#walk with my grandparents

[rat-hand]

[ijustthinkhesneat]

I’m an Alfred/Martha/Thomas truther. Like Alfred is a baddie in his 80s you all know he must have been a slice back in the day. And it is canon Martha and Thomas were smoke shows.

Like let hot people get it. Let hot men kiss while their wife turns mobsters kneecaps into flour with a baseball bat.

[canisalbus]

about the bears! i can relate, i was born and spent my childhood in a small town in Siberia, forests are pretty close to us, too. and bears go into the town for food sometimes, esp in spring and autumn, they tend to scavenger on trash cans. i even remember how when i was in middle school a rumour went around how a bear is in a park nearby my school, and well, we all went to see the bear. fortunately there was no bear for us to see and we got in a big trouble for that xDD my parents even got a note "she went to a park to see a bear without permission, didn't have her coat on!!" and yes, reoccurring bear-chase dreams are a thing for me, too, lol

also i adore your art and Vasco especially, sunny, lovely boy. Thank you so much for sharing your wonderful work with us : )

"Went to a park to see a bear without a permission! Didn't have her coat on!"

[pastatrolatrash]

at this instance I bear with this man by mere habit, and it is mutual I can say

[rupeenotruby]

Deer are just like that.

[drakonovisny]

i only did it twice in my life: once as a kid about 6 years of age and once while drinking on meds i was not supposed to drink on. curious to hear y'all stories 👀

[vpofcookies]

so, I got a new ring today

[calkale]

i loooove my parents for moving me to BC i love it here i love breathing in smoke all summer i love feeling like i could lose literally everything in 5 minutes 😁

[norsesuggestions]

It is like. In 1930s sweden. Other children who was 12 and travelled by themselves to places using public traffic

Every. Single. Working. Class. Kid

Also actually lol. (Almost) Every single swedish 12 year old today

But for why i said that Jan Myrdal sounds spoilt. Your average swedish working class kid in the swedish 1930s

Quit school when they were 13. And then started to work. Like not to be all "back in the day" but my born in the 1930s maternal grandpa worked in a factory when he was 13. And! It is not even a story of some sort extreme poverty that he did so!

He was a normal working class kid, who had quickly found a job at the printing press when he was done with his mandatory 6 years of folkskola. He, and all his classmates who parents could not afford/or did not have good enough grades for further studies after folkskola

Well they... erm graduated for lack of better term, at 13/14 years old. Soooo

Meanwhile Jan Myrdal be like:

"The worst day of my childhood was when i needed to use the bus in new york that one time. Awful!"

Like lol...

[heymrstargazer]

"why don't cats like me?" "how do i make cats love me?" "cats never pick me" just be allergic. literally that's all you have to do.

[yohankang]

me: omg i can't wait to be home again 🥰

me at home:

[ryuseitai]

i really really love dogs a lot in theory but in practice im scared of them. generally

[shrikeseams]

Thinking about elves and babies again (thanks @tolkien-feels ) and thinking about how different Finwion child-rearing would have been in Beleriand vs Aman.

I generally think of elves as being Very Into babies and children and parenting, in a less... complicated way than humans, because it accounts for a much smaller portion of their adult lives. Like, Nerdanel can have seven kids without forfeiting her career, because she’ll have millennia to do things once her kids are adults. In any elvish culture where everyone is pretty materially secure, extended parental leave makes sense if only as a byproduct of immortality. Even a childhood that lasts twice or four times as long as a human’s is going to be an infinitesimally small part of an elf’s expected lifespan. If a human takes 18 years to raise a child, and lives until 85, that’s about 20% of their entire life. If an elf takes 100 years to raise a child and is killed at 3000 years old, that’s only about 3% of their total life.

Now add to this the way that Finwe and his descendants seem to be particularly baby-mad. There are just a lot of kids/cousins running around, and relatedly a lot of adults to help out. There’s a significant support network there to help with parenting advice, and babysitting, and peers to set up playdates etc. That first generation of Finwion cousins have a built-in peer network, and an assortment of trusted adults, all clustered in Tirion and Alqualonde.

And then that social landscape is so completely different in Beleriand. For one thing there are so many only children. Idril*, Celebrimbor*, Maeglin, depending on your choice of parentage Finduilas and Gil-Galad as well. And their parents are all living in different fortresses/cities on a war-torn landmass. There’s no way to casually ask a cousin or sibling or aunt/uncle or grandparent to babysit. There are no spontaneous playdates. Aredhel has no option to ask her brothers or father for parenting advice. Orodreth can’t just pass a colicky baby to Finrod so he can get a nap.

And the thing is, the cousins *wanted* space. They wanted to not be jostling shoulders with each other, they didn’t want relatives peering over their shoulders offering unsolicited advice. And for the most part, I suspect that the space was good and healthy for everyone! But even setting aside the constant risk of attack, parenting in Beleriand would have been so much harder.

[phenakistoskope]

*watching the trailer for the archies (2023)* the fuck kind of 60s did these kids live through, we had a food shortage and massive upheavals in the farming sector.

[kaoharu]

good morning friends in my phone 👍

[royalberryriku]

The more I learn about the history of the middle east in general, the more I realise that the "Israel-Palestine conflict" is actually just a group killing their own fellow shared ethnic group who are "too brown".

Hebrews and Arabs both originate from Phoenicians, aka "Abraham's descendents" according to their respective oral stories and passed on histories. They are from the same place and people. However, there is a narrative that twists this and claims that Arabs were "always an outside force that invaded", when the various groups within that ethnicity always had their share of cooperation and conflict in various stages of history. Just like, say, the various groups in France. They were of the same group and no particular ethnicity had no more of a "claim" to the land than the other, they just had their beef and eventually integrated.

So when I see "but the Arabs are colonisers" I can't help but ask; what is a colonisers to you? Seriously. If colonisation means "any conflict in the past between a shared group from the same place" every single group would be colonisers. There's no such thing as "an innocent conflict" where atrocities weren't committed by either side. So please get that out of your head if you want to say "but the Arabs did X, Y, Z to the Hebrews so it's colonisation and they don't belong in A, B or C areas". That's just not how colonisation works. It's like calling TERF or cis a slur when they're not. Conflict between the same people from the same area is, yeah, a conflict hit not colonisation. However, a people who are from a completely different place who want to erase an ethnic group and take over their culture, erase their history and get rid of their physical features? Yeah, that's what colonisation is. It's genocide with the aim to erase a specific group or culture and take it and the land over. For example, the British in the Middle East.

The problem with calling Arabs "colonisers" is not only is it completely historically wrong, they're from the same place and have the same origins as the Hebrews, but they (like Palestinian Jews) have been their since before the British came. Compared to European Jews who came later on after having lived in Europe (and became European as that is genuinely a part of their culture and ethnicity as well and shouldn't be erased or forgotten, that's also cultural erasure of Germanic, Polish, etc traditions passed on) and, sure, do have origins there *as well* but it needs to be understood that they, specifically Zionists, are a part of the British colonial project aimed at killing *both* Arabs and Jews. The point isn't to help Jews against a colonisers from the first few centuries (sorry to tell you everyone, but no, the Ottoman Empire, Baylon and the Pharaohs literally do not exist anymore, like how Italy isn't the Roman Empire by default because that's where Rome is), but a group of people who've just been living there for the past few centuries and generations who just want to live. The problem is, they haven't been allowed that and propaganda keeps being pushed that completely jumps around historical facts like, for example, Jews (ethnically speaking) were not always Jews but the Ancient Hebrews, aka, Phoenicians, aka where Arabs came from ethically. They are the same people, just who moved to different areas and developed different cultures and languages. Sort of like, you know, every other nation with specific dialects for specific regions and different cultures and folk stories depending on where you go.

The point is, so much of Jewish history is actively being erased to "protect the Jews" by...commuting cultural genocide of the Jews and Arabs. It ignores the actual impact of Nazism within Israel's formation and history, how much it influenced policy, how Jews who were "too visibly Phoenicians" aka appeared too Jewish or arabic or middle eastern in appearance were deemed as "weaker" and "lesser" for my surviving the holocaust and used as a reason to deny rights to both Jews and Arabs who were too visibly Semitic. It ignores how antisemetic Israel is towards Jewishness and how utterly antisemetic Islamophobia is because they are literally from the same origin and, yes, hatred and fear of one does carry into hatred and fear of the other. So much of the propaganda and denialism of history happening right now is a direct response to dear and hatred of "big noses", "brown skin" and people deemed as too middle eastern because they, just like in World War II, World War I and beforehand, antisemetism is the backbone of British imperialism and conquest of the middle east (yes, this also means a targeting of Arabs and Jews as people who look a specific way). And yes I'm annoyed and yes this is a ramble that's probably not very coherent, but damn I'm so sick and tired of misinformation and the twisting of everything to suit this narrative of "Arabs versus Jews" as if they aren't both just Semites who are being collectively oppressed, erased and reinvented by the west to suit western ends.