curiouslyodd

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helen “trans people are perpetuating gender steriotypes” joyce is now upset that the scientific american is writing about how women were hunters too back in the day, not just mothers and caretakers. feminist win!

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if your favorite cuss isn’t here but uses one of these as a base word, choose the base word (ex: for “shithead” then choose “shit). if your favorite cuss word is a combo of two or more these (ex: “fuckass”) then choose which of the component words you think really carries the bulk of the cussing power or humor

note: your favorite cuss doesn’t necessarily mean the cuss you employ most frequently. my favorite is “rat bastard” but it’s definitely not my most-used expletive.

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The way most autism literature describes "literal interpretation" is often not at all similar to how I experience it. Teenage me even thought I couldn't be autistic because I've always been able to learn metaphors easily.

In fact, I love wordplay of all kinds. Teenage me was fascinated to learn all the types of figurative language there are in poetry and literature.

But paperwork and questionnaires are hard, because there's so much they don't state clearly. Or they don't leave room for enough nuance.

"List all the jobs you've had, with start and end dates." What if I don't remember the exact day or month? Is the year enough?

"Have you been suffering from blurred vision?" Well, if I take off my glasses the whole world is blurred, but I'm fairly sure that's not what the intake form at the optometrist is asking.

Or the infamous (and infuriatingly stereotypical) "Would you rather go to a library or a party?" What sort of party? Where? Who's there? I work at a library. Am I currently at the library for work or pleasure? Does it have a good collection?

It's not common figures of speech that confound me. It's ambiguity, in situations that aren't supposed to be ambiguous.

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Aggregation of Ruby Spotted Swallowtail caterpillars on a tree in the Yucatán Peninsula

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figure 1: burial of a princess with grave goods indicative of her station

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Something so profoundly fucked up between the inverse ratio of shrinking middle class and ever increasing aggression of advertisement

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is this anything

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why the emphasis on men suffering? nobody says that white ppl suffer under white supremacy because they don't, it's there to benefit them and only them, same with the patriarchy and any other oppressive state

People do in fact talk about white people suffering under white supremacy. I have seen many different anti-racist thinkers discuss that exact topic.

There is literally no benefit from insisting that oppressive systems are 100% good and healthy for those who benefit from them. It is good when people go "actually this system sucks and makes mine and everyone else's life worse."

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let’s settle this shit but do NOT reblog if you’re gonna be modest about it like a little BITCH. anyway privilege check tell me which ones apply to you: hot, funny, can dance, can do math, can spell, can drive, can cook

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people on the subway train are alwaus looking at their phones well we should look to eachother and build a community that lives on trains and be like a siphonophore that uses the train as a shell . and float through the pelagic zone and share the seas nutrients such as small fish and crustaceans among our linked bodies

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Loving this letter that one deeply hilarious National Trust employee was clearly tasked with writing to dress one of the rooms at the property we visited today:

I'm sure they never anticipated Dr Tall Gf and I, who spend half an hour minimum in every single goddamn room, and will therefore notice every single thing, including your funny little jokes!!!

(Letter reads:

Fourth Dec. 1772

Dear Brother,

Whilst I am most delighted to welcome you to my home I must also let you know that quite recently I did engage a local artisan-builder to undertake the plasterwork here at Mompesson House. I have had many wonderful ideas for the plasterwork: to whit, peaches, Inigo Jones and Alexander Pope, King Midas, shells, a Green Man who is most distinctive, the Goddess Athena, a lady with the head of a cornucopia, a Large Eagle, several sundry fruits as well as the aforementioned peaches, and so on. Suffice to say, it will be most grand but also cause a lot of mess. Anyway, my great hope is that one day the plasterwork will be so historically significant that it will pass onto some kind of National Trust that protects buildings and their furniture and so forth. I am sure the employees of such an institution would be kind, generous, thoughtful, attractive, most engaging and witty, probably extremely sexy and certainly in general a delight to be near. Visitors of the future witnessing my noble plasterwork will be so grateful that they will no doubt spend plentiful money in the tea room and secondhand bookshop I should think.)

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Been playing too much Zero Escape. Just had the thought 'oh, in all the many worlds of my existence, this must be the one where I never find love.'

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I am losing my fucking mind.

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The Flower Vendor by Victor Prouvé (1882)

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"The North Korean regime in the ‘50s developed a series of remarkably effective torture techniques, techniques that were so effective, in fact, that they were able to make captured American airmen admit to all sorts of atrocities they had not in fact committed, all the time, being convinced they had not, actually, been tortured. The techniques were quite simple. Just make the victim do something mildly uncomfortable—sit on the edge of chair, for example, or lean against a wall in a slightly awkward position—only, make them do it for an extremely long period of time. After eight hours the victim would be willing to do virtually anything to make it stop. But try going to the International Court of Justice at The Hague and tell them you’ve been made to sit on the edge of a chair all day. Even the victims were unwilling to describe their captors as torturers. When the CIA learned about these techniques—according to Korean friends of mine, they’re actually just particularly sadistic versions of classic Korean ways of punishing small children—they were intrigued, and, apparently, conducted extensive research on how they could be adopted for their own detention centers.

Again, sometimes, in Palestine, one feels one is in an entire country that’s being treated this way. Obviously, there is also outright torture, people who are actually being shot, beaten, tortured, or violently abused. But I’m speaking here even of the ones that aren’t. For most, it’s as if the very texture of everyday life has been designed to be intolerable—only, in a way that you can never quite say is exactly a human rights violation. There’s never enough water. Showering requires almost military discipline. You can’t get a permit. You’re always standing in line. If something breaks it’s impossible to get permission to fix it. Or else you can’t get spare parts. There are four different bodies of law that might apply to any legal situation (Ottoman, British, Jordanian, Israeli), it’s anyone’s guess which court will say what applies where, or what document is required, or acceptable. Most rules are not even supposed to make sense. It can take eight hours to drive 20 kilometers to see your girlfriend, and doing so will almost certainly mean having machine guns waved in your faces and being shouted at in a language you half understand by people who think you’re subhuman. So you do most of your dalliance by phone. When you can afford the minutes. There are endless traffic jams before and after checkpoints and drivers bicker and curse and try not to take it out on one another. Everyone lives no more than 12 or 15 miles from the Mediterranean but even on the hottest day, it’s absolutely impossible to get to the beach. Unless you climb the wall, there are places you can do that; but then you can expect to be hunted every moment by security patrols. Of course teenagers do it anyway. But it means swimming is always accompanied by the fear of being shot. If you’re a trader, or a laborer, or a driver, or a tobacco farmer, or clerk, the very process of subsistence is continual stream of minor humiliations. Your tomatoes are held and left two days to rot while someone grins at you. You have to beg to get your child out of detention. And if you do go to beseech the guards, those same guards might arbitrarily decide to hold you to pressure him to confess to rock-throwing, and suddenly you are in a concrete cell without cigarettes. Your toilet backs up. And you realize: you’re going to have to live like this forever. There is no “political process.” It will never end. Barring some kind of divine intervention, you can expect to be facing exactly this sort of terror and absurdity for the rest of your natural life."

-David Graeber, Reflections from a Visit to the West Bank

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