tweedlebean

[tweedlebean]

Paramount keeps trying to pull from the older Star Trek series and what people liked about them to get people to watch the newer shows but the real thing that sets the older series apart from the newer ones is the number of episodes per season. You want dedicated viewers? Go back to 26-episode seasons. Or at least more than 10.

[tweedlebean]

The real reason why you need to be social is the best chinese place within 10 miles is an unknown hole in the wall with a yearly marketing budget of $15 dollars and you will never, ever find it unless someone tells you about it.

[tweedlebean]

[tweedlebean]

[tweedlebean]

Happy pride month to my dad. When I came out as bi to him, this man googled what it ment, look at me and said "ohh. Yeah. You get that from me. You'd have far more siblings of I only shaged women." And went right back to his work emails.

[tweedlebean]

You need to care about other people and their right to self-determine more than you care about systems of classification

[tweedlebean]

Hooray! Yay! Dykes!

[tweedlebean]

New video! Shikata Ga Nai: The Mars Trilogy by Kim Stanley Robinson

This one is really special to me ✨ I love space and I love communism and I love utopianism, and the Mars trilogy has been a huge inspiration to me ever since I first read it. It's a sociological epic telling the story of human habitation of Mars through a series of successive revolutions over 200 years as humanity strives towards a future where nobody is hungry or homeless

The books have never been adapted to screen, which presented a big challenge to me as a video essayist, so I included a lot of my own astrophotography to show everyone why I love space 🌌 🔭

I also spent hundreds of hours in Kerbal Space Program recreating iconic sci fi set pieces from the series ✨👽

It's a really pretty video about a story that matters a lot to me, and I think there's so much in the trilogy to enjoy that I didn't get around to that you really don't need have read the books before watching 🥰 but I hope you'll want to read them after.

This essay is about utopianism, which I think is utterly vital. We need to formulate and share our postcapitalist desire. We must dream.

"The deepest desires of our hearts and minds and those of others are a necessary form of knowledge and of truth" - Ruth Levitas, Utopia as Method

✨🪐Incredible thumbnail art by @lafleurailee 🪐✨

[tweedlebean]

As a society we have benefited so much from successful public health measures that we now have the privilege of declaring that we must not need them anymore

Bitch before enriched flour, neural tube defects like spina bifida were far more common. Even now, spina bifida clinicians and researchers are begging to have salt and maize fortified to reach groups that don’t use as much flour. Before iodized salt, the United States had a fucking GOITER BELT. Eleven years after the introduction of fluoridated water, a city in Michigan found the rate of dental caries among school children dropped a staggering 60%— in an era where tooth decay regularly fucking killed people

I’m literally not even going to start on vaccines, which are among the most successful and robustly studied public health measures in world history

You might say “oh well today we all have access to vitamins and toothpastes and dentists so we don’t need those things in our food supplies” and boy do white people on social media loooove to fucking say that. But here’s the thing: no, people don’t all have easy access to those things. That’s privilege talking yet again

[tweedlebean]

This is one of those true, declassified government things that always sounds made up but one of the things Henry Kissinger did with his career was use the CIA to help turn small, prosperous socialist nations into fascist dictatorships just to keep those nations powerless and possibly to keep socialist systems *looking* doomed and futile to the American public, like maybe just to scare Americans out of demanding better infrastructure or universal income. Yes it sounds like an insane conspiracy theory a maniac would invent. It also happened multiple times and several generations of people around the world are still living in misery because of it.

[tweedlebean]

ANHEDONIA REMEDIES!

GET YOUR ANHEDONIA REMEDIES HERE!

if you are lost in the rut, i am begging you to read this essay by Sasha Chapin suggesting what, essentially, my take, are potential jump-starts back into living life in real time. like actually experiencing experiences

do it now! don’t lose months, years, or decades! there is a life beyond doomscrolling, and it’s finite (sorry. sorry. i know okay)

[tweedlebean]

The closest experience I've ever had to discovering "the vitamin" was buying a 100% wool outfit and wearing it in the winter.

Not only was I not freezing anymore, I was not sweating and overheating either. The horrible sensory nightmare of winter clothes disappeared.

In particular, I bought a pair of wool pants. They were a thrifted pair of fancy dress pants like you would wear at an important office job, and they were easily the most comfortable pair of winter-appropriate pants i'd ever worn. I wore them Every Single Day.

From that point on I realized a lot of my clothes were making me feel bad, and the common thread was polyester. Especially polyester blends.

It's a trap because the polyester clothes are the ones that always feel sooooo silky soft when they are in the store, whereas cotton, linen and wool can feel comparatively rough and scratchy. But when actually wearing them for hours throughout the day, it's the natural fibers that feel more comfortable.

Maybe the secret to sensory comfort is not about the presence of softness, but the absence of overloading sensations. Or maybe the sensory stress and agony is not triggered by texture of the fabric, but by how it breathes and regulates temperature.

Then there's the problem of clothing life span: polyester blends, no matter how soft they seem at first, become rough and scratchy and covered in hard, itchy pills after wearing them 10 or 20 times, whether or not they have been tumble-dried or even washed at all. (I tested it!) Linen and cotton become softer and more comfy the more you wear them, polyester but ESPECIALLY polyester blends become a constant stressor. Polyester blend t-shirts I used to love for their softness now feel bristly and irritating.

So now I'm trying to change my wardrobe to as many natural fibers as possible, and the more natural fiber clothes i have the more I realize that the plastic fibers stress me out. It's so easy to overheat or freeze in them and they're always degrading and becoming less comfortable and it sucks.

[tweedlebean]

👏🏼👏🏼👏🏼👏🏼👏🏼

[tweedlebean]

I am re-reading The Left Hand of Darkness and unfortunately, my brain is too rotten for this, because all I can think about is an alternate timeline where the girlies got absolutely sauced on this book and instead of inventing the Omegaverse, people just wrote Kemmering AUs instead.

to be clear, Ursula K. LeGuin would hate this

[tweedlebean]

the helpful & informative nilered that concocts a night-time beverage VS the wretched & dastardly nileblue that brews the dark and secret KILLS YOU potion

[tweedlebean]

Me: Man, I can't believe I didn't see it was pride day! I have some stuff I could have worn.

Coworker: Oh? Like what?

Me: Well I have a necklace that's-- *realizing I shouldn't verbally out myself while standing near like six other coworkers who I don't know well* ... Some colors. And a shirt that's. Some different colors.

[tweedlebean]

One of the iwan ceilings of Fatima Masumeh Shrine in atabki sahn, Qom, Iran