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A Midwest Whoop-Ass Extravaganza

@twistedingenue / twistedingenue.tumblr.com

Bellydancer | Hellenic Polytheist | Fandom | Occasional Functional Adult Practice Radical Kindness She/They

Unironically, vegans need to be advocating for more and better sheep, llama, and alpaca farms. Wool is one of the best fabrics we have in terms of versatility, longevity and most importantly, insulation. Even wet, it retains 80% of it’s insulation potential.

AND IT DOESN’T SHED MICROPLASTICS

Like, there’s literally nothing you can do to a sheep that’s as morally reprehensible as dumping plastic down the gullet of literally every other living thing. You wanna talk about animal welfare? Talk about reducing the amount of microplastics produced by rayon, polyester, and spandex.

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guinea-big-deactivated20221004

Bruh plant-based sources of clothing exist and are better for the environment and don’t involve slicing an animal’s throat open please shut the fuck up you cunt

THE WOOL GROWS BACK

Do they think you kill a sheep for it’s wool

A LOT OF THEM DO THINK THIS. They get told this carp by PETA and the like.

People- wool animals are not killed for their wool/hair. Yaks, angora rabbits, angora goats, sheep, alpacas, llamas etc… We SHEAR THEM. Not Flay. Shear. With clippers.

Or some people just gather what falls off the critter, or in the case of “chien” which is dog fluff, you brush that off them.

Healthy happy animals make good fiber. It is monetarily foolish and useless to abuse your animals because then their fiber is bad. You can debate points of husbandry and some parts of industries need change so fight about that.

But wool is amazing.

Ever since I got a job as a security guard I can’t take heist movies seriously anymore.

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kansascity-marshwiggle

Why is that?

Accurate heist movie: The Team is sneaking into a high security facility. An alarm is triggered, they freeze, prepared to knock out whoever responds to the alarm. It takes 40 minutes for someone to respond. When they finally do show up, they shuffle along, annoyed, arms full of 16 bags of pretzels for some reason, and reset the alarm without bothering to check their surroundings. They report that the alarm went off in error. Security control starts a fight about the correct designation of the door. The guard announces that they’re leaving the alarm key in the alarm because it’s always going off for no reason. No one challenges them on this. They shuffle away, leaving an alarm key and several bags of pretzels behind.

The Team knocks out a security guard and steals their radio. The team mimic can perfectly replicate the knocked out guard’s voice. They get caught because they pronounced the name of the company correctly.

The Team disables an alarm. The only way to do this is to rip it out of the wall and disassemble it until it physically can’t make noise anymore. This very loud process is clearly heard by the posted security guard nearby, who rolls their eyes and text their supervisor that the logistics contractors are fooling with the alarms again.

The Team breaks into the facility at night. There they meet a single security guard who is chanting potential names for NPCs in their DnD campaign out loud while they do their patrols. They encounter a fire extinguisher. They pause in their chanting to check that it is properly charged and to apply a sticker that reads, “Anal use only”. This guy is disgustingly good at their job. There’s no way around it, they’re going to catch you. And you’re going to have to deal with the fact that you’ve been had by someone who has a supply of stickers that say “Anal use only” and who unironically wanted to name their NPC shopkeep Mammogrammus.

The Team attempts to bribe a security guard. This is its own post but know there’s no way in hell that would work.

The Team breaks into the high security room and disables all the alarms. Security control sends several guards to investigate why there are no alarms going off.

The Team attempts to break into the high security room but can’t because it’s randomly decided not to let anyone at all in today.

The Team steals a keycard with “””””unlimited””””” access to the facility and gets caught because the computer system that manages keycards randomly revokes access for no reason.

The Team walks past a security guard in broad daylight wearing T-shirts that say, “We are here to rob you”. The security guard does nothing, having seen several people in logistics wearing that exact shirt two days prior.

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kansascity-marshwiggle

This sounds like a great movie, honestly

I will always remember that when I worked for a pharmaceutical company in IT, there were massive security procedures, systems with air gaps, locations with biometric scanners and metal detectors and locking revolving doors, but the highest level of security was a human being in a bulletproof proof room with line of sight to the door and a button. To /get/ to the door, you had to go through tons of other layers and badge access and identity verification, but the final lock was a dual physical key (which required two people to open) and a human being with a book of photographs and a button to push.

At the onset of the 2008-onward recession it became more or less impossible to get the sort of summer gig that college students traditionally get. I couldn’t get a callback from any of the area fast food restaurants, the babysitting gigs were gone, I drew blanks on waitressing, dishwashing, landscaping, car washes, summer camps, you name it. The big local summer attraction near me is a horse racetrack, and I put in apps for every position from betting clerk to horse manure removal tech. I got one (1) job offer that summer, and it was to be a security guard. I was a 19 year old girl with a perky ponytail, big ol’ doe eyes, and no experience or interest whatsoever in policing, so I genuinely thought I’d gotten the offer because they’d confused my application with someone else’s… until the first day of training.

Training consisted of a number of retired high ranking New York State Troopers very earnestly trying to convince a room of “dudes who desperately wanted to be a cop but couldn’t jump even that low hurdle” and also “one increasingly incredulous 19 year old girl who could only hear a loud high pitched note in one ear because she stood too close to her amps at the punk show last night” not to bring swords, shurukens, or butterfly knives into work.

We went over the “do not bring in your own weapons” lecture for the majority of day 1 of training. Day 2 was also “do not bring in your own weapons” for a lot of the day, then we moved onto “identifying the different types of fire extinguisher,” and wrapped up the day with “wasp stings.” Well, actually during “wasp stings” we had a sidebar when this one guard who looked like Ben Franklin raised his hand and shared that he, personally, took care of wasps by blowing their nests up with improvised gasoline-based explosives, so technically we wrapped up the day with “do not bring in your own weapons even if those weapons are to harm a wasp.”

Day 3 was a half day, where we reviewed everything we’d learned about no weapons, fire extinguishers, and wasps, and then we took a written test, which I finished with a perfect score in three minutes so Sargeant Minetti made me grade everyone else’s. After that, I was a full ass security guard; I picked up my fake cop uniform, badge(!!!), tiny notebook, strapped a walkie to my belt, and was given my assignment. My beat was very very literally the most public facing one that existed; while most of my colleagues were posted at gates that might never get opened for the entire summer, I had “the wholeass quarter mile of pavement abutting the chain link fence that separated the public from the ponies.” My responsibilities were simple:

1. tell people to move their rolling coolers out of the fire lane

2. take people with wasp stings to the nurse

and oh yeah

3. every time a clerk at a betting window in my section accumulated more than $10,000 dollars in cash, I had to escort them for ½ of a mile through the incredibly dense crowd of drunk people, any of whom might be interested in stealing more than $10,000 dollars, and get the money safely into the giant vault.

I remember the very first run i made. The betting clerk looked at me, the 19 year old responsible for protecting both them and $10,000. I looked back at him through the mirrored aviators that I’d bought at a gas station for 5 bucks because I thought it was very very funny and good fake cop cosplay. My walkie hissed ominously.

“…Uh, so if someone tries to take the money, what are you going to do?” He asked.

“Well, I get paid 12 bucks an hour, so… nothing.” I responded. “How about you?”

We quickly arrived at an understanding.

Two of the guards from my training group got fired that summer for bringing in their own weapons, and at least one of them had both a butterfly knife and at least one shuruken. Many more dropped out as they discovered that they would not actually be doing Die Hard shit. As for me, I did literally nothing to prevent crime all summer, but I also halfheartedly cleared a path through the crowd at the front of a very sad “St. Patrick’s Day In July” parade, which made me enough of a success story that they actually called me unprompted to ask if I’d come back the next year… with one caveat.

See, the next year I returned as a weathered veteran with a spotless disciplinary record, so they gave me three hours of additional training to get a certification to become a peace officer. As a result, from ages 20-23 (when my license expired) I had the same legal powers of arrest as a police officer.

Me. They just gave me that.

In conclusion, if you’re a highly qualified team of heistmen looking to rob an entity that accumulates wealth by convincing drunk desperate people to give them their money and you pick a fucking casino when the racetrack is right there, you’re either thinking way too inside the box… or you have a healthy fear of shurukens I guess.

Only valid response to this post, everyone else can go home.

Greek Mythology Meme // ˢᶦˣ ᴼˡʸᵐᵖᶦᵃⁿˢ ⁽⁵/⁶⁾ 

Dionysus, God of Vine, Grape Harvest, Winemaking, Wine, Ritual madness, Religious Ecstasy and Theatre

Something that I get chills about is the fact that the oldest story told made by the oldest civilization opens with "In those days, in those distant days, in those ancient nights."

This confirms that there is a civilization older than the Sumerians that we have yet to find

Some people get existential dread from this

Me? I think it's fucking awesome it shows just how much of this world we have yet to discover and that is just fascinating

@makaeru peer review cos this made me check when the Sumerians happened and I forget how recent history is for every other continent. 7000 - 8000 years ago just isn't that long when you're in Australia, and the amount of detailed history we have access to here is wonderful and should be recognised more internationally

And a quote I picked out from a longer interview with an Aboriginal local elder about the area where he touched on the history

Source (the rest of the interview is really interesting and all transcribed, have a look if you're curious)

This is part of my Ancient Civilizations class that I teach, which does a whole week about Australia and the Torres Strait Islands because I was sick of never seeing them represented in USAmerican history contexts. With the help of @micewithknives and @acearchaeologist I've learned so many incredible things about Australia's past and it's been incredibly rewarding to share them with students.

My favorite fact about Aboriginal oral history is the fact that we pretty recently discovered that the Aboriginal myth of the 7 Sisters, an origin story for the Pleiades star cluster, accurately reflects a point TEN THOUSAND YEARS AGO when two stars in the constellation got close enough together to no longer be distinguishable by the naked eye.

The story? 6 sisters running from something that took their 7th sister.

as a gilgar gunditj woman, i was not expecting to see my culture on my dash.

thank you for spreading our words and treating our culture with respect.

Boosting signal.

Echoes from the ancient human past, wonderful.

I think I found my new favorite rabbit hole. This voice actor does Shakespeare scenes in a southern accent and I need to see the whole damn play. Absolutely beautiful

if you're not from the us american south, there's some amazing nuances to this you may have missed. i can't really describe all of them, because i've lived here my whole life and a lot of the body language is sort of a native tongue thing. the body language is its own language, and i am not so great at teaching language. i do know i instinctively sucked on my lower teeth at the same time as he did, and when he scratched the side of his face, i was ready to take up fucking arms with him.

but y'all. the way he said "brutus is an honourable man" - each and every time it changed just a little. it was the full condemnation Shakespeare wanted it to be. it started off slightly mock sincere. barely trying to cover the sarcasm. by the end...it wasn't a threat, it was a promise.

christ, he's good.

the eliding of “you all” to “y’all” while still maintaining 2 syllables is a deliberate and brilliant act of violence. “bear with me” said exactly like i’ve heard it at every funeral. the choices of breaking and re-establishing of eye contact. the balance of rehearsed and improvised tone. A+++ get this man a hollywood contract.

Get this man a starring role as Marc Antony in a southern adaptation of this show PLEASE.

This man is fantastic. 💕

The thing that just destroys me about this, though -- we think of Shakespearean language as being high-cultured, and intellectual, and somewhat inaccessible. And I know people think of Southerners as being ill-educated (which...let's be fair, most are, but not the way it's said). But that whole speech, unaltered, is so authentically Southern. And the thing is: Leaning into that language really amps the mood, in metalanguage. I'm not really sure how to explain it except... like... "Thrice" is not a word you hear in common speech...unless you're in the South and someone is trying to Make A Fucking Point.

Anyway. This was amazing and I want a revival of Shakespeare As Southern Gothic.

One of the lovely things about this, and one of the reasons it works so well, is that from what we can piece together of how Shakespeare was originally pronounced, it leans more towards an American southern accent than it does towards a modern British RP.

In addition, in the evolution of the English language in america, the south has retained many of the words, expressions, and cadences from the Renaissance/Elizabethan English spoken by the original British colonists.

One of the biggest examples of this is that the south still uses “O!”/“Oh!” In sentences, especially in multi-tone and multi-syllable varieties. We’ve lost that in other parts of the country (except in some specific pocket communities). But in the south on the whole? Still there. People in California or Chicago don’t generally say things like “why, oh why?” Or “oh bless your heart” or “Oh! Now why you gotta do a thing like that?!” But people from the south still do.

I teach, direct, and dramaturg Shakespeare for a living. When people are struggling with the “heightened” language, especially in “O” heavy plays like R&J and Hamlet, a frequent exercise I have them do is to run the scene once in a southern accent. You wouldn’t believe the way it opens them up and gives their contemporary brains an insight into ways to use that language without it being stiff and fake. Do the Balcony scene in a southern accent- you’ll never see it the same way again.

This guy is also doing two things that are absolutely spot-on for this speech:

First, he’s using the rhetorical figures Shakespeare gave him! The repetition of “ambition” and “Brutus is an honorable man”, the logos with which he presents his argument, the use of juxtaposition and antitheses (“poor have cried/caesar hath wept”, etc). You would not believe how many RADA/Carnegie/LAMDA/Yale trained actors blow past those, and how much of my career I spend pointing it out and making them put it back in.

Second, he’s playing the situation of the speech and character exactly right. This speech is hard not just because it’s famous, but because linguistically and rhetorically it’s a better speech than Brutus’ speech and in the context of the play, Brutus is the one who is considered a great orator. Brutus’ speech is fiery passion and grandstanding, working the crowd, etc. Anthony is not a man of speeches (“I am no orator, as Brutus is; But, as you know me all, a plain blunt man”) His toastmaster skills are not what Brutus’ are, but he speaks from his heart (his turn into verse in this scene from Brutus’ prose is brilliant) and lays out such a reasonable, logical argument that the people are moved anyway. I completely believe that in this guy’s performance. A plain, blunt, honest speaker. Exactly what Anthony should be.

TLDR: Shakespeare is my job and this is 100% a good take on this speech.

definitely one of the challenges I have with reading Shakespeare is that it sounds so weird to me. “The good is oft interr’d with their bones”?? Who talks like that?

Well,,, rednecks. Despite being Elizabethan English, none of this is really out of character for a man with that accent; southern american English has retained not only (I am told) the accent of Shakespeare, and the “Oh!” speech patterns, but also so many of the little linguistic patterns: parenthetic repetition (“so are they all - all honorable men”), speaking formally when deeply emotional, getting more and more sarcastic and passive-aggressive as time goes on, etc.

I love watching big dogs teach little dogs the rules. They always have such big "old timer employee giving the intern orientation" energy. They're so businesslike about it. This is their valued junior colleague, they are showing them the break room and the photocopier trick.

this is targeted tumblr content

This is what language is for. Evolution. Ridiculous, wonderful evolution.

This is so good, I'm awake at 3am and glad of it - for this has arrived on my dash like a boss

the "tried to make him the main character" part killed me bc, indeed, caesar is not the main character of Shakespeare's Julius Caesar

“They all did slay

This is SO DAMN DAMN GOOD. I think Shakespeare would have approved.

IN A DISTANT and second-hand set of dimensions, in an astral plane that was never meant to fly, the curling star-mists waver and part . . .

See . . .

"GNU Sir Terry Pratchett" - L-Space Wiki / Ursula K. LeGuin / "Terry Pratchett" - Wikipedia / "GNU" - Urban Dictionary / Going Postal by Terry Pratchett / Reaper Man by Terry Pratchett / Brandon Sanderson / Paul Kidby / The Colour of Magic by Terry Pratchett

A Temple Has Opened In Greece

The temple to Zeus and Pan has opened in Gortynia, Arcadia, Greece. This is wonderful news for Hellenism!

Unfortunately, the temple was opened by the YSEE group - a folkish Hellenist group in Greece known for the anti LGBTQ views amongst other things.

However this will hopefully pave the way for more temples to follow! Especially in such an Orthodox place like Greece.

The temple was not opened by the YSEE. They merely participated in the opening ceremony.

The temple was actually opened by one Evangelos Bexis, a violent antisemite and ultra-nationalist who is besties with infamous scammer, failed politician, and criminal Artemis Sorras.

Bexis, as far as I can tell, has been arrested for building on land that doesn't belong to him but to someone from the diaspora who is extremely wealthy.

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