Maggie speaking, my position has been 'reorganized' and all social media duties removed. The person who is taking on social media will be letting the Libraries' Tumblr account go dormant.
I'm setting this to post at the end of what I currently have queued.
The past 5 years, 56 Featured Bookshelf posts, and 6,300 posts/reblogs have been amazing. Thank you for all the great interactions.
I usually can’t finish a drawing to save my life but I had to
Happy pride month and good omens season 2!!
it’s time to look at some photos of pikas carrying plants and flowers in their mouths
Jo Brown
Biologist and artist
Journals
i can tell i’m sleep deprived bc i just made myself cry about tutankhamun and i have, like, negative interest in the kid
have now made the rest of the discord cry about this little boy who had multi-coloured ducks sewn onto a tunic that he loved so much he wore it to a Very Important Event because he was EIGHT and have you SEEN my DUCKS
sorry no i’m not done i’m gonna make you all cry some more i’m bringing you down with me
there was once a little boy.
he is born disabled. his body hurts, and he can’t walk properly the way the other children do. he doesn’t understand why. he’s a little boy. but he plays with wooden boats and pulls toys on a string.
somebody makes him a tunic. they sew ducks onto it in red and green and yellow and blue. the bright colours of a child.
the little boy is eight years old, and he’s going to be king now. there’s a big ceremony about it. he doesn’t really fully understand what’s going on, because he’s eight, but he wears the tunic with the brightly coloured ducks for the occasion because he loves it. look at his ducks! aren’t they great?
he is a child. the adults around him manipulate and coax him to gain more power for themselves. he still plays with toys.
as a teenager, not yet an adult, he fathers children. they do not survive. he’s not even old enough to have full agency in his job and is still being manipulated, but he had babies and they died.
he does not make it to his twenties. at eighteen or nineteen years old he dies, and is buried. his babies, so tiny, are buried with him.
and so is his tunic with the little ducks that he loved so much he kept it long after it no longer fit.
there was once a little boy.
yeah i think that like. especially with historical figures in your mind people who were kings and queens or important nobles were adults. even if you know how old they were it doesn’t really click. it doesn’t seem real
but then you get something like a little tunic with brightly coloured ducks on it and it hits you like a fucking truck that this really was a little kid and no matter how far removed you are a little kid is still a little kid. their brains didn’t develop any quicker back then. he was just as developed/mature mentally as any 8 year old now. he had cartoonish animals on his clothes and he played with toy boats and probably terrorised the local cat population.
tutankhamun was a child and he didn’t make it to adulthood because he was unfortunate enough to be a very important child
his dad died when he was 8. he saw his own babies die when he was still just a boy himself.
but he had brightly coloured little ducks on his favourite shirt, and he kept it.
and he did not just keep the duckie shirt either
tutankhamun had a little pair of sandals with ducks on them. he had earrings decorated with ducks. he kept those, and other items of childhood clothing. some toys. keepsakes. things he loved, and treasured. he kept them all in a little wooden chest. the chest… was carved with ducks.
and that little duck chest, filled with things he kept from his childhood, was buried with him. maybe he was keeping them for the little babies who did not make it. maybe they just reminded him of good days and fun times.
but he was a little boy who thought ducks were just the best
WITH PLEASURE
(greyscale makes it hard but the duck head is on the right above the toe strap. always takes me a while to find it too)
Thinking about the history of the relationship between humans and dogs, and just arrrggh. Like, here's this beautiful creature that we can somehow form deep bonds with and who we have found ways to breed dogs with incredibly specialized abilities that have helped us survive over the centuries of human existence and all of them are so so good.
Like, I wanna talk about this more tomorrow when I'm more coherent, but the history of the relationship between humans and domesticated animals? I can't think about it too much or I'll tear up.
I’m not repeating anything new, but one of the most fascinating things about humans to me is our ability and willingness to make friends with anyone and anything. Our ancestors looked at wolves and went “That could be a friend”. Our ancestors looked at elephants and went, “Possible friend?” Heck, we look at a Roomba and go “This is my friend, Sweepy McSweep Face”.
What a fascinatingly weird and wonderful attribute of humanity.
YES. THiS. You get it.
how fucked up is it that in the future you could stumble upon internet threads and the timestamps would be “one century ago” like imagine that… youre reading the words of these people, their conversations and their lives all perfectly laid out from over a century ago. and they say shit like “mario has the best nintendo feet” and thats just been sitting there for a century
seriously though, imagine a teenager in like 2113 diving into the early internet out of boredom or for a school project or something and he comes across your blog that you stopped posting on around 2024 but they cal still see all your posts, all your thoughts, your silly convos with your friends, all the stupid discourse you were in, all your interests, the art and writing youve posted/reblogged, everything about you just right there. they impossibly stumbled onto such an obscure corner of the internet, sure to be much more wide and advanced than it is today, and they can peer into your life for just a bit, even though you died ages ago. its like they found your ghost, a small imprint you left online, they found you, you might be gone but youre also right there.
I’ve read a letter where a man tells his wife and kids to remember that it’s 1820 now and to “stop writing 1819, you sillies!”
yes. yes, I can absolutely imagine it. and it’s beautiful.
One day a grad student will write their thesis on the contrasts between the serious way the Ever Given being stuck in the Suez canal is talked about in history books with the memes that were circulating on social media at the time, and that might be the single greatest achievement of the internet.
(if you are that grad student reading this, I recommend “put it back” as your title)
Sometimes falling in love with a character is about seeing yourself in a character, or what you could be, and drawing strength and inspiration from them.
And sometimes it’s like finding an angry opossum in a dumpster, eating your trash, and deciding it’s your baby.
I was trying to explain tumblr to someone who had never used it before and she said “So what do people post there? Videos, like on tiktok?” and it took all my self control not to say “Mostly we just post bullshit.”
The exact structure of Tumblr is something I’ve had to explain to my whole family to both people that are very online and people who have never had a social media account before and all of them thought that it sounded weird and complicated and I always try to explain to them no complicated press reblog head empty but they don’t get it
“What sort of content do people put on tumblr?”
We’re literally….we’re literally just vibing
What kind of content? Yes.
[After finishing a book] *cries* *pterodactyl screeches* *silence* *contemplates life* *more crying* … “Hey friend read this book”
Here we go, a more useful bunch of information than “GO GET A RESPIRATOR AND PANIC WITH ME”. I appreciate this person so much.
I hope this information gets around as much as the post I made about cold weather dressing - this is just as important, just in the other direction.
I was guilty of not having enough carriers for all of my animals - I’ve since rectified that.
I also ordered respirators today. They aren’t that expensive! You can get them on the Evil Site of Evil for ~20 and up. Make sure they either come with the filter pads, or you get some. It’s not always standard.
The following links were provided in subsequent posts:
Alix Powell @thatpowellgirl Y’all remember last year‘s wildfires? @MinkasaurusRex [hey that’s me!] brought to my attention that is wildfire season again, and I think that calls for a safety thread. These graphics showcase last yeardrought drought versus this years drought. This year has the potential to be much, much worse.
I’ll put the rest in the Read More.
Yup. Just gonna keep doing it. It’s going to be important, very very soon.
Fun update!
Image: Western Drought map, June 2021 showing the dramatic increase over last year.
Drought can make it *much* more likely to have fires, and if you recall last year, it was pretty shit.
Prepare yourselves, please.
nothing wrong with being easy to please! give all the books you read five stars. watch that movie again after people tell you that it wasn’t that great. play that band’s new album on repeat, even though it’s not supposed to be as good as their old stuff. refuse to say anything critical about something you thought was cool. be bold in telling grumpy people “actually i liked it a lot!”
read anything you want honestly because reading is so much fun and you shouldn't limit that fun by reading things you think you should
