magellanicpenguin

[magellanicpenguin]

solidarity with california.

[magellanicpenguin]

"Following the tragic drownings of 15 schoolchildren in his home town, an Indian man has started a swimming club that has seen more than 10,000 learn how to handle themselves in the water.

He’s narrowed down the introductory course, which focuses entirely on swimming for safety rather than for sport, to just 16 lessons that begins by removing the fear of the water and the river’s current.

It’s called the Valasseril River Swimming Club, and it now boasts thousands of members among the communities living along the Periyar river in the southwestern Indian state of Kerala.

It was created by Saji Valasseril, a humble furniture shop owner who, according to the Better India, was overwhelmed with grief following the overturning of a boat carrying a school class and its teacher in 2009. He started by teaching his children to swim, then his friend, then his friend’s children, then some from the neighborhood.

Soon the news spread that free swimming classes were available and the trickle of interest turned into a torrent.

“Most drowning cases reported here are of people boating close to the banks and not in the middle of the river,” says Saji. “You only need 16 days to learn how to remove your fear of water and save yourself from drowning.”

[Note: In India, drowning kills an estimated 38,000 people each year. Source]

“All kinds of people come together, young and old, men and women, from diverse professions, backgrounds and belief systems. We don’t see any of those differences. No one is looked down or looked up, there’s only teaching.”

In the water of the Periyar, swimming lanes are formed by strings of floaties or tires which are separated based on difficulty level. Deeper lanes with a stronger current are playfully called the “doctorate lanes” while those under which the student can place their feet on the riverbed are called “Kindergarten.”

All children have to be accompanied by a guardian who will be able to reach them from the riverbank in case something should happen. This, the Better India reports, has led to many of the guardians becoming club members themselves. Older folks, disabled, and the neurologically disordered have all learned to swim at the Valasseril club, which even attracts athletes.

Recently, one of its teenage students set a record in the Asian Book of Records for the longest open-sea swim by a minor. Another is preparing to swim the English Channel.

Those who ‘graduate’ not uncommonly pull on a branded aquatic shirt as a volunteer teacher or lifeguard, reflecting how at 5:30 a.m. before the heat of the day sets in, and with the chorus emanating from the Thattekkad Bird Sanctuary nearby, there’s no place most would rather be."

-via Good News Network, June 5, 2025

[magellanicpenguin]

fatima aamer bilal, excerpt from moony moonless sky’s ‘i am an observer, but not by choice.’

[text id: my fist has always been clenched around the handle of an invisible suitcase. / i am always ready to leave. / there is not a single room in this world where i belong.]

[magellanicpenguin]

today I used the phrase "breasting boobily" in casual real life conversation and everyone was shocked asking how I came up with that and I had to explain it. ive been at the devil's sacrament so long that I forgot he wasn't god

[magellanicpenguin]

I do actually care marginally about the guy in that reddit screenshot who voted for Trump and is now worried that he might lose his medicaid funding because I did not fucking stutter when I said healthcare is a human right but the people losing their internships and job offers to the hiring freeze are straight up hilarious.

[magellanicpenguin]

every single server with a “vent channel” is awkward, creepy and toxic so i came up with the idea of a “medical status” channel which i didn’t even have to write rules for everyone just read my mind and is perfectly using it as intended and hopefully it speaks for itself

[magellanicpenguin]

reblogging so i, too, will be able to cash my tax refund

executive dysfunction is literally like. ive had a random dollar on my floor for two weeks and i dont know when ill fit it in my schedule to pick it up. people dont realize this

[magellanicpenguin]

huge shout out to this little kid for writing my favorite poem

[magellanicpenguin]

[magellanicpenguin]

i read this in cartman's voice

im sorry but if youre drawing a nerd fetish character like a girl with big glasses and novelty t shirts and everything and youre NOT making her fag youre doing something terribly wrong

[magellanicpenguin]

i saved a lot of my old stuff, most of it on homework assignments and random bits of paper. Starting from fifth grade to I think freshman year in high school, I would empty all my folders and binders for the first time since I emptied them the year before and cut out all the drawings I liked. I then proceeded to tape them with cellophane tape, blue painters tape, and even duct tape if driven to it, collage style on the walls of my bedroom. I had all these odd-shaped cut outs, and I'd spend an entire afternoon figuring out how it fit in my expanding web of ideas and imagination. And a web it was, spreading out from the corner my bed was tucked into to the edges of the window and the blunt barrier of my bookcase. Gaps left from years past would be filled, sometimes with tiny doodles less than a square inch. Many of these drawings I vividly remembered making; the delicate angle I held the mechanical pencil to make a soft blur, the joy of the fairytale-like (dollar-bill-like?) crosshatched shadow, the sorrows of an OC inexplicably invented just to be a sad orphan baby, the odd non-joint of a shoulder as I tried full-body poses for the first time, the cartoonish yaoi-ness of an angel's jaw-to-shoulder-to-arm distance. I would look at my wall and remember immediately the stories I invented for them, most of them outlandish and whimsical and very much anime inspired.

This was often dubbed my "serial killer wall" by family members. I never really understood why. It was just like having a cork board with pictures of your friends and family. I was proud of it, slapdash and unserious, well suited to my creative style. I thought it was a monument to my art, a testament to my diligence (I drew in every class, on every handout, on every textbook, on every homework assignment. Not even planners were safe), and proof of my excellent spatial reasoning skills (in the end, every single drawing was taped to at least three other drawings, they were so closely fitted together). But they kept calling it that, and it was true none of my siblings, though all of us drew, did what I did. I didn't like having people in there, either, because it was always the first thing, maybe the only thing, people looked at. In hindsight, it's not surprisingly I didn't enjoy people having a front-row seat to the inside of my brain, but I figured I was ashamed of it...

I took it all down in high school. I cut all my hair off, got trendy plastic frames, started brushing my teeth... These weren't related, by the way, but these were all external changes I was making at the same time for a menagerie of frolicking purposes. Basically, I was trying to change myself, and it didn't really work (do brush your teeth though! that was a game changer).

I regret it quite a bit. See, the real reason I did the whole thing was to keep a sort of anthropological record of myself. As the web grew larger and older, each layer became more interesting not because they were good illustrations, but because they had different styles, different techniques, different approaches, different stories trapped within the amber of who I was at that moment. I was collecting specimens, rather than a portfolio.

You are merely the latest epoch in the fossil record, worthy of study and enough to fill a museum exhibit. You are not cringe. You're a fucking dinosaur.

Anyway, here's some old stuff that I managed find, that I don't plan on parting with, between the years 2013 and 2019 (middle and high school) in no particular order.

"what's the worst thing you can do as an artist" is not "shade with black" or "not use references" or whatever the worst thing you can do as an artist is hate yourself. and that includes the person you used to be

[magellanicpenguin]

i feel like counter-trolling is an essential skill that kids online aren’t learning and it’s kinda worrying

like back in my day, the day of online forums, learning how to trick someone in to getting themselves banned was an essential skill. if you could tell someone was a chud, you would ask them short, leading questions and watch them get frustrated and post longer and longer rants until they said something that would catch a mod’s attention and get them banned and/or at least publicly humiliated. 

and guess what? that’s the exact same tactics the alt-right use now. these people are exclusively acting in bad faith. every interaction these people post online is done with the intention of getting someone to respond to them so they can screenshot the massive paragraphs of text and laugh

so, what’s the solution?

dare ‘em to post dick pics.

don’t acknowledge the content of the stuff they post. if you see someone trying to engage you in bad faith just dare them to post pictures of their penis until they either get frustrated and leave or get frustrated and do it. either way they lose. 

this is the tactic used by the fans of a podcast (that i haven’t listened to) called the Chapo Trap House, and 4chan’s /pol/ users fucking HATE them. they hate Chapo Trap House and think they’re crazy because Chapo Trap House fans refuse to engage in meaningful debate and repeatedly demand dick pics. they get frustrated and leave. it works. 

[magellanicpenguin]

this is literally the funniest plot twist in any form of media ever

[magellanicpenguin]

So today I watched this interview with the Star Trek: The Next Generation cast and they demonstrate the phenomenon "space ship acting"

and they all go

and it just cracks me up, ESPECIALLY Sir Patrick Stewart

[magellanicpenguin]

I literally heard myself wheeze at one point reading these. 😂

[magellanicpenguin]

i had a dream that time travel was invented and too many people choose to travel back in time to save the titanic from sinking (the question of whether unsinking of the titanic deserved so much attention in the face of human history was the subject of both heavy academic and online discourse), which caused a rift in the space-time-continuum that led to the titanic showing up indiscriminately all over the world’s oceans and sea in various states of sinking.

this caused a lot of issues both in terms of fixing said space-time-continuum and in terms of nautical navigation, and after a long and heavy battle in the international maritime organization it was decided that the bureaucratic burden of dealing with this was to be upon Ireland, much to their dismay. the Irish Government then released an app for all sailors and seafarers so they could report titanic sightings during their journeys, even though they heavily dissuaded you from reporting them given the paperwork it caused.

anyway i woke up with a clear image of the app in my head and needed to recreate it for all of you: