quill and parchment love letters to the moon

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All the posts I've reblogged that had 10 or fewer notes at the time of tagging have been addorned with a brand new label:

Go dive into the Needs Love tag and shower these posts with likes, reblogs and nice tags!!

Let's surprise these creators with a sudden influx of love for their work and boost those notes beyond everything they could hope for!

I don't live in a walkable city.

I live in a mid-sized Texas town that only realizes that there are people who don't drive when TXDoT gives them money for active transportation infrastructure.

People constantly tell me that you just cannot walk or ride a bike in this city. It's impossible!

I do it anyway, because I firmly believe that solarpunk is a useless aesthetic if you aren't living it as best you can. We don't need technology to solve our problems we need will.

Also I do volunteer work on the political side of the local animal shelter and so I find myself at city hall several times a year and there's no bike rack.

Or rather there wasn't a bike rack.

I complained to someone, politely, informing them that I am doing this volunteer work and I don't have any safe place to lock my bike and that locking it to a handrail is inconvenient for everyone and also hideous.

A few months later a single staple-style bike rack was installed at city hall. It's not much, but I got sent a photo of someone else who got to use it before I did, clearly there was a need, if small.

Then I turned my gaze to the local grocery store, which had a bike rack, but the bike rack was terrible. It was too short for modern tire sizes, it was placed too close to the wall so one side was useless, and it was generally pretty cramped.

It took some time, but an advocate friend told me to contact the property owner instead of banging my head against the wall contacting HEB itself, and so I sent another polite complaint with a photo, explaining why it wasn't a very good bike rack and it would be really cool if we had a different one with better placement.

And about two months later, we have new staple-style racks at the grocery store, properly placed for maximum parking.

It's not a new bike lane. It's not a removal of parking minimums. It's not infill development or an active transportation advisory board.

They're just bike racks.

But that's the beauty of it. I, a person with an email address, some basic "how to be firm but polite while making an argument" skills, and a willingness to work out who to contact, fixed two problems for the local community. Trust me, I have had people wait on me to unlock my bike so they could have the "good spot." I was not the only person annoyed at the old rack.

It can be done. You're not powerless. Solarpunk doesn't have to be a wishful aesthetic.

Technology will not save us.

Just like the anti-Vietnam War protest songs that we associate with the 1960s, or the early nihilism that spawned punk music in the 1970s. But he didn’t *sound* like a punk anarchist; he sounded like a country rock singer. When he released Born in the U.S.A. people completely misinterpreted (or possibly ignored) the lyrics in favor of the tone of the music.

Politicians used his music to promote their ‘Murica Yes! brand, and he had to literally explain that that was not what he was about. He’s over here asking when we’re going to have jobs and heathcare, not stanning the politicians who weren’t helping the people.

It was also kind of a big deal that he had an integrated band, because even as late as the 1980s music was still kind of segregated and MTV was straight up racist. They refused to play and promote black artists and then claimed that were no black artists in the first place. Michael Jackson’s record company had to threaten a boycott of their white artists to get MTV to play his Thriller video.

Plus, the first black/white interracial kiss on TV was in 1968 (OG Star Trek). Also it took us until the 70s to get sympathetic gay characters on screen, and the 90s to get gay characters to kiss onscreen. And all of those firsts were met with outrage.

So keep that in mind when you see Bruce Springsteen not just playing with an interracial band, but engaging in an interracial, gay kiss on stage repeatedly.

https://www.gq.com/story/this-fucked-me-up-bruce-springsteen-singing-about-clarence-clemons

It was a story where… we remade the city. We remade the city, shaping it into the kind of place where our friendship and our love for one another wouldn’t have been such an exceptional thing. - Bruce Springsteen

It wasn’t about showmanship or rejecting bigots or anything it was just. Damn right that was one of the loves of his life and damn right he was going to kiss him onstage

It gets me a little that Bruce has had a divorce, that he’s been married twice, but he loved Clarence for the rest of Clarence’s life and will presumably love him the rest of his own

Clemons said in one interview. “Bruce and I looked at each other and didn’t say anything, we just knew. We knew we were the missing links in each other’s lives. He was what I’d been searching for.” In another version of the story, Clemons says “He looked at me, and I looked at him, and we fell in love.”

I’m having some emotions about it!

“He was elemental in my life,“ Springsteen adds, “and losing him was like losing the rain.”

Not just! I love you pure and deep and true but! I am going to love you like that in front of the whole damn world!

We have fewer narratives about taking risks and making statements for platonic love rather than romantic and supposedly it would be easier to downplay this onstage than romance and! They refused! They fucking refused! In front of hundreds of thousands of people, over the course of years! In the spotlight, in word and deed, I love you!

Thank you to everyone who has been sending such kind messages, I promise I really do read them all, even if I can't reply, but while these messages are wonderful (and really. I mean it. just the nicest and most heartfelt things I've ever seen) the sad fact is they don't change my situation. But you can change it. You can help me.

If you know my situation, if you want to help me, please write to Glitch Productions. They are the only people who can, and I believe, might, be able and willing to save me. SMG4 has ignored me, even through a legal letter. I have no hope that they will do otherwise, but Glitch are a different case and I think they just genuinely don't know I exist. I have sent them a message, to no reply, but more messages means more of a chance they will notice. IF you are on twitter please message that way, I closed my account there years ago, and please be polite: I am not asking for hate, even if I've received it.

1) TIMELINE RGB was created long before, over a decade before Mr. Puzzles first debuted. (*RGB's first appearance may have been 2011, was a little iffy on that)

2) UNDENIABLY UNCANNY RESEMBLANCE The number of traits, some uniquely specific to and representative of RGB's design, that are copied in Mr. Puzzles design are too many to be chalked up to 'just a coincidence'

Especially when you look at the designs of all of the other TV head characters out there - I collected as many as I could find (though I'm sure there's more) and none of them come even close to sharing the number of similarities that these two do.

3) TV MODEL AND DESIGN CHOICES While looking up references for older TVs, I found that for the exact TV they're based on (small retro box TV with knobs in the upper right of the TV and an antenna) most of the references didn't have a vent on the side of them like RGB and Mr. Puzzles do.

I looked up 4 different reference terms, and still had to scroll a while before I found one that matched exactly (above collection just a general sample/example of types of TVs I found). Unless my browsers are wigging out, either the pictures that would come up for these kinds of TVs were different in 2023, or this exact combination of features are just not very common for this style of TV. If that's the case, it may be a bit strange to design a character with those features together.

Here's where that distinction is important: Mr. Puzzles as a character doesn't have much of a reason to go with this design over other styles of similar TVs. But RGB does. The vents on the sides of RGB's head aren't just an aesthetic choice - they're included as a legitimately integral part of the story-line (Negative RGB). The same can be said for a number of other choices Modmad has made, down to individual items of clothing, that show just how much thought and intention and consideration went into every aspect of RGB's design.

Which makes it that much more frustrating to see him get plagiarized in such a careless manner by people who don't even seem to put much care into their own character (common criticism I've read that SMG4 fans have had about Mr. Puzzles and his 'arc').

4) OTHER PEOPLE, EVEN THOSE WHO HADN'T HEARD ABOUT THE SITUATION FROM MOD, NOTICED This has been noted by fans of both series since Mr. Puzzles first came out.

Maker: Cecile Choi

Inspiration: Matisse’s Goldfish

A fabulous suit. It isn’t clear in this photo, but there is a legal clipped to the collar (by the shop staff) that reads: Whoever buys this, we ARE coming too!