Things I Like

Shane learns pretty quickly not to play any audio from Ilya in public, both because he doesn't want to blow up Ilya's spot and reveal how secretly sappy his boyfriend is, and because there's no telling when Ilya will launch into sex talk in the middle of an otherwise mundane message.

years into this, he's driving Hayden to the airport after hosting him for a long weekend. a message from Ilya comes in, starting with "hey baby, coach just called..." according to the iPhone speech-to-text description. it's short, anyway, and Shane doesn't want to read while driving on the highway — he has no choice to press play.

"Hey baby, Coach just called and said practice is pushed back an hour tonight, I told him that's fine for us. Also, I was just showering and I have a hickey on my dick —"

Shane turns bright red and almost swerves into oncoming traffic trying to turn the phone off.

"Did not know this was possible. You gave me dick hickey," Ilya's voice continues despite Shane's best efforts.

Of course they all attend, and, as per usual, Shane and Ilya stick together as close as humanly possible all the time, but at some point they do get seperated for a moment as they get called to sign rainbow jerseys and take pictures with kids.

Ilya starts looking for his husband - he gets fidgety like a chihuahua with seperation anxiety when Shane is out of sight for too long, a fact that he conveniently avoids talking about in therapy, as he knows that Shane is not much better, so obviously they are both perfectly fine and well adjusted.

Anyway, he spots Shanes scribbeling something as he is standing next to a participation wall that is covered in colourful sticky notes where people write their thoughts for the question that is printed in big letters on the top: "What makes you Proud?"

Ilya's immediately sprints over to Shane because that is NOT the time and place for his sweet and lovely husband to write "being a olympic gold medalist, world champion and four times stanley cup winner :)"

He reaches the wall, just as Shane is ready to turn around and leave; a big smile hits Ilya like a ray on sunshine as Shane spots him.

"Solnyshko", Ilya wraps his arm around Shane's waist and presses his forehead against Shane's, allowing himself a moment to revel in the relief of having his Shane back, before turning them both back towards the wall. "What did you write?", Ilya asks and carefully trying for a carefree tone.

From the side, he can see a blush creeping up Shane's cheeks and he looks so cute, flushed and freckled and Ilya wants to eat him up and- omg Rozanov get it together, Shane being so pretty really fucks with your concentration.

"You know, just the normal stuff", Shane mumbles and tries to turn around, but Ilya presses his body even closer to his side - not that Shane fights against him really hard.

Ilya scans the wall, taking in the heartwarming messages of people being proud of being out and happy and living their best lives, of finding joy in their communities, of embracing their identities, of finally being comfortable in their bodies, of fighting for their rights and through hardships, of celebrating life and joy. And all this joy is so much and wonderful and it makes Ilya's knees wobbly and he is once again very lucky to have Shane to lean on.

And then, right under the "What makes you Proud?" print Ilya spots that purple sticky note, covered in chicken scratch. Obviously the author tried very hard to write neatly on this one, but still, it's unmistakably Shane's writing.

Ilya's breath catches as he reads: "My husband. The strongest and kindest and funniest person I know. Who takes care others and of himself, every day. Who loves life and makes mine so much better. I love him."

Ilya reaches for Shane's hand. It is barely Shakespeare, but the sheer earnestness of Shane's note make him feel like being checked into the boards, his knees really are close to give up now, his fingers seeking purchase in Shane's flesh it must be painful and he let's himself be hold by Shane's solid and warm body.

Of course he knows that Shane loves him, he tells Ilya every day, and he knows that Shane is proud of Ilya for going to therapy, for being a good captain... but reading it, here, and for everyone to see?

No, Ilya does NOT want to cry about it, not before he's got his mouth on Shane's cock and then fuck them both to tears afterwards.

For now he presses his nose in Shane's hair and whispers: "Kindest person? Seriously? What have I have done to be insulted like this, Lyubimyy?"

"What the fuck, Ilya?" Shane's face scrunches up in that adorable way that makes it hard for Ilya to suppress a smile.

"No it's true, ask entire league. They all say I'm biggest asshole. I worked very hard for that reputation."

"Oh don't worry, you earn that." Shane huffs.

"See, even my husband agrees."

Then Shane turns his head around just enough to eye Ilya with this open, soft glance of his and Ilya knows already his heart will give up. "Yes, you are the biggest asshole, but you also have the biggest heart. And I'm very proud of you, baby."

everyone needs to hear about the situation in india right now. the youth of this nation are going through hell and back to protect the foundations that our country was built on in the first place, while the adults who are supposed to actually be in charge try to silence our voices.

NEET, which is an exam taken by millions of students per year and is the ONLY gateway for medical admissions across the country, had its papers leaked. so many took their lives because this exam meant everything for their future. and NTA, the agency who conducts this exam, was not held accountable.

there was national backlash. cockroach janta party (initially a satirical political party formed by abhijeet dipke in retaliation to the remarks of the chief justice of india calling the youth "cockroaches" and "parasites of society") started protests at jantar mantar, demanding the resignation of the union education minister, dharmendra pradhan. the movement also asked for ten million inr (~100,000 usd) in compensation for the families of students who died by suicide and wanted NTA be held accountable.

sonam wangchuk, a climate activist and education reformer, also went on a hunger strike at jantar mantar to protest against this corruption in india's higher education system. his fast began on june 28, demanding the resignation of the union education minister. his fast lasted for 20 days until delhi police FORCIBLY removed him and admitted him to safdarjung hospital on july 18.

because of this, cockroach janta party announced "chalo sansad," a march to the parliament beginning on june 20th, 9:00 am ist. but the police seems to be responding with water cannons, mobile jammers, and baton charge. all of this, because of a peaceful protest led by people no older than 30.

The government is doing everything it can except for actually having an honest dialogue with the protestors.

It’s important to note that despite all the police brutality, despite how the government has had extra forces airlifted to Delhi to help quash the protest, this has deterred no one.

Not only is the protest in Delhi going strong, the government closed down every metro station in Central Delhi in an effort to stop them and it still hasn’t.

There’s protests in most major cities in India in solidarity. Palakkad, Chennai, Mumbai, Hyderabad, Bangalore, Kochi, and probably more besides. There has been a protest in the UK as well in solidarity.

People who aren’t at the protest are donating so much food that the organisers have had to ask them to stop doing so because there’s more than enough. In lieu of that people are donating money for medicine, lawyers, cleanup, and umbrellas.

Most crucially, hopes aren’t broken. Spirits aren’t broken. People with bruises and broken bones are still showing up. People are showing up cosplaying as freedom fighters and super heroes and a dinosaur. People are doxxing goons who show up trying to incite violence. People are making reels. People in Mumbai literally opened a moving police detainment van to allow arrested students to escape.

We cast her anyway, in a chorus role. Offered her lots of support and encouragement and kindness and grace.

At the next audition she whispered. Anyone who had never seen her before would have thought she was the most nervous kid there. But the directing team was abuzz afterward. Did you see? She did it! Once or twice I could actually almost hear her! Amazing.

Got cast again, in a chorus role. She’d been making friends with the other kids, and they offered her encouragement too.

And the next audition we said wow I can hear her! She’s speaking! Let’s give her a handful of lines! She can do it!

Stop backing up my fucking files.

Stop asking me to back up my fucking files.

Stop taking my fucking files off my fucking computer.

I don't want a fucking reminder in three fucking days. Let me fucking say no.

Here's a text tutorial to get rid of that shit on Windows 11.

Here's a video tutorial to get rid of that shit on Windows 10.

Here's a video tutorial to get rid of that shit on Windows 11.

“Do you know why I pulled you over?” is a trap. It means there’s a good chance the officer doesn’t actually have a good reason to ticket you, and is trying to get you to waive your 5th Amendment rights and incriminate yourself. If you make a guess, that’s a confession of guilt.

materialist-scumbag

THE TICK THAT DREW THE MAP OF THE WEST June 28, 2026

So the longhorn was a garbage animal. Stringy, mean, half-feral, descended from Spanish cattle that had gone loose in the brush country for a couple centuries and bred for survival rather than meat. In Texas after the war it was worth maybe three or four dollars a head, because there were millions of them and nobody to eat them. The local market was Texans, and Texas was broke. Up in Chicago or New York the same animal was worth thirty, forty dollars, because the Union had spent four years eating its way through the eastern cattle supply and the cities were short on beef.

That spread is the whole engine of the cattle drive. You don't need a tick to explain why a man would walk a cow a thousand miles to multiply its value by ten. The arithmetic does it.

What the tick explains is the SHAPE.

Because the thing about the longhorn nobody in the romance mentions is that it was a carrier. Centuries in the brush had given it a shaky immune truce with Babesia bigemina, a protozoan that lived in its blood and rode around on a tick that dropped off into the grass wherever the herd went.

The longhorn itself looked fine. Walked fine, sold fine, butchered fine. But the cattle it walked past, the fat improved Midwestern stock that had never met the parasite, those animals would start pissing blood and die at a rate that touched nine in ten. The Texans, reasonably, refused to believe their healthy-looking cattle were doing it. They took it to the Supreme Court in 1877 and won, on the entirely correct observation that their cows weren't sick. The cows weren't sick. The cows were Typhoid Mary.

(The disease disappeared every winter, too, north of a certain latitude, which baffled everybody for thirty years until somebody worked out that the tick just froze to death up there, no vector, no disease, the whole thing seasonal in a way that made it look like a moral judgment on Texas cattle specifically. It wasn't anybody's leading hypothesis that an insect was committing the murders. The leading hypothesis for a while was that the longhorns were poisoning the grass.)

So now run the two facts together. The cow is worth ten times more up north. The cow kills every other cow it passes on the way up north. What do you get?

You get a line.

You get a bunch of lines, actually. Quarantine lines, drawn and redrawn by Missouri and Kansas legislatures and eventually by the federal government, declaring that Texas cattle could not cross at all, or could only cross in winter when the tick was dead, or could only cross by rail if they were going straight to slaughter and never touched dirt that a local cow might later stand on. Missouri shut its border. Farmers formed Vigilance Committees (which is a polite nineteenth-century way of saying armed men) and turned the herds back at gunpoint. Kansas banned Texas cattle outright in 1885. And every one of those legal and shotgun-enforced lines was a wall the drive had to find a gate in.

The gate was the railhead.

This is the part that rewires the map. The famous cattle town (Abilene, Dodge City, Wichita, Ellsworth, the whole gunfighter pantheon) is not a town that grew up around ranching or water or gold or a river crossing. It's a point where the trail coming up out of the quarantine zone touched a railroad that could take the cow east to the slaughterhouse without it walking through anybody's protected pasture.

Abilene gets invented basically from scratch in 1867 by a man named Joseph McCoy who looked at the map, found a spot on the Kansas Pacific that was far enough WEST that the trail in from Texas could swing around the settled farm country and its quarantine, and built stockyards there. The town is a loading dock. The cowboy at the end of the trail, in the saloon, shooting the place up: he is a longshoreman who has just finished a shift, and the shift was getting the cargo to the one point where it could legally change from hooves to wheels.

And the cargo had to keep moving west precisely because the tick kept the settled east closed. As Kansas farmers spread and the quarantine line marched west with them, the railhead had to march west too. Abilene to Ellsworth to Wichita to Dodge, each town flaring up and dying back as the line of legal infection-free transfer slid across the state. The towns weren't competing on amenities. They were competing on being the current solvent point in a chemistry problem about where a tick could and couldn't survive the trip.

(Dodge City lasts longest because it's furthest out, last to get caught by the advancing farms, sitting out where the quarantine couldn't reach it yet. Its whole mythological career (Wyatt Earp, Boot Hill, the Long Branch) is a few years long and happens because of an agricultural-settlement frontier creeping toward it at the speed of homesteading. When the farms arrive, the party's over. The party was always a function of the farms not having arrived.)

So the geography of the Wild West, which towns exist and why they're where they are and why they boom for five years and empty out and why the trail bends where it bends, is not topography and not destiny and not the romance of open range.

It's the intersection of a price differential and a quarantine map. The price differential said go north. The quarantine map, drawn by the tick, said you may only go north HERE, and HERE, and now not there anymore, here. The cow drew the route and the parasite drew the borders and the men with the guns were just enforcing a public-health regime they didn't know was a public-health regime.

And it all gets zeroed out, eventually, the same way these things always do, not by a hero but by a logistics upgrade. They build the Kansas City stockyards and the packing plants, and then the rail net gets dense enough that the cow doesn't have to walk to the train at all, the train comes to the cow. Refrigerated cars mean you slaughter in Chicago and ship the meat instead of the animal. The long drive, the trail town, the whole apparatus that existed only to get a tick-bearing animal across a quarantine line to a loading point, it just stops being necessary, and the gunfighter towns settle down into being ordinary Kansas, dry and flat and law-abiding, within about a decade of their own legend.

The cattle tick itself they finally beat in 1943, dipping every cow in the South in arsenic for forty years to break the lifecycle. Nobody made a movie about the dipping vats.

To 2025:

Hell, they even cover the devastating heaviness of MASS SHOOTINGS without censoring or watering anything down.

They've been doing this for YEARS, and it's ALWAYS handled with dignity, respect, seriousness, understanding, and love.

Or how about when someone is put into the foster care system because their home isn't safe anymore and their needs aren't being met?

Maybe some discussions about group therapy/getting help and support?

Hey look! Here's a segment about gender expression vs taught expectation, including unlearning harmful biases and what to do when you hurt someone on accident because you didn't know it was wrong!

Look! The topic of race and diversity! The importance of unity and equity!

They even also have a more allegorical take on discrimination and being looked down on for who you are, featuring Big Bird. The conflict is about how he's not being let into a club because the one bird running the club personally decided he didn't want someone like Big Bird there.

Big Bird goes out of his way to keep changing parts of himself in order to "prove" he can fit into this club if he just changed enough. The truth comes out though, and there's nothing he can do to gain the approval of that bird. He will never be good enough in his eyes, and Big Bird starts to hate himself. His real friends see this finally put their feet down, emphasizing that you should never change yourself just to fit into one singular narrow idea someone else has.

There's A LOT of different situations this can be an allegory for. Racism, sexism, homophobia, basically ANY form of exclusion is put on full blast in this 15 minute clip. Sesame Street can be both blunt and allegorical when approaching difficult topics, and it NEVER misses or looses the point.

It does an exceptional job in both styles of representation WITHOUT watering anything down. The more sanitized everything gets, the more radical Sesame Street is suddenly considered, hence why so many "particular groups" want it gone. Hmmm! I can only imagine why that could be, in this current political climate! (I'm being sarcastic)

When Sesame Street is suddenly labeled as "questionable" or "politically/agenda motivated" content...it says A LOT about where we currently are and who gets to decide what's "best" for kids or not. Don't fall for the censorship and topic-dodging excuses that are covered by the "But think of the children!!!" movement. Never fall for it, because you know which side you're on if you do.

Sesame Street proves kids can be taught and trusted with learning about these topics when it's handled with the right amount of understanding and care. It shows what all this "controversy" is all really about. What it's always been about, actually.

You have a superpower that keeps you safe: whenever you are in danger, time freezes.

You could be asleep, or in the middle of a conversation, or watching a movie. Time would stop and give you a chance to leave the area, and as soon as you were out of danger, time would immediately start up again

You walk in front of a bus and time stops until you exit its path. Someone tries to mug you, but suddenly you're gone; down the street and around the corner, so even when he turns around he can't see you, and therefore can't come after you.

One day you're watching tv at home and everything freezes. You look around, but you're alone. You get up and walk out of your apartment - the unnatural quiet, and the immobile dust motes suspended in the shaft of light from the window at the end of the hall tells you the danger still has not passed. You leave the building and the city is motionless. You walk down the street, then you go a few blocks, and before you know it you've traversed several neighborhoods, but nothing changes

After what feels like hours of walking, time still hasn't resumed, which means the danger still hasn't passed

This is not metaphorical. I mean actual, literal pieces of paper/plastic/metal/whatever explicitly erected to inform the public.

“How did you know this was the right trail?” I read the sign.

“Wow, how did you know what that flower is?” There’s a SIGN.

“How did you know we needed to use the side door?” THERE IS A SIGN POSTED ON THE FRONT DOOR.

Just…why are we having such different experiences of the world? People can read. I KNOW they can read. There’s nothing wrong with their vision.

Just. READ. THE. GOD. DAMN. SIGN.

This also applies to:

Syllabi

The second search result had included the slur "ob*se" in the title of the article.

There are seriously people who tell me fat people aren't oppressed. Meanwhile, trying to find information about how to keep a fat person from drying in a car crash is met with links to products that make dirty money off of how society views my body.

Pelvic bones are strong and sturdy, and you're going to be MUCH less likely to injure internal organs and such when you suddenly slam into a nylon belt"

Text and photos by @thejacespace

Anyway this post is about Dhaka muslin but it’s also about everything.

That being said, efforts to bring it back are underway, and they have been making amazing progress, and succeed in creating Dhaka Muslin yet again.

This is a pretty good updated article, it has a lot of the same info as the BCC one (which also discusses some of the revival efforts) but with more of a focus on that process, an update to the story, and it details some of the other ongoing projects working on the revival!

Here's the first weaver to manage to produce a finished piece in nearly 200 years, Al Amin.

His first piece was 300 threads, according to the article they have now been able to get into the 700s for thread counts, which is absolutely incredible.

Several projects are actually underway now each with different weavers and slightly different methods, producing fabric intended to meet or best the original!

And if you're curious, "okay but can it pass through a ring" yes! Yes they can!

All three of these photos are of pieces made in the modern century, photos by Wasiul Bahar!