Date night for Chester and Norris

(+shoutout to @moofter for drawing the design on the mug 😌)

I was meeting a client at a famous museum’s lounge for lunch (fancy, I know) and had an hour to kill afterwards so I joined the first random docent tour I could find. The woman who took us around was a great-grandmother from the Bronx “back when that was nothing to brag about” and she was doing a talk on alternative mediums within art.

What I thought that meant: telling us about unique sculpture materials and paint mixtures.

What that actually meant: an 84yo woman gingerly holding a beautifully beaded and embroidered dress (apparently from Ukraine and at least 200 years old) and, with tears in her eyes, showing how each individual thread was spun by hand and weaved into place on a cottage floor loom, with bright blue silk embroidery thread and hand-blown beads intricately piercing the work of other labor for days upon days, as the labor of a dozen talented people came together to make something so beautiful for a village girl’s wedding day.

What it also meant: in 1948, a young girl lived in a cramped tenement-like third floor apartment in Manhattan, with a father who had just joined them after not having been allowed to escape through Poland with his pregnant wife nine years earlier. She sits in her father’s lap and watches with wide, quiet eyes as her mother’s deft hands fly across fabric with bright blue silk thread (echoing hands from over a century years earlier). Thread that her mother had salvaged from white embroidery scraps at the tailor’s shop where she worked and spent the last few days carefully dying in the kitchen sink and drying on the roof.

The dress is in the traditional Hungarian fashion and is folded across her mother’s lap: her mother doesn’t had a pattern, but she doesn’t need one to make her daughter’s dress for the fifth grade dance. The dress would end up differing significantly from the pure white, petticoated first communion dresses worn by her daughter’s majority-Catholic classmates, but the young girl would love it all the more for its uniqueness and bright blue thread.

And now, that same young girl (and maybe also the villager from 19th century Ukraine) stands in front of us, trying not to clutch the old fabric too hard as her voice shakes with the emotion of all the love and humanity that is poured into the labor of art. The village girl and the girl in the Bronx were very different people: different centuries, different religions, different ages, and different continents. But the love in the stitches and beads on their dresses was the same. And she tells us that when we look at the labor of art, we don’t just see the work to create that piece - we see the labor of our own creations and the creations of others for us, and the value in something so seemingly frivolous.

But, maybe more importantly, she says that we only admire this piece in a museum because it happened to survive the love of the wearer and those who owned it afterwards, but there have been quite literally billions of small, quiet works of art in billions of small, quiet homes all over the world, for millennia. That your grandmother’s quilt is used as a picnic blanket just as Van Gogh’s works hung in his poor friends’ hallways. That your father’s hand-painted model plane sets are displayed in your parents’ livingroom as Grecian vases are displayed in museums. That your older sister’s engineering drawings in a steady, fine-lined hand are akin to Da Vinci’s scribbles of flying machines.

I don’t think there’s any dramatic conclusions to be drawn from these thoughts - they’ve been echoed by thousands of other people across the centuries. However, if you ever feel bad for spending all of your time sewing, knitting, drawing, building lego sets, or whatever else - especially if you feel like you have to somehow monetize or show off your work online to justify your labor - please know that there’s an 84yo museum docent in the Bronx who would cry simply at the thought of you spending so much effort to quietly create something that’s beautiful to you.

I personally think that all whale sharks should be put on Mickey’s Dick Smasher.

WHAT!!!! they are such gentile creatures why would you say thst…

y’know what? FUCK you. i’m putting your ass in the control group. *injects you with boring saline instead of the fun and exciting glowing green goo i originally had planned*

i hope everyone in nintendo’s management department dies and goes to hell no matter what and i’m not kidding

Ideal Gravity Falls reboot for me would be if they just released a movie, takes place ten+ years in the future, Dipper and Mabel are adults now going back to gf for the summer and you know there’s a lot of like serious tonal shifts from the original work in that it actually plays a bit more in the horror and drama space that Disney might not have let it originally and one of those dramatic notes could be that when they get to the shack the grunkles aren’t there to greet them and no one really mentions it but they’re talking about stan in the past tense and maybe Dipper gets really defensive every time he’s brought up and this goes on for two hours and we’ve reached the climax and at the last moment it’s revealed that stan and ford aren’t dead or anything they just got pulled over for speeding and Stan got arrested for punching a cop

tweet of all time. truly

i think what pisses me off the most is that last year, nobody had trouble going against russia. companies dropped everything so they could keep russians off their sites, to block them from their news articles and to sanction in other ways. eurovision kicked it out. even steam, discord, any fucking western apps or websites have been so willing to perform in ‘activism’. musicians and celebrities speaking out and country-blocking their work, and so much more. but now what? where is all of that now for israel? where are all the brands leaving the country to ‘protest’? where is anything? what pisses me off the most is that none of them have actually really cared about ukraine, ever, and none of them care about palestine now.

I love the plot of Splatoon games because it’s just

“hello Young Child I am a War Veteran, you must help my grandchildren Taylor Swift and Billie Eilish to save our cities only form of energy. A giant fucking Eel. Have this gun.”

one of my beloved friends (very autism) was in.. not denial but ignorance sounds mean. but that abt themself last time you brought up the raads r test so i sent it to the gc (full of autism) and they were like psh. fake test no one could get below 100. they know now but i think about it so much

The thing is. When you take the autism test. And you see your score is in the 100 to 160 range. You think. Oh this is probably the middle? Middle autism. Tinge of autism. Your relatives calling you bright but shy autism. Just a whiff of autism. And then you see the score ranges. And you go. This test is lying to me there is absolutely no way the majority of people score under 65. The 65 number is such a low cutoff and so many of these experiences are clearly universal a score under 65 is something they made up in a lab. People who score under 65 are obviously scoring just under that mark from 59 to 64 and they’re also obviously lying or purposely misrepresenting their experiences as less severe than they are. And then you find out there are real people who get a 20 or 30 or 7 on it. And you go. Ah

i think it’s the most funny and romantic thing ever that they’re so attracted to each other in dangerous/deathly situations. in both those scenes, they are an absolute mess - percy covered in dirt, blood, and spiderwebs, and annabeth covered in muck and sewer water - and yet they find each other so beautiful. they could literally be about to DIE, and yet all they’re thinking is “wow you look so hot right now.” i just love when they percabeth like that. they are so funny.

also. perseus jackson, where the HELL were you going with that thought about the way her beads looked on her throat before you stopped yourself, young man?

It’s always either or

Some thoughts about who Eclipse is exactly

the BEST new pokémon in gen 9 btw are these two sanrio reject ass mice that count as one pokemon together

but they they silently evolve from level 25+ into the exact same two mice but now they have 1 or 2 kids with them. literally you open your party to discover that these two mice FUCKED in their pokeball and have now sprung their kid(s) on you

life changing field trip in kyoshi island