all gay & no chill

The Magnus Archives was a podcast

L'Origine du monde, 1866, by Gustave Courbet. Musée d'Orsay, Paris. Personal photo. It’s really impressive to see it in the museum : all people who look at it seem utterly intimidated, in a hurry, meanwhile they look with a satisfied curiosity to the 34'567 penises dangling from whatever statue.

I mean, if I’m remembering right that wasn’t caused by political mismanagement, just the regular kind. If you mean that the government should’ve been quicker providing relief, that stands, although Roosevelt’s response was impressive for the US.

I dunno, the gov’mint doing their level best to exterminate the indigenous population and forcing the rest onto reservations and then parceling out that stolen land to white settlers who didn’t know shit about how to sustainably farm it and who immediately stripped off all the prairie that stabilized the topsoil to farm water-intensive crops in an area with frequent droughts seems like a lot of political mismanagement to me.

Oklahoman here, and can confirm that @systlin is correct.  Even the locusts can be ultimately blamed on government mismanagement, as the stripping away of prairie soil also led to loss of habitat for multiple ground dwelling bird species that normally eat the locusts when they swarm.

Oh, and by the way?  The government also paid people not to grow crops -and- would destroy crops and livestock, because they were trying to ensure that people had to buy food to prop up the local merchant economy.  My grandmother used to get a haunted look on her face when she described the mounds of dead cattle and pigs and chickens that had been doused with turpentine so that the meat was inedible.  She was born in 1919 and was ten or eleven when the Dust Bowl took place.

Grapes of Wrath, y’all. Grapes of wrath. 

Detailed examples in Little House on the Prairie of deliberate Climate Change; discuss.

Well we can START by pointing out that their first family homestead on the prairie was illegal because they just fuckin moved into the Osage tribe reservation (with a load of other white settlers) and started plowing it up on the assumption that it was going to be opened up for white settlers soon. Marinate that with Ma’s open racism against Native Americans and how she’s constantly sure they’re going to rape and murder her, WHILE she is the one currently actively stealing treatied reservation lands out from under the Osage’s noses.

One can pick up clues about the richness of the Kansas prairie before white settlers by some of the observation Pa makes RE; the abundance of game, the streams full of fish, ect ect. All of those were, of course, dependent on the prairie ecosystem which was intentionally maintained by the native tribes.

There are several references to large packs of wolves, which thrived on the abundant large mammal life that the grazing lands of the prairie supported. The settlers immediately go about attempting to shoot all of the wolves; for the importance of large predators to an ecosystem please see the ecological impact of re-introducing wolves to Yellowstone national park. There are, of course, no wolves living wild in Kansas any longer.

The regular prairie fires that are an integral part of a healthy prairie ecosystem are here seen as a terrible threat, and the settlers are suspicious of the Native Americans because they assume that the fires were set to get rid of the settlers.

The settlers, of course, immediately start plowing it up as fast as they possibly can. Notes are made that the sheer density of the roots of the prairie plants make it difficult for even a steel moldbord plow to cut through the mass. (Half of a prairie’s biomass is the root systems of the plants that live there!) It is specifically this dense root and vegetation growth that secures the soil in place during windstorms and drought, and prairie plants grow very deep root systems (up to seven feet deep!) in order to access water even during droughts. The family plant wheat and corn, both of which are shallow-rooted, and while wheat is less water-intensive than corn it is still unsuitable for areas such as the High Plains that simply do not get enough rain to grow it without extensive irrigation. Corn is a water-intensive crop and not suited for long drought periods.

It is precisely these actions that in the long run destroy the entire tallgrass prairie ecosystem nearly completely (less than 5% survives today) and lead ultimately to the Dust Bowl of the 1930′s. Thank you everyone for coming to my TED talk.

historical padlocks are just great

the town crier finds me sleeping on my doorstep bc drunk me last night couldn’t open the lock on my door and announces my buffoonery to the whole square

Day 24093 This is my house. I won’t allow anyone to harm it. There should have been no more intruders after the last one. I do not want these people here. They will leave-

Day 24095 They are siblings. They are loud. Always singing and talking and stomping. As if they must be louder than anything else.

Day 24106 There are bolts on the door now. Bolts and hideous, gaudy new locks. How dare they-

Night 24112 I was going to fill the night with terrors. But he woke up screaming before I began. She came running from the other room. They sleep right across the hall from each other, with the doors on a crack. …they are young, are they not, to be living on their own. Was I ever so young?

Day 24129 She has fixed the squeak in the door at the top of the stairs. It never squeaked when I still lived.

Day 24121 The noise of the doorbell scares them. But they get so many deliveries. It is a good bell. It has worked all these years- I can see one of the men coming now with his packages, trudging up to the door. …perhaps if I knock before he is here, they will come and look before he can sound the bell.

Day 24114 He is planting flowers in boxes on my windowsills. I always wished I could have some flowers.

Night 24137 She is afraid of the dark. I could see it in her eyes when she got out of bed. …I lit the lamps for her.

Day 24142 They have moved the couch to the sun spot a little to the right of the window. That is where I used to have my armchair. It is the only sensible place for it.

Day 24163 Sometimes the noises of the world are suddenly too much for him. He winces and tries not to sway his head. This is my house. …I can keep it calm and quiet for a while.

Day 24178 She just got a phone call and now they are both laughing. Laughter is a good sound, isn’t it. They said this house has been good luck…

Night 24205 They are singing in our kitchen. He found my cookbook in the gap at the back of the kitchen cabinet and now they are trying to cook. They wanted to start with the soufflé. They don’t even know how to make béchamel! I turned the page to the casserole instead.

Day 24236 This is my house. These are my boarders. I won’t allow anyone to harm them.

I’m crying. This just hit all my emotions

i love this so much!!!!!!

Local Ghost Adopts Children

look at marbles being an apex predator

The Beriozka. A traditional Russian dance performed on tippy-toes with long dresses making it appear that they’re floating.

This is both amazing and deeply disturbing

I have this clip from Teen Wolf saved on my computer as physicalcomedy.mov because this is my all time favorite physical comedy bit.

Nothing gets me like Michael J. Fox trying to run down a very wet & slippery hallway.

Oscar worthy.

For anyone not so familiar with cat behavior, this cat is out of its mind excited to do this. It’s much more rare for cars to wag their tails but it means the same as it does when a dog does it. This cat is curious and proud and playing. It keeps looking at its owner too, like “LOOK AT ME, DAD” and it’s so rare to get videos of cats this happy. This is fucking rad

Nope.. wagging tails means anger or irritation in cat body language.

hey y’all, hope you don’t mind me stepping in!

you’re both right :) a wagging tail means the cat is highly stimulated (think coiled spring, ready to go off). depending on the situation, this can be interpreted differently - just like people can smile nervously at job interviews vs. happily grin at friends.

in most cases, it’s safe to interpret overstimulation as ‘you’re doing something to amp up the cat & it wants you to stop’ (ex. unwanted petting). it should be seen as a warning; all that pent-up energy COULD be released as a swat or bite.

BUT in this case, that tail-wagging ‘frustration’ is the stimulation that comes from problem-solving (where can I jump? is it safe to go here?) and the excitement of play. it’s good to be wary of ‘cute’ animals vids, but this seems like an unproblematic video!

I’d like to add to this–just look at world-famous box-loving cat, Maru, who wags his tail every time he stuffs his body into a box or other small object. He’s clearly not about to attack the person behind the camera! It’s definitely based on stimulation, but more to the point of “ahhh FINALLY I’ve gotten into the small space, now how do I get the rest of me inside”:

i love everything about cats ever always

i would like to.. become a bumble bee. sit on flowers. be yellow. not go to school. not understand capitalism.

Uh, Minnie, I have something to tell you…

youd be scared too if a 6 inch tall naked human sprinted across your floor

Thats fair

me and the boys getting groceries

me, home alone at three in the morning: hmmm what should i watch??

me:

i’m done with texting and calling from now on i’m only communicating through shared lucid dreams