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The chronicle of the monk Herbert of Reichenau for the year 1021 ends “My brother Werner was born on November 1.“ 

1021 was not an uneventful year. The emperor began a campaign into Italy. Illustrious abbots died. There was an earthquake. But Herbert took the time to note, at the end of the year, that his brother was born. 

Of such acts of tenderness is history made. 

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WAIT I FORGOT ABOUT YUGIOH UWU DAY SHIT

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just grab a spirit from out in the streets and let it in your house. A good way for your urban spiritist to get started. Those trash spirits are free, you know.

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september is HERE which means it is time to show some love to my favourite lil offline browser buddy

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Kestrel-dad not sure how to dad but he’s trying his best.

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You're not embarrassed being an old woman and being in tumblr? I would rather die that my grannies have an actual account on tumblr for celebrities rho

Why would I be embarrassed for having interests I enjoy? My guess is that you’re really, really young. And that maybe you don’t actually have solid relationships with adults who have lives outside of parenting or work. But I hope for you that when you’re my age you have hobbies that bring you happiness. And that by that point you realize that trying to shame someone for being an adult only makes you look too immature to be in adult spaces, which Tumblr is.

When I was 20, I loved music, making art, writing and reading good stories, fashion, talking about popular culture, making friends, going to concerts… You’d be surprised how little changes when you’re my age. I just have way more money and time to enjoy those things now. I’m only 55. I’m not dead. I’m also not a “granny”, but even if I was, I’d probably still like all of those things.

Ageism isn’t cute, love. And I sure don’t ever see people telling men they shouldn’t go to football games or have their little “fantasy football leagues” or wear their favorite player’s merch. For every comment you guys like to say is misogynistic (but isn’t), this is one that really reeks of it.

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ok bud this one seems accurate

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There’ve been a few responses to/reblogs with tags on my post about DIY clothing embellishments that basically boil down to ‘I’d love to do this but I’m scared it’ll turn out bad/I’m not a good enough artist’. And I get it, I really do! I also want my art things to turn out nicely. But also…making it badly is sort of the point of punk DIY. 

Listen. We live in a world that would dearly love to charge you a subscription fee for breathing. The bastards are doing everything they possibly can to figure out how to turn art - stories, visual art, music, textile/fibre art, sculpture, crafts and creations of every kind - into a neat, discrete, packageable commodity, a product they can chop up into little pieces and stick behind a paywall so they can charge you for every drop of it you want to have in your life. 

The whole sneering idea that ‘everybody wants to be some kind of creator now’ and anything less than absolute mastery right out the gate is somehow shameful and embarrassing is a tool those bastards are using. It’s a way to reinforce the idea that only a set group of people can create and control art, and everybody else has to buy it. 

But art isn’t a product. Art is a fundamental human impulse. Nobody is entitled to a specific piece of art (which is where this message gets skewed into pitting people who love art against the artists who make it, while the bastards screw us all and run away with the money). But making art belongs to everybody. We make up songs and dances and stories, and paint things, and make clothes, and embellish them, and carve flowers into our furniture and our lintels and our doorframes, and make windows out of tiny pieces of coloured glass, and decorate our homes and our bodies and our lives with things we make and make up, simply for the love of beauty and of the act of creation. Grave goods from tens of thousands of years ago show that ancient hominids gave their dead wreaths of ceramic flowers, tattooed their bodies, beaded their shoes. Making things for the sake of beauty and enjoyment is one of the most ancient and human things we can do. 

The idea that we can’t, that we have to buy shit instead, because art is a product and you have to have the bestest prettiest most perfect product, is the enemy of joy. It’s the death of culture. And it means that, instead of whatever it is that you cherish and enjoy and value, you get whatever inoffensive (and to whom is it inoffensive?) bland meaningless samey-samey crap that the bastards want you to be allowed to have. What are you missing and what are you missing out on, if you don’t make or modify or decorate anything for yourself, if you don’t think you can because the product at the end won’t be polished or perfect or marketable enough? What do you lose? What do we lose? 

It is a desperately vital and necessary thing for you to make shit. For you to know that you can make shit, that you don’t have to just lie back and take whatever pablum the bastards want to force-feed you (and charge you through the nose for). That the bastards need you more than you need them. 

Become ungovernable. Be your own weirdly-endearing punk little freak. Paint on a t-shirt. Sing off-key in the shower or at karaoke night or at open mic night. Make up a story where you get to meet your favourite fictional character and you guys hug or fuck or punch each other in the face. Make art. Do it badly. Do it frequently. Do it enthusiastically. Do it for love and joy and creativity and fun and the spiteful joy of thumbing your nose at some smug motherfucker with a Swiss bank account who wants to track your heartbeat and location for the rest of your life in order to automatically pump AI-generated beats matched to your mood into your earbuds for a small monthly subscription fee of $24.99/month. It is literally the only way we are ever going to have even a chance to save art and our own lives from the bastards. 

So. Paint that t-shirt. 

(Also support artists where you can, and buy your music from Bandcamp.)

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Paper cranes by Cristian Marianciuc

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One of my greatest inspirations as a writer is the late great LA Times food reviewer Jonathan Gold. I legitimately think he should be considered one of the best writers of the last 100 years. Look at this.

Poetry. Non-fiction par excellence. This is a man who not only understood the visceral, the sensory, the sublime, but he could put it into words.

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Full view to find 4 hidden penguins on the royal penguin; and 4 hidden ducks on the royal duck! 

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The dog developed seductive traits, specifically directed at humans. All signs of wolfish aggression were tempered; the dog no longer rolls back its whisker pads to show its teeth, for example. Its ears became soft, making it the only mammal in its genus to possess this discernible trait, which is associated with the gene for sociability. This new dog literally disguised itself as the happy imbecile with whom we now identify it, because this choice had become its best chance of success. The dog domesticated us rather than the other way around, even learning to divine the intention of humans by observing their sclerotics – the whites of their eyes…

Conversely, humans have been able to unburden themselves of a certain number of tasks, particularly those related to attention and vigilance. The human brain has become specialised, as has the dog’s, to the point where the cerebral areas of humans and dogs have undergone reciprocal changes; and everything indicates that we have one brain between us, that our brain is never truly complete unless it is paired with a dog’s.

— Mark Alizart, Dogs: A Philosophical Guide to Our Best Friends (2018)

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Studio Ghibli’s animation software will be made available via open source this month. 

That’s right…💯% free.

Read more on CartoonBrew.com

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me remembering niche bits of lore about my mutuals

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They really should teach people how to cook in school.

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