students of necessity

My self insert, living the life I wish I had:

Me, living the life I didn’t ask for:

her storytelling skills are killing me

having cash is like having secret money. like whos gonna find out i’m buying tacos with this crisp $20 bill??? not my bank account, that’s for sure

That’s literally why the government wants to stop it

Defend cash. The existence of a cash economy  is so so necessary for the survival of every population that the government wants to kill. Homeless people, sex workers, undocumented people, addicts. They all need cash to survive.

Blossom is 20 years old

Source: https://bit.ly/3D83HNf

Your daily dose of cat memes

#so did they miss the part where gatsby ends up floating dead in a pool and all the miserable deaths in wuthering heights#or did they miss that because there weren’t any chapters titled In Which The Sinners Are Punished For Their Errors#like. even if you require explicit moral instruction from literature it’s pretty hard to miss the comeuppance in those.

“What I assume my teachers were trying to teach me”

Huck Finn is about a white Southern boy who was raised to believe that freeing slaves is a sin that would send you directly to hell who forges a familial bond with a runaway slave and chooses to free him and thereby in his mind lose his salvation because he refuses to believe that his best friend and surrogate father is less of a man just because he’s black. Yes it features what we now consider racial slurs but this is a book written only 20 years after people were literally fighting to be allowed to keep other human beings as property, we cannot expect people from the 1880s to exactly conform with the social mores of 2020, and more to the point if we ourselves had been raised during that time period there’s very little doubt that we would also hold most if not all of the prevalent views of the time because actual history isn’t like period novels written now where the heroes are perfect 21st century social justice crusaders and the villains are all as racist and sexist as humanly possible. Change happens slowly and ignoring the radical statement that we’re all human beings that Twain wrote at a time when segregation and racial tensions were still hugely prevalent just because he wrote using the language of his time period is short-sighted and foolhardy to the highest degree.

I’m really kind of alarmed at the rise in the past few years of the “and we do condemn! wholeheartedly!” discourse around historical figures. it seems like people have somehow boomeranged between “morals were different in the past, therefore nobody in the past can ever be held accountable for ANY wrongs” to “morals are universal and timeless, and anything done wrong by today’s standards in the past is ABSOLUTELY unforgiveable” so completely, because social media 2.0 is profoundly allergic to nuance

please try this on for size:

there have always been, in past times as today, a range of people in every society, some of whom were even then fighting for a more just and compassionate accord with their fellow man and some of whom let their greeds and hatreds rule them to the worst allowable excesses. the goal of classics and history education is to teach you enough context to discern between the two, not only in the past but in the present

My mind just boggles at the “There’s Racism In That Book” argument.  Yes, there is racism in that book, because that book is ABOUT RACISM.  The message is that it is BAD. 

My high school English teacher, who was a viciously brilliant woman, used to say that when people banned Huck Finn they said it was about the language, but it was really the message they were trying to ban, the subversive deconstruction of (religious) authority and white supremacy.

Huckleberry Finn can actually be seen as a powerful case study in trying to do social justice when you have absolutely no tools for it, right down to vocabulary.  And in that respect, it’s a heroic tale, because Huck—with absolutely no good examples besides Jim, who he has been taught to see as subhuman, with no guidance, with everyone telling him that doing the right thing will literally damn him, with a vocabulary that’s full of hate speech—he turns around and says, “I’m not going to do it.  I’m not going to participate in this system.  If that means I go to Hell, so be it.  Going to Hell now.”

(I used to read a blogger who insisted that “All right, I’ll go to Hell,” from Huckleberry Finn is the most pure and perfect prayer in the canon of American literature.  Meaning, as I understand it, that the decision to do the right thing in the face of eternal damnation is the most holy decision one can make, and if God Himself is not proud of the poor mixed-up kid, then God Himself is not worth much more than a “Get thee behind me,” and the rest of us should be lining up to go to Hell too.  Worth noting that this person identified as an evangelical Christian, not because he was in line with what current American evangelicals believe, but because “they can change their name, I’m not changing mine.”  Interesting guy.  Sorry for the long parenthetical.)

Anyway, the point of Huck Finn, as far as I can tell, is that you can still choose to do good in utter darkness, with no guidance and no help and none of the right words.

And when you put it like that, it’s no wonder that a lot of people on Tumblr—people who prioritize words over every other form of social justice—find it threatening and hard to comprehend.

Theo and jay incredibly normal brothers

Just remembered how my old boss used to say “allied forces” any time dragon flys showed up when we were out working in mosquito infested swamps

had the wildest interaction today some random woman called me a slag and my dog a fucking faggot because I was using a pink lead/harness and he’s a boy like what the fuck lmfaoo

he did start wagging his tail when he got called a fag so good for him <3

imagine seeing this and being like oh my god oh my god i need to say a slur right now

Getting extremely strong Ramattra vibes from this photo

SALVATION

DAMNATION

"Many species of polychaetes undergo epitoky whereby sexually immature worms transform into pelagic morphs capable of sexual reproduction. After fertilization, they release their gametes through rapid disintegration." worms are out here having insane sex we can't even comprehend

"what do they mean by disintegrate?" "oh yeah no he fucking disintegrated"

This skips the best part! The epitoke isn't the "real" or "original" worm. The worm grows an extra body with a simpler brain that only knows how to swim and cum (by exploding) so this part breaks off and the rest of the worm just stays home.

In some species the epitoke, also known as a cummunculus in this post just now, is advanced enough to have its own eyes and everything, though only so it at least knows the right direction to swim (up) because it's so stupid and all

"Babe, i.... I have something to confess to you. I'm not.. not actually a......"