Rise Up, Oh Heart, For There is Another Battle to Win

(vibrating intensely with barely repressed excitement) yeah sure that sounds like something i could do

FIRST PRIZE GOES TO:

(from a french book of hours, c. 1400s)

sad mandolin-playing cat with its vulva out. i love this cat so much. i have a picture of it on my wall and one time i thought about it while i was high and it made me laugh so hard that i nearly threw up. sad mandolin-playing cat with its vulva out is my favourite medieval animal; there is no contest, nothing comes close.

SECOND PRIZE:

(from the gorleston psalter, east anglia, angland, c. 1310-24)

i'm a really big fan of weapon-wielding rabbits in medieval art. it was hard to pick just one, but i eventually chose this guy: a gleeful rabbit getting ready to whang the king's head off with a big axe (king's expression suggests forlorn resignation).

drolleries of murderous rabbits crop up a lot in 13th and 14th-century manuscripts - sometimes jousting, sometimes overseeing executions, sometimes riding into battle on the backs of other animals - and it's generally thought to be a form of carnivalesque comic subversion, upending the stereotype of the rabbit as a meek, docile prey animal. there's a fun article about rabbits in medieval art here, if you want to see some more examples.

THIRD PRIZE:

from Der naturen bloeme, the netherlands, c. 1350)

i think this is supposed to be a mussell, but God, just look at him. he's perfect. ideal body, peak performance, no notes.

as for the remaining 7:

4. crows holding a Very Important Meeting

5. old (mer)man yaoi. well actually i don't know what's going on here but it seems intimate

6. forg

7. distressed lion receiving a manicure

8. a brave attempt at an elephant

9. happy little bat :3

10. the oldest cat you have ever seen

Right as I wake up there’s a nurse there who hustles over and says he’s glad he saw me wake up and tells me he’s giving me some pain meds and then he gives me IV Fentanyl and so I go from like “Ow ow ow ow awake awake awake” to “ooooooh fuck I’m floating on clouds made of rainbows” in like 6 seconds and so I was pretty out of it. The hospital had all the recently-post op patients all in one big-ass room, and they see patients for ALL sorts of surgeries, so I was next to an old guy who got his knee replaced on one side and some young 30-something dude with some kind of mechanism on his leg. So I asked him what happened since I was high as fuck and feeling kind as a result, and he said he broke his leg hiking off-trail when his leg went down a literal rabbit hole and snapped his shinbone. I say something like “damn dude that blowssssss” while giggling because I’m high as FUCK on actual fentanyl and he’s like “Yeah, for real, I’m feeling great right now though! What about you? What are you in here for?”

And I fully was not thinking like a person, I was thinking like a fentanyl-addled tgirl so I just go “Oh, haha, they cut my dick off!”

I cannot express to you how FAST it has gone. I grew up in a world that does not exist now. We're starting on the path to reverse it, globally. You might not know how much solar has EXPLODED in the last decade or two. It's gone from a side thing, a weirdo novelty that was just Not Viable... to whole countries investing in infrastructure. but we have to keep fighting big oil and fascism everywhere we can in order to keep on this road to a new better less scorching burning earth.

Bodily autonomy (like abortion, anti draft, etc) -> “The government shouldn’t be able to force anything on my body I don’t want.”

Anti surveillance -> “I don’t trust big government/big tech (big brother if you’re feeling frisky) with the ability to spy on me and my family.”

Immigration -> “Next to all of us immigrated at some point, I don’t see why the elites get to decide who’s allowed to be where. What’s to stop them coming for me?”

Climate Change -> “Big oil shouldn’t get to determine whether or not I get to go places. I don’t want to be dependent on some big business to survive.”

State Violence -> “I don’t want the goddamn secret police breathing down my neck! I trust my community a whole hell of a lot more to help me than I do the state!”