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I haven't been on tumblr in years.

What happened to the tumblr logo, and why is it pink

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Chinese Dragon & Terrace by Xision Wu

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Damn this is well done

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based on a true story

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i wasn't supposed to write about roses or blood or silver, about hearts or wings or galaxies; my teacher used to press her hands, firmly, to the top of our poetry stacks and beg us - love different. she was bored of it. i'd go home and write something with each of her off-limits words, emboldened by spite.

for a stint of time, i was a reader for a poetry magazine, shifting through thousands of submitted writings, each hopefully printed onto my tiny laptop screen for next-submission-viewing. one editor had a pile where we would put all the poems with parsnips or cauliflower, one pile for long-thin emergency rants that devolved into a blank scream, one pile for mentions of belladonna and chartreuse - for a whole year, i'd go to bed hearing chartreuse and silver and cities playing in my head in calligraphy. every three months, the beautiful public eye would become just-fascinated by pretty things. unusual, beautiful monstrosities. one winter, all about daises. the next, a fascination with posies. i watched the world spin from catching love in language to the same five phrases - help, it's ending, i'm alone, help, it's dark here, come home, help -

later, as an english teacher, i saw patterns. every semester, one million essays about four specific things. it wasn't pretty enough to be a teachable moment: the content they wanted to discuss was all extremely violent; a broken anthem of climate change and constantly being videoed is destroying us. i would wake up shaking, worried their visions were prophetic, soon-to-be-true. selfish, i couldn't handle the constant semester-to-semester panic they scribbled into six paragraphs, MLA-formatted text. read the world is ending fifty times every month; sob to your therapist i'm not doing enough, tell your students: please, no more violence, i don't have the right stomach.

each one seemed the same poem: we're dying, and nobody is coming to save us.

there are very few celebration poems these days. i want to rest my hand on a stack of poems about love in big red wings. love in a jacket, standing under an open galaxy. love written on the bicep, in an anatomically correct heart, with an arrow shot through the center so you can see the pink viscera of surviving a wound - so you know that even permanent tattoos are permeable. blood on the snout of a newborn lamb. silver rings around the pink scales of a pigeon's leg, and love with her hand around the ribs of a bird. i want to read boring essays about lunch. about which video games run the best graphics. about carnivals. about love in big cliche terms: standing in a garden of parsnips, clutching daises to her chest, eating raw meat over the body of a rich man.

i want to open the poetry magazine and have pages of sonnets about bluebells. about survival. about a mundane, beautiful spring. about sitting with your dog on a front porch, writing without spite, happily toying with the idea of ice cream.

my student sends me an email. i know you said to write about what brings you joy. but nothing really makes me happy these days. i don't know what i'm doing.

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People say a lot of things about the economies of the Nordic countries and why they are so much more equal than ours. In this discussion, certainly the presence of unions and sector bargaining comes up, but rarely do you get a discussion of just how radically powerful and organized the Nordic unions are and have been. If you didn’t know better, you’d think the Nordic labor market is the way it is because all of the employers and workers came together and agreed that their system is better for everyone. And while it’s true of course that, on a day-to-day basis, labor relations in the countries are peaceful, lurking behind that peace is often a credible threat that the unions will crush an employer that steps out of line, not just by striking at one site or at one company, but by striking every single thing that the company touches.

We saw this most recently in 2019 Finland when the state-owned postal service decided to cut the pay of 700 package handlers by moving them to a different sector agreement than the one they were currently being paid under. The unions responded by striking airlines, ferries, buses, trains, and ports. In the aftermath of these strikes, the pay cuts were reversed and the prime minister of the country resigned.

When I bring this up, people sometimes respond by saying that these kinds of strikes are illegal in the US. This is a true and worthwhile bit of information, but insofar as it is meant to imply that the different legal environment is what accounts for the labor radicalism, this obviously has things backwards. The laws aren’t driving the labor radicalism, but rather the labor radicalism is driving the laws.

McDonalds doesn’t pay Danes high wages because of a statutory wage floor or even because the state stepped in to enforce a collective bargaining agreement. They pay high wages because back in the 1980s, Danish unions flipped a switch and turned the whole business off, and McDonalds doesn’t want to find out whether they would do it again.

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©东予薏米  jade rabbits making mooncakes for mid-autumn festival

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Husky getting nervous at his first swimming lesson

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post from a friend who works on film/tv sets about the IATSE strike, feel free to repost

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Meet my new OC families~

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There's also the corrupt officials and private sector cronies in my shitty government who used the emergency situation to steal millions upon millions of dollars of taxpayer money, and then you get to thinking about how many people we could have saved, how many families supported throughout our ridiculous lockdowns, how many businesses and jobs kept afloat, how we could have had a better response to the pandemic, if only they had less of their greed and more of the compassion and integrity we expect out of elected officials and actually put that money to use serving their sworn duty to the people--

What’s so awful and hope-eroding about the pandemic at this point is how consistently the value of life is cheapened before our eyes. The number of deaths go up. We are appalled and scared. The number of deaths go down, we talk about the economy. Hospital wards are full to bursting. The number of deaths go up. That number isn’t as scary as it was. We can get through that. The number goes down. It’s not zero. It’s hundreds and thousands, but it’s less than before and there are profits to be made. The number goes up. We’ve seen worse. The numbers go by. We don’t blink an eye anymore. They’re just numbers. The profits go up and the deaths go up and it’s business as usual. People are dying. People are always dying. It doesn’t make your stomach drop anymore. The number goes down. The economy goes down. Add another covid booster shot, make the numbers go the right way. My neighbor gets evicted because he can’t work anymore due to Covid side effects. Make him a number. People live out of their cars. But they didn’t die, don’t count them. Restaurants are open. Shops are open. People are dying. It’s not scary anymore. 526 Covid deaths yesterday. That’s not so bad. This is normal. It’s all numbers. 4.5 million dead around the world. How many is that? Is that a lot? I don’t know anymore. I feel sick.

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Happy hallowee

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... I don't understand, when you decommission something don't you ensure it won't work anymore and that there's nothing of value left behind? Why leave behind shit that would fuck up the surroundings if the containers ever broke??

“18,000 miles of undersea pipelines have been abandoned in the Gulf—97% of all decommissioned pipelines there—with no remediation or monitoring.”

Read more: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/09/04/climate/oil-spill-hurricane-ida.html

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Well folks I've been sitting on this little script for ages and finally decided to just go ahead and publish it. What does it do?

you can enter any ao3 link - for example, to your bookmarks or an author's works page - and automatically download all the works and series that are linked from that page in the format of your choice

if your format of choice is epub (sorry, this part doesn't work for other file formats), you can check your fanfic-savin' folder for unfinished fics and automatically update them if there are new chapters

if you're a dinosaur who uses Pinboard, you can back up all the Pinboard bookmarks you have that link to ao3

don't worry about crashing ao3 with this! this baby takes forever to run, guaranteed. anyway ao3 won't let me make more than one request per second even if I wanted to so it's quite safe

I've been working on this for about two years and it's finally in a state where it does everything I want and isn't breaking every two seconds, so I thought it was time to share! I hope y'all get some use out of it.

note: this is a standalone desktop app that DOES NOT DO ANYTHING aside from automate clicking on buttons on the ao3 website. Everything this script does, can be done by hand using ao3's regular features. It is just a utility to facilitate personal backups for offline reading - there's no website or server, I have no access to or indeed interest in the fics other people download using this. No plagiarism is happening here, please don't come after me.

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I can't decide if I should be--

Awestruck at how fricking cool this panel is

Scared shitless imagining how terrifying this must look like to the clueless hunters gathered below that gigantic gate or

Laughing hysterically at all those dragon heads poking out looking like owo? 0w0??

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