The children are learning about the US Civil War. I can’t say it’s going well. (On the bright side, they’re very clear about slavery. We’re solid on that front. It’s the actual war we’re having trouble with.)

“Ms. T, why would his parents name him that?”

I frantically flip through the possible Civil War leaders they could be referencing. “… Well, you know how Stonewall got his nickname, and we’ve talked about Tecumseh, so there’s Sherman, and -”

“No, not them.” They roll their eyes at my ignorance, then pivot back to the point at hand. “That other guy. Useless.” As this describes a number of Civil War leaders, I blink uncomprehendingly at her. “You know, Ms. T, Useless. Useless Grant.”

“Um. … Well -”

Another child raises their hand. “Ms. T, I don’t understand number three.”

Number three is a question about the Battle of Bull Run, asking for explanations about a Confederate victory despite Union advantages. “What paragraph are you looking in?” I ask in a monotone, because I’ve been fielding this question all day.

The student points at the correct paragraph, even focuses in on the quote about Jackson holding off a Union advance. “It says Jackson and the men ‘screamed like furries,’ Ms. T, but why would that help?”

I cough. I cover my mouth with both hands. “That’s ‘furies,’ sweetie,” I inform them, still wheezing. “Like they’re insane with anger,” I elaborate, deciding to skip describing actual furies at this point in time. “Not … not like furries.”

So, here’s how the war is going, one week in: Useless Grant has been made general of the Union forces, but a bunch of furries are preventing him from gaining much ground.

George Michael: Freedom (2017)

Here is EVERY deal Hamas has tried to strike with Israel. It was never about the hostages.

Tonight, we remember one who lent his enormous talent to telling the story we have all come to love. Hail, the victorious dead!

May the Simbelmynë cover his tomb as it did the tomb of the one he so accurately portrayed.

Bernard Hill Dec 17, 1944 - May 5, 2024

there's a public consultation on sunak's stupid ''no more sick leave work yourselves to death'' idea which closes 8th July 2024.

uk people you know the drill: polite but firm about how this is economically and socially a stupid fucking idea

non uk people please share for visibility

because sometimes there are invisible tests and invisible rules and you're just supposed to ... know the rule. someone you thought of as a friend asks you for book recommendations, so you give her a list of like 30 books, each with a brief blurb and why you like it. later, you find out she screenshotted the list and send it out to a group chat with the note: what an absolute freak can you believe this. you saw the responses: emojis where people are rolling over laughing. too much and obsessive and actually kind of creepy in the comments. you thought you'd been doing the right thing. she'd asked, right? an invisible rule: this is what happens when you get too excited.

you aren't supposed to laugh at your own jokes, so you don't, but then you're too serious. you're not supposed to be too loud, but then people say you're too quiet. you aren't supposed to get passionate about things, but then you're shy, boring. you aren't supposed to talk too much, but then people are mad when you're not good at replying.

you fold yourself into a prettier paper crane. since you never know what is "selfish" and what is "charity," you give yourself over, fully. you'd rather be empty and over-generous - you'd rather eat your own boundaries than have even one person believe that you're mean. since you don't know what the thing is that will make them hate you, you simply scrub yourself clean of any form of roughness. if you are perfect and smiling and funny, they can love you. if you are always there for them and never admit what's happening and never mention your past and never make them uncomfortable - you can make up for it. you can earn it.

don't fuck up. they're all testing you, always. they're tolerating you. whatever secret club happened, over a summer somewhere - during some activity you didn't get to attend - everyone else just... figured it out. like they got some kind of award or examination that allowed them to know how-to-be-normal. how to fit. and for the rest of your life, you've been playing catch-up. you've been trying to prove that - haha! you get it! that the joke they're telling, the people they are, the manual they got- yeah, you've totally read it.

if you can just divide yourself in two - the lovable one, and the one that is you - you can do this. you can walk the line. they can laugh and accept you. if you are always-balanced, never burdensome, a delight to have in class, champagne and glittering and never gawky or florescent or god-forbid cringe: you can get away with it.

you stare at your therapist, whom you can make jokes with, and who laughs at your jokes, because you are so fucking good at people-pleasing. you smile at her, and she asks you how you're doing, and you automatically say i'm good, thanks, how are you? while the answer swims somewhere in your little lizard brain:

how long have you been doing this now? mastering the art of your body and mind like you're piloting a puppet. has it worked? what do you mean that all you feel is... just exhausted. pick yourself up, the tightrope has no net. after all, you're cheating, somehow, but nobody seems to know you actually flunked the test. it's working!

aren't you happy yet?

"girl dinner is when you don't eat teehee" "men think about the roman empire women think about their ex best friends and poetry" "✨sapphic love✨ is so pure and innocent and sweet unlike nasty gross Man Lust" "girl math is when you can buy starbucks and makeup because you didn't buy it yesterday so it's free" "I'm going to explain (complex topic) for the girlies! so basically it's like when you go shopping-" "I love women because they're so soft and smooth and feminine and we can talk about girly things and they're not sweaty or hairy or horny like gross men" "women should be unemployed girls don't need jobs men should do all that for us" "ugh girls that don't like pink or being feminine just need to stop being such pick mes and get over their internalized misogyny it's gross"

god save my hairy dyke ass from this hell before I start whacking people's shins with my Girl Baseball Bat. teehee!

The most fascinating and undoubtedly my favourite aspect of the way Black Sails references and reinterpets Classics (in this post, classics = ancient Greek & Roman) is not any singular instance of reincorporation. It's not the parallels between Julius and Julius Caesar, Augustus Featherstone and Augustus (Octavian), Miranda and Clytemenestra/Cassandra, the Homer references, or even the fact that the first half of season 3 is essentially the plot of book 1 of Virgil's Aeneid. It's not even how skilfully these references are inserted so that you can totally miss them if you're not looking.

It's the fact that they're there at all. I go a little bit crazy if I think about this so much because it's not a meaningless incorporation at all, it's the direct opposite of referencing something "just because you can." It means SO MUCH that Black Sails is drawing so heavily on the study of Classics because that study was so incredibly directly in British imperialism and colonialism. Historically, not just in Britain, studies of the classics were used as major templates and justifications for colonialism. The Athenians were a democracy. They believed, theoretically, that you shouldn't impose your way of life on others, that you should be tolerant and all should be equal. They were also heavily imperialist, arguing that their empire was a gift and if they relented their military presence their ability to preserve their ideals of freedom and democracy would be compromised. The British Empire literally based their system of imperalism directly off of the Roman Empire. The system we see in Black Sails, of governors and provinces, was taken directly from the Romans.

So it is so. fucking cool that a story not only tackling imperialism and colonialism, but also tackling the stories that allow imperialism and colonialism to continue, is using and reinterpreting classics like this. It's so fucking perfect. "These are the stories they tell their children." "This is how they survive." "England survives because we cannot imagine a world without her." These same stories of Virgil, Aeschylus, Homer, etc, are all part of a bank of narratives used by imperialist forces to justify the historical basis of their imperialism. their reincorporation makes so much fucking sense jdkfjdkfkdfjkdfjd

"A century of gradual reforestation across the American East and Southeast has kept the region cooler than it otherwise would have become, a new study shows.

The pioneering study of progress shows how the last 25 years of accelerated reforestation around the world might significantly pay off in the second half of the 21st century.

Using a variety of calculative methods and estimations based on satellite and temperature data from weather stations, the authors determined that forests in the eastern United States cool the land surface by 1.8 – 3.6°F annually compared to nearby grasslands and croplands, with the strongest effect seen in summer, when cooling amounts to 3.6 – 9°F.

The younger the forest, the more this cooling effect was detected, with forest trees between 20 and 40 years old offering the coolest temperatures underneath.

“The reforestation has been remarkable and we have shown this has translated into the surrounding air temperature,” Mallory Barnes, an environmental scientist at Indiana University who led the research, told The Guardian.

“Moving forward, we need to think about tree planting not just as a way to absorb carbon dioxide but also the cooling effects in adapting for climate change, to help cities be resilient against these very hot temperatures.”

The cooling of the land surface affected the air near ground level as well, with a stepwise reduction in heat linked to reductions in near-surface air temps.

“Analyses of historical land cover and air temperature trends showed that the cooling benefits of reforestation extend across the landscape,” the authors write. “Locations surrounded by reforestation were up to 1.8°F cooler than neighboring locations that did not undergo land cover change, and areas dominated by regrowing forests were associated with cooling temperature trends in much of the Eastern United States.”

By the 1930s, forest cover loss in the eastern states like the Carolinas and Mississippi had stopped, as the descendants of European settlers moved in greater and greater numbers into cities and marginal agricultural land was abandoned.

The Civilian Conservation Corps undertook large replanting efforts of forests that had been cleared, and this is believed to be what is causing the lower average temperatures observed in the study data.

However, the authors note that other causes, like more sophisticated crop irrigation and increases in airborne pollutants that block incoming sunlight, may have also contributed to the lowering of temperatures over time. They also note that tree planting might not always produce this effect, such as in the boreal zone where increases in trees are linked with increases in humidity that way raise average temperatures."

-via Good News Network, February 20, 2024

Squirts my T gel directly into this persons eyes, blinding them due to its high alcohol content

last night I had a dream that I met Bill and Ted, and I complimented Bills crop top and said something about how I would wear crop tops if my body was less bogus and he put a hand on my shoulder and said “what’s truly bogus is the way you think about yourself” and Ted nodded solemnly and then I woke up