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just because someone can articulate their point better doesn’t make them right, it makes them articulated. 

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Forgot to post this video of a million tree frogs singing in my backyard last month (sound on)

Athens, Georgia, March 7, 2024 | SM Piotrowski

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Through the grass - Ala Khonikava

 Belarusian , b. 1965 -

Acrylic on canvas

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Shades Of Pacific Blue is a painting by David Lloyd Glover

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Im sick with flu so naturally I picked up my newly bought copy of Howl's Moving Castle which includes DWJ interviews in the back.

And im in love with the way she tells these stories feels like a part of her books.

And my favorite:

The magic in the mundane :)

edit: I'm copying the ID by @princess-of-purple-prose below, thank you!

[ID: Excerpts of printed text which read:

I suppose there's also a biographical element in that Sophie is the eldest of three sisters, and so am I. The idea for Sophie grew out of the time I discovered I had a very severe milk allergy. I almost lost the use of my legs and had to walk with the aid of a stick. I was moderately young, but because of this I suddenly became old.

I had to wait until I knew what Wizard Howl was like. I began to discover Howl about the time when one of my sons took to spending several hours in the bathroom every morning and I got really, really, really annoyed with him.

Where were you when you wrote it? I wrote the book the way I write everything, stretched out on the big sofa in my sitting room, in everyone's way. This often annoys my husband rather a lot.

which made me burst out laughing. I laughed and laughed at the seven league boot, and when I came to the bit where Sophie accidentally makes Howl's suit twenty times too big for him, I laughed so much that I fell off the sofa. My husband was really irritated by this time. He snapped, "You can't be making yourself laugh!" And I gasped, "But I am, I am!" and rolled about on the floor.

Are any of your relatives or friends included in the book? Yes, well the thing that started me off writing the book was a friend of mine who never does her laundry. She has it around the place in huge bags for often as much as a year. When she does tip it all out and try to wash it, she discovers all sorts of clothes that she has forgotten she had.

Which is your favourite part of the book and why? I like the book all over, but I suppose if I had to choose a bit, I'd choose the place where Howl gets a cold. It so happened that when I was writing this bit, my husband caught a bad cold. He is the world's most histrionic cold catcher. He moans, he coughs, he piles on the pathos, he makes strange noises, he blows his nose exactly like a bassoon in a tunnel, he demands bacon sandwiches at all hours, and he is liable to appear (usually wrapped in someone else's dressing gown) at any time, announcing that he is dying of neglect and boredom. So all I had to do was write it down. End ID]

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the only true ally

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i miss when merch was actually cool. i dont want the crap some impoverished red bubble "third party fulfiller" or amazons merch-on-demand. i want the patches messily screen printed in someones moms basement. tote bags that are barely legible. logos on t-shirts someone up-cycled from the thrift store. if im going to be advertising a product i want to know that some love went into the creation of it.

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I try to avoid to avoid posting too much about the abyss of bad things the US, but this one was too much--in one of the more ridiculous political missteps in a US politics (which takes a lot these days) Kristi Noem, contender for the Trump VP position, describes killing a puppy and a billy goat in front of a construction crew.

"At that moment," Noem says, "I realised I had to put her down." Noem, who also represented her state in Congress for eight years, got her gun, then led Cricket to a gravel pit. "It was not a pleasant job," she writes, "but it had to be done. And after it was over, I realised another unpleasant job needed to be done." Incredibly, Noem's tale of slaughter is not finished. Her family, she writes, also owned a male goat that was "nasty and mean", because it had not been castrated. Furthermore, the goat smelled "disgusting, musky, rancid" and "loved to chase" Noem's children, knocking them down and ruining their clothes. Noem decided to kill the unnamed goat the same way she had just killed Cricket the dog. But though she "dragged him to a gravel pit", the goat jumped as she shot and therefore survived the wound. Noem says she went back to her truck, retrieved another shell, then "hurried back to the gravel pit and put him down".THE GUARDIAN

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Make them straight adjacent for the homies

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You forgot Cowboy Bebop!

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Mona Hatoum, Grater Divide, 2002 Mild steel, 204 cm x variable width and depth

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BEYOND obsessed with this house in fort worth, texas i mean

okay pretty normal, let’s look at the interior photos—

WHAT THE FUCK

here we see the first example of a pattern that will recur throughout the house, which is that once your eyes adjust to the bonkers dictator chic marble-and-gilded-everything, you notice some pretty egregiously shoddy workmanship. look at how that baseboard intersects with the outlet. look at how the marble… uh, thing on the wall (i was gonna call it a fireplace but it’s not a fireplace, i have no idea what that is) has gaps and weird angles wherever two pieces meet. it’s like they’re trying to recreate versailles on an ikea budget

i… don’t hate the kitchen. i mean, obviously it’s ugly and #toomuch and there was zero effort made to match the very modern appliances and sink to the cabinets, but still, i’m a sucker for a pass-through and a big sink with a window above it.

this ceiling Fucks but the wrinkly, uneven curtains and terrible caulking around the faux-column in the middle anti-Fuck

why did we suddenly completely switch aesthetics. why is there an old TV set into the wall at floor level. why is there a tiny set of doors next to it. why does the fireplace look like an asset ripped from the original dark souls. i feel a sinister presence sucking at my soul the longer i look at this photo

i feel like whoever designed this monstrosity started with the dining room and then once they’d finished it realized they’d blown half their budget on just this one room. it’s so overdecorated that the gaudiness feels intentional, like it’s a statement rather than a side effect of genuine tastelessness. i can applaud that.

here we have the antithesis of the dining room. i don’t know what this room is supposed to be but i hate it. i’m pretty sure everything in this photo literally came from ikea. there is a lack of commitment here and it is rancid

ladies, gentlemen, distinguished colleagues, we have now hit the cornerstone of any great tacky real estate listing: the heart-shaped bathtub! this one gets bonus points for being next to a gilded mirror and surrounded by bright red damask wallpaper. as a bathtub i’d give it a 1/10 because those angles look incredibly uncomfortable, but as a place to shoot my lover through the heart while wearing a gauzy fur-trimmed bathrobe before fleeing with our ill-gotten fortune i’d give it a solid 11/10

here we are with the lack of commitment again. this literally looks like the kitchen in my college dorm but with a weird fringey lamp and some curtains that are absolutely too long for their windows

again, the mix of styles here is just killing me. half damask wallpaper and carved wall panels, half normal-ass bathroom? really? isn’t there anything truly unhinged left in this house? anything truly opulent, decadent, off the chain, extravagant, gaudy—

THAT’S WHAT I’M TALKING ABOUT BAY BEE!!! THAT’S MORE THE FUCK LIKE IT!!! COMMIT! TO! THE! BIT! GO BIG OR GO HOME! IF YOU’RE GONNA STICK A CEILING DOME IN THE FOYER OF YOUR SUBURBAN TEXAS HOUSE IT HAD BETTER BE TWELVE FEET IN DIAMETER AND PAINTED WITH DOZENS OF FLOWERS OR ELSE WHAT THE FUCK ARE WE EVEN DOING HERE??

and finally, to close out the show, a reminder that this entire acid trip of a real estate listing took place in an ordinary, modern single-story house in texas, one with a backyard and utility boxes on the exterior walls and neighbors who may be blissfully unaware that they live mere feet from a yawning pit of madness.

i love tacky real estate listings.

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theres cowardice theres perfidy and then theres the actions of Indiana U's administration

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i went to the butchart gardens with my mom today. the is first time in my adult life i have actually gotten her alone for more than a few minutes. it drizzled all day, cold-in-the-bones kind of damp, but the gardens are exactly how i remember--opulent and edwardian and uncomfortably british. it exudes the atmosphere of a royal auntie, one who thinks exacting control of her garden validates all her good intentions, colonial though they may be.

the place radiates aesthetic philanthropy and invisible labour. on display is a letter written to the owners humbly thanks them for allowing the orphans to visit and drink tea among them. a statue allows visitors to emulate saint francis of assissi's halo of birds in flight. ('with enough goodness, you, too, can speak to nature'.) the garden staff work on the large wire frames of animals across the garden, pulling out the dead brown moss and replacing it with dead green moss. (is there a more on-the-nose metaphor for colonialism?)

over a million visitors come each year. it is genuinely fun and pretty. my mom and i ride the carousel, the fastest in bc. i take her to afternoon tea, where she refuses to eat any 'grain combined with potato product' (this means any bread with baking powder.) instead she digs out the innards of the sandwiches and takes the smallest bites of the fragrant layered lemon cake while i eat everything she cant. (is there a more on-the-nose metaphor for the child-parent relationship?)

over tea we discuss my father's family. my grandmother's electroshock therapy (already known family fact) and my grandfather's physical abuse of her (fun new family fact). how my uncle left his cats to cover the family house in their shit. how my father now makes her keep her phone in a faraday cage, her credit card in an altoid tin.

my father calls me, later. she is not picking up her phone, he says. i miss you, he says. i hope you are both okay, he says.

now, behind me, she blasts her jehovahs witness meeting. tells everyone on the zoom call that the gardens are just like the garden of eden. even with earplugs and earphones on maximum i cant drown it out (is there a more on-the-nose metaphor for leaving an abusive religion?) she spent the day misgendering me and my partner, calling me by the wrong name. we are now the physically closest we have been in years. i feel grateful this is our only night in the same room. i sit next to the space heater and try to keep out the chill.

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biology facts: only two recognized genders are adhd and autism. nothing else is valid. anyone who isnt one of these two things is lying.