the main problem i have with america is that nothings old as hell there. i cant be so far away from a castle it damages my aura

man people really just say stuff on here huh

Noooo haha don't spread racist ideals and colonizer propaganda by idolizing white european aesthetics above all else and denying the life and accomplishments of native peoples on their own lands

I work in postcolonial USAmerican history (museums in New England, Revolutionary through Victorian) and I constantly find myself correcting tourists who say we "don't have anything as old as in Europe here"

they don't usually mean anything by it; they're just not thinking and often get a bit embarrassed when I gently say "nothing EUROPEAN that's that old." but I will keep saying it until I run out of breath, if necessary

(also some pueblos are still occupied! Acoma Pueblo has been continuously occupied for 2000 years! which is incredibly cool!)

Delightful Wooden Nesting Dolls by Salakauppa Playfully Reimagine Traditional Designs

media you can't touch because you interacted with it during a really bad and dark time in your life and the entire media is coated in gross drippy bad-touch depression gunk vs media you can't touch because you interacted with it during a really good time in your life and trying to touch it zaps your brain with pangs of longing and grief for what you no longer have, fight

Dealing with auditory processing disorder

LAWFUL: take the parts you heard and turn it into a clarifying question, e. g. "you saw your cousin where?" or "she's writing a what?"

NEUTRAL: "what did you say?"

CHAOTIC: take a wild stab at what the person said, e. g. "you want to baptize a mackerel?"

To answer someone's question: yes this post applies to you even if you only experience auditory processing difficulties sometimes. Dynamic disability is still disability, and you can still count yourself as disabled even if your disability is not 100% all the time.

Dinner time fellas

That bitch didnt stand a chance

HE FUCKING ATE HER!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

The thing about knitting is it’s much harder to fear the existential futility of all your actions while you’re doing it.

Like ok, sure, sometimes it’s hard to believe you’ve made any positive impact on the world. But it’s pretty easy to believe you’ve made a sock. Look at it. There it is. Put it on, now your foot’s warm.

Checkmate, nihilism.

This is a powerful positive message..

I’m literally reading a book right now (Burnout by Emily and Amelia Nagoski) that says this is scientifically sound.

There have been studies done on rats and dogs where they develop learned helplessness in the animals by giving them impossible tasks. Eventually the animals stop trying, even when the task stops being impossible. (I.e. put a rat in a maze with cheese it can’t get to until it develops learned helplessness, then put the cheese somewhere it can get to it and it won’t even try.) But once they show the animals they CAN do something - i.e. physically moving the rat to the cheese - the learned helplessness goes away.

No one can move you to your cheese for you, but the book says DOING something - which they define as “anything that isn’t nothing” can help. Make a food. Work in the garden. Clean a thing. Do a favor for a friend. Call your elected officials.

Knit a sock.

If you feel overwhelmed by existential despair, do something. It doesn’t have to be big. It just has to be anything that isn’t nothing.

This is really good advice for ADHD people because when executive dysfunction gets bad it’s easy to fall into this pattern of thinking. Do just one thing. It doesn’t have to be your homework, or a chore. It can be something small, it can be something you enjoy. But do just one thing to remind yourself that you can.

This is what “humans want to be productive” really means

We want to make things. We want to do something and at the end of the process see that something has changed. We want physical proof that we did something. We want to be able to point at something and say “I made this”. We want to be creators

So, Boris Johnson wrote an essay in which he talked about the Sistine Chapel and then said : “There is nothing like it in Muslim art of that or any age, not just because it is beyond the technical accomplishment of Islamic art, but because it is so theologically offensive to Islam.”

BITCH

NOT TO MENTION the fact that the prohibition against direct images in Islam was actually the reason for the development of the incredible advances in higher mathematics of the Islamic Golden Age because they were required to create these structures. The Islamic World basically took the ban on images as a “hold my beer” thing and created an entire artistic culture based on mathematics and architecture where art and science fed into and glorified each other, 700 years before the Italian Renaissance.

In conclusion

i will say that islamic art drove me nuts as a kid because i did not have the math knowledge or capability to create such geometric patterns. it may have been the art of my people but by gOD it was difficult and unnecessarily difficult. however my pride in islamic art is neverending. it was frowned upon to be vain in the house, so artists would deck out the places of worship - but places of worship couldn’t be too garishly decorated, or it might detract from worship! the compromise? calm blues and greens, intricate details hidden into the complex patterns. carefully mapped out and planned patterns that were beyond complex and straight into deliberately confusing and practically impossible to replicate. not only that, but verses from the Quran were hidden along the walls, asking god for blessings and care.

muslim art is stunning and i’ll fight the bitch that says otherwise.

Also something underappreciated about the Islamic art is that not only is it geometrically incredible, but the geometry and structure of it has a purpose. In the niches and ceilings, the cascading ornamentation is used for acoustic purposes. In many of the mosques, they are so well laid out and designed that a single person standing on a specific spot can speak/sing/pray and be heard in every single part of the building.