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Two different constituencies that have apparently voted conservative since the 1880s have flipped. Jesus christ.

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it is very childish and naive but i am still so shocked to see that so many people are just fucking outright mean

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I haven't seen this circulating here on Tumblr, so I decided to make my own post.

last saturday, in Porto, there was a pride parade going down the street and this old man was standing there, by his front door, waving the portuguese flag. most people on the parade probably thought the same: old person waving the national flag? he's probably protesting against the parade, he's a nationalist of some sort.

then the old man called for that person to come near him. the whole parade stopped. everyone just.. stopped moving. they didn't know what to expect, and most expected the worst. and that person decided to give him the benefit of the doubt and approached the old man. and then... they traded flags, he hugged the person and then he waved the pride flag happily. everyone cheered him.

such a wholesome moment. 🥹❤️🌈

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This is so funny

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No joke is one-size-fits-all, but adding "but I remain optimistic" at the end of any somewhat-speculating statement makes it funny, taking a different tone in each.

Adding it to the end of something positive gives it an unexpected twist - implying that whatever the good thing that happened was, it wasn't what you expected or hoped to happen, but you're yet to give up hope of whatever the fuck you've now vaguely implied towards might still happen. "He survived and is expected to make a full recovery, but I remain optimistic."

Adding it to a neutral statement implies that you think something can be done about it, funniest if the statement is something that obviously can't be affected. "Apparently it's tuesday tomorrow, but I remain optimistic."

And the bleakest, most hopeless statements just become bleakly funny by the grim absurdity. "About 30 seconds remain until impact, and the chances of any of us surviving the crash are zero. But I remain optimistic."

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I keep thinking about that one post that was going around talking about the potential origins of cheese and everyone immediately jumps to it must've been rotten milk that they ate out of desperation. But I'd like to posit that the first cheese was probably someone adding an acid to warmed milk and realising it splits it. Like it's not that big a stretch of the imagination for someone to think "oh I like warm milk but I also like this acidic fruit, I wonder if I can mix them". From there a little experimentation on separating the new curd from the whey and you've got a simple fresh cheese.

I dunno I think the reason I wanted to make this post is just that we tend to desscribe a lot of discoveries around food as desperate acts of starvation and not genuinely thought out experimentations based on observations like every other form of human knowledge. Ancient people weren't stupid starving unwashed masses and it's important to remember that. They were people who could think and deduce and logic their way through things as good as you or I.

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Studying sustainability has taught me that the answer to things like “is it better to use paper or plastic bags?” always ends up being something like “we would need to perform an extremely in depth study on the entire life cycle of both types of bags from virgin material collection to product recollection, compare things like amount of product each type of bag can carry, material usage per bag, how frequently double-bagging is occurring, and take into account a ridiculous number of factors down to the fuel efficiency of the trucks that transport them and even after all that we would have to try to find a way to compare whether the higher carbon emissions of producing and transporting paper bags is better than the fact that the plastic bags will be plastic bags for the next thousand years. And at the end of the day all this research would ultimately not be particularly useful because our waste collection streams in the US are so fucking bad it’s depressing.”

And then someone will ask about reusable bags and you’d have to do the study again only to reveal that you need to use the reusable bag like a couple thousand times to offset the carbon emissions it takes to make the reusable bag and make it worth it over disposable bags and that’s not taking into consideration bags breaking before then or being forgotten about completely.

The answer always leads to “it’s incredibly complicated but our current practices are so terrible we would need a full scale restructuring of our economy and practices to such a degree that can literally never happen because our government is lobbied by the people who make money off of said unsustainable practices.”

So the answer to “paper bags or plastic bags?” is that we need to destroy capitalism

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I just saw the most Galaxy Brain gender take ever, from a cis man on reddit

[ID: a screenshot of a comment from reddit, with no username visible. The commend reads: This doesn’t make a ton of sense to me either. Setting aside the question of whether gender/sex is assigned or observed at birth, the gender I was assigned at birth was ‘boy.’ The gender I have now is ‘man’. Boys and men have different gender roles, and few adults identify as boys anymore. From this standpoint, every adult has a different gender than the one they had at birth. End ID]

Framing “girl” and “boy” as separate genders from “woman” and “man” is such an amazing take. it’s a framework that accommodates and explains so many trans experiences. Some trans people never were their AGAB. Some feel like they were their AGAB, but that that changed (usually when puberty hits, which is when you start “becoming a man/woman”. The accepted societal path is that girls grow up to into women, and boys grow up into men. But some girls grow up into men, and some boys grow up into women. This guy was a boy who grew up into a man, which generally works out pretty well for people. Some boys and girls grow up into people who aren’t men or women, even! It’s like this random cis guy skipped right over transgender 101, 102, 201, etc. and stumbled directly into Transgender Nirvana.

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also just a general rule of thumb: when nationalized/public service industries are striking, they ARE striking for YOUR benefit, ultimately. bus drivers are the ones who fight against capitalist upper management trying to shut down bus routes that "don't generate enough profits" or trying to generally set up a worse (public!) service for the sake of """"efficiency""""" and """"""cost optimization""""""" (read: pay less people and overwork them to give YOU, the public, a much worse service or commodity).

it's like this in schools, hospitals, public transportation, literally everywhere. the striking workers care for the public' needs more than the bosses will ever do. sure they want better work conditions which is (should be) enough of a reason to support strikes in general, but by supporting striking workers, you ultimately support your own quality of life. it's all intertwined

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Hello. If you don't mind, I have a question that runs kinda parallel to the whole Egyptian curse discourse you've been suffering lately.

Tw: discussion of religious intrusive thoughts.

A while ago I was reading about modern Hellenistic worship and there was a bit about how serious it was to commit yourself to a certain deity, what a big decision it was and how for many deities it was a lifelong choice, but that that commitment didn't necessitate a ritual if the practitioner didn't feel called to one. My intrusive thoughts immediately started pledging themselves eternally to a wide variety of Greek deities (mainly the ones I would least like to associate myself with) and although I don't believe in those deities the idea that I might accidentally pledge myself to a power beyond my understanding was a tad distressing.

So today I'm exploring a new archeology YouTube channel and the host has a video about getting a replica of the oldest tattoo ever found on a mummy and my immediate gut reaction, based solely off of the thumbnail, was "but what if you accidentally pledged yourself to something you wouldn't want to be tied to?”

And then I thought of the mummy's curse discourse and I wondered how this reaction of mine fits with that orientalist idea. I want to believe the reactions are different, that mine is more about an acknowledgement of the potential for any supernatural belief to have validity and therefore not fucking around unless you are very sure you want to find out, but I have self serving reasons to want to believe that and so hoped to get the outside perspective of someone who knows a lot more than I do on this subject.

Thanks in advance and hope you're having a groovy day.

C

Your reaction wasn’t “oh ewww a curse” or “put it back you’ll get cursed” but “what if I pledged myself to a deity by tattooing something on me?” which is entirely different. What that speaks to is a concern not to be overstepping boundaries and thinking about whether it is right for you to do something that might have cultural implications. This is fine! You’re not immediately associating having the tattoo with being cursed, but instead asking if what you’re doing has religious implications.

With the person getting the tattoo? That’s up to them and their choice to get it. I know several Egyptologists who have tattoos of hieroglyphs, including replica placements of ones found on mummies. These people can read hieroglyphs, and they understand what the signs represent. Some of them may have deeper meanings that were not aware of yet, (I have an article on some tattoos on a woman from Deir el Medina if you’re interested) but I’m not aware of any tradition in Egypt, especially at the time the woman lived, where a tattoo would pledge you to a god. Egyptian religion doesn’t work like that. Even if one did, the person would have to believe in the Egyptian gods for it to have any meaning. Meaning lies with the owner of the tattoo. If they say it means something then it means that thing. If they say it means nothing and is just a picture then that’s what it is. It’s about agency and intent.

Egyptian religion works by people understanding the intent behind certain motifs and symbols (because people can’t read). If the intent doesn’t match then the Egyptian belief that heka can work through images will not work. So basically, if the intent of the original tattoo was a protection of Thoth (baboon symbol), then it’s a protection of Thoth for the deceased who has it. If the researcher intends to get a replica of the tattoo of Thoth just for fun, then the intent is “for fun” and heka cannot work.

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Anyone talking about 'curses' and 'letting curses out if you open things' on the Pyramid post, but also y'know Ancient Egypt in general?

Thanks for perpetuating Orientalist othering! That's pretty racist of you!

✨Go Fuck Yourself✨

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imagine being sappho of lesbos writing some poetry abt ur gf and then 2000 years later ‘there are two common adjectives for love between women and you won’t believe who they’re named after!’ ‘by the delights of athena, you can’t mean that one of them is named after me?’ ‘no both of them are’

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I don't mean to be callous but when I talk about walkability/transit and someone says "what about people who live out in the country" I'm like yeah, what about them? What does that have to do with how people in cities get around?

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a collection of my favorite tweets regarding the Ever Given in the Suez Canal

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Watch: Poet G Yamazawa nails what it’s like to grow up in the U.S. as the child of immigrants.

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Hey! I'm offering pixel art in @fandomtrumpshate, a fanworks auction benefitting charities that support progressive causes, and bidding is open now! For a minimum bid of just 10$ (that, again, goes to a charity of your choosing from a given list!) you could have pixel art based on The Magnus Archives, Rusty Quill Gaming, or Wheel of Time.

Examples of my work below

ID: a collage of four pixel art pieces.

Top left: an overfull carboard box filled with off-white paper files. The box is messily labeled "uncategorized", the background is light green.

Top right: Martin Blackwood, a fat white man with lots of freckles, standing with his bare back to the viewer. He's wearing black boxers and he has short curly reddish brown hair. The background is a pastel blue to pink gradient.

Bottom left: Jon and Martin from a Spiritfarer AU, standing on a grassy hill under a star-filled night sky with a crescent moon. Martin noteably has fogged over glasses and wears a capelet with a large, bright clasp - the everlight. Jon has moth traits - antennae, neck fluff, two extra arms, and of course wings.

Bottom right: Grizzop a grey goblin in a cream, laced shirt, seen from the chest up and smiling fondly. The backgrouns is dark green.

End ID

I'm very much open to negotiation and talking about what you'd like to see so feel free to reach out here on tumblr beforehand!

Bidding runs till this Sunday, March 5th, at 8PM EST.

Ready to bid? You can find my auction here

There's a bunch of other great auctions in each of the listed fandoms too so I encourage you to browse those tags, or those of other fandoms you're interested in, as well!