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I want more female characters who are just so bad at comforting others. Not for lack of trying or caring, they just get so so awkward when someone's upset, and they try to repeat things they've heard even if it doesn't necessarily apply to the situation, or they accidentally say the wrong thing and make it worse. If someone cries they panic and throw every single comfort technique down at once and it only helps because it's such bizarre behaviour

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Celestial Seasonings: Iconic Artworks

Lori Anzalone: Bengal Spice (2007)

Mike Wimmer: Candy Cane Lane (2004)

Robert Giusti: Tension Tamer (1991)

Braldt Bralds: Mint Magic (1986)

Tom Newsom: Red Zinger (2004)

Beth Underwood: Sleepytime (1973)

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Can I Please Eat In The Computer Room Tonight? by Nicole Nikolich (2025)

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The jankiest Spanish Flea midi you’ll ever hear. It’s like it’s trying to fall out of tune/tempo

Original MIDI at http://pureuphonic.com/spanishflea.mid

This file was extracted from a shareware program called MacBlaster 2000, and the MIDI’s embedded metadata states: “Copyright: Copyright . 1999 by George Q. Simmons“

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please help eyad!!!

eyad @eyad-alanqe223 has asked me to make another post on his and his family's behalf since his campaign is moving very slowly, especially after having to start a new one because, as we all know by now, gfm has a very clear bias and they have stalled many legitimate gazan fundraisers "for whatever reason"

eyad is 20 years old and he's supporting his entire family. the strip is facing famine, a cruel blockade, and the seemingly inevitable resuming of the genocide

tagging for reach: @sawasawako @feluka @memingursa @strangeauthor @paper-mario-wiki @spacebeyonce @prisonhannibal @sayruq

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hooked rugs, c. 1860.

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When you at the function but they don’t have numbers

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"We wish you a merry christmas" uncensored lyrics

Oh bring us some fucking pudding

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How would you die in Willy Wonka’s chocolate factory?

this is a great question because it narrowed my soul! i would choke on regular chewing gum on the steps outside before even entering the factory. willy would make no attempt to perform the heimlich maneuver and would leave my corpse on the concrete

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Donate!!!!!! Boost!!!!!

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my best friend

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Chef, you seem to have introduced an element of yum-yum to this sauce?

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fitz &floyd had this pattern called fat is beautiful-variations back in 1979 and i have fallen in love with them 

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btw the palestinian children’s relief fund is currently running a fundraiser & is more than halfway to their goal of $10,000 !

here’s a link for anyone who is willing & able to donate, please share so it can reach more people, especially as the weather grows colder & these children are desperately lacking resources.

(at $5,314 / $10,000 as of December 1)

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so the thing about "read theory" as a mantra: in the social media sphere there is a consistent downplaying of what that kind of commitment actually entails, plus a consistent obfuscation of what exactly the commitment is necessary for.

let's say that you're interested in learning more about specifically "Marxist theory." This, I think, also raises a bunch of questions about what we mean by theory - works of political philosophy, texts on revolutionary and military strategy, political speeches, journalistic or sociological analysis, historiography - these varying things with very different discursive norms and standards of evidence or logic often get rolled into one singular object called "theory." but let's set that aside for now.

you want to learn this for maybe an assortment of reasons, here's a few (non-exhaustive) good ones:

Marxism has been a substantial historical force that has probably had a notable impact on the world around you in some way.

Learning about Marx/ism might offer some level of insight into your current social world that other things are unable to offer.

Many texts - Capital, The Wretched of the Earth, The Second Sex, The State and Revolution - are also world-historical forms of political literature, which is interesting.

Follow-up to 2 - maybe having some level of familiarity with these things will give you the ability to better articulate yourself and participate in social and political movements around you.

generally speaking the Social Media Marxist approach is to tell you to go read off a list of texts of whatever writers the author personally agrees with or whatever works she happens to have read. so you decide to start with the big guy Marx, who is at the top of the list. totally reasonable decision.

however, there are a few contextual questions that might reasonably come up when doing so.

first, it will be clear that Marx did not pop out of an intellectual vacuum; Lenin has a rather popular identification of the "three sources of Marxism" - post-Hegelian German philosophy, French socialism, and English political economy. from my perspective, these are more like three of his main objects of ire (and so in some sense are both influences and also breakages - but not strictly speaking a synthesis), but I digress. so, frequently, in order to grasp what Marx is talking about or responding to, you are going to need some level of familiarity with a lot of additional people: Smith, Ricardo, Malthus, Hegel, Bauer, Feuerbach, Hobbes, Spinoza, Rousseau, Mill, Sismondi. suddenly you are not just learning about the works of one guy, but his attitude towards all the people he relies on for support or aims his criticisms at. and each of those different intellectual relationships is going to be different. sometimes at different times!

second, and relatedly, Marx is not always the most charitable to the people he's criticizing, who were often rival socialists (so there were pretty notable political and personal stakes at work in proving them wrong or diminishing their influence over the movement). the introductory materials to the new translation of Capital also observe that Marx's approach to scholarship is, shall we say, haphazard; often he makes quotes or citations that are not actually representative of what he's citing. finally, many of the people he's criticizing have sort of been rendered obsolete historically *in no small part* due to the success of Marxism as a political orientation in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. so to determine whether Marx is being fair to the people he is basing his critique on, we will have to do some level of intellectual work to check. so now we're not just evaluating Marx's relationship to different thinkers but also the substantial content of each of those thinkers themselves.

third, Marx did not pop out of a social vacuum. all of these different writers didn't just crop up from nowhere but wrote within particular sociohistorical contexts, some of which were rather divorced from the European revolutionary wave, first worldwide financial crisis, and the shifting character of the United States in the wake of the Civil War and the formal abolition of slavery. and the radical liberals, republicans, and socialists Marx criticized all also had their own intellectual and social histories. so now we're getting a little far afield from the initial notion, which was just to read some guy, and getting into the realm of social and world history, and trying to understand the relationship between world history and the ideas produced within it.

fourth, you are a subject in the world, which is to say YOU did not pop out of a social or intellectual vacuum. you likely bring predispositions, assumptions, biases, and cognitive distortions to what you read; we all do. working through those and trying to note where they're happening - where they might be fine and where they might be problematic - will require a certain willingness to reflect, to write, to take notes, to analyze and self-scrutinize, and to be critical of both yourself as a reader and of the text you are reading. (a nested problem is that we have a truly staggering amount of material from Marx and Engels, and you might have to make certain determinations as to which material is important or worthwhile or more useful, and identify the standards by which you think that - all of which requires a certain reflection on your status as a political subject and agent).

okay, so consider all that. we started with "I wanna read this one guy," we end with "to really grasp the work of this one guy it's also important to know both preceding and contemporaneous world history, his intellectual influences, and the gaps or silences or errors in his work.” now consider that, if you really want to be able to speak on them with some level of confidence and intellectual honesty, you have to apply approximately the same level of rigor to every other writer on the Social Media Marxist approved list - Lenin, Fanon, Che, Kollontai, Cabral, Mao, Luxemburg, whoever.

Marx developed his work through an incredibly sustained engagement with enormous volumes of different material; we have entire notebooks of him poring over Max Stirner, or Spinoza, or the political economists, or the empirical observations of English factory inspectors. I'm not saying that you have to do that, or even that one strictly *has* to go down any or all of the first three rabbitholes I identified. Marx was in the somewhat unique position of sustaining himself through the support of Engels and his journalistic work, as a product of being in perpetual exile. that's not the kind of position that most of us are typically in.

the point is not "commit yourself to being a perfect monastic scholar in order to reach perfect truth" - such a thing is probably a fantasy, even if we wish otherwise. the point is that if you think "theory" is worth taking seriously, well, you have to actually take it seriously. if you don’t think it has stakes or utility, that’s fine; different people find different things useful. I think “theory” is not a set of dead letters by canonical authors but produced through social life. but if “reading theory” is part of a project of really asserting yourself as a political subject and agent, of claiming some intellectual autonomy and acquiring some understanding that you can put into practice in your life, then that’s demanding. it’s not impossible, but it does take real effort and a commitment to study and a certain level of resistance to being dogmatic. otherwise you are just letting yourself be rhetorically persuaded by whatever is in front of you.

as Marx says in the preface to Capital, Volume I, "I am of course assuming that my readers will want to learn something new, and so are ready to think for themselves."