#please read the whole article

[kosmogrl]

100 small acts of love by The New York Times 💌

[svnflowermoon]

y'all go from being feminists to tearing these women down within seconds oh my god it's 2024 can we please stop viciously tearing one woman down to bring another up i don't care what side you take but saying vile shit about either woman and their music is disgusting, please grow up

[transfaabulous]

13 January, 2023

not a dream

Genetic genealogy is incredible.

So many Jane and John Does have been getting their names back in the past few years thanks to it. So many crimes have been solved.

Joseph Augustus Zarelli, formerly known as "The Boy in the Box" has been identified 65 years after being found.

He got a new headstone, and many people, among them the people who have been working on his case for years, were there to see it being unveiled.

[iwanthermidnightz]

*excerpts below — but I highly recommend reading the full article in link above*

Hit Me Hard and Soft dunks us headfirst back into that universe, from the deepest wallows of depression to the exhaustion that comes with the world speculating about her every move. There are no arachnids where they shouldn’t be, but getting in touch with her darker side has Eilish finally feeling like herself again. “I feel like this album is me,” she says. “It’s not a character. It feels like the When We All Fall Asleep, Where Do We Go? version of me. It feels like my youth and who I was as a kid.”

Although 2019 felt like a whirlwind of madness at the time, she has found herself missing it. “It was the best time of my life,” she says. “This whole process has felt like I’m coming back to the girl that I was. I’ve been grieving her. I’ve been looking for her in everything, and it’s almost like she got drowned by the world and the media. I don’t remember when she went away.”

The title Hit Me Hard and Soft derives from a conversation she had with Finneas, when she mistakenly thought the name of a synth in Logic Pro was called Hit Me Hard and Soft. “I thought it was such a perfect encapsulation of what this album does,” she explains. “It’s an impossible request: You can’t be hit hard and soft. You can’t do anything hard and soft at the same time. I’m a pretty extremist person, and I really like when things are really intense physically, but I also love when things are very tender and sweet. I want two things at once. So I thought that was a really good way to describe me, and I love that it’s not possible.”

Eilish and Finneas call Hit Me Hard and Soft “an album-ass album.” It’s not a concept record, but it is a self-consciously cohesive set of songs, inspired by auteurist works from the past 15 years or so, like Coldplay’s Viva La Vida, Lana Del Rey’s Born to Die, Tyler, the Creator’s Goblin, Marina and the Diamonds’ Electra Heart, and Vince Staples’ Big Fish Theory.

“Lunch,” a complete 180 in both sound and subject content. It’s a sexy, bass-heavy banger where Eilish is crushing on a girl so hard she likens sex with her to devouring a meal. Finneas remembers playing this moment for Interscope and witnessing the team shift in their seats. “What’s funny about starting the album with [the opener] is that it is a total false promise,” he says. “If you’re remembering ‘What Was I Made For?’ and then you hear [it], you go, ‘Oh, OK. I understand this world.’ Then the drums come in [on “Lunch”], and it really is the kill-the-main-character-type beat. It’s like Drew Barrymore being in the first five minutes of Scream and then they kill her. You’re like, ‘They can’t kill Drew. Oh, my God, they killed Drew!’”

Eilish and I spend a lot of time talking about the new era she is about to kick off, and how she’ll promote Hit Me Hard and Soft while prioritizing her mental health, privacy, and well-being. With all of that in mind, I wonder if she’s ready for journalists to pepper her with questions about the album’s subject matter, particularly the sexual nature of “Lunch.” “That song was actually part of what helped me become who I am, to be real,” Eilish says. “I wrote some of it before even doing anything with a girl, and then wrote the rest after. I’ve been in love with girls for my whole life, but I just didn’t understand — until, last year, I realized I wanted my face in a vagina. I was never planning on talking about my sexuality ever, in a million years. It’s really frustrating to me that it came up.”

Eilish is referring to her interview with Variety last fall, in which she mentioned she was attracted to women. The quote — “I’m attracted to them for real” — became a national headline. The following month, Eilish attended Variety’s Hitmakers event in L.A. While on the red carpet, she was asked if she intentionally came out in the story. “No, I didn’t,” she told them. “But I kind of thought, ‘Wasn’t it obvious?’” Eilish then posted about it on Instagram, with a caption that read, “Thanks Variety for my award and for also outing me on a red carpet at 11 a.m. instead of talking about anything else that matters. I like boys and girls leave me alone about it please literally who cares.”

Looking back, Eilish admits she overreacted with the Instagram post. “Who fucking cares?” she says. “The whole world suddenly decided who I was, and I didn’t get to say anything or control any of it. Nobody should be pressured into being one thing or the other, and I think that there’s a lot of wanting labels all over the place. Dude, I’ve known people that don’t know their sexuality, or feel comfortable with it, until they’re in their forties, fifties, sixties. It takes a while to find yourself, and I think it’s really unfair, the way that the internet bullies you into talking about who you are and what you are.”

As for that red-carpet quote that made all the headlines, Eilish says she tried to think of a response that would be entertaining for her fans and the internet. “I went into Billie Eilish interview mode, [like], ‘Oh, I don’t care. Yeah, I’ll say whatever. Wasn’t it obvious?’” she says. “And then afterwards I was like, ‘Wait. It wasn’t obvious to me.’”

Thinking about it now, she draws a bigger lesson from that moment. “I know everybody’s been thinking this about me for years and years, but I’m only figuring out myself now,” she says. “And honestly, what I said was funny, because I really was just saying what they’ve all been saying.” She adds that she liked the journalist she was talking to and didn’t want to be rude. But she still felt exploited. “Bro, I have asthma out here,” she says. “I fucking can’t take a breath.”

If Eilish had the opportunity to do it over again on the red carpet, she says, she wouldn’t have answered the question. But she acknowledges it could have been worse. “I’m lucky enough to be in a time when I’m able to say something like that and things go OK for me,” she says. “And that’s not how a lot of people’s experience is.”

Eilish has officially decided to make some changes to the way she presents herself to the world. “This album, to me, feels like a way to restart, in terms of my sharing,” she says. So let’s take a second to reintroduce Billie Eilish, the home-schooled bohemian who captured our attention as a teenager. She’s 22 now, yet she’s more self-aware than people twice her age. She would like some space to grow, to figure out exactly who she is — no label required. She is not the poster child for anything. And she is not, she’d like to note, a TED Talk speaker. So where does that leave us? Eilish sums things up with four simple words that point to her desire for normalcy and acceptance.

“I’m just a girl.”

[inloveforevr]

I think critical thinking should be compulsory in schools and universities. Wdym you’re accepting a snippet of a news article as reality???? Please go to the source and read the whole article 😭 and read from a reputable site !! And read multiple articles about the subject. It’s so easy to get absorbed in fear mongering but please pause and use the critical part of your brain. There are so many books/studies to lean into and while academia is sadly not accessible to all, pls question the information you’re internalising.

[thatsgoodweather]

"Journalists and politicians call it war. The informed and honest call it genocide.

What I see is a holocaust – the incomprehensible culmination of 75 years of Israeli impunity for persistent war crimes.

Rafah is the southernmost part of Gaza, where Israel crammed 1.4 million people into a space the size of London��s Heathrow Airport.

Water, food, electricity, fuel and supplies are scarce. Children are without school – their classrooms having been turned into makeshift shelters for tens of thousands of families.

Nearly every inch of previously empty space is now occupied by a flimsy tent sheltering a family.

There are barely any trees left, as people have been forced to cut them down for firewood.

I didn’t register the absence of greenery until I happened upon a red bougainvillea. Its flowers were dusty and alone in a deflowered world, but still alive.

The incongruity struck me and I stopped the car to photograph it.

Now I look for greenery and flowers wherever I go – so far in the southern and middle areas (though the middle increasingly became more difficult to enter). But there are only small patches of grass here and there and an occasional tree waiting to be burned to bake bread for a family subsisting on UN rations of canned beans, canned meat and canned cheese.

A proud people with rich culinary traditions and habits of fresh foods have been reduced and accustomed to a handful of pastes and mush that have been sitting on shelves for so long that all you can taste is the metallic rancidity of the cans."

susan abulhawa | The Electronic Intifada | 6 March 2024

[hyperfixationsstation]

do I want to know how they're hating on AC now (sorry don't have Twitter and it won't show me the tweets without an account)

they really said oop my bad we mean angel city only like what 😭😭😭😭

[sea-changed]

"When the tactics of the Spanish-American War showed the wisdom of some semblance of camouflage, blue gave way to khaki [in U.S. Army uniforms] and eventually to the olive-brown tones of Dwight Eisenhower’s famous short jacket. The standard-issue olive drabs, or 'O.D.s,' were openly derided. 'It was a shade that might have reminded an imaginative observer of the color of vomit or even excrement,' the cultural critic Paul Fussell wrote in his 2002 book, 'Uniforms.' After V-J Day, it became existentially necessary for the Army to address its image problem. Olive drab was a drag on morale and a handicap to recruitment, and the mass entry of army clothes to the civilian life, as worn by veterans to tend their lawns or to pump a customer’s gas, further eroded its prestige.

"In 1949, the Office of the Quartermaster General set about stabilizing the army uniform, and its search for a new color may have represented the most extensive development and market-testing process in the history of both apparel and bureaucracy. An advisory committee ruled that a neutral gray-green would be 'flattering to the greatest range of people,' according to a later technical report. A team from the Quartermaster Corps proposed army uniforms to about 15,000 troops in 24 cities [and] quantified the relative enthusiasm of recruits, veterans and officers’ wives[.]

"[...] Phased in between the mid-’50s and early ’60s, the army green field uniform projected “the confidence and readiness of an authoritative military force,” the historian Shelby Stanton wrote in 'U.S. Army Uniforms of the Cold War, 1948-1973.' 'Army green,' Stanton felt, 'complemented the U.S. desire to project the most professional soldiering image toward its Cold War adversaries.'"

Troy Patterson, "How the Army Jacket Became a Staple of Civilian Garb" (New York Times)

[sheliesshattered]

the number of times that I've been actively researching a scientific topic in preparation for writing a sci-fi story that incorporates that topic

and then brand new info on that topic is released into the scientific community. while I'm in the midst of reading up on it

is too damn high, and honestly starting to get a little spooky

[reisspieces]

lewis said he wanted to make chelsea a ‘diverse club’ 😃😃😃😃😃 whatever that means

literally what does that even mean

[weirdbabs]

i think this is one of my favorite pages. panel 2 and 8 max are adorable, isabel looks so free dancing around, creating paper waves and whirlpools, and the colors are warm and beautiful

[erotesianangel]

A friend of mine interviewed one of the founders of the nun-themed drag group the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence! It's a fun little read and glimpse into a slice of queer history

[thats-a-lot-of-cortisol]

My mom just sent a message to the family group chat suggesting that my siblings download the 'For the Strength of Youth' magazine on their Gospel Library app and talked about how much the youth magazines helped her testimony growing up and like, cool. Fine. Don't know why the 'sending random spiritual thoughts in the gc' thing started out of nowhere when it hadn't been a thing for a decade but this is just another one of those, and you're ofc allowed to talk about things that are significant in your life.

I don't think sending the 'What I Did When Someone Close to Me Challenged My Faith' article right afterwards was strictly necessary though 🙃

[fakecats]

there's no such thing as "me," now / as hard as you look, nowhere to be found / i can't remember a single role i was suited for - lyrics from dramaturgy by eve

[justaslime]

Currently reading one of only two academic articles about Dracula Daily so far and I absolutely loooooooove being part of an ant colony under a microscope, like yes girlies, try to make sense of this, I’m begging you