i learned that at least one of the victims of the Vesuvius Eruption in 79 C.E was found with a vitrified brain. In other words their brain was turned to glass due to the extreme heat (x)

The way that we learn about Helen Keller in school is an absolute outrage. We read “The Miracle Worker”- the miracle worker referring to her teacher; she’s not even the title character in her own story. The narrative about disabled people that we are comfortable with follows this format- “overcoming” disability. Disabled people as children.

Helen Keller as an adult, though? She was a radical socialist, a fierce disability advocate, and a suffragette. There’s no reason she should not be considered a feminist icon, btw, and the fact that she isn’t is pure ableism- while other white feminists of that time were blatent racists, she was speaking out against Woodrew Wilson because of his vehement racism. She supported woman’s suffrage and birth control. She was an anti-war speaker. She was an initial donor to the NAACP. She spoke out about the causes of blindness- often disease caused by poverty and poor working conditions. She was so brave and outspoken that the FBI had a file on her because of all the trouble she caused.

Yet when we talk about her, it’s either the boring, inspiration porn story of her as a child and her heroic teacher, or as the punchline of ableist, misogynistic jokes. It’s not just offensive, it’s downright disgusting.

the reason the story stops once hellen keller learns to talk is no one wanted to listen to what she had to say

how’s that for a fucking punchline

Another part of the story that is often conveniently omitted is that Anne Sullivan, the “miracle worker” in question, was also a visually impaired woman (and abolitionist) who faced her own struggles finding accessible education. That was why she was able to teach Helen Keller and connect her with resources that would allow her to flourish in academia. When Helen Keller was railing against poverty-induced diseases that caused blindness, she was talking about things like trachoma which was what had caused her friend’s vision loss.

The fact that Sullivan is often portrayed as able-bodied in retellings of their story is indicative of the narrative that is most comfortable for an ableist society: that accessibility and equality are gifts bestowed upon the disabled by able-bodied heroes. Disabled children are never taught that they have the power to lift each other up, and that’s a crying shame.

anyone wanna form a tight knit group of highly influential artists with future cult appeal

The Seed Song

Patreon / Store

I don't think any video game I've ever played that tries to deliberately play up the "liminal spaces" angle has ever achieved even a quarter the liminality captured by sheer accident in the act of backtracking in a certain brand of late 1990s to early 2000s console RPGs.

You know the ones – from that era where the idea of linear, event-driven stories had just caught on, but the practice of putting the world map itself on rails wasn't yet de rigeur, so you could in theory revisit anyplace you'd ever been, including the areas that literally only existed for the purpose of one specific setpiece.

When you returned to such an area, all of the monsters and NPCs would be gone, and there'd be no music or audio ambience because no non-event-related soundtrack for that area had ever been written, which made the game's regular sound effects seem conspicuously louder. Just wandering around in this empty, silent backdrop; maybe you'd run into an NPC the devs forgot to dummy out who still acts like the event is ongoing, repeating now-contextless lines of dialogue and gesturing frantically at thin air. Maybe you'd stumble upon a treasure chest you missed the first time around, and the "item get" jingle would crack like a gunshot. Maybe there'd even be a room where the devs neglected to unset the event flag, and you'd suddenly be assailed by pulse-pounding techno heralding the approach of absolutely nothing.

Like, forget the Backrooms – give me a game that plays with that.

Pretend, for example, that you were born in Chicago and have never had the remotest desire to visit Hong Kong, which is only a name on a map for you; pretend that some convulsion, sometimes called accident, throws you into connection with a man or a woman who lives in Hong Kong; and that you fall in love. Hong Kong will immediately cease to be a name and become the center of your life. And you may never know how many people live in Hong Kong. But you will know that one man or one woman lives there without whom you cannot live. And this is how our lives are changed, and this is how we are redeemed.

What a journey this life is! Dependent, entirely, on things unseen. If your lover lives in Hong Kong and cannot get to Chicago, it will be necessary for you to go to Hong Kong. Perhaps you will spend your life there, and never see Chicago again. And you will, I assure you, as long as space and time divide you from anyone you love, discover a great deal about shipping routes, airlines, earth quake, famine, disease, and war. And you will always know what time it is in Hong Kong, for you love someone who lives there. And love will simply have no choice but to go into battle with space and time and, furthermore, to win.

—James Baldwin, The Price of the Ticket

Truth

When I'm in charge of the planet, it will be illegal to make a job posting unless you are actively searching for a candidate.

Lean staffing will also be illegal. If you need three people to do a job, you're hiring four.

You are also either earning an amount or you are not earning that amount. 'Earn up to 21.50/hr' no. Either you're paying 21.50 or you are not paying 21.50. Tell the truth or jail for employer for 1000 years.

If someone asks for 2 years experience for an entry level job paying just above minimum wage, you should be legally permitted to launch them into the fucking sun.

so ? ?? did fox mulder fly to chicago early just. grinning ear to ear like, “how do i show my wife, yet again, that i’m the Most Dramatic Person in the Universe? oh yeah i know, i’ll rise from a steam vent like the phantom of the frickin opera. yeah. yeah she’ll dig that”

brutalist kitty

Aug 1st. it’s cement awareness month.

so that’s a conk creat baby, you’d say

People are always complaining about shifts in grammar feeling wrong to them, but when I was a kid it was still considered an error in formal English to apply the possessive pronoun to inanimate objects – i.e., you couldn't say "any die whose value is X", you had to say "a die the value of which is X" – and people pulling the stick out of their collective ass over that one is literally the best thing that ever happened to me.

Them: It's like [show] can't decide whether it wants to be arc-driven or episodic, so it tries to have it both ways and ends up with all the drawbacks of both approaches and none of the benefits! It's impossible to watch casually because you need to know about these big, elaborate myth-arcs to understand what's going on, but that emotional investment never has any payoff because every single time the resolution is just "whoops, it turns out everybody was wrong about what's really going on" and everything reverts to the status quo.

Me: