crochetingwhale

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I love seeing a meme and being like oh, tumblrs going to love this one

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Corvid Christmas tree. Simple, but beautiful.

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the contrabass saxophone is such an absurd instrument

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Tell me a soft memory

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Hello everyone,

I am Sahar, a Palestinian from Gaza.

After I lived a beautiful life and my rosy dreams that I had always dreamed of and waited for came true, by marrying my life partner and moving to our house, which we continued to work day and night until we built it stone by stone, where we only stayed for a few days until we found ourselves on the side of the road, fleeing in order to save ourselves. And our family.

Whoever knows us knows that we are chaste and do not ask for help from anyone throughout our lives. Each of us had his work and his financial income, and these are our pictures while we were at the head of our work, my husband and I.

Now something has happened that we did not wish for, and these dire circumstances have forced us to seek help in order to provide the necessities of life after we spent all the money we saved trying to secure food and shelter. We are now homeless after our house was completely destroyed by the Israeli occupation.

These are the pictures of our building after If it was destroyed in the war.

This is where my husband, his family and I currently live, with no means of survival.💔

Every penny counts. Your support will make a big difference in saving lives. I believe in the free world and the humane hearts there.

Please donate and share this fundraising campaign. You will save live.

My campaign has been verified by:

@gazavetters my number verified on this list (#205) here.

@a-shade-of-blue here.

@bilal-salah0 here.

@90-ghost here.

@postanagramgenerator here.

@tpwrtrmnky here.

@prisonhannibal here.

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Honestly, fr fr, if anyone has any actual evidence of even Some palestinian fundraisers being scams/bots/etc I would love to hear it ‼ being skeptical of people asking for your money online is healthy! But I have actually personally spoken to some of these people (and you could, too, if you like. Responded to their messages) and all I've heard people saying to discredit them are things to the tune of, like. "If they're poor how do they have phones" (stop.) "gofundme doesn't work in gaza" (almost a valid point, I'd have to check? But most gfm descriptions, if you read them, explain that they're organized by someone in another country who is helping the people in need) or just straight up denying that anything bad is happening to them in the first place. So I'm inclined to believe that in the 21st century we're connected enough to be able to do this

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Frankenstein is like. Everybody focuses on the giant zombie strangling people to death but somehow what's more disturbing, the real source of horror and unease, is like. 19th century family structures

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Never gonna forget showing my roommate MASH after explaining it as a Korean War drama/comedy, then watching it in silence till the end where she turns to me and says that wasn’t a K-drama

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Laptops are always so much more Fucked than phones in my experience. A laptop is like a beautiful horse that wants nothing more than to break all of its legs. A decently solid android phone will act normal

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Everyone asks for facts, no one asks how is Facts.

How are you?

Worthless, useless, aware only of my failures and inability to do even the slightest good for anyone I know, I am a net loss to humankind.

On the plus side I got a job as a motivational speaker and life coach.

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Had a conversation with a housemate earlier and I want to reiterate this on the internet. Speaking as a disabled person, who’s been Officially Disabled on paper for more than a decade: I literally do not give two shits if those twits who are taking horse dewormer - the ones seriously damaging their health longterm, what with the risk of blindness and organ damage and all - end up going on disability or receiving public assistance. They should still receive disability benefits if they qualify for them. “It taxes an already stressed system-” Yeah, you know why it’s stressed? Because rich people don’t pay their taxes. We could fund these programs a dozen times over if we actually made it a priority, as a society, to take care of people. And maybe, I don’t know, bought fewer tanks. People still deserve to eat and have housing. We don’t let people starve in the streets because they made bad choices. (Besides, what about those kids whose parents are COVID deniers, or feeding them vetrinary drugs? Do they “deserve” to suffer their whole lives because their parents are assholes?) Once we open that door to “Oh it’s their own fault they’re disabled, so why should society pay for it?” it VERY QUICKLY becomes “Well, it’s your fault for being fat*. Or “You must not have been eating right, so you deserve it.”  Or “It’s your fault for not trying yoga”. Or “This treatment didn’t work for you, so you must have been doing it wrong”.

*This isn’t an academic exercise. The city I live in has a policy that if your disability is due to alcoholism, drug abuse, or “obesity”, you can’t qualify for a reduced fare transit pass, or paratransit services. Do you know how easy it is to spin something into not qualifying for benefits? “Well they’re fat, so the pain must be their own fault.” even if it’s a matter of “Bad knees run in my family, and being in pain all the time makes it really difficult to exercise”. Who gives a shit why it happened? They’re suffering, and access to better transportation would make them suffer less. Actually, if someone’s an alcoholic or addict, I probably want them to have MORE access to public transit? Drunk driving is bad. We don’t give people more reasons to deny people help. I literally do not give even a single, solitary fuck if a million people who “brought it on themselves” get help. Any focus on “BUT THE UNDESERVING-” is an attempt to con you into policing poor people and disabled people more.

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wow you got to the red stop light faster and more dangerously than anyone else. should we throw a party?? should we call nascar

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Please read this man’s description of his dachshund and its most annoying habit

“I have a ridiculous dog named Walnut. He is as domesticated as a beast can be: a purebred longhaired miniature dachshund with fur so thick it feels rich and creamy, like pudding. His tail is a huge spreading golden fan, a clutch of sunbeams. He looks less like a dog than like a tropical fish. People see him and gasp. Sometimes I tell Walnut right out loud that he is my precious little teddy bear pudding cup sweet boy snuggle-stinker.

In my daily life, Walnut is omnipresent. He shadows me all over the house. When I sit, he gallops up into my lap. When I go to bed, he stretches out his long warm body against my body or he tucks himself under my chin like a soft violin. Walnut is so relentlessly present that sometimes, paradoxically, he disappears. If I am stressed or tired, I can go a whole day without noticing him. I will pet him idly; I will yell at him absent-mindedly for barking at the mailman; I will nuzzle him with my foot. But I will not really see him. He will ask for my attention, but I will have no attention to give. Humans are notorious for this: for our ability to become blind to our surroundings — even a fluffy little jewel of a mammal like Walnut.

…

When I come home from a trip, Walnut gets very excited. He prances and hops and barks and sniffs me at the door. And the consciousnesses of all the wild creatures I’ve seen — the puffins, rhinos, manatees, ferrets, the weird hairy wet horses — come to life for me inside of my domestic dog. He is, suddenly, one of these unfamiliar animals. I can pet him with my full attention, with a full union of our two attentions. He is new to me and I am new to him. We are new again together.

Even when he is horrible. The most annoying thing Walnut does, even worse than barking at the mailman, is the ritual of his “evening drink.” Every night, when I am settled in bed, when I am on the brink of sleep, Walnut will suddenly get very thirsty. If I go to bed at 10:30, Walnut will get thirsty at 11. If I go to bed at midnight, he’ll wake me up at 1. I’ve found that the only way I cannot be mad about this is to treat this ritual as its own special kind of voyage — to try to experience it as if for the first time. If I am open to it, my upstairs hallway contains an astonishing amount of life.

The evening drink goes something like this: First, Walnut will stand on the edge of the bed, in a muscular, stout little stance, and he will wave his big ridiculous fan tail in my face, creating enough of a breeze that I can’t ignore it. I will roll over and try to go back to sleep, but he won’t let me: He’ll stamp his hairy front paws and wag harder, then add expressive noises from his snout — half-whine, half-breath, hardly audible except to me. And so I give up. I sit up and pivot and plant my feet on the floor — I am hardly even awake yet — and I make a little basket of my arms, like a running back preparing to take a handoff, and Walnut pops his body right into that pocket, entrusting the long length of his vulnerable spine (a hazard of the dachshund breed) to the stretch of my right arm, and then he hangs his furry front legs over my left. From this point on we function as a unit, a fusion of man and dog. As I lift my weight from the bed Walnut does a little hop, just to help me with gravity, and we set off down the narrow hall. We are Odysseus on the wine-dark sea. (Walnut is Odysseus; I am the ship.)

All of evolution, all of the births and deaths since caveman times, since wolf times, that produced my ancestors and his — all the firelight and sneak attacks and tenderly offered scraps of meat, the cages and houses, the secret stretchy coils of German DNA — it has all come, finally, to this: a fully grown exhausted human man, a tiny panting goofy harmless dog, walking down the hall together. Even in the dark, Walnut will tilt his snout up at me, throw me a deep happy look from his big black eyes — I can feel this happening even when I can’t see it — and he will snuffle the air until I say nice words to him (OK you fuzzy stinker, let’s go get your evening drink), and then, always, I will lower my face and he will lick my nose, and his breath is so bad, his fetid snout-wind, it smells like a scoop of the primordial soup. It is not good in any way. And yet I love it.

Walnut and I move down the hall together, step by bipedal step, one two three four, tired man and thirsty friend, and together we pass the wildlife of the hallway — a moth, a spider on the ceiling, both of which my children will yell at me later to move outside, and of course each of these creatures could be its own voyage, its own portal to millions of years of history, but we can’t stop to study them now; we are passing my son’s room. We can hear him murmuring words to his friends in a voice that sounds disturbingly like my own voice, deep sound waves rumbling over deep mammalian cords — and now we are passing my daughter’s room, my sweet nearly grown-up girl, who was so tiny when we brought Walnut home, as a golden puppy, but now she is moving off to college. In her room she has a hamster she calls Acorn, another consciousness, another portal to millions of years, to ancient ancestors in China, nighttime scampering over deserts.

But we move on. Behind us, in the hallway, comes a sudden galumphing. It is yet another animal: our other dog, Pistachio, he is getting up to see what’s happening; he was sleeping, too, but now he is following us. Pistachio is the opposite of Walnut, a huge mutt we adopted from a shelter, a gangly scraggly garbage muppet, his body welded together out of old mops and sandpaper, with legs like stilts and an enormous block head and a tail so long that when he whips it in joy, constantly, he beats himself in the face. Pistachio unfolds himself from his sleepy curl, stands, trots, huffs and stares after us with big human eyes. Walnut ignores him, because with every step he is sniffing the dark air ahead of us, like a car probing a night road with headlights, and he knows we are approaching his water dish now, he knows I am about to bend my body in half to set his four paws simultaneously down on the floor, he knows that he will slap the cool water with his tongue for 15 seconds before I pick him up again and we journey back down the hall. And I find myself wondering, although of course it doesn’t matter, if Walnut was even thirsty, or if we are just playing out a mutual script. Or maybe, and who could blame him, he just felt like taking a trip.”

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I can't stress enough how much I miss StumbleUpon

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My brother's girlfriend had HPV, so he went to get himself the HPV vaccine. There is a fee to pay (nothing much, something like €87) but it's completely free if you're in one of the "at risk" groups.

"What does that mean," he asks. "It's free if you're gay," he's told. "Ah. Would I have to like, prove it, or...?" "Just put in a check mark here."

My brother is in no way, shape or form attracted to men, but also he's stingy as it gets. So now he's officially gay. Congrats bro.