#touristing

[bluedesignwall]

Another lovely summer’s day in London. So far I have done 26,432 steps. We still have to walk to a pub for dinner so there will be more steps added later. We scratched the surface of the V&A. So many amazing things to see there. Harrods was unreal. We saw the biggest Pride parade ever and we are constantly blown away by the number of people everywhere we went.

[hblayer]

watching the ships

[illusioncanthurtme--art]

Physically? I am sitting in my bedroom. Mentally? Spiritually? I AM DEAD ON THE FLOOR!!!!! THESE TWO HAVE KILLED ME!!!!

(Another drawing! This was originally attempt #1 at drawing stan, and then fiddleford just showed up. Kinda feels like them five minutes after the above acting like nothing happened though, so it works sdjkgkjfshj)

[sea-salted-wolverine]

So there are some perks to living in a tourist destination. There are a lot of detractors mostly that you cannot shoot the tourists because you rely on them for your income but you have a semi captive audience with no context for any of the bullshit you spew. You can tell these people anything and they will believe you, the trusted friendly local. Now this is a very much Spider-Man situation where Great Power begets Great Audacity and even worse Responsibility.

My buddy goes on a run and when hes done there is a bar near a creek. So he wades into the creek because the day is hot and the water is cold.

Tourists ask what hes up to, with his running stuff he didn't want wet piled on the shore and him very obviously cooling off in the water. He says he's fishing.

But now here is why I am telling you this story. The universe occasionally aligns in such a way that we get to really really fuck with people and their perception of said universe. The opportunities do not come often and when they come you must seize the day. This is what my buddy did.

So this Creek runs through town and as a result of the highway and neighborhoods and culverts and roads it does not have a great salmon run. It's a short Creek the headwaters are only a few miles from the ocean it never had a great salmon run to begin with. But there are salmon.

One such fish brushes past my buddy's leg. Immediately he knees the fish like he is juggling a soccer ball and pops it out of the water, then slaps it out of the air on to the shore.

This is dumb luck. He could not do this again if he spent years training. Noodling (catching fish with your hands) is a thing that is legal to do with salmon but it is so much harder than literally every other way to catch salmon, including grabbing them with a garbage can. What he just managed is the kind of thing that should make you want to grab the fish and swing it around your head like a stripper with her panties off.

But,

He has an audience.

This is the opportunity offered by the universe.

He plays it cool.

He puts on dead pan straight face on and wades up to shore to grab his fish and nod to the tourists. Someone asks something and he assures them this is the standard way to get a quick dinner here. The tour guide has caught up with his group. He looks at my buddy and his fish and the general lack of fishing accoutrement. Without missing a beat, the guide backs up every ounce of bullshit out of my buddys mouth because if there is one true fraternity it is locals bullshitting stupid tourists.

[becausegoodheroesdeservekidneys]

You guuuuuys, you are going to be. So. Jealous. Of what I did today

So Amgueddfa Cymru is the umbrella super museum in Wales, and it is in charge of multiple museums around the country. Seven branches specifically. Entry to each is free, and each commemorates a different facet of Welsh history and culture; of the seven, I had (until a few hours ago) been to five. I've done Caerleon Roman Museum and Amphitheatre, Cardiff Museum, St Ffagan Folk Museum of Welsh Life, Big Pit Coal Mining Museum, and Swansea Waterfront Museum. I have yet to do the Slate Museum in Eryri.

And today, I went to:

The National Wool Museum

YEAH THAT'S RIGHT we have a national wool museum. It's so cool. We arrived at lunchtime so we started in the cafe and we had soup and also cheese and leek Welsh cakes. Except the soup was so Welsh it was correctly served with a piece of cheese:

AS IT SHOULD

Anyway, the building was a wool mill once upon a time, and half of the machinery still works, and still produces 100% woollen textiles. Also they run workshops for knitting and weaving and stuff. But you follow the rooms around and they show you the full process, from fleece to flannel.

BUT ALSO at each stop they had little stands where you could try a bit for yourselves. So for example, there was an exhibit where you could card fleece by hand, with a pile of washed fleece beside, and you could just... go ham with the carding.

I deliberately tried not to photograph literally everything. But here's a lil collection:

I should have taken a picture of the carding, actually, that was my favourite.

OH MY GOD YEAH and also, they had a section on the uses of the wool. A whole display of traditional Welsh blankets, trad and modern clothes, and, of course, instructions for how to cwtch a baby in a shawl, which was so lovely because that's what my Welsh paternal grandmother taught my English mother to do with me as a baby.

Anyway, then the gift shop sold balls of 100% wool in many fun colours, and tabletop looms, and books on how to knit/weave, and bags of roving that you could spin yourself, and plushie sheep and dragons. And Welsh blankets and shawls/scarves and that.

Anyway, you lot are textile nerds. You should all go. It's in the tiniest village in Ceredigion and it is the BEST.

[ladywaterfall]

This pony’s special talent is: to discover Vietnam!

[oderu]

pt.1

pt.2 our second pair of twins… the pines bros

closeups

[poorly-drawn-mdzs]

PD-MDZS: The Hallmark Episode.

[sleepy-bebby]

[mzuul]

CUNTY DRACO

Thank you to @the-forbidden-forest for creating the best Draco dtiys chain ever! I had to draw my own!

[tanookitalez]

what replaying undertale in 2024 feels like

[mudwerks]

(via The Famous Chicago Rat Hole - Neatorama)

Winslow Dumaine, a comedian, writer, and artist in Chicago, tweeted that he recently made a pilgrimage to the famous Chicago Rat Hole.

This is one of the Windy City's most famous tourist attractions, second only to the Art Institute of Chicago for drawing crowds.

The origins of Chicago Rat Hole are shrouded in mystery. Legend holds that while the concrete for this sidewalk at 1918 West Roscoe Street was being poured, a rat fell in, forever marking the sidewalk with an imprint of its own body. Other Chicagoans contend that it was a squirrel, not a rat.

[bricktoygrapher]

Alien tourist 👽 📸

[lesbianrecorderplayer]

I love how in the literal first episode of the show, Dipper reads the sentence "in Gravity Falls, there is no one you can trust", then 3 seconds later Mabel says "are you actually not gonna tell me?" at which point Dipper, without a MOMENT'S hesitation, tells her exactly what's going on. And that's the whole show. Mabel IS trustworthy. And as much as Dipper relies on the journal throughout the show, his love of Mabel doesn't waiver once. He breaks Ford's trauma cycle without even trying.

[sofipitch]

So we were on vacation visiting some pretty Catholic church not for mass but just to see and there was a spot for vigil candles and at the time they were like 25 cents (they are like one or two dollars now, even prayers get hit by inflation I guess) and my mom paid for both me and my brother (~5 yrs old at the time) to light one. She explained that it's usually for someone who died or you feel needs a prayer. I lit one for a family member who passed, I didn't remember but my mom told me a lot about her and really loved her. My mom was tearing up a little in happiness that that person was on my little kid mind. And my brother, who was obsessed with the Charlie and the Chocolate Factory movie lit one for Willy Wonka