Reblog. Procrastinate. Reblog again.

did you have to use that photo for that

i mean good on them...? still paired with that image thats uh. interesting

OP alluded to how unsettling the machine looks, and I believe that it was a concious decision; the robot dogs have garnered sympathy due to their apperance, which makes it easier for the police to morally justify their use. This thing? You're not gonna get many people to sympathise with it. The only people who would are monster and-or robot fuckers, and I believe these circles generally understand that a machine cannot be trusted (though of course many would willingly approach it for pervert reasons (positive) knowing full well it's a bad idea).

admittedly i do think that picture of it standing in the doorway with glowing white eyes is like comically frightening but it's SUPPOSED to be so you don't feel bad for it or approach it

here's the list of things you need to know about ao3 if you're new to the platform

I’m paying to force seven thousand strangers to see a photo of my late husband having fun with his dog. Tumblr Blaze is totally worth it. XD

Reading your tag made me laugh out loud. It’s like two old friends unexpectedly stopped by your porch for a quick visit. XD

What’s loved, lives.

Yes, Peter, you’re absolutely right. What’s loved, lives. You three boys all come back around again to see me again soon, okay?

So we’re going around again.

Sex workers are thrown under the bus, shown only as thieves who fleece men in the woods at night, while queer sexuality is relegated to a few scenes with Allie’s roommate (a woefully underused Quintessa Swindell) and a handful of pans past blurry same-sex extras making out in the background. “This night is for the straights,” Swindell’s character says to Allie, before saying that queer people have worked around straight laws for centuries.  This is supposed to be a nod to queer resilience, but largely comes off as straightwashing the history of anti-LGBTQ legislation in this country that led towards raids of queer clubs and incarceration of queer people in the not-too-distant past (let alone the current barrage of anti-Trans and LGBTQ legislation currently in the works and on the books). It’s also ignorant of the long and fraught fight for the normalization of age-of-consent laws, which, by the way, did not happen in all states in this very country until 2003. Yes, that’s not even thirty years ago.  By the end, our intrepid protagonists have not had sex with anyone, because this is a film about Romance with a Capital R (and I guess sex is not part of romance!) and for that very same reason they ultimately embrace the fascist state of things. They aren’t the only ones who refuse to fight back. No one in this cursed film is protesting this mandate beyond “repeal” signs in various windows and some creative graffiti (...) (...) If we are supposed to believe that the film is making some subversive statement about the state of sex and bodily autonomy in this country, it cannot end with its leads embracing their chains. That’s just warmed-over conservatism running around in sheep’s clothing.

the premise could have been interesting as a serious dystopian story, especially taking that history into account, but it wasn't written that way at all. this movie should never have been a fucking romcom making light of the violence the united states (and many other countries) has enacted on any kinds of sexual relationships it deems undesirable.

Help your local library; get books out even if you know you can’t read them all!

Anyway, on fera jamais mieux que ce graphique du LA Times.

(side note, I find it very funny that English swung so hard towards formality that we lost our informal pronoun, and now we're swinging so hard to informality that a lot of us don't use Mr/Ms/etc anymore, we call our bosses by their first names, etc.)

We owe the survival of our traditions to men like William Kimber, Cecil Sharpe, Ralph Vaughan Williams, and to the work of Maude Karpeles, who taught the dances to her Esperance Club girls in London and took the traditions around the world again. What we have now is a revival and a survival, and we wouldn't have any of it without a few dedicated nerds who collected and preserved what they could before it was all lost in war and economic decline.

Folk music, dance, song, they were all primarily working class traditions, shared during work, around hearthsides, in pubs. These are the people who are hit hardest by war and economic hardship.

If you're interested in the survival of morris dancing, I highly recommend The Way Of The Morris. It's a beautiful and deeply moving film. Available through the BFI and apparently on Prime: https://player.bfi.org.uk/subscription/film/watch-way-of-the-morris-2010-online

It is less about this specific case and more about the principle of the matter. Particularly in a case so high-profile, we need to scrutinize the case of the state as much as humanly possible. We need to maintain awareness of how the state operates, how it prosecutes, how it punishes. This same pattern has played out with unknowable quantities of other people being ground to paste in the machinery of the prison industrial complex. This is a conversation everyone in America needs to be having. These are maneuvers every American needs to be aware of, particularly as the police state kicks into higher gear than we've ever seen it before. We cannot trust state prosecution. You need to maintain your skepticism, not for this case, but for all the cases that are going to follow it. We all need to hang onto this together.

the British tabloid press remains, and will always be, fucking evil

this is in spite of the fact that black people were a lot more common in medieval europe than potatoes.

if you do it on purpose you're a dick. if it's on accident but you keep doing it that person is still going to be mad at you because you don't care enough to try not to step on their toes