I don't know where it came from, but several years ago this idea popped into my head unbidden, and for some reason it tickles me. I don't know if it's funny, but I like it and I made it into a zine, I hope you enjoy it.

It lays out really nicely as 3-up spreads on A4 paper, so you can print, staple and fold it, then cut it into 3 zines. It made it really easy to print up 20 of them to trade at this art social thing I went to

micron, rotring and sharpie on printer paper, coloured and screentoned digitally, 2024

This is magnificent and I love it.

I actually really like the thing when you're starting to get the hang of a new language, enough to understand and say simple sentences but you gotta get creative to get more complex thoughts across, like a puzzle. I remember a time in the restortation school when a classmate who wasn't natively finnish and did her best anyway dropped something and sighed, telling me "every day is monday this week. I have had four mondays this week." And I understood.

I don't think I speak much of spanish anymore, but in the nursing school training period I did there, I did manage to get by with making weird Tarzan sentences. I got a nosebleed at some point and startled another nurse. Not knowing the words "humidity" or "stress", I managed to string together: "This is ok. It is hot, it is cold, I have a bad day, I am sad, I have blood. This is normal for me." And she understood.

And sometimes you just say things weird, but it's better than not saying it. One time, I was stuck in a narrow hallway behind someone walking really slowly with a walker, and he apologised for being in the way. I was not in any hurry, but didn't know the spanish word for "hurry", but I did know enough words to try to circumvent it by borrowing the english "I have all the time in the world."

The man burst into one of those cackling old man laughters that they do when something in this world still manages to surprise them. He had to be somewhere between 70 and a 100 years old, and I guess if there was one thing he wasn't expecting to hear today, it would be a random blond vaguely baltic-looking fuck casually announce that he is the sole owner and keeper of the very concept of time.

I’ve mostly learned Chinese in school, so I know a lot of academic vocabulary while having the language skills of a toddler in some basic areas. Once, I forgot the word for sad, which is a really dumb thing to forget. A bunch of the ways to say sad in Chinese are literally just “not happy”, but I also momentarily forgot how to say happy. So instead I said “there is an economic downturn inside my brain”.

When my wife and I were in Japan we went to an izakaya on our first full night in the country, and when it was time to pay we weren't sure where to do it, at the table or at the counter up front? Our waitress didn't speak much English, so I threw myself on that conversational grenade with, "Okane ga koko desu ka? Okane ga asoko desu ka?" Literally translated that's, "Money is/goes/should be here? Money is/goes/should be over there?"

She very gratefully confirmed that "Money goes over there," and we paid and left.

This is exactly what I was taught to do when I took Spanish (and I took a decades' worth, and my main teacher was amazing). He always tried to get us to tell him what we wanted or needed or was trying to say in the best way we knew how, because that is how people actually use language. Rather than have it be a barrier, he taught us above all to keep communicating. He never really told us why, or how valuable a skill it would be, he would just pretend he couldn't understand us anyway when we asked for a word we didn't know, and basically forced us to do exactly that. So it became completely normal to just...do that when we didn't know something.

Later, when I was in college and/or in the real world and I didn't know a word or couldn't remember or didn't have the words for a concept, I would I automatically do what I always did, what had become normalised: I would talk around it, which is what my teacher always called it. I even had one of my professors compliment me on getting what I needed that way, and she said that she'd never had another student do that and how helpful it was for her to be able to help me. I know that when I encountered others in my job with whom I had to speak in Spanish, and I couldn't communicate with them in the "proper" way, I could still get what I needed, or they needed, and there was always a sense of delight that even though my grammar was far from perfect, and I didn't always use the right words, that we all accomplished what we were there for. Most people don't care if you get it "right." They just want to be able to communicate effectively. (Can't speak for the French, though. 😉)

I also highly recommend doing this in your native language if you forget a word or blank on something. When I have conversations with people and they tell me they're blanking or can't think of something, I always, always ask them to describe it. Most people don't because they think it's weird and so either they don't get their point across or the conversation simply stops. But if they were more willing to keep communicating, we might get there. So I'm subtly trying to train everyone around me to do the same thing.

it's so much less frustrating and more funny when you can forget the word for windows and just say 'the doors for light to come in the wall' and if you forget the word for noodles you say 'you know the bread worms? from soup?' and if you forget the word for tiger you say 'those big assholes in the jungle, with stripes, they're orange.'

genuinely people love it when you do this. it makes the rest of the conversation so much more fun.

official linguistics post

- Timothy Snyder. The first and perhaps most important lesson from On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons for the Twentieth Century (2017)

Snyder's new book, On Freedom, was published in 2024.

This right here? ⬆️ Circle it, then underline it.

You can't offer your opponent a compromise and expect them to just accept it.

Especially when the 'compromise' in question involves people's basic rights, dignity, or safety.

— Stardust (2007) Elizabeth: The Golden Age (2007) Christopher Strong (1933) Gattaca (1997) Chicago (2002) Daughters of Darkness (1971) Dune: Part Two (2024) The Huntsman: Winter's War (2016) Daredevil (2003) Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery (1997) Moulin Rouge! (2001) Alice in Wonderland (2010) Malcolm & Marie (2021) Donkey Skin (1970) Gypsy (1962)

another gravity falls animation! :3 hope yall enjoy!

tumblr users not immune to weird guy in a river

i think there’s something to be said about how the gig economy makes things ostensibly more convenient but also worse. and not just like, doordash guys take too long to get to you so your food is cold. but because the business model is centered around a million people doing work without any familiarity with what theyre doing and decentralized from the businesses they’re working with, you get service that’s being reinvented from scratch every time it’s purchased.

it happens all the time that I’ll order an uber and when they pick me up, they’ll just stop in the middle of the street with their hazards on, making me dodge traffic to get to them and pissing off the cars around them. and then I’ll get in the car and chat with the driver and find out they’re actually from two counties over and they’ve never driven here before, so they don’t know where parking is or whether they’re heading to a wide open parking lot or a busy downtown. and then you start to realize that they’re not being a dick, they’re just given as little information as possible every time they pick up a ride so they have to just guess how and where to pick up a passenger. and since they’re paid by ride, they’re incentivized to pick you up as fast as possible. and all the people who cared about finding a safe place to pick you up quit the app or stopped doing that so all you’re left with is the pissed off cockroach motherfuckers.

and then you see that this happens with every fucking app. doordash sucks because you pay 8 million dollars for delivery and you still have to hike half a mile to find the guy because he got lost in your apartment complex. Instacart sucks because the guy picking your groceries couldn’t care less about getting ripe fruit and replaces your heavy cream with shaving cream. customer support for all this sucks because the guy helping you can’t do anything more than offer you $5 credit, beg for your forgiveness, and hope you get out of the queue fast enough for him to go to the bathroom. because all of them aren’t given enough time to do a good job or enough money to care.

and every time a gig worker makes the experience suck for you, it’s a rational decision. they’re evaluating the money they’re being paid and if it’s worth getting paid less to do a good job, and correctly deciding that it isn’t. so you can’t even get mad, because you’d do it too. and so the company manages to pass on its race to the bottom to its lowest-paid employees.

My partner and I do Doordash (he is the Dasher of record because he can drive, I manage the music, grab the in-store pickups, and keep things from falling over on sharp turns), and here is an incomplete list of things that someone could have told us if we had coworkers that we instead had to figure out ourselves:

i was actually reading a really interesting paper tangentially about this the other day. It makes the claim that, due to the lack of information about how workers are evaluated and how a platform operates, gig workers will engage in self-tracking.

You can see someone else also using the devices' second seat, and I think that's so cool. Mobility devices help everyone, here other employees also get a chance to sit while they're working. I just love mobility aids, man. It's like the cut curb effect

This setup is obviously so much more convenient than every alternative, gives him so much natural freedom back and is such an effective thing to rest on in general that I'm mad it hasnt always been a standard kind of everyday furniture. We're wasting so much ceiling space.

A crocodile doll made in collaboration with Santaniel Workshop!

The baby has movable paws, head and tail. She takes different poses. The dress and accessories are removable. She has soft textile body and plastic limbs\head. I love here little curious face!

Source details and larger version.

Here’s my modest collection of vintage sharks.

Encounter: rooftop sharkman bootblack

being in a long-term committed loving relationship with a neurodivergent person, as someone very much neurotypical, has been a beautiful exercise in both humility and communication

I am high maintenance and I am demanding, and I do expect A Lot from my partner. but for a very long time I lived in this realm of half-coded half-messages, cryptic signals and unvoiced expectations, a spiderweb-like system of relations and emotions - a realm of my own creation - where I'd feel upset and abandoned if those needs were not correctly guessed, anticipated, decoded or fulfilled. and usually that'd only result in my alienating myself and hurting myself even more than it hurt others.

with my partner now I know that those Messages and Codes and Expectations have to be explained, sometimes twice, and in great detail, ideally with examples and data to back them up - initially even called out as they happen - and only after that is done I can reattach this value and emotion to them. if my partner misses those then, I have a right to be a upset. but they're not obvious or set as default, and not knowing them intrinsically isn't my partner's way of being purposefully hurtful.

sometimes I will tell my partner something and they won't have much of a reaction. and I learned that all it takes is just giving more explanation: what I'm saying now to you means that I am upset, the words and tone are both there to tell you that I'm upset, I'm upset because of XYZ, and I would like you to react, preferably by being there for me/hugging me/listening to me.

I used to think that was ridiculous. that it was debasing, that it was humiliating, that it was me begging to be acknowledged, begging to be loved. but in this case it isn't - I only had to do it twice, maybe three times in different situations, and since then they've learned my Messages and my Codes and my Meanings. and they love me so they do their best to follow them and act on them - and ask for guidance if they're not sure. and that's love, that's what love is to me.

and the other way around - oftentimes it had to be me asking for clarification. it had to be me going "what you're saying now, your wording and your tone do not match your facial expressions and body language. what you're saying is positive but your face and body tell me you're angry and distressed" - and my partner would usually just tell me, oops, you can disregard my facial expressions because I actually didn't even know I was making them, I am actually very happy and calm now" or sometimes "what might seem like distressed to you is actually the way my body behaves when I'm just focused on explaining something to you, it's not negative, I'm actually having a great time".

sometimes it had to be me going "I really hoped you'd like this [activity/place/movie/whatever] but to me you seem bored and disinterested, can you please confirm whether you're enjoying this or if you'd prefer we do something else?" and sure, sometimes it would be "yeah I'm not that into this, sorry" but much more often it would be "I really like this but there's this one detail/smell/sensation that gets in the way of me fully enjoying it" or actually "oh no I really like this, in fact I like this to the extent where I focus mostly on it and not on acting outwards with the intention of showing I like it"

and I've learned. even when those are things that go directly against all the Codes I learned for neurotypical people in my life, I now know better. it was embarrassing and sometimes frustrating to ask and to need an explanation, but it worked so well. and that's love. again, that's love.

How to Ditch Amazon

Support your local libraries and the small businesses that are actually making the products you want.  Fuck Jeff Bezos and the systemic, universal worker abuse, gaslighting, and brutality they live off of.

this seems like a good thing to bring around as people holiday shop

Gabriella Possum Nungurrayi — Milky Way Dreaming (acrylic on linen, 1988)

Gabriella Possum Nungurrayi (Australian/Aboriginal, 1967)

everyone says join your local mutual aid groups and build community, but uh, what do you do if a lot of them seem to have dissolved and the other ones don't have consistent recurring meetings.

this is real, and it's a thing that a lot of people are going to run into in the face of calls to "get involved," especially if they're people who haven't been deeply involved in their communities before. so here's what I can share: