Soooo many pictures. Too many for the Twitters, so I’m dusting off the ol’ Tumblr.
In anticipation of next season’s American Gods, my girlfriend and I visited the House on the Rock. It’s a little hard to explain, but here’s the short version: an architect/engineer climbed up a rock and built Frank Lloyd Wright’s worst nightmare. It struck Neil Gaiman so deeply he included it as a critical location in American Gods, and it’ll be featured in season 2 of the Starz series.
So we went. Behold.
This was what greeted us when we pulled up: a ¾ full parking lot, and a big one at that. I was a little surprised; Gaiman’s descriptions of the place gave me a seedier, hole-in-the-wall vibe, but this looked like some mid-level theme park entrance. Hmm.
We started the tour and ventured around … and I was starting to think we came to the wrong place. Sure, the statue in front was kind of iffy, and some of the rooms looked a little retro, maybe gauche … but not the mindfuck I had anticipated.
Then … then we came to the Infinity Room.
… um. Okay. Hey, there’s a glass floor at the midway point, what’s under ther–
What are those, bushes? Wait … treetops?
HOLY FUCK YOU BATMAN IT’S AN UNSUPPORTED ROOM HANGING OUT OVER A FUCKING CLIFF YOU GO JUMP UP AN ASSHOLE
(It also creaks and sways. I thought it was just an old house, not a FUCK YOU CLIFF OF DOOM.)
Once back on solid ground, we found a door.
After that, shit got … weird.
I call this the Impractical Rejected Weapons from Fallout 3 collection.
Including a literal HAND CANNON. What the what?
Um.
This is getting unsettling.
The pooping dog piggy bank’s eyes won’t stop following me.
Ooohhhkay … hey, look! Another one of them doors!
I wonder what’s behind this–
… well, I would have never guessed “replica American Main Street inside a house.” You win this round.
“I wish I was BIG.”
And because why the hell not, he’s a goddamned carnival pipe organ.
Then we came to this sign.
What? Bullshit. Bullshit you have a whale in this house. I will *shit myself* if you have a whale in th–
OH FUCK YOU MATE.
NO FUCK YOU THAT IS A THREE STORY TALL WHALE.
THAT IS A THREE STORY TALL WHALE FIGHTING A GIANT SQUID IN YOUR HOUSE YOU HAVE TOO MANY DRUGS
YOU PUT A FUCKING MOTORBOAT IN ITS MOUTH WHAT THE HELL ARE YOU
THIS DUDE GETS IT.
“I have seen some shit.”
And after the whale was just menagerie after menagerie of random audacious bullshit.
“Hello, I’ll be waiting in your closet tonight.”
“YOUR SILENCE GIVES CONSENT.”
Okay, this made me smile.
Fun fact: Burma Shave ads were the precursor to WTFIWWY.
Wait, where is that noise coming fro–
Oh yeah! There’s a HUGE assortment of these weird mechanical music machines assembled from real instruments, electronics, pneumatics, and madness.
But it doesn’t stop there.
Then we stumbled on the “Abominations in the Sight of God” section.
And at the very end … this. If you’ve read American Gods, you know *exactly* what this is. If you’re only watching the show, consider this spoilers for season 2.
Then we went outside, and there was a kitty.
I petted the kitty.
The end.
Bonus: Here is a machine that perfectly replicates the sound of Steve Martin falling down a flight of stairs.
Boozhoo (hello), my name is Ken, I am a disabled Ojibwe artist from northern Wisconsin. I am writing this post because I am having a hard time making ends meet and any donations I could possibly receive at this time would be greatly appreciated. Recent events have left my bank account depleted and my cupboards bare, I have some food but it will not last and I still do not know how I will cover all the utility bills.
I do have PayPal, that is really the best way to donate at this time, the email I use for that is: baapimakwa@gmail.com, or you can click here.
Having an extremely hard time right now, my father and I both have impaired mobility, I can’t bend or lift and he needs both of his knees replaced, we had a family member staying with us who did much of the cleaning but now that it’s summer they’ve been gone, the house is falling apart and we desperately need to bring someone in to clean. It’s very embarrassing and there is only so much we can do.
This is the scariest part tbh and also the reason why I couldn’t care less what racist anons have to say
Can I also point out how classist many of these stereotypes are?
Yes yes we can. Middle class and rich people like to pretend that bigotry is a lower class poor problem and that is why these stereotypes exist in this form.
Okay, harsh fact: the fact that so many of us are crowd funding our survival is putting a significant strain on solidarity in our online communities.
The main reason being that we mostly crowdsource in our own circles where most people do not have a lot of money. And with so many people who need to crowd fund expensive things like health care bills, rent and legal fees, there simplyisn’t enough readily available money to go around within these mostly marganilized communities. So inevitably a lot of people aren’t going to get what they need this way.
This creates tension in our communities where the Tumblr famous, the white, the skinny, the young, the pretty, inevitably are more succesful at surviving their crowd funding than those who are not. Counter responses often call on individual responsibility, focusing on supporting POC people, not conventionally beautiful people etc, but calling for individual responsibility doesn’t work when systematic privilege defines who has enough audience to make a succesful crowdfunding post. Result: anger, pain, bitterness, in-fighting.
When people are literally dying from poverty (and people are), a failed crowd funding campaign can feel like the community allowed someone to die. Even though what killed them is the state and what stopped the community from helping them is the fact that they were overwhelmed by millions of similar emergencies.
And crowd-funding isn’t like offline mutual aid. You can’t share your last sandwich through crowd funding, or let someone use your shower. You can’t build the interpersonal physical connections that result in the kind of long term systematic support that helps people survive. Instead of having a few friends that support you and that you will support no matter what, with crowd funding you have a crowd of thousands that you feel should help you survive but that will inevitably consistently let you down because they do not have money either and because algorithms of what gets views and what doesn’t are unpredictable.
Then there’s the fact that crowd funding campaigns are easy to fake, the fact that crowd funding forces people to put on displays of their suffering,the fact that when being liked means surviving, our communities become coercive.
crowd funding also exposes people to groups that want to harm them, etc. I could go on. Crowd funding our survival poses great challenge to community building.
This isn’t the fault of people who feel the need to crowdfund their survival but it is still a fact we have to deal with as a community.
And if Trump, the Tories and all the other fuckers that are ruining our countries right now are getting their way, the number of us that feel forced to crowd fund our survival will get much much bigger while the means we have to help them will get less. People are dying because governments deny them to means to live, that is only going to get worse. We need an answer to this fast because it could potentially destroy what online communities we have.
I don’t often see abuse posts about the opposite spectrum of post-abuse behavior, and it’s. Kind of a bummer bc those are still things people experience.
So shout out to :
people who feel like they have to aggressively defend the things that are important to them because they’re so used to it being torn down and taken from them – even if a friend was just kidding, it’s so hard to see it as just kidding.
People who are constantly on high alert for a fight and had to learn to treat everything like a debate because it was the only way they could stand up for themselves. People who have a hard time rationalizing not everything is an attack because everything used to be an attack.
People who are mad and furious over what happened and get completely consumed by rage no matter how hard they try to let it go. And who have to deal with people telling them they’re making it bigger than it was.
People who have to constantly front as being a badass or aloof because they can’t be seen as vulnerable in any way.
People who constantly fear they’re just like their abuser because they lash out at a moment’s notice to defend themselves
There’s a ton more things but I’m on my break and these are just things I experience that I know a lot more people relate to omg. It’s hard to unlearn aggressive means of self preservation and it hurts to hurt people after you’ve had to experience that hurt and it seems impossible to get over or unlearn those things but you’ll do alright it just needs time and patience and there’s nothing wrong with being angry.
Urocyon's Jaunts 2.0 
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