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🦽update:

Wheelchair man sent the information so I can order my chair -- that's good!

Wheelchair man did not send ALL the information I need to order my chair -- that's bad!

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United Healthcare getting sued by its investors, because it didn't warn them that the CEO getting murdered (by the tendrils of their unmitigated greed) was going to lead to them approving more claims (for covered services that they had no right to deny) is a cartoonish example of exactly why their CEO got murdered.

Their argument is essentially "You promised us a specific profit margin that is not possible to achieve under this increased public scrutiny of your unethical practices. We only agreed to invest because of those unethical practices. So we demand compensation because you didn't warn us that you'd be behaving more ethically"

And idk. Satire isn't just dead. We've pissed on its corpse and now it's dissolving in lye.

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Hey guys it's summer solstice today so the days are only going to get shorter from now on, enjoy the sun while it last!

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˙spɹɐʇsɐq ʇᴉ ʇɐ dǝǝʞ ¿ʎǝ 'ɹǝƃuol ʇǝƃ ɐuuoƃ ʎllɐuᴉɟ ǝɹɐ sʎɐp oS ˙ʇunɔ ǝɥʇ 'ǝɔᴉʇslos ɹǝʇuᴉʍ s,ʇᴉ 'sǝʇɐɯ ʎO

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Stories should have in-universe clichés and stereotypes. A teenage dragon rider who gets a dragon who will be his steed for life and is a solid inky black and immediately names her Midnight. He then immediately encounters someone who sees his steed who goes "lmao please don't tell me you're one of those young riders who gets a dark-colour dragon and immediately names it Darkness or Midnight or something, and starts acting like being dark and broody has been their whole thing their whole life."

And he immediately scrambles back like "oh no of course not that's cringe, her name is - uh - Daisy."

Meanwhile the Morbid Broody Dark Gothy One is bonded with a bright dandelion yellow dragon, naming her steed Sulfur and then revamps her whole aesthetic into a black-and-yellow Toxins, Poisons And Venoms -theme.

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I’m at my dog sitting job in a pretty old countryside farm and the lady who does the cleaning up here told me this morning that there are old tunnels (now closed up) running from the house to the church (1km) and I did not want to know that

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Speef is real to me. I'm sorry for that.

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Zohran Mamdani has almost certainly won New York City's mayoral primary. Next week's Ranked Vote tabulation will make the results clear, but Lander's and Adrienne's votes will overwhelmingly go to Mamdani, who will face Sliwa and incumbent Eric Adams in the general election. It's unclear if Cuomo will also mount an independent run.

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This is who is leading the NYC mayoral democratic primary rn

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picturing a roman empire equivalent of reactionaries who say "if you don't like it here then move somewhere else"

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Me to my friends when they try to give me pep talks

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It’s so fucked up how tiktok culture has made clout-poisoned people turn the public into content, every day I see people minding their business have their entire faces put online for thousands of likes, a couple kissing on the train, a lady dancing across a cross walk, a guy nodding his head to the music at a club, a lady buying a banana at the store, ring camera footage of the neighbors kids being stupid. Just let people live jfc

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Little soft wind down art for the evening <3

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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.

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Killie + Textposts, Part 2

+ Bonus O Holy Thunder

+ Bonus Charlie

Killie + textposts Part 1

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@so-i-did-this-thing