iagonizing

[iagonizing]

Couldn't resist a bit of Valentine's fun with the birds at work! This is one of our ambassador red-tailed hawks, Jesse, trying to get at her snack! Jesse is a non-releasable ambassador, not a pet, and she had been at our facility for 25 years this year, so she deserves some love! (She is not very good at enrichment, so sometimes she needs 'help!')

[iagonizing]

a comforting spot to be; the laundromat

[iagonizing]

The Drowned Halls

[iagonizing]

giant redwood trees really are so cool, they just have something incredibly special going on. it's hard to describe if you haven't seen them

[iagonizing]

[iagonizing]

it does still make me insane specifically how many queer people lovingly embrace astrology. I went to a poetry workshop yesterday that was genuinely quite good but also included an option to disclose astrology designations during introductions and so many people broke out some variation of "I'm a [x] sum but I have a [y] placement and it SHOWS" girl no it doesn't. that's meaningless correlation you completely invented the causation

[iagonizing]

Human beings b like. *sits and stares peacefully at a fire* *sits and stares peacefully at the ocean* *sits and stares peacefully at a sleeping animal*

[iagonizing]

hades explaining that he’s the god of the dead, not the god of death

hades explaining that he’s the god of the dead, not the god of death

[iagonizing]

youtube recommended me an hour long video where someone rants about the decline of build a bear as a brand and I decided to watch maybe 15 minutes or so not for any insight, but instead as a form of people watching. what kind of life would an adult my age lead to feel that kind of consumer betrayal? not because build a bear is cringe but because build a bear is expensive. ridiculously expensive. the only time in my life where i walked into a build a bear and did not immediately walk out was when my old-old ex took me there for my 18th birthday and got me a twilight sparkle plush because we were looking at the cost of these custom bears and their clothes and going "holy fuck whaaaaat". a build a bear ride or die is built very different from me.

you probably deduced from the thumbnail (as well as from the nature of these consumer grievance type videos) that the thing this person has an issue with is the overall modern day "aesthetic". the store has downsized considerably in the last decade and resembles a regular toy store moreso than its older workshop-like setup. at one point she near-tearily mulls over how many malls only have a "dinky little kiosk" instead of an actual location. she hates the fluorescent lights and minimalist style shelves. she doesn't get why things that were once painted surfaces are now interactable screens. she gushes over the things she loved about the old store as if she's seeing it all for the first time in between talking extensively about her personal relationship to certain accessories and plush types. she hates that so many of the plushies are just licensed characters now. she misses the experience of being in the store as a child. she misses the bears from her childhood that she regretfully gave away. she doesn't like that these things that meant so much to her are going away and that she doesn't know how to get them back. at one point, she mentions that she tried to go back to the store a few years ago and (pausing repeatedly as if hovering above some kind of inscrutable alien truth) that buying a bear and paying $30+ for clothes "just wasn't...fun?" but immediately combats the instinct to investigate these feelings by arguing that this is the store's fault for not being fun. that build a bear is failing because it is not more accommodating to adults.

with any other youtuber who was confounded by the fact that novelty things from their childhood did not survive the forces of the market 15+ years later (and had to shuffle around its brand aesthetics to see what would maybe make investors happy while also minimizing cost) I would probably have just stopped watching at the 15 minute mark, but I found myself fascinated by this humorism powered hydraulic performance. she simmers in nostalgia happily, reliving her memories with every image of old build a bear she superimposes over the screen, before snapping into a state of sadness and confusion once the image has been taken away. it takes about 25 minutes in for her to start verbalizing her frustration towards all modern day toy aesthetics. "why did they do this? what makes them do this? why does everything look like this now? I don't understand" she's less asking a question and more unable to reconcile that a part of her life which once possessed tangibility no longer exists, and the transactional nature of her relationship with build a bear is what specifically makes her unable to make peace with this. she cannot accept that she cannot buy back this time that was lost because her time as a child in build a bear was something that she purchased in the first place. the experience is tied so much to build a bear as an enterprise and transaction that to simply separate what she liked about it and pursue something that resembles that is inconceivable, and instead that the only choice is to. retvrn to build a bear.

[iagonizing]

Bill Braun creates paintings that look like construction paper!

[iagonizing]

[iagonizing]

[iagonizing]

"these researchers published a paper on something that literally any of us could have told you 🙄" ok well my supervisors wont let me write something in my thesis unless I can back it up with a citation so maybe it's a good thing that they're amplifying your voice to the scientific community in a way that prevents people from writing off your experiences as annecdotal evidence

[iagonizing]

i get that americans love their cultural imperialism, but it really does piss me off that june is “international” pride month just because something happened in the united states.

in aotearoa, june isn’t our pride, it’s theirs. marsha p johnson and sylvia rivera are their historical figures, not ours. the phrase that “you owe your rights to Black trans women” is true there, but here we owe our rights to (mostly) Māori historical figures. i have the freedoms i do because of the legacy of an entirely different set of people operating in an entirely different context at entirely different times.

But because of american cultural imperialism, most queer people in Aotearoa don’t even know our own queer history. Carmen Rupe, Ngahuia Te Awekotuku, the Dorian Society, Gillian Laundon, Georgina Beyer, and the Wolfenden Association are some of our queer history. We should know their names! we should know what they did for us! but because of the power of the american imperial machine, we don’t.

our national pride month should be july, the month that the Homosexual Law Reform Act passed in 1986. our two largest cities hold their pride festivals in february and march, respectively. american queer history has very little (or nothing, depending on who you ask) to do with our queer history. anecdotally, from my own queries, queer youth in aotearoa know more about american queer history than our own.

anyway, happy pride, americans. i’m truly sorry that most of you don’t see the negative impact your nation’s culture has on the rest of the world. and to the rest of the world reading this, try searching for your own country and culture’s queer history, don’t accept the american narratives as your own. we deserve our own histories divorced from the cultural hegemony of the USA.