'Star Wars' and 'Harry Potter' are two franchises that try to claim, textually, that it doesn't really matter who your family is whilst showing subtextually that it unequivocally does matter who your family is.
subtext isn't a thing dude
Welp, there’s my entire literature degree disproven.
STOP. DON'T SCROLL. READ THIS TO SAVE LIVES IN GAZA. Below are some VETTED campaigns to support Gazans. These people have been experiencing an active genocide for almost a full year. Donate and share widely.
(may 27th)
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If I didn’t think of anything put it in the tags
Sound on
the “cannibalism is inherently sexual and about love and so hot” crowd somehow turns out to be very put off when a rap song has the word pussy in it
“shake that ass bitch” on a trap beat seems to be just a little too much for blogger who spends 7 hours of their day writing omegaverse fanfic porn
“be gay do crimes” chanter suddenly very upset reading lyrics on genius dot com about someone making and dealing drugs
this post is about antiblack racism and specifically how nonblack users like the ones mentioned above have a racial bias and are ok with sexuality and talk of violence until it’s coming from a black person, the subconscious idea that black people are uniquely perverse or aggressive is what’s being mocked here, if ur reblogging this and saying anything like “me” ur missing the point, this behavior isn’t funny or cute or quirky, its just one of the many ways nonblacks show how they dehumanize us while being perfectly fine with doing the same actions that they dislike seeing a black person do bc of not seeing us as equally human
As someone who was recently in Fukui, this isn't even scratching the surface of how mad the town is for dinosaurs.
For example, here is the outside of the train station:
If you thought that they were only outside the station, think again!
The last dinosaur has a crab, because the region is known for seafood.
You can even buy coffee emblazoned with dinosaurs!
And that's not even getting into how you get to the nearby Fukui Prefectural Dinosaur Museum. Behold, the Dino-Liner:
And if you're like, man I don't know how the museum will top all of these dinosaurs, boy do I have news for you.
And then you get to the cafe:
But, eventually, it was time to head back to the train station...on the dino bus.
thinking that poor people shouldn’t reproduce is in fact still eugenics
maybe instead of blaming people for “fiscal irresponsibility” we should question a system that lets anyone of any means go hungry and uncared for
This is so precious oh my god. There’s more under the cut. Also click HERE for full-sized pics and also a vid of a chicken screaming at the wind XD
Omg I’ve got a story that’s almost identical to this!!
So back in July of 2021 we got a call from our neighbors about a random chicken that showed up in their yard, they assumed she was ours because we have a lot of chickens but I’d never seen this bird before
She’s unbelievably sweet and cuddly and we’re thinking that no way this isn’t someone’s beloved pet
So the next day I went out and drove to every neighbor to ask “hey this this your chicken?”
Nobody has any idea, my mom asks around on local pages but still, nothing
So for context my neighborhood is pretty big, not that many people but lots and lots of land. If this chicken didn’t come from any of our neighbors then she would had to have travel miles, which out here in rural Colorado where we are constantly surrounded by hawks, coyotes and raccoons would have been extremely unlikely.
She was also a bit malnourished, implying that she might have been out on her own for some time before being found. I also quickly realized something else about her, she is blind.
Not entirely blind but damn near close as her right eye is completely blind

Now the reason this has rendered her almost completely blind is thanks to a funny little quirk of chicken anatomy. Their right eyes are always near sighted and the left is always far sighted, this is the result of turning themselves in the egg so that the right eye is exposed to light through the shell, while the left is not, because it’s directed toward the body. So while she can see things far away just fine, everything that’s remotely close to her is a blur, making it difficult for her to navigate and eat
So we took her into our own flock, I named her Weah because I asked her for her name, since I didn’t know if she previously had one, and her response was “wwwwwrrraaah”. Getting her integrated into the flock was difficult, the other hens picked on her a lot and there wasn’t much she could do to defend herself, with no other options we decided to put her in the bantam coop, with it’s lone resident
This is Ash, a serama hen who we had gotten with a rooster, Cocktail, as a breeding pair. However after Cocktail’s passing she was left on her own
Now this didn’t bother Ash too much as she’d found a way to leave her coop whenever she wanted, even for a bird of her stature she was quite capable of holding her own in the main population
So here we are with two birds who couldn’t be any more different: Weah, a shy, clingy, visually impaired sex link, and Ash, a feisty, dominant, independent serama. It was the perfect storm.
Weah clung to Ask like glue pretty much from day one and Ash seemed surprisingly chill with the whole affair. In fact, she even started guiding Weah around while walking on her blind side, showing her around and helping her not get lost
Ash is very protective of Weah and will often tidbit for her and court her, Weah will call out to Ash whenever she’s not near by and will get distressed when she cannot find her
They’re both living happily in the larger special needs coop now, always together. Weah is doing much better with the help of her seeing eye girlfriend and has adjusted wonderfully!
So to conclude, if I had a nickel for every time there was a mutually beneficial lesbian relationship in my coop where one was saved by the other, I’d have two nickels. Which isn’t a lot but it’s kinda weird it’s happened twice
I will be honest guys, the Red portrait of king Charles is gorgeous asdfghjkl
it's a bad portrait. Like. Objectively. It does the opposite of what's intended. It looks like the painter is insulting him. If it was in a contemporary gallery with no context you would see it immediately as the ambivalent criticism of Charles's reign, how he fades into the overwhelming red background as a tiny little figure, small and insignificant, insufficient for the clothes he's wearing. It reminds my of Goya's portraits, how they were so 'realistic' that they ended up making these great figures look pathetic to the viewer. So these are our rulers?
the sheer novelty. the surprise and shock, the kinda cunt it's serving for no reason. I. I love it. It's an incredible portrait by Jonathan Yeo. By the sheer fact that Charles, the man, is impossible to portray as greater than man because he's just such a nothingburger of a dude. So a portrait made to make him look huge and interesting made him be swallowed in red brushstrokes. The butterfly, that reminded me immediately of " we will all laugh at guilded butterflies", draws more attention than him. It looks like an omen. It looks like a warning in all this red. Something is not right here.
This is the best royal portrait ever 10/10
This is a painting of a monarch whose individual personality and even bodily presence are a mere footnote within the legacy of bloodshed that built the throne he occupies. This is the only way it's possible to depict him. It's a photograph of his soul
I think Jonathan Yeo meant this portrait to be absolutely all of those things, he just can't be very vocal about the paintings true meaning. Yet.
I've done this on another post, but let's compare that portrait up there to some other portraits Yeo's done.
Here's actor and activist Idris Elba, whom colleagues have described as warm and friendly, open-hearted, with an emotional intelligence that makes him capable of being very honest and vulnerable with the character he's playing:
Here's Jony Ive - who founded Apple with Steve Jobs and was chief design officer responsible for some of the more popular artistic choices, who recently left the company because the culture had gotten so toxic and shitty. He now works more in private design, so he has more artistic freedom and he can be less in the public eye:
Yeo's even previously painted British heads of state. Here's the phenomenal Baroness Doreen Lawrence of the labour party, a Jamaican immigrant who turned the tragic murder of her son into a lifelong campaign of quietly and steadily dismantling systemic racism:
To me, all these portraits are deeply personal, conveying the sitter's character with empathy and quiet dignity.
Elba is leaning forward in an intimate friendly gesture. He makes eye contact with the viewer but his face is turned slightly to the side, inviting but not confrontational, his brows slightly drawn together thoughtfully. His hands are natural and relaxed. He's shirtless - not to be a beefcake thirst trap (okay maybe just a tiny little bit), but to convey how emotionally naked he's willing to be.
Ives is literally putting a lens between himself and the viewer - we have to look closer to see his face, but when we do we see his eyes crinkled with a hint of good humor. The perspectives are all distorted, but the main thing we see is the hands that have physically built so much of the technology we use. And even outside the phone screen he's still enased by a circular frame within a frame, indicating yet another layer of separation between the subject and the viewer.
Lawrence is radiant, proudly upright and implacable as a mountain, her head held high and her hands folded before her with a self-contained air of calm determination. And even though the background is a chaotic sea of looming shapes and quick brush strokes, her eyes keep us grounded, even pinned in place. We're the viewer, but she is studying us.
And then, on the other end of the personality spectrum, here's noted asshole Damien Hirst, who frequently makes the news for being racist and sexist and just generally a really slimy piece of shit. His most famous works are the animal carcasses suspended in resin-
-yeah, that. That guy. He's made all the money in the goddamn world three times over for pieces like that, and he still seems like he's on a personal mission to make everyone around him as miserable as possible.
Here's Yeo's portrait of him, seated on a leather throne, dick bulge at eye level, contained in one of his own tanks:
Here's the droopy and melancholic portrait of the famously pompous and insufferable John Cooper Clarke, self-described "original punk poet", who was recently booed off stage for making super transphobic remarks, and whose most famous quote is "I read Kerouac at 12 and decided I could do better":
And, most notably for the argument I'm making here, here's D-Day veteran Sgt Geoffrey Pattinson, and see if you can spot the extremely subtle use of color theory here:
And I think he brings absolutely all of his artistic talent to the Charles portrait.
@chromegnomes is absolutely right; it is the only possible way to depict him. It is a photograph of his soul.
And that's precisely why it's so ugly and uncomfortable to look at.
People have said that Charles has a "complicated legacy", which is what people say when someone has an objectively horrible legacy that they are still personally benefiting from. But the people who still tolerate his extravagant gilded existence to "honor historical tradition" will find absolutely nothing to like in this portrait. All the gold and brass and pomp of his uniform, all the military accolades for his colonial warmongering, all the fabulous ostentatious wealth he was born into and has spent every second of his life surrounded by - which would have been rendered with glittering precision and care in a traditional royal portrait - they're all dingy and washed out and already fading. The medals aren't even clearly marked enough to really know what they are; it's all sound and fury, signifying nothing.
The butterfly that was included as a nod to his honestly extensive conservation work (because let's give the little bit of credit where credit is actually due) stands out as the one bright point of beauty and authenticity - but it's dwarfed by the only other visible object, the sword, and it's being swallowed up by that lurid, putrid background that seems to seep out of Charles' uniform. The dark tips of its wings are the most high-contrast part of the painting except for Charles' black hollow eyes that stare into nothing. And, most significantly in my opinion, the butterfly isn't actually touching him, or connected to him in any way. It just exists alongside him, but it doesn't need him.
His face is painted in such a way to detail absolutely every wrinkle without ever being able to completely cover up the blood red background, and below the sunken shark-like eyes, the artist has included that vapidly pleasant plastered-on smile with nothing behind it that is practically the royal uniform by now. I think the angle is also deliberately chosen to be unsettling: many portraits are traditionally done either head-on, 3/4 profile, or full profile. Charles is none of these - his head is tilted juuust a few degrees off kilter. It's not quite right. And he's looking off to the side very slightly; his thousand-yard-stare is kind of drifting over the viewers shoulder. He can't look us in the eye.
And there is no way, there is absolutely no possible way that an artist who is smart enough and skilled enough to imbue all his other portraits with so much meaning and symbolism and indicators of the subject's character - there's no way that's not intentional.
But... Yeo lives in London. He's still working on other royal and aristocratic portraits. He still has to live in that society, and he still has to get paid.
So of course he has to toe the line, at least until Charles dies, and say that the vivid blood-soaked red is to symbolize the """vibrancy""" of this terminally ill octogenarian, to bring a """modern contemporary feel""" to this 19th century colonizer.
Yeo knows exactly what he's doing.
Here's an excerpt about it from Smithsonian magazine:
The king saw the painting when it was about halfway done. Yeo tells BBC News’ Katie Razzall that Charles was “mildly surprised by the strong color, but otherwise he seemed to be smiling approvingly.” He adds that when Camilla saw the portrait, she said, “Yes, you’ve got him.”
Listen, I work in memory care and end-of-life care, and we only say someone "seems to be smiling approvingly" to comfort the family when someone is so far gone they clearly don't know where they are anymore. His ex-wife Camilla, who probably has more good reasons to hate him than any other single human being alive, looked at this haunting vision of hell and was like YES PERFECT.
This is all completely intentional. We are all picking up on exactly the message the artist was trying to convey. Yeo is trying to tell us, loud and clear, that something is not right here. It is absolutely an omen.
Op is right; it is insulting him. And it is supposed to make us look at this pathetic villain, who is currently toddling through the final days of his unfairly long and lavishly useless life, and think "these are our rulers?"
The Iranian Regime is going to execute rapper Toomaj Salehi for supporting protests of Jina Amini’s murder by the regime in his songs.
Iranian activist Elica Le Bon says, “Iranians in the diaspora picked up on the fact that the regime tends not to execute people who become known to the international community. We have seen many examples of prisoners that were either released on bail or had their sentences commuted through our “say their names to save their lives” campaign on social media, using hashtags to garner attention for their causes, and even before social media existed, through getting the stories of political prisoners to international media outlets. Once reported on, and once the eyes shift to the regime and the reality of its pending brutality, realizing that the action is not worth the repercussions, we have seen them back down and not execute. For that reason, this is part of an urgent campaign for readers to talk about Toomaj as much as you can, using the hashtag #FreeToomaj or #ToomajSalehi. Every comment makes a difference, and if we were wrong, what did we lose by trying?”
It is very rare that posting actually is activism.
But in this case, getting this man's name trending on multiple platforms could literally save his life.
Exactly this ^^^
This is one of the very rare cases where the only thing we are being asked to do is make something go viral.
AVOCADOS. Get that moldy-grass-tasting shit away from me.
I once had to make guacamole when I worked in the kitchen at a Tex-Mex place. If I never see another avocado again it will be too soon.
