse, that -- in technical terms -- they have a lower density of biomass than other habitats, does not mean that they are empty of life. The plants and animals of the world's deserts are hardy, clever, and resilient; like tundra and mountains, their communities grow slowly, with many plants growing only fractions of an inch per year, for thousands of years -- damage is catastrophic. Others, and many animals, flourish in the rare moments when water is plenty, erupting into a frenzy of life and activity before retreating to dormancy

Without the camel, or the sidewinder snake, or the hairy scorpion; the African lungfish, and the constellated diversity of Tanganyika cichlids; without the saguaro or the Joshua tree or strange, ancient Welsitschia; the Syntrichia moss that draws water directly from the air; the dense, bulbous Ilareta shrub --

Without the painted mountains of Peru; without the stone forests of Tsingy de Bemahara; without the singing sands of the Namib, and Gobi, and Taklamakan; the high salt flats of the Atacama where flamingoes raise their young --

Our world would be so much poorer.

Over the millennia of human existence countless peoples have made their homes with deserts. On every continent save Antarctica, human cultures and histories have molded & been molded by desert homes; have lived with them, and loved them, and managed them, and been part of them

The camel, llama, and alpaca; the lion, crocodile, and and sacred vulture; even our beloved housecats -- we owe them all to deserts

The pigeon! Our everyday, ubiquitous Columba livia! Heroes of world wars, foundational to the theory of evolution, prized friends and companions (and, yes, livestock) to humanity for five thousand years! Whose ability to find home across hundreds of miles originated (we believe) to bring them back to their cliffside roosts after foraging faraway sources of food and water across the Mediterranean deserts of their origin!

The Nazca lines survive only because their desert environment is dry enough to preserve them; the Pueblo peoples carved homes into cliff faces; Uluru (map by Tony Tjamiwa) is sacred to the Pitjantjatjara people

And the thoughtless colonial erasure -- "greening" -- of these deserts is the genocide of their peoples, packaged as environmentalism, appealing to Euro-centric aesthetics and ideals of "nature." The label of "wasteland" is historically inextricable from genocide -- literally, labelling a land and the people who live there "waste" to discard and obliterate

We see this today in Palestine, where olive groves are razed for pine forests planted over the ruins of Palestinian towns whose people were slaughtered and exiled in the founding of the state of Israel, to hide that they were ever there, that any atrocity was committed -- an ongoing genocide that has continued for some 70 years, a proud slogan upheld by the Israeli occupation! "Making the Desert Bloom" ... in a manner economically productive for European industrial agriculture, fertile on the bodies of Palestine's people, on the eradication of the "empty" "wasteland" the first Zionist settlers "found"

Whether deserts serve as carbon sinks; how they compare as carbon sinks to other habitats; whether they feed forests -- all of these questions are important, true, but none of them matter as to whether deserts are worthwhile. Whether deserts get to exist.

Deserts get to exist because they are alive, and dynamic, and historied. Deserts get to exist because they have been homes for people and cultures since time immemorial. Deserts get to exist because each of them is unique, and to lose any of them would be a tragic, irreparable atrocity

[thanks to @rainbowobsidianbutterfly for talking over thoughts + providing examples]

I can't believe you blocked me, just because I read everything you said in bad faith with open hostility.

okay.

“Put it all in his pussy” I love it. He just wadded it all up and shoved it right in there. Crammed it all in. That expression should be commonplace too.

It's literally queer AAVE

It's literally queer AAVE

It's an American saying originated from 'they put their whole foot in it' which means giving your all to something. (which in turn originated from the saying 'they dipped their toe into it' which means tentatively trying something out)

Ya'll love to appropriate Black culture and call it something the 'internet puked up one day' it's sickening.

To those who are finding out right now, please don't ignore this because it makes you uncomfortable. If you wanna use the phrase please respect its origins.

WHY ARE PEOPLE REBLOGGING THIS TAGGED "Q SLUR" IF YALL DONT FUCKIN QUIT

Ban on conversion practices in the European Union

If you're an EU citizen: please consider signing.

Web page on the progress of the initiative

“queer spaces should be inclusive of people who don’t enjoy sex and who have “strange”, negative or repulsed relationships with sex” and “sex is an important aspect of lgbt community, history, and activism and queer people should be allowed and able to talk freely about sex without stigma or shame” are ideas that can and should coexist.

Instagram : krewkutz

This made me feel really happy ❤️

as a POC I can’t overstate how much I appreciate this, the third one especially who has this look that has lost so much hope, you can see her eyes swell in real time post transformation and it just goes to show that looking good makes us feel good

it warms my heart to see so many reblog this from me, yet unless you’re Black? (with little exceptions) I don’t think you all really get it, so let me really paint the story here.

the thing about Black hair is that it is varied, like incredibly so. some of us luck out and get what we dub “Good Hair”, hair that is normally not as tightly curled and manageable with a little to midrange amount of effort. But many MANY of us have natural hair that is tough and thick, the curls are small, sometimes very tightly wound, it makes brushing and combing damn near impossible on top of other hair care methods. short as well as braided hair isn’t always desired but for many of us we have no choice, it’s just easier to maintain it that way, it is a sentence, not a style.

keep in mind that hairstyle is a statement, especially when you’re Black, your hair says so much about you in this community in particular. we also have the fact that our standard is held against White standards of beauty, and that is a whole different conversation involving privilege, systemic racism, and internalized hatred—like bitch, this has LAYERS!

take the age into account here for all these women, but in this case I’m specifically talking about the third. now, these are all educated assumptions, but you know where those tears are from? she’s had to live with this hair her whole life! and you just KNOW she’s tried everything!—heat, curling, straightening, perms, softeners/relaxers, HUNDREDS of products that make hundreds of promises, and many of these risk taking out the natural oil and proteins in hair which is a death sentence for Black hair. she had given up hope that anything good could ever be done I’ll bet. that transformation did more than style her hair, it gave her years upon years of hope; Listen to Black folk when they tell you, it’s more than just hair.

this man is doing more than hair, he’s changing lives…I just hope he knows that.

REBLOG if you have amazing, talented WRITER friends.

Because I certainly do, and I love every single one of them and their work.

Lilo & Stitch (2002) dir. Chris Sanders and Dean DeBlois

saw an opinion i disagreed with and didn’t say anything about it. +350XP

lovely story from a friend today.

Look, this post has been wildly more popular than I thought it deserved, apparently at least in part because "don't burden others; be independent" is far more ingrained in people than I realized. So here's the thing: society works when people help each other. Helping others gives people a chance to know each other, and gives them an investment in the people they help. Helping creates bonds. People enjoy helping, and you are doing a good by letting them help you if they so wish.

Offer help; accept help. You will be a part of creating a helping culture. Which, incidentally, weakens capitalism and the fractionation between people that benefits those who would use us.