😩✨️

Kaz + what was left unsaid about Inej

THIS!!

I think a lot about how we as a culture have turned “forever” into the only acceptable definition of success.

Like… if you open a coffee shop and run it for a while and it makes you happy but then stuff gets too expensive and stressful and you want to do something else so you close it, it’s a “failed” business. If you write a book or two, then decide that you don’t actually want to keep doing that, you’re a “failed” writer. If you marry someone, and that marriage is good for a while, and then stops working and you get divorced, it’s a “failed” marriage.

The only acceptable “win condition” is “you keep doing that thing forever”. A friendship that lasts for a few years but then its time is done and you move on is considered less valuable or not a “real” friendship. A hobby that you do for a while and then are done with is a “phase” - or, alternatively, a “pity” that you don’t do that thing any more. A fandom is “dying” because people have had a lot of fun with it but are now moving on to other things.

I just think that something can be good, and also end, and that thing was still good. And it’s okay to be sad that it ended, too. But the idea that anything that ends is automatically less than this hypothetical eternal state of success… I don’t think that’s doing us any good at all.

Coming into a fandom late

If you’ve ever wondered why Egyptian mummies are so rare, it’s because wealthy Europeans ate them. Between the 12th and 17th centuries, while pilfering the continent for goods, resources, artifacts, and Africans themselves, colonizers also looted and exoticized Egyptian tombs. Mummies were ground up into medicines and consumed by the elite, believed to be a remedy for various ailments and an infusion of life-energy from the spirits of the dead. When Egyptian mummies became scarce after hundreds of years of eating them, corpses from other parts of North Africa and Guanche mummies from the Canary Islands were instead exported and sold to European apothecaries. But even as they engaged in cannibalism for their own selfish indulgences, one of the primary ways that Europeans demonized Indigenous peoples was by naming them all as savages and cannibals.

Colonizers have not limited their use of racial cannibalism to the medicinal. They have also used it punitively and vindictively. During the genocidal King Leopold II’s occupation of the Congo (1885-1908), Belgians massacred more than 10 million Africans. Most were forced to work for the Anglo-Belgian India Rubber Company, and were severely punished if they did not meet their rubber quota. In Don’t Call Me Lady: The Journey of Lady Alice Seeley Harris, there is a black and white photo of a Congolese man named Nsala, seated at the edge of a porch. His eyes are fixed on the severed hand and foot of his 5 year-old daughter, Boali. The Belgian militia had cut them from her body before killing her and her mother. To further exact their cruelty, they ate Nsala’s wife and child. They did this because he had failed to meet his rubber quota for the day.

The thing about white supremacy is that it does not merely subsist through the consumption of the Other; it whitewashes by de-emphasizing and lessening these misdeeds and others. History looks very different when white people are not the protagonists in its retelling. A significant instance: the accepted and well-known white feminist narrative about the Salem Witch Trials of the 1600s is that it was a hysteria driven by rampant misogyny and a pointed persecution of white women, the survival of which they harken to as evidence of their historical resilience. I prefer to think of it, more accurately, as a community of racist, religiously-intolerant enslavers and colonizers of stolen Native land cannibalizing itself—and I wish it had finished its meal instead of begetting centuries of white people who would gorge on the lives and cultures of Black and Indigenous folks.

As the Donner Party traveled across the U.S. as part of a violent westward expansion in 1847, a small group that broke off from the larger party became stranded without food in a grueling wintery hellscape. So, they conspired to murder their two Native American guides, Salvador and Luis, for food. The two men ran away, but were found a few days later and were swiftly eaten, the only members of the party to be hunted and murdered before they were cannibalized. Salvador and Luis are rarely spoken of when the story is told to relay the suffering and survival of the people who ate them. In the version of the story that tells the truth about colonialism and the violence it requires, the Donner Party are the monsters, not the damsels.

The Transatlantic Slave Trade was a monstrosity of boundless proportions. Its enormity altered the world in a multitude of ways and none were/are more changed by it than Africans and their descendants. Many Africans believed—or, rather, knew—that white people were cannibals and feared that they would be taken away and consumed, like the others who had disappeared and not returned once white people began to arrive on African shores. Fear of white cannibalism on the ships carrying Africans to other lands was indeed palpable, and often led to attempted mutiny and escape or suicide by jumping into the waters below.

—  Sherronda J. Brown, THE HISTORY OF CONSUMPTION AND THE CANNIBALISTIC NATURE OF WHITENESS

I wanna move here lol

The Gardener's Cottage. x

I WANT THESE!!!

Porcelain corsets by Joyce Spakman

💀💀

I love homemade strawberry milkshake❤️

(via)

#VanGogh#art

“When Van Gogh was a young man in his early twenties, he was in London studying to be a clergyman. He had no thought of being an artist at all. he sat in his cheap little room writing a letter to his younger brother in Holland, whom he loved very much. He looked out his window at a watery twilight, a thin lamppost, a star, and he said in his letter something like this: “it is so beautiful I must show you how it looks.” And then on his cheap ruled note paper, he made the most beautiful, tender, little drawing of it. When I read this letter of Van Gogh’s it comforted me very much and seemed to throw a clear light on the whole road of Art. Before, I thought that to produce a work of painting or literature, you scowled and thought long and ponderously and weighed everything solemnly and learned everything that all artists had ever done aforetime, and what their influences and schools were, and you were extremely careful about *design* and *balance* and getting *interesting planes* into your painting, and avoided, with the most astringent severity, showing the faintest *academical* tendency, and were strictly modern. And so on and so on. But the moment I read Van Gogh’s letter I knew what art was, and the creative impulse. It is a feeling of love and enthusiasm for something, and in a direct, simple, passionate and true way, you try to show this beauty in things to others, by drawing it. And Van Gogh’s little drawing on the cheap note paper was a work of art because he loved the sky and the frail lamppost against it so seriously that he made the drawing with the most exquisite conscientiousness and care.”

— Brenda Ueland, from “If You Want to Write: A Book about Art, Independence and Spirit”

SOOO FREAKINGGG CUTE😩❤AHHH

Pride & Prejudice (2005) dir. Joe Wright