#but y’all do

[emmynomrwrb]

twitter historically sucks but man this is a banger of a tweet

[hamletthedane]

I was meeting a client at a famous museum’s lounge for lunch (fancy, I know) and had an hour to kill afterwards so I joined the first random docent tour I could find. The woman who took us around was a great-grandmother from the Bronx “back when that was nothing to brag about” and she was doing a talk on alternative mediums within art.

What I thought that meant: telling us about unique sculpture materials and paint mixtures.

What that actually meant: an 84yo woman gingerly holding a beautifully beaded and embroidered dress (apparently from Ukraine and at least 200 years old) and, with tears in her eyes, showing how each individual thread was spun by hand and weaved into place on a cottage floor loom, with bright blue silk embroidery thread and hand-blown beads intricately piercing the work of other labor for days upon days, as the labor of a dozen talented people came together to make something so beautiful for a village girl’s wedding day.

What it also meant: in 1948, a young girl lived in a cramped tenement-like third floor apartment in Manhattan, with a father who had just joined them after not having been allowed to escape through Poland with his pregnant wife nine years earlier. She sits in her father’s lap and watches with wide, quiet eyes as her mother’s deft hands fly across fabric with bright blue silk thread (echoing hands from over a century years earlier). Thread that her mother had salvaged from white embroidery scraps at the tailor’s shop where she worked and spent the last few days carefully dying in the kitchen sink and drying on the roof.

The dress is in the traditional Hungarian fashion and is folded across her mother’s lap: her mother doesn’t had a pattern, but she doesn’t need one to make her daughter’s dress for the fifth grade dance. The dress would end up differing significantly from the pure white, petticoated first communion dresses worn by her daughter’s majority-Catholic classmates, but the young girl would love it all the more for its uniqueness and bright blue thread.

And now, that same young girl (and maybe also the villager from 19th century Ukraine) stands in front of us, trying not to clutch the old fabric too hard as her voice shakes with the emotion of all the love and humanity that is poured into the labor of art. The village girl and the girl in the Bronx were very different people: different centuries, different religions, different ages, and different continents. But the love in the stitches and beads on their dresses was the same. And she tells us that when we look at the labor of art, we don’t just see the work to create that piece - we see the labor of our own creations and the creations of others for us, and the value in something so seemingly frivolous.

But, maybe more importantly, she says that we only admire this piece in a museum because it happened to survive the love of the wearer and those who owned it afterwards, but there have been quite literally billions of small, quiet works of art in billions of small, quiet homes all over the world, for millennia. That your grandmother’s quilt is used as a picnic blanket just as Van Gogh’s works hung in his poor friends’ hallways. That your father’s hand-painted model plane sets are displayed in your parents’ livingroom as Grecian vases are displayed in museums. That your older sister’s engineering drawings in a steady, fine-lined hand are akin to Da Vinci’s scribbles of flying machines.

I don’t think there’s any dramatic conclusions to be drawn from these thoughts - they’ve been echoed by thousands of other people across the centuries. However, if you ever feel bad for spending all of your time sewing, knitting, drawing, building lego sets, or whatever else - especially if you feel like you have to somehow monetize or show off your work online to justify your labor - please know that there’s an 84yo museum docent in the Bronx who would cry simply at the thought of you spending so much effort to quietly create something that’s beautiful to you.

[so-many-ocs]

:(

[greelin]

being on here and condescending is crazy

[bluebeesknees]

They’re being obnoxious at work 💙

[marisatomay]

just saw someone call barbie movie an independent film. and. girls. what are we doing here. a $100mil movie, from warner brothers, about one of the most famous toys in the world, produced by the makers of that toy, is not an independent film. come on. you can be excited for it without treating it like some low budget arthouse underdog.

[xx-sketchy-xx]

LOOOK, LOOK WHAT MY MOTHER MADE FROM CAKE. AAAAAAAAAA-

[juniperhillpatient]

“apologist.” “critical.” y’all are doing too much. when my favorite characters do evil reprehensible shit I simply don’t fucking care cause it’s not real

[stuckinapril]

i know the quest of educating people never ends, but it does kind of bum me out that even in the year of 2023 we need to go out of our way to explain the simplest concepts to people. “you should give a fuck that a whole country is being genocided” seems like a relatively easy to understand sentiment, and yet you will still have people out there coming up w a thousand and one reasons for why it’s none of their concern. it blows my mind every fucking time. we really do need to teach people to care about other people and that is insane to me. like what basic human rights do you need to be spoon fed next??? should we also be pointing out that poor people are also people

[housecow]

almost need both hands to hold my boobs at this point..

[snake-with-scallions]

PSA (because I know we’re all so excited for Nico but this needs to be said): YOU CANNOT PUT NICO’S IDENTITY ONTO THE SMOL BOY WHOS GOING TO PLAY HIM.

IF THE ACTOR TURNS OUT NOT TO BE GAY AS THE YEARS GO BY WE ARE GOING TO LOVE AND RESPECT HIM REGARDLESS!!

IF ANYONE IN THIS FANDOM KIT CONNORS A FRIGGIN TEN YEAR OLD I WILL FIND YOU AND RIP OUT YOUR SPINE!!!!

EVERYONE’S EXCITED FOR OUR GAY DISNEY PRINCE BUT PLEASE REMEMBER THAT THE ACTOR ISN’T NICO, AND WILL HAVE HIS OWN IDENTITY THAT HE NEEDS TO FIND OUT FOR HIMSELF AND NOT SHOVED ON HIM BY A BUNCH OF RANDOM FANS THAT DON’T EVEN KNOW HIM!!!

Please I know everyone is excited but I am so scared for this kid

[badolmen]

They don’t even attempt to assassinate US politicians anymore. You notice that? Not since the anthrax scare back for… who was it, Barack? And even that… pathetic. This new generation has no respect for an honest hitman. I’m not sure this new generation has any honest hitman - you see that shit with Boeing? Sloppy, fucking disgraceful - you kill the whistleblowers before they get halfway to a lawsuit. What kind of fucking amateur is doing faked suicides the night before testimony? Goddamn greenhorns. Back in my day someone tried to shoot Ronald Reagan in broad daylight. There used to be bomb threats to Congress. I took out a few union leaders in the utilities sector myself. Today’s generation? Won’t even threaten to throw a punch - not even over on that - what’s it now, ‘X’? They got no guts. None! And they don’t even have poor impulse control to boot! Too much of that - that panopticon anxiety bullshit. “Oh what if I get a called out post???” People used to send the president letters full of bioweapons. In the mail! Today’s generation? Not a chance. All because of woke.

[taktitty]

Shhhhh the blorbos are sleepy

[lavenderhazess]

In vet school learning about animal production and y’all what the hell are you doing in the USA 😅 they teach us (Australians) things like DONT do this this is very bad and then the next slide is ‘the Americans do it tho’

Also you call adrenaline ‘epinephrine’ why

[rsdradio]

guilt :(

[captainzigo]