1. Sierra de Órganos National Park, made with Nahua Textiles

2. Tapalpa Church, made with Otomi Textiles

3. Chichen Itza, made with Tzotzil & Maya Textiles

4. Iglesia de Nuestra Señora de los Remedios, made with Nahua Textiles

5. Desert Sunset, made with Huichol Textiles

I might work a little more on these, since I have until the 19th to finish, but in any case, for my Art final (my last final before graduating) we had to do a 5 piece series on whatever subject/topic we desired. So I recreated stock photos of Mexico (that I purchased), using Indigenous textiles.

Despite my professors thoughts, I made the choice to stick to one indigenous group per piece, as I don’t enjoy the common view of seeing indigenous groups as a monolith.

If you struggle with self-doubt or caring what people think or being self conscious- your late 30s/early 40s are a revelation! You are gradually released from so much of that stuff. It’s so freeing. Hang in there and don’t be afraid of aging, make it your own

listen. aging into your thirties rocks. yes your joints get a little creaky. yes you can’t sleep in a pretzel on the floor anymore after a concert or a convention. and you lose some friends. but the thing is that you sort out who your real friends are and you sort out who you really are. and you get to see your friends settling into careers they like, and adopt new dogs and cats, and you find a job you can stand, and get really good at arts and crafts, and maybe that book you loved as a kid gets a movie deal and it doesn’t suck, and you learn to like new food and bake your own bread, and you realize that the great portfolio of self harm scars you all used to curate are going white with age and not updated, and half your friends are a different gender now and so much happier and maybe you are too, and you know who you are, and that it’s a journey and not a revelation. it’s a direction you’re headed, and you’re enjoying the trip.

reaching your 30′s rocks. and i’m hearing good things about what comes next, too.

Do it for the meme. http://blinkingguy.com

jeff buckley

Bug of the Day - Arachtober!

Check out the amazing long leglashes on this orchard orbweaver (Leucauge venusta)!

Woot woot! Arachtober!

Bug of the Day

OMG it's Arachtober!!! Please enjoy this Hoy's jumping spider (Evarcha hoyi) I photographed at a bioblitz last month, and stay tuned for a spoodiferous month.

Illustration of the Works of Mercy, from Sarah Fuller, LA Catholic Worker. 

“Conditions are never perfect. “Someday” is a disease that will take your dreams to the grave with you. If it’s important to you, and you want to do it “eventually”, just do it - and correct your course along the way.”

— Tim Ferriss

The new characters, meanwhile, aren’t just new—they’re deeply ordinary, an unusual trait for Star Wars protagonists. Rogue One’s heroine, Jyn Erso (played by Felicity Jones), isn’t a princess; she begins the film as a disillusioned nobody, uninterested in leading or assisting anyone. Diego Luna’s Cassian Andor is a captain in the Rebel Alliance, but he makes clear that his story is not special: His remorse over what he’s done in the war echoes the feelings of countless other fighters. Even K-2SO (voiced by Alan Tudyk), the Imperial droid reprogrammed to assist Cassian, is defined by profoundly human motivations, sacrificing himself for the greater good and, in doing so, becoming just another nameless casualty of war.

When the film was released, many critics saw these archetypal traits as a weakness, arguing that the new characters felt shallow next to the backstory-laden Skywalker types. But Jyn’s crew allows Rogue One to observe the world of Star Wars from an unexpected angle: the ground-level, midi-chlorian-free, lightsaber-less foot-soldier perspective, where decisions have to be made on morsels of intelligence and where, more often than not, one’s moral compass is the only reliable tool available. In the growing library of spin-offs, Rogue One’s quotidian ensemble feels refreshing: These characters are not royalty. They’re not related to anyone audiences have previously met. They’re not superpowered in any way. In fact, they have very little power at all.

Of course, it’s impossible to discuss these characters without noting the way Rogue One ends: with all of them dead. The film concludes with a coda that underlines the hope their mission brought to the Rebel Alliance, but the finality of their stories hits hard. The film’s audience knows going in that the characters’ central mission will succeed, but Rogue One uses that to its advantage, enriching both the story it’s telling and the larger universe it’s serving. No other Star Wars film depicts so viscerally the brutality of actual war, and few franchises have dared to permanently kill off so many so quickly. In The Rise of Skywalker, the Sith Lord Palpatine returns “somehow.” Every character dusted in the Marvel Cinematic Universe makes it back just fine. Even the humans in Jurassic World aren’t getting eaten anymore. Rogue One’s deaths show the everyday toll of the conflict that exists in the backdrop of every Star Wars movie.

Most of you, by now, will have read about the sudden and unexpected passing of Hilary Mantel; a writer who I've come to admire enormously in recent years. I thought I'd collect together a masterpost of my favourites among her shorter essays, that you can read for free online:

No Passport Required (2002) - on nationality and identity

Written On Our Bodies (2003) - on female infertility and medical misogyny

Holy Disorders (2004) - on anorexia and sainthood

'Every part of my body hurt' (2004) - on endometriosis

Author, Author (2008) - on Virago Modern Classics, publishers of neglected women's fiction

Night Visions (2008) - on dreams and writing fiction

'Looking for female role models in nineteenth century novels' (2009)

The Shape We're In (2009) - fatphobia in relation to feminism and capitalism

The War Against Women (2009) - on 'A History of Women' by Marilyn French

Women Over 50 - The Invisible Generation (2009) - on aging and womanhood

Anne Boleyn: Witch, Bitch, Temptress, Feminist (2012)

'You have to experience it to know what fat is like' (2013) - on fatphobia

Hilary Mantel On Grief (2014)

'Endometriosis took my fertility, and part of my self' (2015)

Elizabeth Jane Howard: Hilary Mantel on the Novelist She Tells Everyone to Read (2016)

The Princess Myth (2017) - on Princess Diana

The Welsh Viking is pretty cool! 

“You were always very kind.” “I hope that still counts for something.” “It’s the only thing that counts.”

— Marilynne Robinson, from Home

why did we as a society stop putting gargoyles on everything. what fucking loser looked at a building and was like no actually this doesn’t need a horrid little creacher

postcard c1910

I shall pass through this world but once, any good thing therefore I can do, or any kindness I can show to any human being, let me do it now, let me not defer it or neglect it for I shall not pass this way again.

I was in line at Aldi and this girl with two toddlers in front of me had her card declined and she looked so fucking sad and said “let me call my husband real quick” and it was only 18 dollars, so I just paid for it, and she was very sweet and then as she walked off, the lady behind me said `”You know that was probably a scam, right?” and like, even if it was, like what a sad fucking scam, right? 18 dollars at the Aldi. If you’re “scamming” me for some Tyson chicken and apple juice and cauliflower, then just take my fucking money. 

“A scam” people are fucking wild.  

The most fun thing about MASH is that all of the things your MASH-watching mutuals say about it, that sound unhinged on the level of Supernatural posts, are actually objectively true about the show