platypussary

rb to take prev to the aquarium

i realized i never posted this on tumblr??? anyways here ya go tumblr

when you grew up as a lonely uncool girl it will never stop haunting you by the way. you will meet a cool person at a bar or the train station or at a friend's party and you can wear your most stylish outfit and striking eye makeup and you will swear that they can see through all of the facade and see the lonely terribly insecure teenage girl you used to be who desperately wanted to connect and you will swear that they know that there is like an insurmountable gap between you. this will happen forever

I mean not to derail but some of us escaped the hole and are having a pretty sick time, actually

There are a lot of people on this site going around tagging everything "#harry dubois" who really need to watch more Nicholas Cage movies.

HALF LIGHT [Challenging: Success]

SUGGESTION [Challenging: Failure] - "You know, I can uh ... eat a peach for hours"

ESPRIT DE CORPS [Medium: Failure] - “That was the plan, to give you a boner. And you got one!”

I was looking up Phantom Tollbooth cover art variations on google images because I’m schizophrenic and I found this Humbug from a community theatre show who is just serving improbable amounts of cunt (ovipositor?)

so I just thought we should take a moment to appreciate that

Tramp stamp that says the center cannot hold

Something I’ve noticed is that leftist movements tend to turn practical, thought out tactics that were part of a larger plan for liberation, and remove them from their context. Then we often use these tactics as symbolic ways to mark our distaste for empire and harken back to older movements. However, these tactics are often already accounted for by the system, and sometimes are actively encouraged as ways to harm our people and defang our processes.

Here is an example;

In the Civil Rights struggle, getting arrested en mass was seen as an important part of the process of freedom. The civil rights leaders realized that the areas they were in did not have large enough jails to confine them all, and that if they filled the jails up, the police simply could not confine everyone else in the movement. Getting arrested in coordinated ways was a noble and helpful sacrifice that kept your brothers and sisters from getting arrested. Due to less strict sentencing at the time, and the ability of the movement to scare the police into releasing people, getting arrested often wasn’t the utterly disabling and free-life ending process it is today. (That’s not to say getting arrested was easy on people; the police brutality of the time was incredibly intense.)

Those who spent time in jail were given almost a reverent status. That had gone through much suffering to keep others from the same fate. Often, their ability to taking confinement completely off the table for the rest of the activists is precisely what allowed for certain other actions to be successful. Paying for legal defense and moderate bail costs was something of a drain on the movements scant, resources but it could often be worth it due to the role arrests played.

However, the state responded to this, and turned it to their benefit. The next fifty years saw a prison boom. Now, economically deprived small towns were made to bid and beg for prisons to be built in there areas; not only to lock people up, but also because working at the prison was presented as one of the only jobs left in rural America. Additionally, thisdrove the labor minded population to be further in conflict with other movements in some areas.

As the capacity of the government to capture and confine increased, the capacity of the movement to fill up the jails and prevent further arrests did not. Now, the system was hungry for more and more bodies for its endless rooms. It further instilled and mechanized the capacity of prisons to force labor, undercutting labor movements. Sentences became longer, parole became stricter, fines and restitutions increased to exorbitant amounts. Those who went in for petty arrests often never came out.

But, the feeling that getting arrested was a noble and venerable goal did not leave the movement. Some transitioned tactics; instead of filling up the jails to allow others to act without recourse, they sought to get arrested in test cases, as they had seen work occasionally before. But this too became more and more difficult, as the legal system realized it did not have to play by its own rules. Slowly but surely, the legal mythology that because it is written and because it is fair, it will be ruled so, began to overtake the minds of activists; even as they failed time and time again to win this way, they still threw countless of their friends into the mouth of the enemy, and condemned them to life in prison.

Even this had become a shadow of itself by the 2000s and 2010s. Arrest became an aesthetic goal instead of a practical one. The most radical in the movements were culturally encouraged to throw their lives away for petty protests that none would see, and would have no material impact on the operations of the system of dominion. The reality that getting kettled at a non violent protest could land you with the same jail time as a political assassination did not dawn upon these activists until long after hey were already in jail, and already disconnected from the movement. Their friends would gather all their meager savings towards bail funds, oftentimes going into debt, or otherwise extracting money from the rest of the marginalized communities supportive of the activism. Those funds would then go to the government in the form of bail, and then right back towards operating the same policing systems that targeted them. In this way, the main economic output of the leftists movement of the time was to fund the very systems of policing that they sought to destroy; and to get themselves and each other locked in cages in the process. Instead of developing practical systems of change, radicals were taught to emulate key aspects of the tactics of prior generations that had specifically been recuperated into the goals of the state.

Those who saw the futility in this were readily pushed towards the defanged and self acknowledged pointless marches of the nonviolent liberal movement, which never had any goal other than to once again emulate the visual aesthetics and personal emotional fulfillment of past movements.

We see this pattern play out all the time. People insisting on the radical importance of a leftist print newspaper in a time when print journalism is dead. A fetishization of industrial unionism in a town where no factory has been for three generations. Arguments over whether to support long defunct governments and long dead leaders for some tactical benefit which will never arise from reality.

It is long past time for us to realize that the process of achieving human liberation does not come from symbolic actions, nor from following the playbook of past movements. We must learn our history, yes, but not to emulate it; instead we must learn it to understand its failures and its successes, and, most importantly, how our movement ancestors interacted with the material conditions of their time to create multifaceted plans that met the needs of their people and made successful guerrilla war upon dominion.

We need to imagine ways of making change that are suited to the times that we are living in, the problems we face, and the opportunities that we have. This utterly necessitates that we get deeply embedded into the places and communities around us, that we listen with open ears to the problems our people are facing, and that we fold those ever more towards opportunities of liberation and care for one another.

thinking about the japanese racehorse who was such a failgirl she became a folk hero for losers

legitimately everything 2 me

@elodieunderglass horses?

Isn't she enchanting? Don't you love her? I love that her betting slips (guaranteed to fail!) were considered talismanic against accidents. I love that not even Yutaka Take could pick her up and carry her home over his shoulder. I love that she's been retired with all honour instead of minced. epic. brilliant. just goes to show that Northern Dancer and Nijinsky in your pedigree can't overcome a natural talent for Loss. nobody else is doing it like her.

hat tip @plaguling thanks for this!

Twisted Trinity by Sadan Vague

Joy Sullivan, “Before”, Instructions for Traveling West

"you should watch this show!!" "what is it about?" "oh it's gay!"

The Dead Lovers by Edvard Munch / Vienna Cemetery / Lovers of Valdaro / The Lovers of Modena / Hasanlu Lovers / Monumento Rossi / Dave Navarro & Carmen Electra by David LaChapelle / A Memorial to Marriage by Patricia Cronin / Monumento Scarneo / Olavi Lanu / Bronze Age Scythian Couple / The Life & Death of a Relationship - Sue Law / Lovers of Turuel / New Orleans Botanical Garden / Etruscan Sarcophagi / Gravestone commissioned by widow for deceased husband - Mt. Macedon Cemetery / Eternal Love - Frank Kunert / Meant To Be - Bruno Caesar / Roman Sarcophagus / Sarcophagus of the Spouses

The tomb in question (of Richard Fitzalan and Eleanor of Lancaster, Earl and Countess of Arundel)

I got to see this similar one of Thomas Beauchamp and Katherine Mortimer:

I'm also fond of this one, of a protestant and catholic couple who couldn't be buried in the same cemetary:

Here is another personal favourite of mine, Caroline and Joseph Damer, later 1st Earl of Dorchester:

Images by Mike Searle via Wikimedia Commons (1), (2).

This person has some even better pictures and close-ups on their Flickr account.

Caroline Damer died in 1775 aged 57, and her husband, heartbroken, commissioned the Italian sculptor Agostino Carlini to create this marble tomb.

Joseph survived her by 23 years, but, from all I could find, never had a subsequent spouse or partners.

What gets me is how well Carlini captured the difference between the dead and the living person and how, rather than following the old saying of Christian origins intended to comfort grieving people that the dead "watch over" their loved ones from above, it is Joseph who gazes down at Caroline, unable to take his eyes off her after 33 years of marriage, even in death. And continues to do so, even now.

I'm right up there with all this, but I'm sure @dduane will understand when I also say I'm in no hurry for us to appear on one.

Kitten, Daddy’s gonna be real with you—he’s tired. Tired of the soul-numbing grind and the slow erosion of his humanity beneath the blood-slick gears of late-stage capitalism

i'm a menace at the pho shop eating them out of stock they had to banh me