Seaweed and shells. Theory and practice of design. 1894. 

Dear God.

The thing about ICE.

As bad as you think it is. It’s always worse.

I was today year's old when I found out a Black man invented game cartridges

(x)

Black man, Dr. Lonnie Johnson, invented the Super Soaker.  Among over 100 other things.

A lot of people owe these men their childhoods.

underwater

16-8-2020

Jane Pica on Instagram

“I am merely a simple Keeper of the Temple.”

Alternate title: T-Pose to assert dominance.

crab!

Pondering life and death

untitled on Flickr.

A few things:

01. Gypsy is a slur & there is no “positive” or “acceptable” way of using it if you aren’t Romani. It should not be part of your vocabulary – the same goes for the term “gypped”. If you want to talk about the slur censor it or simply call it “the g slur.”

02. Anti Romani racism exists everywhere and there is a slur for the us in every language. Gypsy is the slur used in the English language but there is also Zigan, Tigan, Cigan, Gitano, Zigeuner, etc. - a lot of them stem from the Greek word for “slave” and are considered even worse than the Gypsy slur. However all of them are still slurs and shouldn’t be used by you if you aren’t Romani.

03. Gypsy has never been anything other than a derogatory slur against Romani that has been screamed at us while we have been branded, enslaved, hunted down, murdered, put through a genocide and a holocaust, segregated and discriminated against. 

04. Romani is the proper name of the people that are being targeted by the G slur. Some people write it as Rromani which is also correct. The term Roma/Rroma can be used too, however not all Romani are Roma.

05. Romani and Romanian do not mean the same thing. Romani are the people that are being targeted by the G slur and we are brown people originally from India. Romanians are people from the European country Romania.

06. The official term for racism directed towards Romani is called “Antiziganism”, that term however is offensive since it includes the word “Zigan” which is a horrible slur against Romani. Please do not use that term and instead use “Anti-Romani racism”, “Anti-Romanism”, etc.

07. Anti-Romani racism is very extreme in Europe (segregation in housing, education and health care, forced sterilizations, evictions and demolition of settlements, police brutality, etc), which is why we even received the title of “Europe’s Most Hated”, but it’s not an exclusively European thing. Anti-Romani racism exists in America and Canada as well. (Canada even has an immigration ban on Romani.)

08. “My Big Fat Gypsy Wedding” does not display actual Romani people as far as I have heard so it does not represent Romani people/culture at all.

09. Your believes that Romani “don’t want to work”, “don’t want to send their children to school”, “steal children”, “are dirty”, “genetically prone to crime”, “are lazy”, etc. are nothing but racist stereotypes and left over Nazi propaganda. All of them are untrue as well. (Also: Romani would love to work and go to school but the extreme discrimination against us in the field of education makes that very hard. And the widely spread traditional anti-Romani attitudes and prejudices don’t make it any easier either.)

10. Stereotypes such as that all Romani women are “sexual temptresses” and promiscuous disregarding of age are obviously incorrect too. Virginity is actually considered important in Romani culture. Believing in those stereotypes is very harmful and dangerous as well because despite Romani being only a minority in most European countries we make up the highest % when it comes to sex trafficking victims.

11. Romani culture doesn’t have anything to do with witchcraft, wicca, paganism, etc. We didn’t create tarot, palm reading or crystal balls either. You can stop calling yourself a “Gypsy Witch” and faking Romani heritage now. The only reason why assumptions like that came to exist is because of racist believes and lies spread by the church. Our skills with medical herbs and palm reading were seen as “evidence of heresy” and from the 16th century onward we were outlawed, expelled and persecuted, culminating in the organized killing of our people. 

12. Fortune teller costumes are racist. Romani women have always been stereotyped as fortune tellers which is why the stereotypical image of a fortune teller is always linked with Romani women - dark skin, messy black hair, a big nose, a “weird” accent, a headscarf, big hoop earrings, gold coins added to clothes and an “untrustworthy/deceiving” nature, etc. (A lot of people even use the term “fortune teller” like a synonym for the G slur nowadays.) A person’s race/ethnicity is not a costume, so if you ever consider dressing up as a fortune teller chose something different. 

If you are Romani too please feel free to add things onto this list and please correct me if I made any mistakes.

🌱 check out more of my photos (archive link for pc)

🌿 check out my instagram

🌳 paypal / cash app / ko-fi

vegans make peace with honey

no shut up do it

vegans will pretend not to hear when natives tell them their agave products are unsustainable because they have whimsical feelings about, and i cannot stress this enough, the freedom of hive insects

Honey is literally murder but go off

Prove it.

They literally puke their guts up to make your honey

I have not seen any evidence tonsugges they are harmed or die in the process of production. They do regurgitate the nectar as part of the process to concentrate it into honey (an interesting process) but they do not suffer any injury during this process. If they did, the cost to produce honey, which is done naturally as a measure to survive over winter and through times of lower availability, would outweigh the benefits. If you kill several bees to produce enough honey to make one more bee, It makes no sense. Any animal that did that would die, even with human intervention.

Do you have any sources which suggest otherwise? I’d be interested to hear of this (relatively publicly available) information was false or misunderstood.

Bee farmers use whats called a honey maker. It’s a crude devices. It similar to a meat grinder. They force the bees in and grind them up. What comes out is a paste. That paste is later filtered into what we know as honey

This is the funniest thing I’ve ever read

@zoologicallyobsessed please show us pics of your bee grinder

they might be falsely thinking about a honey extractor machine. but all these do is you place the beehive frames inside and a motor rotates it at a speed that removes the honey, which is then tapped through a tap at the bottom. 

…do they think they put bees in that and spin them around until they vomit…?

bee carnival

bad and naughty bees get put into the b e e c e n t r i f u g e to extract their honey

Vegans coming after beekeepers is one of my major teeth grinding annoyances. For many reasons, because there’s so many lies. And to go one step further because it’s such a waste. You see, the strongest vegan argument is that they don’t want to exploit animals or take from them without their consent.

… but… Bees consent. NO. I’M NOT KIDDING.

How? Bee hives aren’t kept on leashes. They’re outside, the bees can travel miles every day. They follow their queen. Who is also outside, not on a leash, and can travel miles every day. If she doesn’t like the hive for any reason - for example: it got too hot, too cold, too messy, too filled with sugary stuff and they need more space… then the queen leaves. And with her the hive.

The queen stays in the hive because the hive is the best place to live. Period. Done. End of. If the hive is staying with the beekeeper it’s because the keeper is doing their job correctly and keeping them happy because the bees can, and do, leave bad beekeepers.

Of all the animals we have domesticated as livestock, bees are the ones you can most easily argue are consenting participants in their keeping.