This painting was left intentionally incomplete. Haring began it when he was dying due to complications from AIDS, and knew he didn’t have much time left. The piece represents the incomplete lives of him and many others, lost to AIDS during the crisis.
ALT
“AIDS Memorial Quilt” — Multiple
This quilt is over 50 tons heavy, and one of, if not the, largest pieces of community folk art. Many people who died of AIDS did not receive funerals, due to social stigma and many funeral homes refusing to handle the deceased’s remains, so this was one of the only ways their lives could be celebrated. Each panel was created in recognition of someone who died due to AIDS, typically by that person’s loved ones.
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“Untitled” (Portrait of Ross in L.A.) — Felix Gonzalez-Torres
This pile of candy weighs the same amount as an average adult man. Visitors are encouraged to take some of the candy. As they do so, the pile of candy weighs less and less. This is a commentary on how AIDS deteriorates the body of those who have it. Gonzalez-Torres’ partner, Ross Laycock, had died due to AIDS-related complications the same year.
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The SF Gay Men’s Chorus
This photo was taken in 1993. The men in white are the surviving original members. Every man in black is standing in for an original member who lost their lives to AIDS.
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“Electric Fan (Feel it Motherfuckers); Only Unclaimed Item from the Stephen Earabino Estate, 1997” — John Boskovich
After the death of his lover, Stephen Earabino, from AIDS, Boskovich discovered that his family had completely cleared his room, including Boskovich’s own possessions, save for this fan. An entire person, existence and relationship had been erased, just like so many lives during the AIDS crisis. Boskovich encased the fan in Plexiglass, but added cutouts so that its air may be felt by the viewer, almost like an exhalation. In a sense, restoring Earabino’s breath.
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“Blue” — Derek Jarman
This was Jarman’s final feature film, released four months before his death from AIDS-related complications. These complications had left him visually impaired, able to only see in shades of blue. This film consists of a single shot of a saturated blue color, as the soundtrack to the film described Jarman’s life through narration, intercut with the adventures of Blue, a humanization of the color blue. The film’s final moments consist of a set of repeated names: “John. Daniel. Howard. Graham. Terry. Paul". These are the names of former lovers and friends of Jarman who had died due to AIDS.
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“Untitled” (Perfect Lovers) — Felix Gonzalez-Torres
Created by the same man who created the previous untitled piece, this piece was also inspired by his lover’s deterioration and death due to AIDS. This piece consists of two perfectly alike clocks. Over the course of time, one of the clocks will fall out of sync with the other.
In a letter written to his lover about the piece, before his lover’s passing, Gonzalez-Tourres wrote, “Don’t be afraid of the clocks, they are our time, the time has been so generous to us. We imprinted time with the sweet taste of victory. We conquered fate by meeting at a certain time in a certain space. We are a product of the time, therefore we give back credit were it is due: time. We are synchronized, now forever. I love you.”
remember: the ‘holy’ white doves are just white rock doves, aka the common pigeon!
Doves are just pigeons with white privilege
Also can we talk about how STUNNING their irredentist feathers are?
This post made me finally look up whether Australian crested pigeons are also doves, and I didn’t quite understand the wiki page but I think the answer is ‘yes’.
You guys are gonna go ham when you hear about fruit doves
But get a load of these fat bois. The kererū, or New Zealand wood pigeon.
with regards to what is a dove and what is a pigeon- so pigeons & doves make up the family of birds called the columbidae, and there’s a few hundred of them- even the famously extinct dodo bird is a member of the family!
the animal that usually comes to mind when you think “pigeon” is, as noted above, the common rock dove- specifically, the feral populations of domesticated rock doves that are found in cities worldwide. these are not truly wild animals- they’re the descendants of domestic pigeons, which is why you’ll find lots of color and pattern variation looking at city pigeons, like you might looking at a feral cat colony. the undomesticated rock dove lives in northern africa and southwestern eurasia natively, it was the species from which our domestic pigeons were derived- much like red jungle fowl to chickens, and wolves to dogs.
a flock of feral pigeons on the left, and an undomesticated rock dove on the right. note the variation in colors and patterns on the feral flock- some are lighter, darker, have checkered sides, and so on. the rock dove is a more solid light grey with two distinct black wing bars, but feral pigeons can look just like this, too. these all represent only the single species we tend to be most familiar with, only one of the hundreds of species of pigeons/doves out there (such as the various sorts of fruit doves above)!
but the actual difference between what species are called pigeons and what are called doves: well, there really isn’t. generally folks tend to call the larger ones pigeons and smaller ones doves, but this is not at all consistent and there are no specific pigeon or dove clades (evolutionary groupings) within the family. ergo, functionally speaking, ‘pigeon’ and ‘dove’ are pretty much interchangeable.
skin color ref because some of yall non-black poc and whites keep fucking up as if yall don’t know there’s other shades of brown when u racebend for woke points or something
(non-black artists please reblog)
Please reblog regardless of your race/ethnicity.
heres a chart I made for myself showing diffrent undertones and how that affects the skin if anyone’s intrested
Use this to make a skin palette in your art program!
Also! This photography project by Angélica Dass has thousands of photos of people, with a Pantone color assigned to each! It’s very helpful as a resource !!
Matthew Lillard was in my bedroom and he told me there was a bomb under my bed. I realized I was dreaming so I decided to respond condescendingly like, “Oh? There’s a bomb? Oh really? 🤨 Sure pal. Sure.”
If we really want to fight against this puritanical culture that seems to be hell-bent on running sex workers off the internet and banning pornography wherever they can find it, you have a moral duty to post hole on main. Doesn’t have to be your own hole but you got to post it.
New copypasta just dropped
Same guy
Reblog hole to destroy bloodlines and oppress Christians
quick protip: if someone is crying or freaking out over something minor, eg wifi not connecting, can’t find their hat, people talking too loud, do NOT tell them how small or petty the problem is to make it better. they know. they would probably love to calm down. you are doing the furthest possible thing from helping. people don’t have to earn expressions of feelings.
I’m just gonna put it out there that if someone’s freaking about something small, they’re really freaking out about something big that they’re trying to deal with, or something long term that’s been building up, and that little thing is the straw that broke the camel’s back.
I don’t know, try and give people the benefit of the doubt. Don’t be the next straw on their broken back.
Needed this today.
People don’t actually go from 0 to 60. If you think they did, you have failed to notice how long they’ve been at 59.
People don’t actually go from 0 to 60. If you think they did, you have failed to notice how long they’ve been at 59.
[id: screenshot of a tumblr dm from a friend of mine, cropped to hide the name. it says “just realized after scrolling thru ur whole blog that ur undescribed tag is actually referencing image descriptions and not just a vague term for anything that makes you feel an undescribed emotion”. /end id]
[id: another dm, from the same friend. it says: “you wench you fucking described me” /end id]
coffee shop by my house hired a new barista who is extraordinarily hot and flirts with me incessantly but she also makes the worst - and i truly mean the worst - coffee i’ve ever paid for. atrociously bad. just another of god’s little jokes
just remembered the barista who worked there last year and treated me with an attitude generally reserved for children and the incompetent to the point where she would frequently adjust my drink order in front of me and every single time it was BANGIN’
Tiktokers just discovered The Crime Of Being Small genre of poems, genuinely amazing news for all the spiders of the world. the original video of this person’s poem has 1.1m likes!
Anyway while we’re on the subject of public misconception towards living things (which is completely understandable because have you SEEN living things? There’s like dozens of them!) here’s a fresh rundown of some common mistakes about bugs!
Arachnids aren’t just spiders! They’re also scorpions, mites, ticks and some real weirdos out there
Insects with wings are always finished growing! Wings are the last new thing they ever develop! There can never be a “baby bee” that’s just a smaller bee flying around.
That said, not all insects have larvae! Many older insect groups do look like little versions of adults….but the wings rule still applies.
Insects do have brains! Lobes and everything!
Only the Hymenoptera (bees, ants and wasps) have stingers like that.
Not all bees and wasps live in colonies with queens
The only non-hymenoptera with queens are termites, which is convergent evolution, because termites are a type of cockroach!
There are still other insects with colonial lifestyles to various degrees which can include special reproductive castes, just not the whole “queen” setup.
Even ants still deviate from that; there are multi-queen ant species, some species where the whole colony is just females who clone themselves and other outliers
There is no “hive mind;” social insects coordinate no differently from schools of fish, flocks of birds, or for that matter crowds of humans! They’re just following the same signals together and communicating to each other!
Not all mosquito species carry disease, and not all of them bite people
Mosquitoes ARE ecologically very important and nobody in science ever actually said otherwise
The bite of a black widow is so rarely deadly that the United States doesn’t bother stocking antivenin despite hundreds of reported bites per year. It just feels really really bad and they give you painkillers.
Recluse venom does damage skin, but only in the tiny area surrounding the bite. More serious cases are due to this dead skin inviting bacterial infection, and in fact our hospitals don’t carry recluse antivenin either; they just prescribe powerful antibiotics, which has been fully effective at treating confirmed bites.
Bed bugs are real actual specific insects
“Cooties” basically are, too; it’s old slang for lice
Crane flies aren’t “mosquito hawks;” they actually don’t eat at all!
Hobo spiders aren’t really found to have a dangerous bite, leaving only widows and recluses as North America’s “medically significant” spiders
Domestic honeybees actually kill far more people than hornets, including everywhere the giant “murder” hornet naturally occurs.
Wasps are only “less efficient” pollinators in that less pollen sticks to them per wasp. They are still absolutely critical pollinators and many flowers are pollinated by wasps exclusively.
Flies are also as important or more important to pollination than bees.
For “per insect” pollination efficiency it’s now believed that moths also beat bees
Honeybees are non-native to most of the world and not great for the local ecosystem, they’re just essential to us and our food industry
Getting a botfly is unpleasant and can become painful, but they aren’t actually dangerous and they don’t eat your flesh; they essentially push the flesh out of the way to create a chamber and they feed on fluids your immune system keeps making in response to the intrusion. They also keep this chamber free of bacterial infection because that would harm them too!
Botflies also exist in most parts of the world, but only one species specializes partially in humans (and primates in general, but can make do with a few other hosts)
“Kissing bugs” are a group of a couple unusual species of assassin bug. Only the kissing bugs evolved to feed on blood; other assassin bugs just eat other insects.
ive been to a lot of protests in my life and a thing that a lot of people dont understand is that a protest is a threat. its a large group of people saying “we are being nice now, but you must understand that if we stop being nice we have the power to cause you Problems”.
so everyone saying that protests have to be more polite or follow accepted rules is missing the entire point. the point of a protest is not to say “we disagree with you”, they already know that. the point of a protest is to make it clear that if they continue to do things you disagree with, you will burn down their house.
now this wont stop them because theyre stupid and arrogant and believe themselves to be beyond consequence. so here’s the really important thing and that’s that after they do it anyway, you have to burn down their house
I cannot stress this e-fucking-nough. My great-grandmother - hell, most of my whole family - were on the civil rights marches. The fact they had to be so peaceful was because everything done during those protests was breaking the law. None of it was legal, none of it was nice.
She told me this:
“Understand - to many white people in the US, seeing that many Black people gathered together in one place would have been shocking. It’s easy to bully a family in a town. A bit harder, but bullying a community is still possible. But over a million Black people marching upon the Capital would have had the same effect on every single White person watching. They would know what Black people were REALLY saying behind the hymns and the march.
‘Imagine what would happen if we were angry.’
“White people were terrified of those marches. And there were supposed to be afraid. Of course they were gonna push back - they have the guns, they can make up new laws on the fly. They have all the power in the world, literally - and still, nothing scared them more than a million Black people on the march. Protests stopped working when White people were no longer afraid.”
hmmm… there’s probably an INFINITELY more humane way to do this…
i get that they’re not killing them and they end up fine, but imagine the trauma of you, a mammal, going through a long ass tube, not knowing what’s going to happen to you, and you can’t breathe. 🤷♀️
They get misted with water throughout the thing, and it results in fewer injuries than the ‘ladder’ method. Also, it’s a fish. It never knows what’s going to happen to it at any point in time throughout its life.
Also, I, a mammal, have paid 80 bucks to get into a water park to get the opportunity to feel like that fish, and that motherfucker gets in for free every day is fish day at the fish waterpark
well the MOST humane thing would be to not build dams blocking salmon migration routes, nor create a society where there are only resources allocated to solving the problem at all because blocking the salmon endangers the profits of a segment of the food industry.
Buuuut since we’re past that already, here are a couple of additional thoughts:
1 this IS the more humane alternative, which was invented to lower injury and death rates associated with previous techniques. When a better alternative is revealed it will probably replace this one. But this one is a pretty huge improvement over the other methods, one of which killed off something like 80% of the fish involved.
A study of the above fish tube was conducted by Pacific Northwest National Laboratories in 2017 on the Columbia River and showed a much higher success rate. In that study, only one fish died (“due to a human error during the system setup”) and only 3 percent had signs of injury. So. The next best improvement might have to be “remove dam”
2 they are on their way to die. That is where we are helping them get to. That’s the end goal of the salmon’s migration. They on their way to mutate, start rotting alive, have an orgy, and die. That’s where the tube is taking them.
So like, it’s not going to be the weirdest thing they experience this month, is what i’m saying.
I got very loudly deadnamed and misgendered multiple times at the doctors office today. This new receptionist ignored the preferred name on my profile to deadname and misgender me loudly, louder than she talked about anyone else in the waiting room. My birth certificate says “F” nex to sex, my medical documentation reflects this, and I was still deadnamed and misgendered.
And the saving grace was a woman and her child. I wear cat-ears and the child too young to speak loved them, and kept pointing and looking at me. I’m assuming her mother kept saying “yeah, she’s wearing cat-ears”, “yeah, that woman has cute cat-ears”, and the like. Her child was enamoured with them, and that woman didn’t misgender me once. And each time my very obviously masculine deadname name came up, she looked upset at the receptionist, but not once did she give me a bad look.
It doesn’t have to be much. You don’t need to be a knight in shining armour, or in someones face. Simply a quiet refusal to play along with someone elses bullshit is enough. It was enough to turn a trying and tiring moment into something that put a smile on my face and joy back into my life. It wasn’t a lot but it mattered to me.
Im enjoying the longevity of tumblrs recontextualization style of humor. a seemingly innocuous post followed by like “posts that a gnome would make” or like “are you a phone”
More from the notes:
I love this post
The horse thinks as it scratches an itch
Hey are you writing poetry? What does this mean.
- the second person on earth to know about poetry, to the first person on earth to know about poetry.
need a bi4bi t4t m/f pairing where the girl is a giant freak and not in the “cute manic pixie” way but in the “unethical experiments in my fucked up laboratory” way and the guy is a golden retriever who thinks he can fix her. and he brings her cute bento lunches and she’s like “bradley shut up put on your fucking gloves and hold this possum down so i can graft these giant grasshopper legs to it”
the typical transphobic talking point of “oh so if the person you’re having sex with decides they’re transgender during, does that make it gay/straight sex huh????” is stupid for the obvious reasons but also because if somebody transed their gender while they were inside me that would fucking rule. keep me guessing babe