Vanity of vanities; all is vanity.

Orson Welles in The Stranger (1946) dir. Orson Welles

By the way, if any of you, like me, are nerds who love maps, I highly recommend checking out the Turgot map. I won't link it or tumblr will eat this post, but you can find it just by searching Wikipedia - it's an incredibly detailed 3D map of Paris made in the 1730s, and by "incredibly detailed," I mean

incredibly

incredibly

INCREDIBLY

DETAILED!

Look, there's Notre Dame! Individual trees! Individual lampposts! Individual boats!! (Some of them even have little people in lol, though clearly not to scale)

The full scan is over 35,000 pixels wide, guys! That's over 10 feet of map!! All drawn and engraved by hand! I'm freaking out a little! What an absolutely amazing piece of history & art!

LINKS & RESOURCES:

FICTION:

NON - FICTION:

“But Trump wants to reinstitute the Muslim Ban.”

The Muslim Ban was generated from a list that the Obama administration created to restrict people from specifying countries(i.e. predominantly Muslim). Trump just escalated Obama’s restrictive measures to an all-out ban.

Edit: Just want to clarify that the point is that Obama planted the seeds that allowed Trump to flourish. Even when Biden reversed the ban, those people who were banned and removed had to restart and reapply again and be scrutinized by Obama’s already heavily restricted measures limiting travel and immigration from those countries. It’s the same backsliding liberal nonsense that allows any Republican to step in and be worse and any Democrat that precedes or follows them to not actively oppose what the Republicans are and try to be a lesser version of it.

“Trump wants to nuke the Middle East.”

Biden is currently engaged in war with 4 countries in the Middle East and looking to start a war with Iran based on the unfounded speculation that Iran is doing the same shit that the US has been doing for 40 fucking years, I.e. using proxies to start wars.

“Trump wants to bring on an authoritarian regime.”

The Speaker of the House has called for all protesters calling for ceasefire to be investigated by the FBI. Cop City facilities are being built near or in predominantly black neighborhoods to further and more heavily police black people as we speak. The Ninja Turtle Mayor of New York is currently bolstering a campaign of NYPD vigilance because a cop got his ass beat by immigrants.

Bitch we are already here. We’ve been here. The difference is that Trump threatens your lily white ass and Biden doesn’t.

The terrorist zionist occupation already bombed Ghazzah with the equivalent of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in non-nuclear bombs that Biden provided and resupplied. They have erased neighbourhoods and turned people to dust with single bombs.

The Palestine under Trump that you're imagining in your heads is ALREADY HERE. The worst case scenario you have been imagining for yourself IS UNDERWAY. Take some fucking action.

The thing about Cottagecore is that is a fetishized aesthetic of country life, divorced from labor and idealized by a primarily urban audience with a backward looking ethos of tradition. They are not prepared for the stresses of a rural life: farming; harvesting; tapping pumpkins to ensure none of them have been replaced with flesh; losing out on income by having to use one of your pigs in a blood sacrifice to paint protective sigils over your doors and windows; checking cracks and chimneys for the flesh-vines of the Pumpkin Lord; having to decide, before the Growth is complete, whether that's really your tradwife or an amassment of vines, leaves, and blood in the shape of your tradwife; ignoring their desperate pleas that "I'm me! No! No!" as you burn them alive, realizing too late you picked wrong; and the exploitative corporate nature of commercial farming in 2024. All seen through a deeply colonial lens, of course

When I made this post I did not expect it to be an effective test of which Tumblr users actually read a post fully before reblogging, and yet

Jew here with a friendly reminder that:

BUT ALSO

Illustration by John Storey from Science Fiction Monthly, November 1975.

~ Helmingham herbal and bestiary.

Place oforigin/Published: Helmingham, Suffolk

Date: ca. 1500

arundhati roy is an Indian leftist activist and author, and this is a criticism of Gandhi and Gandhian politics. this context is important. she's lived through the failure of gandhi-esque politics.

Damn they were all about the glitter 30 years ago huh?

30?

Idk 32 or something I stopped counting

I am really enjoying reading about the University of Wisconsin chancellor fired after the university discovered all the pornos he and his wife were making.

Generally when someone has a public sex scandal (or “scandal”) you get the standard “I am sorry. I regret it. It was a misjudgment on my part” but this guy is like “fuck you I didn’t do anything wrong. I didn’t violate conflict of interest clauses, you are violating my first amendment rights”

SEXY HEALTHY COOKING

I want to see this legal battle

We can’t do anything about hate speech but if there is consensual sexual activity involved!

I want the details about how this was discovered because it has a real “I saw the professor at the devil’s sacrament” “girl what were YOU doing at the devil’s sacrament 👀" vibe

I know this is funny haha to a lot of people but I need yall to really internalize that this is a gentle example of what happens to sex workers. This is a white man in his 50s who turned to sex work for fun and lost his professional career. Now imagine how fucked it is for disabled impoverished sex workers to advertise themselves in a way that separates their identities and lives from their real ones because if they can't they're barred from most other jobs if ANYONE happens to find out. Aside from jobs, imagine how this affects custody battles and abuse cases and housing availability. Maybe it seems like everyone and their dog has an onlyfans and a pornhub channel and things are cool now, but we live under a christofash oligarchy and sex workers will always be trampled and spat on by most of society. This story is absurd but this isn't funny at all.

Happy New Year!

GERARD DUBOIS Moby Dick

the People pleaser in me setting exactly one☝️ boundary

That was the wrONG GIF

no buddy this works

[ID: "Cold weather reminder. Do NOT plug space heaters into power strips or extension cords. Plug space heaters directly into the wall outlet. Power strips are not designed to handle the high current flow required by a space heater and can overheat causing a fire."

A photo is attached of a power strip with an extremely charred end. Part of the power strip's wire is also charred. End ID]

My husband, an electrician, told me I have to reblog this.

For clarification's sake, is this true everywhere? I ask because I know that different countries have different quality home electricity provision; American home electricity Ain't Great compared with most of Europe, for example. In Wales I have never heard of this being a Thing, but our electricity comes in 240V flavour, so possibly the higher current naturally avoids this issue?

My British husband (not an electrician but electrician-adjacent) says yes this is true in the UK as well - anything that uses a lot of power should be plugged directly into the wall rather than an extension lead

Good to know, thank you!