Weird & Owning It

[Weird & Owning It]

[intermundia]

btw i highly recommend smashing things in a safe and contained manner when you're upset. the instinct to rage and destroy can be sated by the sound of broken glass. find a place and a few objects to shatter, it's good for the soul. i just took a hammer to my ex's bong and i feel so much more normal now. you don't always have to be careful and precious with the world around you, you're allowed to destroy things too, i give you permission. violence can be healing when you're inarticulate with rage :)

[intermundia]

have some vicarious violence 🫶

[phoenixonwheels]

If you want to smash stuff but you don’t want to have to clean up a mess, throwing ice cubes at a brick wall is highly satisfying.

[Weird & Owning It]

[frakyeahadamaroslin]

[Weird & Owning It]

[miseducatedmelanicmuse]

[worldwithoutmiracles]

“My thesis is that at many levels of human interaction there is the opportunity to conflate discomfort with threat, to mistake internal anxiety for exterior danger, and in turn to escalate rather than resolve.” (from Conflict Is Not Abuse by Sarah Schulman. highly recommend it if you’re interested in having better dialogues and feeling less defensive in your life)

[elodieunderglass]

In the New Complete Book of Self-Sufficiency, John Seymour - who pretty much defined the principles of “self-sufficiency” as a modern political movement - goes into detail about conflict and community-building. So far from today’s interpretation of self-sufficiency as an American prepper-homesteader isolated from their neighbors - self-sufficient in the sense of “alone” - he envisioned self-sufficient in the sense of “not needing to buy things,” whether that was buying things for pure survival or buying things just to feel good. Seymour felt strongly that a community of close friends, preferably meeting frequently in pubs with wood-burning fires and live music, was a hallmark of being especially practical and self-sufficient; and if you think about it, you’ll see that it makes sense.

After all, if you want to buy absolutely nothing - if you want to create a way to live separate from society - you cannot do it like Thoreau; even Thoreau wasn’t doing it like Thoreau; you have to create an separate society, a self-sufficient community, and live in that.

And interestingly Seymour put his finger on “why communes fail.”

In his experience, which was deep and broad, experiments in self-sufficient communities/communes virtually always failed. And not because the idealistic fools weren’t capable of growing crops, or chopping wood, or whatever. It isn’t even the founders were stupid or ignorant or inexperienced, or because self-sufficiency only attracts dramatic personalities. No, the communities he observed consistently failed because they had no ability to resolve conflict. Every group of people will have to come to a tricky decision, resolve a sticky situation, have an awkward conversation or even just get along with unideal situations. They didn’t fall apart because a sheep fell in a ditch; anyone can get a sheep out of a ditch; they fell apart over the arguments about ideology, ditches, sheep and blame. It was always some issue of conflict or communication that broke these well-meaning, well-intentioned, well-educated people apart.

Step back from that and think: people frequently try to live outside capitalism even in this modern world, people frequently try to live in the most environmentally-friendly way, people frequently try to envision an alternative to a hostile state, even in this world where it is difficult or impossible to do so. For every utopia you might picture, people (being people) will have already made a decent attempt at building and living it, in the hope of showing it or even giving it to you. And those utopias aren’t here at the moment for you to have, because it’s terrifically difficult to make communities out of nothing. And that’s largely because it’s very hard to have communication skills about anything at all, let alone something that gets you mad.

So it’s worth having communication skills. As a matter of self-sufficiency.

[findingfeather]

If you have ever worked with the public, remember: the public will be part of your politically utopic community.

All the mommy bloggers, all the brosephs, all the every single customer or client or other person you have dealt with who you wanted to fucking strangle, or at least wanted to be allowed one of those amazing moments of Put Down that viral reddit posts are made of, every single frustrating as fuck human: they will be part of your post-capitalist utopia.

They will not wake up, the morning of the revolution, and suddenly become different people. Your choices will be to line them all up against a wall and shoot them . . . .or figure out how to live with them in your community. (And multiple revolutions in the past hundred years have tried that whole "line them up and shoot them" thing, tried it REAL HARD, and it didn't work out great for them either.)

The more de-industrial, de-urbanized, de-impersonal, whatever, your ideal society is? The more it will involve having to work, and work well, and work effectively and without interpersonal violence (physical or social) against people who irritate the fuck out of you.

And no, we never really had any Neat Trick to make that easier in the past. What we most often had was survival pressure so intense that the threat of being ostracized (or having the group turn on you) was enough to force resolutions that nobody was really happy with, or that left an unspoken wound to fester for generations, or to offer up a scapegoat to vent the community's violence on and then pretend to move on, or . . . .

Etc.

If you want a cooperative, non-violent, non-coercive community, and especially if you want that to be the norm, you end up having to learn to work collaboratively and productively with the person who irritates and frustrates and upsets you most in the ENTIRE world. And if you can't picture doing that, then maybe it's time for some self-reflection about how you really want the world to work, and what you're capable of contributing to that.

[Weird & Owning It]

[theconcealedweapon]

[Weird & Owning It]

[secondbeatsongs]

somehow instead of saying "as a treat", I've started using the phrase "for morale", as if my body is a ship and its crew, and I (the captain) have to keep us in high spirits, lest we suffer a mutiny in the coming days.

and so I will eat this small block of fancy cheese, for morale. I will take a break and drink some tea, for morale. I will pick up that weird bug, for morale.

I'm not sure if it helps, but it does entertain me

[cryscal]

I like it!

@akindplace, @wholesomepostarchive

[Weird & Owning It]

[bunjywunjy]

moon landing day tomorrow! this is your only warning that I'm absolutely not going to be normal about it

[Weird & Owning It]

[socialjusticeinamerica]

[Weird & Owning It]

[ewaudreyhorne]

After what we’ve been through, it would be very easy to give up, to lose hope. But not here. Not today. This is more than a ship, Chief. This is an act of faith. It is proof that despite all we’ve lost, we keep trying. And we will get through this, all of us, together. I promise.

[cryscal]

I love this whole scene, but Bill’s glance back at Saul speaks volumes.

[Weird & Owning It]

[disgustedorite]

Do you like speculative evolution and/or designing creatures? Are you fascinated by ancient communities on the internet, and/or does the idea of permanently contributing something to one appeal to you? Because if so, dear Tumblr, do I have a recommendation for you.

Sagan 4 is a really old forum community worldbuilding project–dating back to 2006, having been made in the hype of Spore as basically a way of playing it manually before the game actually came out. Miraculously, the project actually kept going after that–even after Spore came out, it continued on and even gained new members, producing over 5000 unique species made by over 100 contributors over its several hundred million year in-universe history and still going to this day over 16 years later.

And ANYONE can join and submit their own species.

As a collaborative project, Sagan 4 has a myriad of species ranging from realistic to frightening to whimsical and made by creators of all skill levels, all of which can be found on the Sagan 4 Wiki. Though it can be a little intimidating for newcomers (and even just readers), I’ve found as someone who only joined 3 years ago that it’s something you learn more about as you go along–I’m still discovering new things even after contributing well over 100 species, and not even veteran members know everything about what the project contains.

Even if you are not an artist, Sagan 4 might still interest you if you enjoy reading worldbuilding or, perhaps even more so, if you have an interest in old forum communities and lost media–because boy does Sagan 4 have some community history and even a little bit of ancient drama, much of which is lost or fragmented.

If Sagan 4 interests you, here are the links:

• Forum
• Wiki
• Discord
  

[Weird & Owning It]

[socialjusticeinamerica]

[theconcealedweapon]

Ruby Bridges is 68. This is not ancient history. Not even close.

[neil-gaiman]

I know Ruby. She's a really nice person. The idea that they would try and write what she did as a girl out of history is shocking to me on so many levels, the simplest of which is just, but don't they know how lovely she is?

[jld-az]

Ruby was in Tucson, AZ last Thanksgiving. I wasn't able to attend due to illness, but I appreciated the opportunity.