#World of Wonders

[thingsifoundongeoguessr]

The horn & pretzels family crest goes hard ngl

[autumnbell32]

-from, “World of Wonders: In Praise of Fireflies, Whale Sharks, and Other Astonishments,” by Aimee Nezhukumatathil

[theaskew]

World of Wonders, a novel by Robertson Davies (1913–1995). (Macmillan of Canada, Toronto, 1975.)

[macmanx]

No Godzilla, not The Great Wall of China!

Focus is definitely an issue with a subject that simply can’t scale, a lit background, and a regular iPhone 14 camera, but that can all change with practice. 🤞

[jerxiong]

Currently Reading: World of Wonders: In Praise of Fireflies, Whale Sharks, and Other Astonishments by Aimee Nezhukumatathil (Milkweed, 2020)

Status: in progress (about halfway through the book; third time picking this up and getting farther than before)

Thoughts: This essay collection is really proving to me that I'm really, really, really bad with nature. I'm not one of those people who grew up immersed in nature--my parents didn't really take my family on hikes, camping, never really took us to the mountains, to forests, to beaches, to national parks. It was probably only a handful of times. What I learned from nature really came from school, like learning about poison oak and poison ivy--even though to this day, I still don't know the difference and would not recognize it if I came across it. I didn't do "nature" things until I was older, when my sisters were allowed to drive us out to do more things outside; when I was in college where I'd do more activities with them.

So, it's been really hard to finish this book. It's not boring, per se. It's doing straightforward essaying, using nature to talk about or connect back to memories to do with identity and race. I'm just having a difficult time conjuring the images in my head. I don't recognize them, I don't know their names. It's hard.

Strangely, my parents and grandparents were garden folks and so those were the things I recognized the most that their hands built: thai chili peppers, cilantro, green onion, squash, peaches.

[stealchain]

World of Wonders, by Aimee Nezhukumatathil

[as-told-by-sura]

Petra, The Rose City 🇯🇴

[pangur-and-grim]

Belphie looks so handsome today

[fantastic-nonsense]

[illuminatedferret]

post-canon fics where hua cheng gets amnesia'd back into wuming, who inevitably finds out His Beloved Is Married always read like the meme "I'll be his second husband." (what happened to the first?) "Nothing you can prove."

jump to xie lian, who knows exactly what mental contortions the love of his life would go to rather than recognize that xie lian loves him, deciding to humor wuming's murder fantasy for shits and giggles. 'you want to murder my husband, wuming? hm, i dont know... he is nice. except for the time he proposed to me and then immediately walked it back as a joke- oh, you'd treat me better than that? you'd never do something so cruel? well... im listening.'

cue hua cheng getting his memories back like "gege i thought we were over this. gege. gege stop laughing. gege please. i said sorry!"

[autumnbell32]

-from, “World of Wonders: In Praise of Fireflies, Whalesharks, and Other Astonishments,” by Aimee Nezhukumatathil

[hussyknee]

Trying to explain what the fuck just happened in Lankan politics today.

The leftist party has won 159 seats out of 218 in the Parliamentary elections. The single biggest landslide win since we broke from the British and achieved universal franchise in 1948.

Any party achieving a super majority in the executive and legislative is, objectively speaking, bad. It disables checks and balances, which is a catastrophic thing for any democracy, and the only two other times it's happened for us has irrevocably eroded the fabric of civic rights and democratic freedom. Also, the reason the NPP won the North and East is that the colonized, genocided and subjugated people there have no faith in electoralism anymore. The way this government has engaged minority issues has been utterly abysmal and now they've been rewarded for it.

On the other hand:

The winners. Are all. Grassroots. Candidates.¹

We have voted out every single career criminal that's been barnacled into the Lankan political arena since before I've been alive. The fascist party has only three seats.² The other fascists didn't win a single seat. The neoliberal legacy party won none. There are only forty people in Parliament that represent any sort of dynastic political legacy. After 76 solid years of nothing but political dynasties.

This is barely five years after the Rajapaksas swept in and absolutely glutted the Parliament with their family members and cronies end to end.

This is the illegitimate interim government we had for most of the last 18 months. We literally, physically, chased the Rajapaksas out of the country and this fucking demon set up a puppet government just so he could finally sit in that goddamn chair and be the despot he'd always dreamed of in exchange for letting them all come back. He's now gone. His entire circle is gone.

THEY ARE ALL FUCKING GONE.

In US terms, just imagine that, five years from now, when Trump's GOP has control of everything, the entire GOP and the worst of the Dems are all purged from Congress and Senate, the Green Party in control of all three branches of government under a pro-union left-wing President and an unmarried female LGBT rights activist Vice President, and the Dems reduced to barely 20% of the House.

This is my anthropology professor. She joined politics from the small nascent leftist coalition to help keep the government accountable. She's now the Prime Minister and the most popular Parliamentary candidate in the nation's history. (Edit: She was knocked off first place by a dude in the final result. Boo.)

(On the other hand— the woman who helped make me a radical anarchist and literally helped write a book on political dissent and resistance...now is the state. Uh.)

But there are so many women in Parliament! We had the lowest female representation in a South Asian Parliament and some of them were from the list of seats reserved for parties rather than elected ones. Most were either anti-feminist conservative embarrassments, widows and daughters of elite politicians and neoliberal shills. It's still only an increase of a few percentage points (Edit: from the previous 5% to 10% in the final result!) but now we have elected academics, feminist advocates, activists! There Is a representative for Malaiyaha Tamils in the Central Province for the first time in history and it's a young woman! (Edit: now it's two female Malaiyaha MPS!!) This is the plantation community that still live in conditions closest to the slavery the British forced upon them two hundred years ago!

I'm like. Completely mindfucked. To be very very clear, the NPP coalition formed around the nucleus of the JVP that used to be communist but haven't been in 30 years, they're now just social democrats who are left of places like the US and UK, whose "left" is now center-right. They're only threatening to the Western mainstream media for some reason who can't stop bleating about how we have a "Marxist" government now. In reality, the actual chances for radical reform are still quite low, and the opportunity for further erosion is quite high with a super majority government regardless of affiliation.

On the other hand:

What the fuck.

Sometimes living through historical events is really damn amazing.

---

¹ Well, nearly. There are a few career politicians and a nepo baby but they aren't so bad either.

² Goddamn it, Baby Rajapaksa and Sri Lanka's answer to JD Vance have wormed their way in using the list of Constitutionally reserved party seats for non-elected members. FUCK the National List.

[macmanx]

No Godzilla, not The Parthenon!

For this one, I found a photo of The Parthenon, and zoomed in a ridiculous amount to the right for a “realistic” setting.

And, let’s be honest, minifig Godzilla is never going to scale properly.

[jasvvy]

[akanemnon]

Yeah, Kris is definitely NOT alright.

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