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"An Alphabetical Guide to Our Wonderful Future" and "An Alphabetical Guide to Our Dreadful". Two alphabets I made for Nobrow magazine in 2015.

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okay so I finished Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861) by Harriet Jacobs, and here are my takeaways, because it was AMAZING and I can't believe all US students aren't required to read it in school:

shows how slavery actually worked in nuanced ways i'd never thought much about

example: Jacobs's grandmother would work making goods like crackers and preserves after she was done with her work day (so imagine boiling jars at like 3 a.m.) so that she could sell them in the local market

through this her grandmother actually earned enough money, over many years, to buy herself and earn her freedom

BUT her "mistress" needed to borrow money from her. :)))) Yeah. Seriously. And never paid her back, and there was obviously no legal recourse for your "owner" stealing your life's savings, so all those years of laboring to buy her freedom were just ****ing wasted. like.

But also! Her grandmother met a lot of white women by selling them her homemade goods, and she cultivated so much good will in the community that she was able to essentially peer pressure the family that "owned" her into freeing her when she was elderly (because otherwise her so-called owners' white neighbors would have judged them for being total assholes, which they were)

She was free and lived in her own home, but she had to watch her children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren all continue to be enslaved. She tried to buy her family but their "owners" wouldn't allow it.

Enslaved people celebrated Christmas. they feasted, and men went around caroling as a way to ask white people in the community for money.

But Christmas made enslaved people incredibly anxious because New Years was a common time for them to be sold, so mothers giving their children homemade dolls on Christmas might, in just a few days' time, be separated from their children forever

over and over again, families were deliberately ripped apart in just the one community that Harriet Jacobs lived in. so many parents kept from their children. just insane to think of that happening everywhere across the slave states for almost 200 years

Harriet Jacobs was kept from marrying a free Black man she loved because her "owner" wouldn't let her

Jacobs also shows numerous ways slavery made white people powerless

for example: a white politician had some kind of relationship with her outside of marriage, obviously very questionably consensual (she didn't hate him but couldn't have safely said no), and she had 2 children by him--but he wasn't her "master," so her "master" was allowed to legally "own" his children, even though he was an influential and wealthy man and tried for years to buy his children's freedom

she also gives examples of white men raping Black women and, when the Black women gave birth to children who resembled their "masters," the wives of those "masters" would be devastated--like, their husbands were (from their POV) cheating on them, committing violent sexual acts in their own house, and the wives couldn't do anything about it (except take out their anger on the enslaved women who were already rape victims)

just to emphasize: rape was LEGALLY INCENTIVIZED BY US LAW LESS THAN 200 YEARS AGO. It was a legal decision that made children slaves like their mothers were, meaning that a slaveowner who was a serial rapist would "own" more "property" and be better off financially than a man who would not commit rape.

also so many examples of white people promising to free the enslaved but then dying too soon, or marrying a spouse who wouldn't allow it, or going bankrupt and deciding to sell the enslaved person as a last resort instead

A lot of white people who seemed to feel that they would make morally better decisions if not for the fact that they were suffering financially and needed the enslaved to give them some kind of net worth; reminds me of people who buy Shein and other slave-made products because they just "can"t" afford fairly traded stuff

but also there were white people who helped Harriet Jacobs, including a ship captain whose brother was a slavetrader, but he himself felt slavery was wrong, so he agreed to sail Harriet to a free state; later, her white employer did everything she could to help Harriet when Harriet was being hunted by her "owner"

^so clearly the excuse that "people were just racist back then" doesn't hold any water; there were plenty of folks who found it just as insane and wrongminded as we do now

Harriet Jacobs making it to the "free" north and being surprised that she wasn't legally entitled to sit first-class on the train. Again: segregation wasn't this natural thing that seemed normal to people in the 1800s. it was weird and fucked up and it felt weird and fucked up!

Also how valued literacy skills were for the enslaved! Just one example: Harriet Jacobs at one point needed to trick the "slaveowner" who was hunting her into thinking she was in New York, and she used an NYC newspaper to research the names of streets and avenues so that she could send him a letter from a fake New York address

I don't wanna give away the book, because even though it's an autobiography, it has a strangely thrilling plot. But these were some of the points that made a big impression on me.

Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl also inspired the first novel written by a Black American woman, Frances Harper, who penned Iola Leroy. And Iola Leroy, in turn, helped inspire books by writers like Nella Larsen and Zora Neale Hurston. Harriet Jacob is also credited in Colson Whitehead's acknowledgments page for informing the plot of The Underground Railroad. so this book is a pivotal work in the US literary canon and, again, it's weird that we don't all read it as a matter of course.

(also P.S. it's free on project gutenberg and i personally read it [also free] on the app Serial Reader)

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Do you want to be politically pure in theory or help your neighbor. Is it fruitless to help your neighbor because there's no Perfect Pure way to do it ?

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Lan Wangji, heading toward the sounds of commotion after tearing apart hundreds of obnoxious nets across Dafan mountain: I have no doubt who is going to be at the bottom of all this.

Jiang Cheng, staring a Bichen and catching sight of movement out of the corner of his eye: there is an entire mountain, why am I running into this guy.

Both of them, upon meeting gazes: bitch.

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The hamster is never in physical danger, either. Most of the props obviously can't hurt it. The spike traps might hurt it, but they are clearly being manually controlled by someone offstage, and won't close on the hamster for real; similarly, the moving platforms are being manually controlled and only go when the hamster is in the right place. The hamster doesn't want to fall off the hanging barrels that it has to scramble across, but if it did, that's a safe drop for a hamster, into a pile of foam balls.

The hamster is startled a couple of times when a platform it's on starts moving, but otherwise appears to be calm and curiously exploring.

Hamster Escapes the Most Dangerous Prison Maze 🐹

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A Kate Beaton classic for Ida B. Wells birthday.

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@zelinkcommunity Zelink Week Day 4 - Intertwined

Timelapse below the cut

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You shouldn’t keep a woman waiting, chaton…

Someone asked for Ladrien companion art in response to my DJWifi/DJRouge piece I drew and I chanced upon a perfect pose. But for some reason I ended up aging them up to their Married AU versions 😂 Then again, the pose was a little bit more mature so, it fits :3 

Guess Ladybug has visited her husband at work more than once.

DO NOT REPOST OR REUPLOAD

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there is also something kind of gross to me about the constant insinuations that the "questioning social norms" component of autism immediately turns every autistic person into a genderfuckery kinkster leftist who don't give a fuck. and I say this as someone who is a genderfuckery kinkster leftist. autism isn't a political alignment, it's a disability. sometimes the autism 'sense of justice' is wrong. sometimes an autistic person will find a home in conservative ideologies for many of the same reasons as other autistic people will find a home in communist ideologies. sometimes the autistic communist will come up with dogshit analysis even as they're guided by their sense of justice, because good political analysis isn't a feeling or a neurotype, it's a skill that you cultivate. I know it would be pleasant and emotionally soothing for you to be able to believe that autism turns someone into a superpowered leftist but it's a politically fraught and deeply questionable line of thought to be feeding into

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Queen Clarion 👑✨ colored watercolour sketch 🍃

I hope you all are having a great weekend🫶

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Genies can only grant wishes that are things that an ordinary person could do, just better and faster. The jinn are the creations of a divine being, and so they are part of the divine plan and cannot defy the natural order of things; a wish granted by a jinni can’t turn the day into night or the sea into yogurt, but if you wish for a temple to be built, a jinni will build it by hand, the way men do, and have it done in a day.

If you need a wish granted that defies the natural order you gotta catch a leprechaun, because no god was involved in their creation whatsoever. They just kinda showed up one day in the nineteenth century. The Aos Sí have no idea what their deal is

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t eet h

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-_- apparently the cut-off for this thing I want to submit to (which closes tomorrow) is 70k words, and I’ve got 67k

I need to think of three thousand words of bullshit to pad this thing. like a chapter where everyone goes for coffee, or something. 

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man i really love meowmeow and master jinsheesh

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young man. what is that you have found.

I said young man. you picked it up off the ground.

I said young man. you should put that thing down.

I don't think! that! you! should! eat that!

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My edo period samurai roommate keeps telling me how i’ll bring shame and dishonor to our apartment if I keep forgetting to wash the dishes. Like whatever dude, I’m not the one carrying on a passionate yet illicit affair with the daimyo’s daughter whose hand has already been promised to another.

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Belgians must be stopped