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[brnineworms]

micahhh

[brnineworms]

thinking about how like. as a kid growing up in the light-polluted suburbs, space was always somewhere else. it was in the eyepiece of a telescope, star clusters and the andromeda galaxy and the orion nebula (good luck seeing any other galaxies or nebulae from suburbia) all faint and fuzzy, and outside the eyepiece, nothing. just a handful of stars in a not-that-dark sky. it was either that or look up hubble pics

i knew, in theory, that the night sky was space. but in practice i found that hard to believe since the sky i could see barely resembled the wonders of the cosmos described to me in documentaries or books. that telescope eyepiece was like a gateway into another world where faint hints of these things really did exist, because they didn't exist in my sky

and then i started going to dark sky sites, and it's all just. there. it's real. you can just see the plane of our galaxy with its star clouds and dust lanes

one time, a friend and i stopped in the middle of nowhere in kansas on the way back from a road trip. it was the darkest and most remote night sky i've ever seen. she pointed to a fuzzy little cloud fairly close to the horizon, like a puff of steam rising from the spout of the teapot of sagittarius. it was the lagoon nebula. she also pointed out the andromeda galaxy, a distinct smear on the sky

not with a telescope, but with the naked eye. everything was just there! sure, it didn't lookk like hubble pics, but it wasn't just the night sky anymore - it really was space

i think one of the saddest things about light pollution is that we live in a time where humans have unprecedented knowledge about the universe and our place in it. we can look at features of the night sky and understand the immensity and significance of it all. you can look at the puff of steam in sagittarius and know that suns are being born there

but for most people, these facts are distant and irrelevant, because they can't see them in the sky above their heads, and i think that's a tragic loss for our species

[brnineworms]

Kalvin Brnine…. I hope you have to live

[brnineworms]

actual criticisms of academia:

cost of education acting as class barrier

exploitation of graduate workers

colonialist past and present

ties to military industrial complex

danger of power structure entrenching and justifying orthodox views on social issues

criticisms of academia that get made:

those damn ivory tower academics are wasting money learning about things

[brnineworms]

the whole point of a zine is that it's cheap to produce, amateur and homemade. if you're being asked to apply to participate in a print project, it is not a zine. if the final product is being printed and bound professionally, it is not a zine. if you are being asked to enter into any kind of licensing agreement more complex than "my work can be reproduced as part of this publication" it is not a zine. nine times put of ten if the final product costs more than $5 you have left zine country. im so serious about this.

[brnineworms]

“If a society puts half its children into short skirts and warns them not to move in ways that reveal their panties, while putting the other half into jeans and overalls and encouraging them to climb trees, play ball, and participate in other vigorous outdoor games; if later, during adolescence, the children who have been wearing trousers are urged to “eat like growing boys,” while the children in skirts are warned to watch their weight and not get fat; if the half in jeans runs around in sneakers or boots, while the half in skirts totters about on spike heels, then these two groups of people will be biologically as well as socially different. Their muscles will be different, as will their reflexes, posture, arms, legs and feet, hand-eye coordination, and so on. Similarly, people who spend eight hours a day in an office working at a typewriter or a visual display terminal will be biologically different from those who work on construction jobs. There is no way to sort the biological and social components that produce these differences. We cannot sort nature from nurture when we confront group differences in societies in which people from different races, classes, and sexes do not have equal access to resources and power, and therefore live in different environments. Sex-typed generalizations, such as that men are heavier, taller, or stronger than women, obscure the diversity among women and among men and the extensive overlaps between them… Most women and men fall within the same range of heights, weights, and strengths, three variables that depend a great deal on how we have grown up and live. We all know that first-generation Americans, on average, are taller than their immigrant parents and that men who do physical labor, on average, are stronger than male college professors. But we forget to look for the obvious reasons for differences when confronted with assertions like ‘Men are stronger than women.’ We should be asking: ‘Which men?’ and ‘What do they do?’ There may be biologically based average differences between women and men, but these are interwoven with a host of social differences from which we cannot disentangle them.”

— Ruth Hubbard, “The Political Nature of ‘Human Nature’“ (via gothhabiba)

Yes.

[brnineworms]

i understand the appeal of publishing "fic with the serial numbers filed off" as original work but i also feel like. what makes something a good fic is at odds with what makes something a good original story.

[brnineworms]

There are people in my life who have told me "I believe the rapture will happen in my lifetime." But they also agonize over their retirement plans.

I also had a person in my life who have told me "I believe the rapture will happen in my lifetime" and that person sold their house and moved into the desert and died trying to fast like in some Bible story.

[brnineworms]

Le Larousse pour tous: nouveau dictionnaire encyclopédique - 1909 - via Internet Archive

[brnineworms]

Blackwater Dive

2024, hand bleached and dyed denim, cotton batting and thread

inspired by blackwater photography of plankton! this was my first time layering bleach painting. All the silhouettes were painted with bleaching gel, loosely tie dyed, and then bleached again to make the highlights. I quilted the piece using my free motion foot to outline each individual animal and tacked down the rest of the quilt with small satin stitches that remind me of marine snow. I dyed bias tape to match. super happy with this one and excited to show it in a gallery setting soon!

[brnineworms]

if you dont want print media to die, buy physical copies of things. if you don’t want independent journalism to die, subscribe to a local newspaper. if you want more libraries and skate-parks and arcades, get a bunch of friends and call in the individual charge of your village or town or whatever and ask for one to be built and use the existing ones. if you want more native flora and fauna, start looking at the ones that already exist and how to preserve them. this is your world too. fight for it. get rid of the rot of passivity.

[brnineworms]

im the bug that your parents say is more scared of you than you are of me

[brnineworms]

Hey so you guys know "alternative" is literally a marketing demographic developed for commercial radio, right? So many people use that phrase as though it's a real thing with any kind of actual cultural legacy that I want to be sure you all know it's meaningless. It has no ethos or human history. It's a marketing demographic reforged into an identity to be sold to you so you can buy some semblance of gratification through consumption. It's a word that sounds edgy to make people feel punk-rock-adjacent without needing to actually be involved in any kind of subversion at all. You are being sold the fantasy of rebellion as a discrete packaged unit, and it's only "alternative" in the way a waitress asks "is Pepsi okay?" You really should develop an identity based on what you do instead of what you consume.

[brnineworms]

raw scans of recent stuff

[brnineworms]

i <3 planners/journals/scrapbooks

[brnineworms]

i think it's pretty awesome how all public transport is free actually, it's like really nice of them how you can just not pay if you don't feel like it or can't afford it

[brnineworms]

construction workers were a superstitious organization who thought orange objects could ward off vehicles, or even control people.