#Armstrong High School

[libraryofva]

Recent Acquisition - Ephemera Collection

Zeta Phi Beta Sorority Presents The Harry T. Burleigh Glee Club, Wednesday, February 20, 1946, 8:15 PM, Armstrong High School.

[thedungeonbat]

ᯓ★Recap of the last 48 hours :)

Had the time of my life at the Linkin Park concert, touched half of the band (Emily too!!!) and Colin gave me his drumsticks. Stood at the barricade and cried my eyes out. Met so many cool people and got interviewed by swr3 haha

Studied before the concert and turned my library trip today into a study date. Math exam is tomorrow.

Let’s not talk about the fact that I slept for 16 hours xd

[shots-of-whiskey-and-wilson]

i’m going through a green day phase

[spacemonkiesmafia]

2021 me was a force to be reckoned with. i really wish i could go back in time and give her a hug.

i was straight up harassed in school when a group of my "friends" found out i had a crush on him. like i was accused of having an "old man k*nk" and that i was into "d*ad guys" and so many other wicked things, NONE OF WHICH ARE TRUE. I WANNA MAKE THAT VERY CLEAR.

lesson learned: people in my class are the fakest bastards i know.

i don't usually post this heavy of stuff but i thought id share it. it costs nothing to be kind <3

be yourself, and most importantly, love yourself. you are special 💜

[spideyhina236]

She looks so good holyshit 😳🥰 Have mercy Becky Armstrong 🥺

[seventhbeatle]

When my teachers tell me to be normal

[michelleplayswithfire]

[tearsandwishes]

weekend vent dumps #2 

Goodness gracious, this week has been long. Right now, I'm doing a dumb project for bio. Hot Tip: DONT TAKE HONORS BIOLOGY. The only thing that has me going is anime and TikTok.

But, while I'm at it. I want to talk about the dangers of TikTok. Especially with teenagers on it. Recently, I gave a friend (more like an acquaintance) a picture of me. Since they wanted to do this trend where they do "friends we shouldn't take for granted". Now I want to talk about how fake people can be.

Now as you can see, this friend is a sophomore. I only knew this kid since the beginning of the year and now we're "friends". I don't mind being friends with the kid, but if you're using my money and ask me if the Little Mermaid should be black seems to be a stretch.

I could be over exaggerating but this kid seems to want to get the best from me and I don't get anything back. I wouldn't have a problem if you, payed me back, or not have asked me such racist questions (if you're wondering, yes they're white). I don't want to seem harsh but just don't do such things.

Now about TikTok. Apparently people can photoshop their bodies in videos. wtf.

It's hard, day by day, to find someone that is real. TikTok is turning into Instagram slowly (THATS A LIE) and we're soon going to believe that BBLs actually look good again (RIP asian doll).

Anyways, as a young person who's is soon going to vote in 2024, can we please have an argument that social media should not have filters. We seriously have filters that make your skin lighter (DO BETTER TIKTOK, but at the same time, me being a lightskin looks funny).

Now this post seems to be everywhere, so I hope it's not too confusing. Imma finish my project now.

"There are some people that if they don't know, you can't tell them."

-Louis Armstrong

REMEMBER TO DRINK WATER MY MUTUALS

dont be like me who drinks rootbeer 24/7

EDITED - MY DUMBASS FORGOT TAGS

[mindless-cinematic-trash]

Revenge of the Nerds (1984)

[lovestuckyhatemarvel]

Let's Talk About Inflation (the unsexy kind)

Okay so, before I go into this, I wanna first preface this by saying that no one is under any obligation to listen to me or implement a single goddamn thing I say here. If you don't like what I'm saying, you're not required to do any of this. I'm not your editor. I'm just some weirdo on tumblr who thinks too hard about a show that is arguably super badly written and pays no mind to any sort of logic. It barely keeps a coherent timeline. This is just one of my pet peeves.

And that pet peeve is I think people should stop putting actual dollar amounts in their Stranger Things fanfiction because so many people just put wildly high numbers for things and it just immediately is jarring to me. And below the read more, I'll explain why in way too many words and way too much detail.

So the bulk of the canon of Stranger Things takes place between 1983-1986 currently. There are earlier dates in books and plays, and there are also flashbacks in the show, but the bulk takes place in the 1980s because the Duffer brothers can't jerk off to completion unless they're thinking about the 80s and explosions.

And of course because the show is so badly written that you can drive a tank through the plot holes, it attracted fanfic writers. Including me. And so you get people writing about these characters going about their lives, except then they say shit like a character spends 50 dollars at a convenience store, and I'm left going, "No, he fucking didn't."

Because the thing is that economics are extremely complicated and there is a difference between inflation and relative buying power. So you can't actually take the price of a thing today and then plug it into an inflation calculator and then go 'tada, here's the price for 1986'. There are items that have, in fact, in terms of pricing, progressed below the inflation rate, and then others that went way way way above the inflation rate.

And that's also not taking into account the ever shifting prices of things depending on time you're buying it and also location you're buying it. Also the store matters. For example, a gallon of milk from walmart is more expensive than getting a gallon of milk from my local chain. Shockingly, buying from Aldi in my area is the most expensive for buying a gallon of milk. But also walmart in a completely different state has milk for cheaper than the walmart in my area.

So already for the same item on the same date in 4 different stores, I've got 4 different prices. And the price would still be different if I compared it to how it was 6 months ago. And go back further and that's even more true. Especially with Aldi since Aldi used to be the affordable store to go to. And now it's absolutely not. So you can see how trying to figure out the relative buying power of a small fictional town in Indiana in 1986 could be extremely complicated.

One of the reasons beyond just relative buying power being complicated is that Ronald Reagan fucked the economy so hard it literally never recovered. And during Stranger Things, they aren't yet feeling that. The economy actually won't fully show signs of this kind of fuckery for another decade. And then 9/11 made things even worse. That's not to say that no one writing fanfiction of Stranger Things was alive pre-9/11, but most of us weren't keeping track of prices of things outside of like, gum and candy. Or at least I wasn't. RIP to cheap Baby Bottle Pops. You are missed.

But that's just words and opinion, right? So where's my fucking proof?

What up, it's moneynotmoney.com and specifically their extremely detailed analysis on how the price of coca-cola has evolved over the years. And I'm really excited that it's coca-cola because the show loves to jerk that beverage off.

Here's their graph for the absolute price of coca-cola per year going from 1970 to 2022.

And here's their graph for the prices of coca-cola for those same years adjusted for inflation.

So can you accurately put a dollar amount on things for a fic set in the 80s? Sure. Is it easy? Absolutely not. Do I recommend it? No. And I'm gonna be real with y'all, this isn't to call out any individual person, and I'm not blaming anyone for doing this, but literally every single time I've seen someone list a dollar amount for something in your steddie fic, y'all do come across as:

Like even the show avoided putting actual prices on things for most of their run. The only times I remember actual prices being listed being in season 1 when Joyce is buying all the string lights in town multiple times. And a new phone. Like this is a thing I've put way too much thought and research into and I just straight up do not put prices in my story because it's not necessary and also it's way too complicated for my taste. No one's ever asked me to put a number on what 'barely scraping by' means, nor have they asked what having 'enough money to comfortably live the rest of his life without working' means. Even though those are two things that are never stagnant. That's not to say you have to go my route. Once again, I'm not your teacher and I'm not your editor. I'm not your fucking keeper. Do what you want.

[cormancatacombs]

I’m curious how many people actually clicked the first thumbnail and how many just assumed they were voting for the classic Monster Mash instead of the lame parody…

Halloween Song Bracket

Please listen to both songs before voting.

The Original Monster Mash. Content warning: sexual

Spooks

[dev-solovey]

Reading up on the history of American Idiot (album) and realizing exactly how revolutionary it was and I just have to yell about it for a hot second

So, before they started working on American Idiot, the band was having problems and they were thinking they were going to break up. But for a couple of reasons, they switched directions, most notably because they all felt strongly about the Iraq War and how it was manufactured by greed and warmongering from the Bush administration, which was amplified by the news media. I read a quote from Billie Joe Armstrong where he talked about how the news media was becoming "more of a reality show" than it was news, and he couldn't have been more right. In fact, that problem got worse, and now we're living in an era of rampant misinformation where everything is politicized to a point where just supporting human rights for marginalized people is considered controversial. The song American Idiot came out in 2004, and when Donald Trump first visited the UK at the beginning of his presidency, it was the top played song on every UK radio station, 12 years after it was released. Most things would be culturally irrelevant at that point.

When creating the album American Idiot, a lot of thought went into it - they had a very specific message in mind, and their goal was to send that message to youth. This is because they realized at some point that their fanbase was a bunch of teenagers, and even though they hadn't necessarily intended it that way, they suddenly had a platform with the youth of America and they decided they ought to do something good with it. The drummer, Tré Cool, said something along the lines of "I've never really liked the idea of preaching to kids, but I realized we don't really have a choice at this point." And I love that so much because like, so many people who get rich and famous just become completely out of touch, and when they get a platform, it's very easy to exploit that platform, influence them with terrible ideas, or encourage them to act in terrible ways for self-serving reasons (ex: JK Rowling, Andrew Tate, Dream, Logan Paul, Onision, etc etc). Green Day refused to allow themselves to get to that point. They know the platform they had gave them power and they made an active choice early on to be responsible with it. And a lot of that moral code comes from the fact that they came up in the DIY punk scene in Oakland, which held its members to a very high standard of ethics, a code that they still follow even after they were disowned by that scene when they signed on with a major record label in 1994.

The song American Idiot has a message of "this mass media hysteria is manufactured bullshit, don't fall for it," and it is not subtle about that message. It punches you right in the face. I remember being 12 years old and listening to it and thinking, "yeah, I don't want to be an American idiot." And now, at the age of 28, I am a staunch leftist who is firmly against the atrocities the US government commits, and I feel strongly about stopping misinformation. So I can say with absolute certainty that they succeeded.

I also get like, really upset when people say that American Idiot is the album where they sold out, because that's objectively not true, both for the reasons I've provided above, and also because of the song Wake Me Up When September Ends. Not a lot of people know the story behind this song, but it's actually a song that Billie Joe wrote about the experience of his dad dying of cancer when he was 10 years old. The story, as he tells it, is that when he came home from school, his mom gave him the news, and being (understandably!) upset, started crying, ran to his room and slammed the door. When she knocked on the door to try and talk to him, he shouted "wake me up when September ends!!" in response. It took him decades to be able to write this song, and it shows because it's the perfect grief song, having been played at benefits for 9/11, hurricane Katrina, and so on. The first time I heard that song it reduced me to tears, because you can hear the intense sadness in it. A "sellout" would never write a song like that!! (Side note: maybe stop tweeting at Green Day to wake up every October 1st, it's super tone deaf given the subject matter,,,)

Anyway, I think I'm done being autistic about Green Day (that's a lie, they'll forever be my special interest), so TL;DR:

Thank you, Green Day, for creating a generation of leftists who aren't about the bullshit

[emwheezie]

Different art style who dis? (I'M OBSSESSED OK?)

They are so Rivers Cuomo and Billie Joe Armstrong coded.

This is so much more of a relaxed, quicker art style. It's a new take on the style I used to draw in back in high school. This is kind of what the original chapter looked like in 2017. (I'll post some pics later).

This art style feels much more effortless, much more me. I think in general it just fits better?

[girlactionfigure]

THURSDAY HERO: Barney Ross

Dov-Ber Rosovsky was a world-champion boxer and injured World War II hero whose fierce Jewish pride made him an icon to American Jews.

Dov-Ber was born in New York in 1909, the son of a Talmudic scholar who fled to America after surviving a pogrom in Belarus. Dov-Ber grew up in Chicago, helping out in his father’s small grocery store in a poor neighborhood and studying to be a rabbi.

His life was changed forever when his father was shot dead resisting a robbery at his store. Dov-Ber’s mother suffered a nervous breakdown and the kids were farmed out to foster homes.

Dov-Ber became bitter and angry. He turned his back on religion, changed his name to Barney Ross, and took a job working for Al Capone. Barney’s goal was to make enough money to buy a house and reunite his family. He soon became such an effective street fighter, however, that he gave professional boxing a try. Strong, fast, and determined, “Barney” became a world champion in the three different weight classes. He was known for his exceptional stamina and his street smarts.

In the 1930’s, when Hitler was rising to power, Barney Ross became a hero to American Jews by showing pride in his heritage and taking a public stand against Nazi Germany.  He was determined to end each fight on his feet to show that Jews fight and don’t go down. In Barney’s final fight, he defended his title against fellow three-division world champion Henry Armstrong. Barney got brutally pummeled and his trainers begged him to let them stop the fight, but he was determined to stay on his feet. He’d never been knocked out in his career and wasn’t going to start now. He retired from boxing in his early 30’s with a record of 72 wins, 4 loses, 3 draws, and two no decisions, with 22 wins by knockout. He achieved his goal of having no career knockouts.

After retiring from the ring, Barney/Dov-Ber enlisted in the US Marine Corps to fight in World War II. The Marines wanted to keep him stateside as a celebrity morale-booster, but Barney insisted on fighting for his country. He was sent to Guadalcanal in the South Pacific. During his time in Guadalcanal, Barney became friends with Chaplain Frederic Gehrig. Father Gehrig found an old pump organ on the island, and Barney was the only one who could play it. On Christmas Eve, before Barney and his fellow Marines were to go to battle, Gehrig asked him to play “Silent Night” and other Christmas songs for the troops. Barney happily obliged, finishing off the concert with “My Yiddishe Momma,” the song he used to play when he entered the boxing ring. Father Gehrig would later describe Barney Ross as a “national treasure.”

One night, Barney and three other soldiers were trapped under enemy fire. All four were wounded but Barney was the only one able to continue fighting. He gathered his comrades’ weapons and fought 22 Japanese soldiers, killing them all. Two of the American soldiers died, but Barney carried the third man to safety, even though the soldier weighed 230 pounds, while the wounded Barney weighed only 140! For his courage, Barney Ross was awarded a Silver Star and a citation from President Roosevelt.

Barney was hospitalized for his battle injuries, and the pain was so bad that he became dependent on morphine. After the war, he returned to America and opened a bar lounge. However, his drug addiction intensified as he turned to heroin, which was easier to obtain than morphine. Barney became hooked on heroin, an addiction that cost him $500 a day, as well as his marriage, his business and his life savings. Finally he hit rock bottom, and checked into a veteran’s recovery facility. He kicked his habit once and for all, and became a public speaker who educated high school students about the danger of drugs.

In the 1960’s, Barney made his living as a celebrity spokesman. After a brutal struggle with throat cancer, Barney Ross died in 1967 at age 57.

For his wartime heroism and for modeling Jewish strength and pride, we honor Dov-Ber “Barney Ross” Rosovsky as this week’s Thursday Hero.

[jazzdailyblog]

Wynton Marsalis: The Trumpet Maestro Shaping the Future of Jazz

Introduction: Wynton Marsalis is a titan of the jazz world, a prolific composer, a master trumpet player, and an enthusiastic teacher. His decades-long contributions to the music industry have had a profound impact on the genre. This blog post will explore Wynton Marsalis’s life, music, and influence, honoring his incredible musical journey and his ongoing effect on the jazz community. Early…

[greendayauthority]

“I mean, we're still our high school band. That’s how we got together. Me and Mike have known each other since we were ten. But we are excited about the tour and playing these songs for the first time. And for some kids, this will be their first Green Day concert."

— Billie Joe Armstrong, 2024