scribblygryphon

[scribblygryphon]

They are now calling for a boycott of all Starbucks stores for December 20th to December 24th.

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you tell a bitch to keep their cat indoors and suddenly their town is the first in the world to have eradicated every viral, bacterial and parasitic disease, they invented completely harmless cars, dogs and predators dont exist either but somehow the native songbird population is fine since the cats in this place have lost the hunting instinct, there's no pollutants or toxic plants and human cruelty has ceased to exist. and mr mittens has a chip in his brain that will explode if he doesnt go outside 10 hours of the day

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northern hemisphere babes we made it to the longest night of the year. we made it. for the next 6 months, every day will give us a little more daylight than the last. let's go. take my hand. climb out of the darkness with me

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not doomed by the narrative but saved by the narrative. yeah i know you'd rather die than keep suffering but the story doesn't actually care what you want. you have to keep going, even when it hurts. even being erased from existence won't stop you from being salvaged from the wreckage of un-being. get up. keep pushing. keep bleeding. keep living.

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Respectfully, I want to love you in front of people who didn't. I want them to see how much you glow when you're treated right.

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Least fun parts of thrift shopping:

This thrift shop used to have jeans for like $3 and now everything is priced like it's new

Hear about a cool new thrift shop in town and you check it out and it's actually "vintage upcycling and consignment" so the shredded jorts are $250 on sale

This place used to get cool stuff but the tiktok haul resale people found it and now anything decent is snapped up and immediately resold for like $500 online

"Ooh this is cute" and then you check and it's shein

"Ooh this is cute" and then you check and it's Harry P*tter

The jacket of your dreams is in your price range but it's 3 sizes too small

Your absolute FAVOURITE thrifted item finally wears out beyond salvation and when you do research to maybe find a replacement it's been discontinued since 1983

Check the pockets and find used kleenex

STICKY THING

This was exactly what I was looking for but I can't get the weed remnants out

"This is obviously broken but I know how to fix it" (never fixes it)

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For the UK peeps!!

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this messed up vintage cat sewing pattern has tormented me since i saw it & like some other folks have done in that post - i tried my hand at tweaking the pattern to resemble the illustration (and my personal tastes) a little more. i've ended up with this, which i have only tested at a small scale and not this final version exactly (where i have done such things as further widening the cheeks and finalizing the leg shapes.) i bestow it upon you nice folks now 👐

go forth and make weird little beanbag kittens! pls show me if you do!

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Truth, justice, freedom, reasonably priced love, and a hardboiled egg. Did Ankh-Morpork get those things, in the end?

They got truth, there was a whole book about it. Vimes didn't want it when he got it, or at least he didn't want the political cartoon section of the newspaper, but Ankh-Morpork got the free press whether anyone liked it or not.

They got justice, thanks first to Carrot and then to Vimes, forcing the City Watch to reform into an organization that helped the citizenry and would arrest the patrician or a whole invading army if it had to. Vimes had to wage a constant war with himself not to turn into just another gang leader, but he waged it.

They did not get freedom. Pratchett was very clear on that. Things got comparatively better, and immigrants flocked to the city despite it being a hellhole, because the dictator didn't care about persecuting any minority groups or whether or not people made fun of him, but it was still a dictatorship. When Pratchett was alive, fans speculated that he was subtly training Moist von Lipwig to become the new government leader- the Lipwig books always had an emphasis on Vetinari getting older- and Lipwig would have had nothing to fear from an election by popular vote, but that's all fanwank and speculation.

They got reasonably priced love right away. That may have even been one of Vetinari's first acts as patrician, since Mrs. Palm is leader of the Seamstress's Guild at least as far back as the early Watch books.

John Keel's grave got a hardboiled egg every year.

Four out of five ain't bad.

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via tiktok + comments

[scribblygryphon]

The thing with the Mari Lwyd, though, is that it's being... I don't know, 'appropriated' is the wrong word, but certainly turned into something it isn't.

Thing is, this is a folk tradition in the Welsh language, and that's the most important aspect of it. I feel partly responsible for this, because I accidentally became a bit of an expert on the topic of the Mari Lwyd in a post that escaped Tumblr containment, and I clearly didn't stress it strongly enough there (in my defence, I wrote that post for ten likes and some attention); but this is a Welsh language tradition, conducted in Welsh, using Welsh language poetic forms that are older than the entire English language, and also a very specific sung melody (with a very specific first verse; that's Cân y Fari). It is not actually a 'rap battle'. It's not a recited poem. It is not any old rhyme scheme however you want.

It is not in English.

Given the extensive and frankly ongoing attempts by England to wipe out Welsh, and its attendant cultural traditions, the Mari is being revived across Wales as an act of linguistic-cultural defiance. She's a symbol of Welsh language culture, specifically; an icon to remind that we are a distinct people, with our own culture and traditions, and in spite of everyone and everything, we're still here. Separating her from that by removing the Welsh is, to put it mildly, wildly disrespectful.

...but it IS what I'm increasingly seeing, both online and in real world Mari Lwyd festivals. She's gained enormous pop-culture popularity in recent years, which is fantastic; but she's also been reduced from the tradition to just an aesthetic now.

So many people are talking/drawing about her as though she's a cryptid or a mythological figure, rather than the folk practice of shoving a skull on a stick and pretending to be a naughty horse for cheese and drunken larks. And I get it! It's an intriguing visual! Some of the artwork is great! But this is not what she is. She's not a Krampus equivalent for your Dark Christmas aesthetic.

I see people writing their own version of the pwnco (though never called the pwnco; almost always called some variant on 'Mari Lwyd rap battle'), and as fun as these are, they are never even written in the meter and poetic rules of Cân y Fari, much less in Welsh, and they never conclude with the promise to behave before letting the Mari into the house. The pwnco is the central part to the tradition; this is the Welsh language part, the bit that's important and matters.

Mari Lwyd festivals are increasingly just English wassail festivals with a Mari or two present. The Swansea one last weekend didn't even include a Mari trying to break into a building (insert Shrek meme); there was no pwnco at all. Even in the Chepstow ones, they didn't do actual Cân y Fari; just a couple of recited verses. Instead, the Maris are just an aesthetic, a way to make it look a bit more Welsh, without having to commit to the unfashionable inconvenience of actually including Welsh.

And I don't really know what the answers are to these. I can tell you what I'd like - I'd like art to include the Welsh somewhere, maybe incorporating the first line of Cân y Fari like this one did, to keep it connected to the actual Welsh tradition (or other Welsh, if other phrases are preferred). I'd like people who want to write their version of the pwnco to respect the actual tradition of it by using Cân y Fari's meter and rhyme scheme, finishing with the promise to behave, and actually calling it the pwnco rather than a rap battle (and preferably in Welsh, though I do understand that's not always possible lol). I'd like to see the festivals actually observe the tradition, and include a link on the booking website to an audio clip of Cân y Fari and the words to the first verse, so attendees who want to can learn it ahead of time. I don't know how feasible any of that is, of course! But that's what I'd like to see.

I don't know. This is rambly. But it's something I've been thinking about - and increasingly nettled by - for a while. There's was something so affirming and wonderful at first about seeing the Mari's climb into international recognition, but it's very much turned to dismay by now, because she's important to my endangered culture and yet that's the part that everyone apparently wants to drop for being too awkward and ruining the aesthetic. It's very frustrating.

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there is something so crazy and powerful about having art of your oc that was made by anyone other than yourself. like oh my god you actually exist outside of my own brain that's WILD

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Experiment:

Reblog this post and add a poll of your own to the reblog. You can make it a poll about anything. Let's see how far it goes.

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Click on it twice. These are your two super powers.

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She's so polite on sushi night.

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finished my blanket 🤗