Yes! I would like to add
Buy merch directly from the artist, or better yet, DIY.
If you can, help your local animal shelter. They usually need various different types of help, you could adopt a pet, be a foster home, donate food or money, participate on the activities they do to get resources, etc.
Learn to make your own cleaning products. There’s lots of options on the internet, they are usually really cheap + nontoxic and helps reduce your plastic consumption.
Wear less makeup, specially foundation/non-artistic makeup. Skin texture is punk af. I think my dark circles give me attitude. Acne scars, redness, discoloration, all of those are normal. In a world were perfection is demanded, wear your skin proudly.
Care less about your appearance. Life is too short to worry about your color season, your essence, your face type. Wear whatever makes you happy and invest that energy into learning something new!
Use the public transport. This is not always factible, but whenever you can, prefer it over Uber or your car (if you have one). It’s usually cheaper, you don’t have to worry about parking, contaminates less, you can drink and don’t worry about driving.
Travel less. I don’t mean to say you shouldn’t go on vacation, but ideally fly less. Instead, prioritize going to places where you can get by bus, go to towns close-by, get to know your city. Visit your parks, go trekking to nearby routes, go to every lake and river you can find, and please always leave the place cleaner than it was before. So many people goes to other countries to see sights that could have been found inside their own communities! By this I’m not saying you shouldn’t go out to see the world, but that you can also get new experiences without traveling half the planet.
Cut fast fashion - buy used, learn to mend and/or make your own clothes, buy fewer clothes less often so you can save up for ethically made quality
Cancel subscriptions - relearn how to pirate media, spend $10/month buying a digital album from a small artist instead of on Spotify, stream on free services since the paid ones make you watch ads anyway
Green your community - there's lots of ways to do this, like seedbombing or joining a community garden or organizing neighborhood trash pickups
Be kind - stop to give directions, check on stopped cars, smile at kids, let people cut you in line, offer to get stuff off the high shelf, hold the door, ask people if they're okay
Intervene - learn bystander intervention techniques and be prepared to use them, even if it feels awkward
Get closer to your food - grow it yourself, can and preserve it, buy from a farmstand, learn where it's from, go fishing, make it from scratch, learn a new ingredient
Use opensource software - try LibreOffice, try Reaper, learn Linux, use a free Photoshop clone. The next time an app tries to force you to pay, look to see if there's an opensource alternative
Make less trash - start a compost, be mindful of packaging, find another use for that plastic, make it a challenge for yourself!
Get involved in local politics - show up at meetings for city council, the zoning commission, the park district, school boards; fight the NIMBYs that always show up and force them to focus on the things impacting the most vulnerable folks in your community
DIY > fashion - shake off the obsession with pristine presentation that you've been taught! Cut your own hair, use homemade cosmetics, exchange mani/pedis with friends, make your own jewelry, duct tape those broken headphones!
Ditch Google - Chromium browsers (which is almost all of them) are now bloated spyware, and Google search sucks now, so why not finally make the jump to Firefox and another search like DuckDuckGo? Or put the Wikipedia app on your phone and look things up there?
Forage - learn about local edible plants and how to safely and sustainably harvest them or go find fruit trees and such accessible to the public.
Volunteer - every week tutoring at the library or once a month at the humane society or twice a year serving food at the soup kitchen, you can find something that matches your availability
Help your neighbors - which means you have to meet them first and find out how you can help (including your unhoused neighbors), like elderly or disabled folks that might need help with yardwork or who that escape artist dog belongs to or whether the police have been hassling people sleeping rough
Fix stuff - the next time something breaks (a small appliance, an electronic, a piece of furniture, etc.), see if you can figure out what's wrong with it, if there are tutorials on fixing it, or if you can order a replacement part from the manufacturer instead of trashing the whole thing
Mix up your transit - find out what's walkable, try biking instead of driving, try public transit and complain to the city if it sucks, take a train instead of a plane, start a carpool at work
Engage in the arts - go see a local play, check out an art gallery or a small museum, buy art from the farmer's market
Go to the library - to check out a book or a movie or a CD, to use the computers or the printer, to find out if they have other weird rentals like a seed library or luggage, to use meeting space, to file your taxes, to take a class, to ask question
Listen local - see what's happening at local music venues or other events where local musicians will be performing, stop for buskers, find a favorite artist, and support them
Buy local - it's less convenient than online shopping or going to a big box store that sells everything, but try buying what you can from small local shops in your area
Become unmarketable - there are a lot of ways you can disrupt your online marketing surveillance, including buying less, using decoy emails, deleting or removing permissions from apps that spy on you, checking your privacy settings, not clicking advertising links, and...
Use cash - go to the bank and take out cash instead of using your credit card or e-payment for everything! It's better on small businesses and it's untraceable
Give what you can - as capitalism churns on, normal shmucks have less and less, so think about what you can give (time, money, skills, space, stuff) and how it will make the most impact
Talk about wages - with your coworkers, with your friends, while unionizing! Stop thinking about wages as a measure of your worth and talk about whether or not the bosses are paying fairly for the labor they receive
Think about wealthflow - there are a thousand little mechanisms that corporations and billionaires use to capture wealth from the lower class: fees for transactions, interest, vendor platforms, subscriptions, and more. Start thinking about where your money goes, how and where it's getting captured and removed from our class, and where you have the ability to cut off the flow and pass cash directly to your fellow working class people
I’ve noticed lately that it’s often Americans who leave tags like “I don’t even care if it’s made up” on posts I make that are not particularly unbelievable, but are pretty specific to my way of life or corner of the world (like the one about the cheese vendor). It reminds me of that tweet that was circulating, that said Americans have a “medieval peasant scale of worldview”—I mean, if you don’t want to be perceived this way by the rest of the world maybe don’t go around social media saying that if a cultural concept or way of life sounds unfamiliar it must be made up?
It’s the imbalance that’s annoying, because like—when I mentioned having no mobile network around here I had people giving me info about Verizon to fix my problem. I post some rural pic and someone says it must be somewhere in the Midwest because the Southwest doesn’t look like this. My post about my postwoman has thousands of Americans assuming it’s about the USPS. On my post about my architect there’s someone saying “it’s because architecture is an impacted major” and other irrelevant stuff about how architecture is taught in the US. This kind of thing happens so so so often and I’m expected to be familiar with the concepts of Verizon and the Midwest and impacted majors and the USPS and meanwhile I make a post about my daily life and Americans in the notes are debating like “dunno if real. it sounds made up”
Going online for the rest of the world means having to keep in mind an insane amount of hyperspecific trivia about American culture while going online for Americans means having to keep in mind that the rest of the world really exists I guess
In your Authurian legends post you said you think Merlin has a lovely singing voice, do you have any headcanons about that? It’s my favorite headcanon that he can sing too (especially since Colin Morgan can also sing) :)
Oh for sure! I didn’t know Colin could sing too! That would have been cool to see in the show 😌😌😌
- Hunith sang often. Especially when Merlin was upset or sad. As he got older, that was mostly when he figured you were supposed to sing.
- So more often or not when someone was sad baby Merlin would just appear and start singing in an attempt to make people feel better. Will was the one who would occasionally start requesting Merlin sing while nobody was upset.
Will: hey, sing one of your songs!
Merlin: why?
Will: I’m bored
Merlin: ...but... nobody is sad?
Will: I’m going to be sad if I dont hear a song
Merlin: ....fair enough.
- Eventually Merlin would rope Will into singing with him and they made it into something of a game. Merlin would start the song and Will had to make up the lyrics for the next part and so forth.
- Singing. Magic. Like that Rapunzel type shit. Merlin discovers he can do this by accident (like he discovers most of his magic) but a good chunk of his spells seem to get more powerful when he sings. This generally only works with nature oriented magic tho.
- He can also do the thing Lady Helena (I think that was her name) aka Mary did in the first episode. Where you sing people and enchant them? Yeah - he has to be careful because sometimes that happens depending on the song.
- Like, depending on the tone/mood of the song will affect the audience. So if he sings a happy song then people end up getting really zazzed without knowing why exactly. Or a sad song might make them unbearably sad. A lullaby sends them to sleep. An angry song can cause a war.
- Also, sometimes if you closely enough, his magic makes it so you can see sound vibrations.
- Merlin doesn’t sing too much in Camelot because he’s trying his best to fit in and nobody else is really out there singing. Still, he hums under his breath a lot and whistles along with the birds.
- He also sings when he’s stressed out. This is kinda hilarious because you’ll have Merlin sprinting after a sorcerer like ‘la la la trying not to die... la la la...everything is fine...’
- However, he went back to his roots after Gwen’s dad died. Not really knowing how best to comfort her he just sang a bit until she felt better. After that she often went to Merlin when she needed cheering up and asked him to sing.
- Naturally, if Gwen knows then Elyan knew after he came to Camelot. This uhhhhhh caused some problems for Merlin lol
Elyan: ....this patrol is boring. Merlin can you sing something?
Arthur: ha! Merlin can’t sing, Elyan
Elyan: But Gwen says he sings for her all the time?
Gwaine: W H A T?! Merlin, you’ve never sang for me? What the Hell?
Merlin: um, well-
Leon: don’t be mean. maybe he’s shy
Percival: idk, Lancelot said Merlin usually sings to himself when he’s stressed
Merlin: He told you about that? Snake.
Gwaine: if anyone is a snake it’s you for holding out on us
- Thus began the months of tormenting Merlin to sing to them. They cracked him one by one. Gwaine first. Elyan second. Percival third. Then Leon.... Arthur he remained pretty stubborn with for a long time.
- In the end, Arthur catches him by accident while Merlin is brushing out the horses.
- He snuck by the stables everyday for a week afterwards to listen.
- Merlin is often one of those people who can sing along with birds like a disney princess. Sometimes he’ll chill by the window while some birds sing with him and they entire castle is entranced.
- Leon asked Merlin if he wanted to be a bard at any point and Merlin was just... so offended. So affronted. So upset. Sing for NOBLES?! What? Was he supposed to prance around and tell tales of Arthur’s victories? He thinks not. Ha! As if. If he was a bard then he would sing of how much a prat Arthur was.
- ....you can see where I’m going with this lol. Gwaine obviously jumps on this opportunity and every so often they come up with a song about how much of a prat Arthur is. Eventually they teach it to all of the knights and when it is a patrol with just the round table they’ll all sing it together while Arthur steams in the corner.
- Merlin also sings at all of their graves... Every year.
HEY GUYS
The new Venom movie has a scene with intense flashing lights (the lab entry scene) and I received no warnings and had to leave (just for that scene) as I am epileptic!!! PLEASE share this since I’ve seen NO warnings being shared and this is very important and can prevent people from having seizures etc during the film.
"Bottom does not mean sub" might as well be occult knowledge to some of y'all
morgana: merlin’s a lover, not a fighter
merlin, who just took down a whole army with barely a glance: i’m a what?
I come from a long line of people with something wrong with them
And they act as if we all lived like that????
seeing the insides of rich peoples houses in tiktok videos only serves to radicalize me further
a bit of an idiot. i’m always mad about something. 22. health student, full of existential dread. she/her.
235 posts