Month: June 2018

sad-commie:

cold-warrior:

thecringeandwincefactory:

class-struggle-anarchism:

Anthony Bourdain, in his book A Cook’s Tour

I lived there for three years. He’s not wrong. Kissinger is a fucking war criminal.

What does Kissenger have to do with what Pol Pot did?

https://www.antiwar.com/orig/pilger.php?articleid=1807

“For too long Pol Pot and his gang have been an iconic horror show
 in the west, stripped of the reasons why. And this extraordinary film, it has
 to be said, adds little to the why. When Pol Pot died in his bed a few years
 ago, I was asked by a features editor to write about him. I said I would, but
 that the role of “civilized” governments in bringing him to power, sustaining
 his movement and rejuvenating it was a critical component. He wasn’t interested.

The genocide in Cambodia did not begin on April 17 1975, “Year
 Zero.” It began more than five years earlier when American bombers killed
 an estimated 600,000 Cambodians. Phosphorous and cluster bombs, napalm and dump
 bombs that left vast craters were dropped on a neutral country of peasant people
 and straw huts. In one six-month period in 1973, more tons of American bombs
 were dropped on Cambodia than were dropped on Japan during the second world
 war: the equivalent of five Hiroshimas.

The regime of Richard Nixon and Henry
 Kissinger did this, secretly and illegally. Unclassified CIA files leave little doubt that the bombing was
 the catalyst for Pol Pot’s fanatics, who, before the inferno, had only minority
 support. Now, a stricken people rallied to them. In Panh’s film, a torturer
 refers to the bombing as his reason for joining “the maquis”: the Khmer Rouge. 

What Nixon and Kissinger began, Pol Pot completed. And having been driven out
 by the Vietnamese, who came from the wrong side of the cold war, the Khmer Rouge
 were restored in Thailand by the Reagan administration, assisted by the Thatcher
 government, who invented a “coalition” to provide the cover for America’s continuing
 war against Vietnam. “

Source: left-reminders

Auditory Processing Problems

meridok:

ulfelska:

fictions-stranger:

permanentlyhighonlife:

cupcakeslushie:

autistic-sowachowski:

winterwombat:

kohotli:

reliquariies:

jaspuppy:

aspergersprincess:

• *someone says something* “what?” *repeats themselves* “sorry?” *repeats themselves again* “pardon?”

•"hey, y’see the red thing at the top of the shelf, will you get it?“ “Sorry, what?” “On the sh-” “oh yeah sure, I’ll get it.”

•*doesn’t hear teacher because someone’s pen is making a scratchy sound at the back of the room*

•*replays video 10 ten times to figure out what they’re saying*

•teachers asking, “why do you always stop writing in the middle of a sentence, just write down whatever I’m saying,” followed by the response, “I’m just processing it,” rebuked by, “we’ll stop processing it and just write.”

•*gets really focused on staring out the window and goes through four songs without hearing a single on*

someone is whispering to their friends in the library, you don’t even know who this person is but you know their major, what state they grew up in, and their hobbies during high school. you just wanted to find a quiet spot to do your chemistry homework.

wanting to chime in on other people’s conversations all the time, but don’t, because you’re not suppose to be “listening” to them.

being the only person in the house that can hear that awful buzzing sound certain electronics make

hiding in your room because everything is too loud. 

motorcycles were invented by satan

being told that you have dog-like hearing by friends and family

being yelled at for “not listening” by friends and family. 

God. God. God. God.

This entire post is so fucking relatable it hurts

“You just need to learn to tune it out.”

Forgetting how to think because ambient noise is drowning out your internal monologue. 

“No, I don’t need the volume up, I’d just really like to put on subtitles. No, I don’t need to move closer, I just…”

Leaving the room whenever someone starts talking on the phone. 

Pausing your video whenever someone starts talking but trying really really hard not to seem passive aggressive about it. 

Struggling to explain why this one sound is the most horrible thing in the world while other very similar sounds are fine. 

you’re trying to listen to what some very important person is trying to say, but you can only focus on the conversations of the ppl around you

sitting in a restaurant and thinking the people sitting next to you are being SO loud because you can hear everything they’re saying, but when you mention it you get weird looks so obviously you’re just overreacting.

not being able to handle the little keyboard sounds as your mom types a text from across the room, but when you ask your mom (who is a quadruple texter) to put her phone on silent you get a murderous look, like you’ve asked her to kill her cat.

turning on ambient noises and trying to relax, only to end up turning it off because it’s not actually helping you fall asleep.

“the speakers are making this high pitched noise”

“what the hell are you talking about?”

“THE SPEAKERS ARE PRACTICALLY SCREAMING HOW DO YOU NOT HEAR THAT??”

“Just ignore it, and focus on the show.”

Holy cow, i thought this was just me? Other people have problems like this too?

@permanentlyhighonlife it’s extremely common with autism and ADHD among other things, often part of a broader sensory processing disorder (SPD) category. 

I… I just thought this was my ADHD or that everyone could hear the really weird buzzing sounds…. What the actual fuck? 

Does ringing in your ears all the time happen to? Like when the power’s out I nearly die because there’s literally no noise (I have fish tanks so it helps keep my brain from going nuts) and my ears start ringing so badly I have to put on headphones and listen to music or a cd or something or I’ll get a headache. 

The high-pitched buzzing from electronics is at the upper end of what we as humans can hear and you are more likely to hear it when younger – your hearing is more sensitive. But as adults our audible range contracts and often we eventually can’t hear it anymore.

Also @ulfelska that sounds like tinnitus tbh

PSA

itsmagnuswinchester:

I lay in bed and I hear my sister crying in the bathroom and it breaks my heart. I failed to help her. She has no money to pay for bills, she has no money to take her son to the dentist or buy him new shoes. She sleep on the floor in my bedroom for five months now because she just doesn’t have any place to go.
She told me today that she keep thinking about killing herself.

I saw signal boosts where people asked for money because they wanted to go to Disneyland or they wanted to visit their friend in another state. And they got tons of donations. I’m not saying that you can’t raise money for less serious things. But I see my sister who has nothing at all right now and wonder why everyone ignore my asks for help. No one owns me money of course. That’s not what I’m saying. It just would be nice if some nice person or two send a few dollars. You would make a single mother and her son happy.

So please please if you can spare something, send via paypal:  monicakil@mail.com

If you want to know more about the situation click here

AND PLEASE PLEASE REBLOG THIS POST, SPREAD IT SO MORE PEOPLE WOULD SEE IT. WE NEED AT LEAST $500.

THANK YOU

UPDATE ON FRIDAY JUNE 08: WE STILL NEED THOSE $500. PLEASE PLEASE IF EVERYBODY COULD JUST DONATE A DOLLAR WE WOULD MEAT OUR GOAL. OR IF YOU REALLY CAN’T (AND I TOTALLY FEEL YOU) AT LEAST REBLOG IT.

PAYPAL: monicakil@mail.com

yourphysicsiskarkatrocious:

aplpaca:

kinda funny when english teachers say stuff like “i can tell if you didnt read the book” or “i can tell when people bs their paper”

no you cant.  you can tell when people are bad at bs-ing their paper.  i didnt even read the sparknotes and i barely skimmed the wikipedia and you gave me an A.  you kneel before my throne unaware that it was born of lies

“YOU KNEEL BEFORE MY THRONE UNAWARE THAT IT WAS BORN OF LIES” IS ONE OF THE GREATEST SENTENCES I’VE EVER READ AND I CAN’T FUCKING BELIEVE IT’S ON A POST ABOUT BULLSHITTING ON ASSIGNMENTS.

A Brief Guide to Early Literary Dracula AUs

atundratoadstool:

One of the coolest things about being a Dracula fan in the 2010s is all the recent publication of materials shedding light on all of the really bonkers alternate Draculas that either nearly became Dracula itself or spun off from the original 1897 text. So yeah… here’s a rundown of the three weird psuedo-canonical AUs that this fin de siecle vampire novel just sort of… comes with.

Stoker’s Notes/Typescript/“Dracula’s Guest”

Bram’s notes for Dracula indicate that he worked on the novel for at least seven years, that it went through many substantial changes in its plot and cast, and that he had a lot of completely metal ideas that either fate, his editors, or his slender grip on good taste did not permit to appear in the final novel. Some of these things appear in fragmentary form in the typescript for Dracula. Some of them got recycled into a short story later published as “Dracula’s Guest.” Some of them only appear scrawled in Stoker’s atrocious handwriting on the various papers collected at the Rosenbach in Philadelphia.

Highlights:

  • Things initially were going to take place in Styria and the villain’s name was going to be Count Wampyr.
  • Arthur doesn’t exist and Jack/Lucy is canon.
  • Jonathan Harker has a “shrewd, skeptical sister.”
  • There’s a third heroine named Kate Reed (or Kate Lee) who is school chums with Lucy and Mina and apparently helps to spread the flow of gossipy about Lucy and her curly-hair beau going to St. James concerts.
  • There’s a painter named Francis who probably discovers that the Count (in addition to having no reflection and showing up as a skeleton in photographs) cannot even be painted.
  • Other unused characters include a philosophic historian, a paranormal investigator, and a pair of dumb/mute servants in the Count’s employ.
  • The Count has a secret chamber where everything is blood red, and it’s apparently really scary.
  • Quincey might be a professional inventor named Brutus Marix. He also might go to Transylvania in the middle of the book. Also, he just might SAVE THE DAY DURING THE FINAL BATTLE BY OPENING FIRE WITH AN EARLY FORERUNNER TO THE MACHINE GUN.
  • There appear to have been werewolves planned.
  • Jack has a spooky party at his house where everyone has to tell a ghost story like they’re living it up at the Villa Diodati. Dracula shows up and is the thirteenth guest at this super goth affair and presumably tells the spookiest story of all.
  • Jonathan spends three chapters/100 pages doing all sorts of crazy stuff that happens before what we now think of a Chapter 1 of Dracula. These shenanigans include encountering the Count pretending to be dead in a Munich leichenhaus, going to see a performance of The Flying Dutchman, and doing all that incredibly spooky stuff in “Dracula’s Guest” where he has adventures with wolf friends on Walpurgisnacht.
  • Castle Dracula sinks into the earth in a VOLCANIC EXPLOSION after Dracula dies.

  • There is also mention of Dracula FLYING out of his coffin into the air during the final confrontation and the Brides getting taken out by chance BOLTS OF LIGHTNING. 

  • Seriously. We have legitimate evidence that were we but in the true and righteous timeline, Dracula would have ended with lightning bolts and machine guns going off in an aerial vampire battle before a volcano explodes.

Makt Myrkranna (AKA Powers of Darkness AKA Icelandic Bootleg Porno Dracula)

So a few years after Dracula was published, it appears that somebody in Sweden ripped it off, made it much much more Hammer Horror, and published it as their own thing called Mörkrets Makter (Powers of Darkness). Then, after that, Valdimar Ásmundsson in Iceland ripped that off and republished it as his own thing called Makt Myrkranna (…also Powers of Darkness). This latter work just got translated into English in 2017, and there’s been intense speculation as to whether or not whomever originally wrote this thing had anything to do with Bram Stoker and his early drafts for the novel, given that it is headed by a preface that is controversially claimed to have been written by Bram, himself. 

Highlights:

  • The first four chapters of the book (the ones everyone tends to really like) are now massively massively expanded, and Jonathan Harker (now named Thomas) gets to spend much more time exploring the castle, trying to escape, having the Count tell him creepy sexual anecdotes, and watching busty women get murdered.
  • The three women in the castle have been condensed into one woman, who seems to be the Count’s vampiric, incesty bride/cousin/whatever and whose death involved her being locked in a bedroom with her lover until he went mad and threw himself out a window.
  • Instead of finding a secret room of boxes with dirt in them, Jonathan Thomas finds a secret ritual orgymurder room where primordial ape men engage in forbidden revels while the Count bites hypnotized virgins to death.
  • Everything that is not in the massively expanded castle section is barely sketched out summaries of lots and lots of wacky things happening with no real explanation (apparently these portions were treated with more detail in at least one version of

    Mörkrets Makter, but that’s not available in English yet).

  • Lucy (now Lucia) becomes a vampire, but she is never staked, and her plot is never really resolved. Arthur, convinced she is alive after people watch her get back up from being dead, orders that people leave out some blankets and snacks for her (very considerate), and then that thread just sort of ends.
  • Renfield doesn’t exist. Jack sort of makes up for this gap in the novel’s tragically dead madmen quota by going mad and dying himself.
  • Said going mad and dying is facilitated by him attending one two many freaky mesmerism parties at Carfax with the Count’s posse of debauched, anarchist, international conspirator, orgymurder cultist noblemen. 
  • Then like… a mysterious violinist shows up at his asylum and the next thing you know, the Count & Co. have taken over the joint, Quincey has to pretend to go crazy to infiltrate, and the entire place burns down. 
  • There is actually some sort of police investigation into all of the many many many illegal things going on. After Van Helsing knifes Dracula to death, Quincey takes the fall for him, but the investigators don’t end up taking him to trial.

Kazıklı Voyvoda (AKA Impaling Voivode AKA Dracula in Istanbul AKA Turkish Nationalist Propaganda Bootleg Dracula)

Taking a cue from Ásmundsson and whomever the Mörkrets Makter guy is (or not…), Turkish author Ali Rıza Seyfi wrote his own pirated version of Dracula and published it as his own work in 1928. Unlike the Makt Mykrannaverse, the world of Kazıklı Voyvoda is fairly faithful to the original text… save that the action is transposed from London to Istanbul, the events of the story now postdate the Turkish War of Independence, and the entire cast (Dracula excepted) is now very Turkish and very fond of waxing eloquent about their immense national pride in being very Turkish.

Highlights:

  • Dracula is explicitly identified as being Vlad III, and he is a marauding terrible foreign menace from the exotic West, persecuting the good Eastern folk of Istanbul just as he historically persecuted and impaled their ancestors before him. Anyone who has ever read and enjoyed any academic essay on Dracula and the colonial gaze may begin to salivate uncontrollably.
  • Forty-seven years before Salem’s Lot, Seyfi establishes that pretty much any religious symbol works on a vampire if you believe in it, and everyone throughout the text waves around charms made out of suras of the Koran and such to great effect.
  • Azmi (Jonathan) gets the tiniest scraps of expanded backstory in which we learn about his childhood predisposition towards fainting and the existence of his pious mother who took him to saints’ shrines in the hopes he might faint less.
  • Güzin (Mina) is no longer one of Dracula’s victims (unlike in the 1953 film adaptation of this book). She is, however, still an incredibly hardcore researcher nerd who makes sure to tell her fiance all sorts of cool Vlad III history facts.
  • Turan (Arthur), Afif (Jack), and Özdemir (Quincey) all served together during the war and became bros that way instead of just being three guys who went on crazy globetrotting adventures together before all independently deciding to propose to the same girl. 
  • Resuhȋ (Van Helsing) makes sure to drop a line reminding everyone of that time they all did blood tests and found out their blood types are compatible… you know… just in case anybody in this post-blood-typing era might be doing a bunch of blood transfusions and worrying about fatal hemolytic reactions.

Hey internet, can we make this happen?

systlin:

pleasespellchimerical:

forestwater87:

So my mom works at a church. Actually, she works somewhere that is located in a church, but close enough for government work. It’s not important. Anyway, they had an artist gallery, because sometimes churches do that; it’s a whole “supporting local artists” thing, and it’s pretty standard. 

What is very not standard is the artist they happened to host this week.

Susan B. Hale is a musician and painter in the Upstate NY region. (For people wondering where that is: it’s all the not-NYC part. There’s actually an entire state attached to the city, like a big, slightly-racist wart. I’m getting off track.)

Susan’s art is fairly standard, lovely oil-on-canvas Impressionist stuff. Mostly flowers –

– some pretty landscapes –

– some weird abstract shit –

Pretty stuff. If I had anything resembling disposable income, I’d wanna buy some of this stuff, because it’s gorgeous.

You know what else she paints, sometimes?

BIG FUCKING DINOSAURS

BIG FUCKING DINOSAURS FROLICKING WITH FLOWERS

BIG FUCKING DINOSAURS NOSHING ON HUMAN SKULLS IN A BLACK VOID-LIKE HELLSCAPE

BIG FUCKING DINOSAURS ON BIG FUCKING CANVASES PLAYING HIDE-AND-SEEK WITH DEAD FLOATING LADIES BY PICTURESQUE PONDS HOW ARE YOU NOT DELIGHTED BY THIS

Obviously, my immediate reaction was to seek this woman out and find her all of the money. But while I did absolutely spend two hours looking up who she was and then emailing her, she doesn’t appear to have an Etsy – or any online store at all. She has virtually no digital presence, and not much of a reputation offline either.

And this is tragic.

Because let’s be real: this woman should be a fucking internet star. She paints lovely scenes of tranquility and fills them with T-Rexes for no apparent reason, other than that she thinks they’re rad. There’s an alternate reality in which she’s a Tumblr legend, and I want to live in that reality.

So here’s the thing. I know I’m not a Big Tumblr Person. I have virtually no clout in things like this, and the odds of anyone seeing this post are kinda limited. But I also want this woman to be so inundated with requests for awesome dino paintings that she has no choice but to open up an online store. I want my home and those of everyone I know to be filled with humungous, lush oils of morbid hilarious dinosaur beauty, like if Monet spent a glorious weekend binging all of Jurassic Park while also on a cocaine bender.

Reblog this. Email her telling her how great you think she is and how much you wish she had an amazon site or whatever. Consider supporting her, if you have some money and love dinosaurs. Boost the shit out of this, because even if she doesn’t get a single dime, her artwork makes me smile and I want to at least share the happy with others, and maybe bounce some of it back to her.

I am not sorry for the length of this post. You got pretty flowers and fucking dinos and you are welcome for it.

@systlin Yooo can you help boost this?

Anyway this is the best thing since sliced bread. I am delighted, /delighted/ I say, by impressionist dinosaurs.

OH MY GODS