ghost pirate

Me, already vibrating from the dopamine and adrenaline: Let's talk about espaliers

okay, so espaliers are beyond sexy, they are so unbelievably productive

The basics are just... pruning growing trees so they are more 2 dimensional, usually placed against walls. It takes a few years to form/ raise, but they are much easier to maintain than free growing trees in the long run.

(source)

Not only is it more accessible, easier to harvest fruit, but the design has a double purpose; the walls hold and release heat that can keep warm-weathered plants alive during Northen winters!

There are people who use this method to grow avocado, fig, etc trees outdoors without electricity in -20C weather.

After ten days, she found a boat moored near a shelter, and found the boat's fuel tank still partly full. Koepcke poured the gasoline on her wounds, an action which succeeded in removing the maggots from her arm. Out of 93 passengers and crew, Juliane was the only survivor of the LANSA flight 508 crash that took place December 24th, 1971.

This was the first thing that stuck out to me, in her book:

If Juliane was a 17-year-old boy, her judgment calls & survival skills probably wouldn’t be passed off as a mere mistake/fluke. If she was a guy, people would lap that shit up and call her a Fine Boy Scout™.

Next is this passage:

“Now Father has lost his wife...” this thought never crossed Juliane’s mind, because she had no way of knowing if her mother was alive or dead. Juliane couldn’t find her mom after the crash. But notice how the media somehow managed to center the plight of a man in a story about *checks notes* a girl who braved the wilderness alone for 10 days after losing her mother in a plane crash.

Some media outlets floated the idea that, in addition to witnessing her mother’s death, Juliane had seen other struggling survivors as well & neglected to help them. This is false. It just goes to show that girls are villainized for taking care of themselves instead of taking care of everyone else—even when they’re all alone in the middle of the jungle, fighting for their own survival.

Juliane also came under scrutiny for her emotional state, after her rescue. Because she was traumatized and in shock, she didn’t react “appropriately” to her situation or grieve for her mother the way people expected her to.

As seen above, some voices in the media pathologized her understandable trauma response, treating her like a deranged sociopath.

^^^ This shit speaks for itself. Reminder that Juliane was just a child, a teenager.

Lastly, there actually is a 1974 movie about Juliane directed by Giuseppe Maria Scotese, starring Susan Penhaligon. The movie is called Miracles Still Happen. This is how the movie marketed her story:

And here’s how the media covered it:

So yeah. In conclusion, men are trash. And to wrap things up, I’ll leave you with this extremely tasteful comic strip by a (male) artist.

But mortal hands build clever tools, and these last few hundred years I have lived in dread that they will break this, my sacred stone, the last link that preserves me, a faint shadow of a forgotten god. While my sacred stone stands, I do not, quite, fade away.

I am in a park, now, clipped and tamed, my forests long gone. But they landscape around me and my stone, admiring its beauty, so I do not complain. While they take pleasure in the stone, I am safe.

There is a playground a few lengths away, and the laughter and happy shrieking rouse me a little from my sleep. I watched over children, once. It’s nice to hear them again.

But I don’t truly awaken until the Offering is made.

Little hands touch my stone, with curiosity and a sort of reverence that only the very young feel now. For a child young enough the world is still a mystery, and even an ancient granite stone provokes wonder. So I stir, when she touches the stone, becoming hazily aware.

And then, solemnly, the child places a tiny colourful object in the roughly shaped alcove in the stone’s side, the place where offerings were laid two thousand years ago and more, and I awaken. Many people have put things in that alcove, of course… to take pictures, usually, these days, or putting a lost object where it will be seen. Merely to place an object in the alcove isn’t enough. A true offering is given as a gift, with intent.

As this is.

“No,” it says finally. “I am many.”

Let’s pretend we have an allowance tax bracket with a 70% tax on money received after a certain point. To keep things simple, we’ll make the limit $90.

If a kid does chores and earns $10 in allowance, they get $10. They’re not going to be affected by the 70% tax.

If a kid does chores and earns $50, they get $50. They also aren’t in the 70% tax bracket, even though they make five times as much money as the kid making $10.

If a kid does chores and earns $100 in allowance, then they’re in the allowance tax bracket with the 70% tax.

$100 minus $90 is $10. This is the part that’s going to be taxed 70%.

70% of $10 is $7.

So the kid getting $100 in allowance will have $93 after the 70% tax takes its share.

Now, I’d never impose such a thing on actual kids. All of this is a thought exercise.

Uniformed Police have since been banned from Auckland Pride marches since 2018/2019.

basically the whole idea behind grunge was "fuck consumerism, fuck capitalism, fuck beauty standards and gender norms and the fashion industry. do not give a fuck about what you look like or, alternatively, intentionally look like shit. refuse to buy into beauty standards and refuse to participate in fashion trends and literally just wear the cheapest, comfiest, most practical clothes you can get your hands on (preferably second hand so as to say fuck you to corporate) and then wear those clothes until theyre literally falling apart. dont obsess over hygiene; not everything has to be squeaky clean."

and since the birthplace and capital of the genre was seattle (a northern lumberjack town), the clothes that were cheap, comfy, durable and practical around there were flannels, beanies, and big, second hand blue jeans. docs were notoriously cheap at the time, and so were military surplus boots, so thats what the bands wore, essentially. in protest against fashion, beauty standards and capitalism.

then people started wearing the same clothes as the bands and then (as with every counter culture before them) the fashion industry decided to create a cleaner, less subversive version of that. so they started selling the anti-fashion, anti-consumerist look as consumerist fashion.

fast forward to 2014 and you see people wearing an all brand new outfit consisting of black skin-tight jeans that you cant move in and that are ripped before theyre sold and dont last more than a year, $500 docs, expensive "flannels" that are too thin to be warm, a $100 beanie and on-fleek makeup that cost more than those bands lived off of at the start of their careers, took hours to apply and finally a paper thin nirvana shirt sold for 50 bucks and worn without any idea what anything but "sounds like teen spirit" sounds like (which isnt a grunge song btw; its a satirical pop song made to mock the kind of music that it is). all of it bought from hot topic or H&M and made by child slaves in china or taiwan. so, like... actually the complete opposite of what grunge is supposed to be. completely against the values of the subculture. it would literally be more grunge to wear dirty sweatpants and a second hand baseball cap than the shit being sold today.

so, yeah. grunge is supposed to be "i literally do not give two shits about how i look" and yet... and YET....... the fashion and beauty industry totally butchered it.

also op was talking about weight loss products and makeup. These are not something they can sell to us if we literally don’t give a shit. That’s just not possible....those are corrective products for our actual body and not how we choose to dress.

we really don’t talk about these two enough

petty motherfuckers

esp petty with each other

oh sorry booker no i didnt know i left a knife on the bed or no nicky i wasnt aware those were your leftovers

nicky and booker butchering each other’s languages when they’re annoyed at the other, and some very americanized pronunciation of the word ‘croissant’ on nicky’s part

will argue about the dumbest shit ever and will go to extreme lengths to prove themselves correct which is how the team ended up in southern mexico so nicky could prove what color the safehouse walls are 

sorry nicky but joe agrees with booker that they are more green than brown, and no way he can argue with joe

consistently compete and feel the need to one up each other (hence the bets) and it’s resulted in many rules because andy is sick of their shit

one time they bet who would win in a race down the stairs of the eiffel tower, nicky tripped booker who promptly fell all the way down and died on impact

after an extremely loud argument in several languages they went again and booker won but nicky refuses to pay him because booker's height is an unfair advantage (its been 50 years)

if joe and booker are the worlds best bullshitters, nicky and booker are the "fuck around and find out” gang

when in a situation where they’re undercover and speaking to the mark and they get any kinds of suspicious, they immediately start complaining about them and their business, putting on extreme versions of their accents to really pull the ‘pretentious european’ vibe

popular topics: their clothing, nationality, that those aren’t mints in the bathroom, the fact that their mothers are probably disappointed in them

intimidation station

nickys stare + bookers size? no one dares fuck with them on the street

as ive said before, these two are responsible for every single stray that's ever ended up in their safehouses for the nights they are there and the ones responsible for the missing money which they use to leave food out for the rest of the strays

andy has definitely come home to them covered in cat fur as nicky is on bookers shoulders trying to get one of them off the top of the cabinet

italian vs. french rivalry is real

food, language, culture, it's all fair game to insults, yes booker has been called a crusty baguette and it started a war which resulted in no less than 15 insults being banned from being used

nicky probably tries to get booker to eat healthier, bc while nicky definitely appreciates fast food, booker you can't just eat fries and whiskey please eat a single lettuce

i like to think they cook together, i think booker is probably a good cook but it’s not something he does much anymore, not since becoming immortal really but nicky shared his love of cooking and occasionally they cook something together, finding old recipes from their homelands

covers booker with a blanket anytime he wakes up early to find him passed out half off the couch but also definitely takes a picture first 

From: https://www.worldathletics.org/news/feature/barshim-tamberi-friendship-tokyo-olympics-gold

“I still can’t believe it happened, [and] sharing with a friend is even more beautiful. It was just magical.“ —Gimbo