inspired by this stamp

my mom is playin fuckn animal crossing in real life

she got this painting for $75 in an old case at an antique market shes been going to for years, and she thought it looks really beautiful, so she sent an email to a local art center to have it appraised

and now she has an art conservator in her emails making a plan to have her come bring it in to be appraised as a genuine Hokusai wood block print from over a hundred of years ago

thats so fucked up to me. my mom went fuckin shopping at Crazy Redd's

no joke, she got it at an antique market. but she didnt even buy the painting. she bought a bag that the painting was in, cuz she's an artist.

when she got home, the bag fell over, and the painting fell out. into the lap of an unsuspecting small town idaho girl (my ma) (that's how she described it).

movie shit.

UPDATE:

it was NOT AN ORIGINAL, but it is a 19th century reproduction.

so she's gonna keep it and have it restored, which means eventually IM going to inherit it, which is cool because i think it looks cool and would love to hang it in my home B^]

Andy Goldsworthy

this is what so many of you sound like. the notion that you’re somehow wrong to immediately stop illegal shit through courts, because No Reason But Seems Bad, is the kind of exhausting unanswerable stupidity that’s going to make the next 4 years very fucking long.

anyway, a quick summary:

I'll give an example of a specific response. Did not come out the same day as The Nonsense, but if you want to do something enforceable, robust, and that answers most of the "but what about...?" questions, you generally don't turn it around in a few hours.

Here's specific guidance from the democratic governor of Connecticut (Ned Lamont) through the Department of Education to K-12 schools of "what do I do about ICE showing up?"

I'm just gonna copy paste a big chunk because, hey, you should steal this for your school or workplace!

Guidance to K-12 Public Schools Pertaining to Immigration Activities

The rest of the document is largely about what specific laws apply and addressing student and family concerns about rumors and social media postings. It suggests adding additional mental health staff as well as "we will follow up with more specific guidance soon".

Is this a BORING response? Yes. But that is largely what government should be. Boring. We're experiencing *exciting* government and it sucks!!!! So a boring, measured response with detailed directions of how you engage with this nonsense so as to NOT panic students and shield this from this as much as you can, that is a proper response.

Boring responses don't make the news, but they're often the ones that are actually DURABLE. Its all cool politician showing up and grandstanding briefly, but giving the secretary at the school all the tool to go "that's sure nice, but you have the wrong form... go away" is a lot more effective. Because its gonna be a long haul

When people say "why are the Democrats not doing anything??" What they mean is "why aren't the Democrats staging a coup, but for the Good Guys?"

And the answer is, because coups are bad and democracy is good??? Because the whole point is to be able to have a government that doesn't fucking collapse under everyone's feet all the time????

I haven't lived under coups but my parents have and let me tell you. THEY USUALLY DON'T GO WELL.

Because there will never be a dictator who wields power exactly like you want them to.

"why havent the democrats firebombed a walmart"

I'm finishing up an interview I did with @lookcaitlin for my art blog newsletter... This is my favorite illustration that I'm including! Just look at that beaut.

It's Olivier Legan's cover story illustration for Compatibles PC Magazine #2, May 1987, for an article titled "Who Wants the Head of The 5.25 Inch?"

Interview is out tomorrow! Sign up now to get it.

In the meantime, I'll spend today reposting a bunch of @lookcaitlin posts that I used in the interview, so they can get some more appreciation on tumblr.

The man wanted you to get lost in the sauce of color fields, and the original color field to get lost in is the connection of the sky to the horizon

this was from 1923, a time when beverage and ice cream companies were working feverishly to replace cocktails with interesting concoctions. The ones that survived did so as mixers

So fun story about that.

My father used to work for the Veterans Association in the US, back in the 1970s, early in his career as a dentist.

One day, he has this grizzled old NCO come in and sit in his dental chair; the guy does a glance at the name on the door, and asks my father, who is in his 20s at the time, "Hey, kid, you Jewish?"

My father answers "Yes, I am," half-expecting the guy to get up and leave--it had happened before.

The NCO motions him in closer. "Over in Europe, did you lose any family to those Nazis?"

My father, getting discomforted, answers flatly, "Yes, I did." Both of his parents were nearly the sole survivors of their entire families.

"Well, kid, let me tell you something. Come 'ere." He motions my father in closer. "Kid... I hung dem sons-of-bitches!"

He had been the hangman at Nuremberg, and was vastly and eternally proud of that fact.

Imagine having been born in 1905... And all your life it doesn't fucking stop. The Great War, the Spanish Flu, and then you go out of your mind for 7 years. Everyone is traumatised and nothing matters. Then another crash. And then the rise of fascism, and the War to end all Wars didn't and it's 1945 and you're just about still there. You may have fought or ferried the boys from Dunkirk or sabotaged the Nazi occupiers or worked in the factories and put out fires during the Blitz and you're lucky to be alive, because not all your friends made it. But you are and finally, fucking finally, it stops. It stops. You are tough as nails and you can put that strength to work into building something and you do, and people have cars and can buy icecream and you have a pension fund and the kids have money of their own and no nightmares.

I want that for us. I so want that for us. I want to be the generation that has seen fucking everything and is like a MRSA bug and unfazed and when that Cheeto finally dies, I want us to. Plant the gardens and clean the seas because we can and we want to and we remember some joy, some time of trust even when it got broken and we can say to the 20 somethings "let us show you what we can build, how it can feel."

And maybe Gen beta will take it all for granted like the boomers did, but we can give Gen Z and Alpha some peace because we, and Gen Z and Alpha have seen the Dark Times and fuck that noise.

At the start of the Pandemic, my spouse’s grandmother was in an assisted-living home, and of course they were severely locked down, because with no vaccination available and we don’t really know how it spreads and no tests and anyone over 80 is deffo gonna die…. They couldn’t take the risks. So they weren’t even allowed to leave their rooms. Staff brought meals and left them outside the door, and they left dishes outside, and that was just their life for the foreseeable future.

So we tried to make sure someone called her every day, so she would have some kind of interaction, and one time my spouse asked how she was doing, and her attitude was basically, “Yeah, this happens sometimes.”

Because that was her life. She did live through the depression, she did lose three siblings to the last pandemic. She did live through WWII, and sent a son off to Vietnam, and made a family and a household and a career while knowing one slip of a button might wipe out all life on earth. And she lived through it; she survived.

And so 2020 wasn’t the end of the world, for her. It was just another thing. Because life is made up of sunshine and rainbows and puppy dogs, AND ALSO fascists and violence and rancid millionaires living high while people starve. And when you are in the middle of the shit times, you acknowledge that they’re shit, and also that they are not exclusively shit, because they still include spring days and new flowers and people taking care of each other.

And it was just… a really helpful perspective to get. You can survive it, you can become strong enough to live to 103 despite everything, you can become a source of strength and joy for everyone around you.

Hey. Look at me. Please leave yourself a note somewhere you'll see it later that says "it is going to take years if not decades to get the United States government to the level of functionality it had in November of 2024." If we elect a democrat in 2028, we are not going to be up and running by 2032.

Please make sure you have a reminder in your phone reminding you to not look at 2028/32/36 Democratic candidates and say "why are they not promising/delivering Cool Shit?" because you are going to understand that to get Cool Shit we must have competent people running a decently funded government, and we are not going to have that.

We are not getting UBI. We are not getting single payer healthcare. We are not getting free college or free preschool. We are not redistributing wealth on a large scale. We are not getting free internet. We are not getting ranked choice voting.

If we are lucky, we are going to get an IRS that can collect taxes, qualified schoolteachers, research grants, Social Security, and a government that thinks maybe it should be a priority for people around the worlds to not have AIDS, malaria or TB.

Postcard from Jean Cocteau to Henry Bernstein (1922)

"Pense a voux deux sur ma plage déserte"

Henri Bernstein

Henri-Léon-Gustave-Charles Bernstein (June 20, 1876 – November 27, 1953) was a French playwright associated with Boulevard theatre.

El extraño caso del hombre y la bestia (The Strange Case of the Man and the Beast), 1951 art by Anselmo Ballester

Just because the clown car goes very fast does not mean it isn't full of clowns

Attention, rare sightings of the Patrician of Ankh-Morpork 🦩 🖤

“From the back, Vetinari looked like a carnivorous flamingo.” - Men at Arms

“Thin, pale, and clad all in dusty black, the Patrician always put Ridcully in mind of a predatory flamingo, if you could find a flamingo that was black and had the patience of a rock.” - Reaper Man

@elodieunderglass I know it s supposed to be the leucism channel, but COME ON

Beautiful, thank you so much!