Exactly 20 years ago (give or take a few days) like most French schoolchildren I was given a piggy bank to collect yellow coins (small change). It was a charity campaign called Opération Pièces Jaunes, to help hospitalised children, but my classmates & I were quite indifferent to the charity aspect because all we cared about was the fact that our teacher started giving us a candle in the shape of President Jacques Chirac every time we returned our little box filled with coins.
We were completely enraptured by those candles and the way the president’s face would start melting hideously if we let them burn long enough. Without any kind of deliberation among ourselves we turned it into a class-wide contest—it was obvious to everyone that the point of the Yellow Coins charity campaign was to win many little Chiracs and melt them to make the face of our president as freakishly deformed as possible. We exchanged them for pogs and marbles. We had recently learnt about the Plague in history class, with great relish, hence one lucky girl who managed to obtain a particularly monstrous half-melted face with a big wax bubble reminiscent of a bubo sold it way above the going rate, for 12 galaxy marbles—a fortune. (I was among the losers of this auction, and commented in my diary, with deep regret, “It’s just what it would look like if the President had the bubonic plague!”) Every day after school we went round town begging passersby for coins with something akin to mania in order to get more Chiracs to burn into ever ghastlier shapes. An old lady we ambushed in front of the church praised us warmly for our charitable spirit.
Eventually our teacher ran out of candles and this odd chapter of my childhood ended as abruptly as it had started. Our class was congratulated in front of the whole school for being by far the most ardently devoted to the cause (we got ~15kg of coins.) I wonder if the principal asked our teacher what her secret was to make us collect a truly astonishing amount of coins compared to the other classes, and how he reacted when she replied that she motivated us with busts of the President. One teacher gave a Carambar for a full box of coins, another believed that helping sick children should be incentive enough, but our teacher, an expert in child psychology, was alone in her conviction that the best way to go about this was to hand out human wax effigies for her students to burn.
This post is now one year old and my favourite thing about it is that no French person in the notes has ever seen a Chirac candle before, which strengthens my theory that my primary school teacher was making them herself, at home, as a hobby, and with this exact purpose in mind.
Believe it or not but a few months after I made this addition, the origin story of the Chirac candles was brought to light in the French press… In this interview from late 2021, our former President of the Constitutional Council was photographed in his study with a little Chirac candle on a shelf behind him! When asked about it he explained that a member of Chirac’s party made one or two thousand of these candles back in the day, and he (who was also Minister of the Interior and President of the National Assembly) has kept his Chirac candle in his study for the past 20+ years because he finds it hilarious.
Little does he know that a few dozens of these 2,000 candles ended up in the hands of a bunch of feral children somewhere in France who obsessed over them, disfigured them with diabolical glee and went into galaxy marble debt trying to buy the most grotesque Chiracs at auction.
I’m glad that at least one aspect of this mystery has been lifted. It’s still unclear how my teacher came to own so many of these limited-edition candles (I don’t think she was a fan of Chirac or a member of his party…), and of course the thought process that led her to connect the concepts of charity drive and letting kids burn the President in effigy will remain a mystery.
mad scientist ethics board that makes sure that a project is sufficiently unethical before providing funding
sometimes you get a normal scientist trying to apply with a regular invention that just has a puppy shredder attached to it with hot glue or sticky tape
you’d think they’d be disqualified for that, but trying to cheat the system to get research funding actually adds a lot of unethical points
“you have a responsibility to consider how your writing would affect other people” literally 50% of writing is manipulating the audience by setting tone and mood and drawing them in to fuck with their emotions. writers do NOTHING but consider how our writing is affecting other people and this is implying that our moral imperative is to make them feel warm and fuzzy which it is not
The way fantasy writers talk about a thousand years as this uneventful amount of time is really funny to me because like—in less than 1000 years we went from the Norman Invasion of England to Skibidi Toilet.
Anytime your instinct is to write 1000 years, the accurate time gap is almost always gonna be somewhere between 80 & 200 years
Yesterday marked the 100th day of genocide. Please, do not get used to this. Our people, killed, bombed, kidnapped, stripped, executed and starved is not normal. Our kids in pieces, their body parts collected in bags is not normal.
Israel has killed 23,700 human. More than 10,300 child. We’d need 177 school bus to carry the Palestinian children killed by Israel in gaza. 10,022 fatherless child. 8,352 motherless child. The wounded have their wounds rot and die waiting in front of the crossing. Maggots seen inside alive people’s wounds. 5,500 pregnant woman will give birth in the upcoming weeks. 100 Days of Genocide. 100 Days of the world watching silently.
really fucking irritating how many people think theyve invented blistering new social commentary by being like “what if a kink… forms because of trauma and social violence” without ever asking that same question about the sexual desires and practices that they consider normal and therefore natural and therefore not in need of explanation or justification
Years ago my sister told me abt how she used to play online survival games like Rust or something etc. w her friends and she’d go in VC this over-the-top ‘girly’ voice like “ummm hey I don’t play videogames much and I reeeaaallly don’t know what’s going on teehee, can anyone pleaaase come help me I’m so confused” and then when some guy showed up all of her friends would swarm and kill
I haven’t actually had an almond joy in my life ever
ok this is going to be really fucking weird but I feel comfortable enough asking it. I’ve heard what could be considered myths about allergies and allergens in general, so take what I’m about to say with a grain of salt. Id love someone who actually works as a doctor to chime in and clear this up, but you’ll be good enough for now. If I consumed almonds before nutting in your mouth, would the allergens be present in my semen? I’ve heard wives tales about this sort of thing in regards to peanut allergies but of course it’s one of those things I don’t really want to test.
this is a list of all and every anti tony stark user on this site. this screenshot is really tall. the size is 500x27000.
here is the picture. have fun blocking these toxic blogs. just zoom a couple of times and you should be able to see all the blogs!
Tony Stark is an obnoxious character obviously written by straight men who have know idea what a charming man is like, and he is also bourgeoisie scum who deserves the rusty blade of a guillotine.
we used to have real drama on this website
Iron Man was invented by Stan Lee in order to basically say “I’m gonna make the kids love an arms dealer, you stupid hippies”
I have this goal of finding a modeler/printer who will model all of my OC’s in the same way that one renaissance painting is where all the guys are holding up the other guy
i dont know the name of it does anyone know? it’s not jesus related i dont think
wait i think its a statue actually
oh i know how to appeal to you guys
theres a statue or a painting i forget which that is like. a guy falling and like 4-5 other people around him holding him up BUT theres a tumblr post where like a group of friends recreate it in a museum next to it
i hate talking about dysphoria with cis ppl because they immediately clock it as body dysmorphia, and only as body dysmorphia. (i say only bc some trans ppl can and do experience both)
i can’t talk about how i hate how my thighs make me feel/look feminine because they always say “but you look fine!” or “i think you look amazing!” or “but you should love them!”
and it’s so hard to describe dysphoria, especially to ppl who don’t experience it, or who don’t want to understand it isn’t dysmorphia
and no matter how hard you try to explain they always try to make you love this body you have because “you should love yourself as you are!”
but i do love myself. but not quite exactly how i am. i love what i know I can be. i love knowing that one day i’ll have top surgery scars i can trace with my fingers and a scratchy beard from T. i love knowing that I can eventually do my silly little effeminate gestures without hating how it makes me look. i love knowing that eventually i can look in a mirror and grin at the man i’ve become.
but that’s not right now. i may cry a little when a shirt doesn’t fit the way it should, but i don’t hate the body that makes it that way. I may feel a pit in my stomach when I realize the way that i’m standing makes me look girly, but i don’t hate that i’m standing that way.
i don’t hate that i used to be a girl but i hate when people still think i am.
i don’t hate my body, i just hate how it isn’t what it’s supposed to be quite yet. could that make any sense to the cis folks reading this?
I am trans and I love my body, just sometimes it doesn’t love me back. and one day it will.
The most impressive flair of completely worthless coding on this website is how if you click the like button there’s an animation of a heart rising from it, and if you manage to click THAT heart it unlikes the post. No one would ever attempt this maneuver on purpose. I have done it by mistake 5000 times because the rising heart floats directly above the button to expand the tags on a post when I’m on my phone. …Actually, I have yet to catch the broken heart animation that falls down when you slaughter the rising heart. Would… Would that re-like the post…?
Many brave scientists in the notes have now confirmed it DOES re-like the post! Most of them have also politely apologized for spamming me with notifications by testing it, which is how I learned that if you like and unlike the same post twenty times op still only gets one notification tops on the current activity page. :( I want to see the same name fifty times in a row and know they’re doing science. :( (For the record this seems to be the same whether you have notes bundled or not.)
writers when they’re proofreading their works for the 34th time *find zero mistakes, there’s no typo, no grammatical error. everything looks good. hit the post button*
writers when they’re reading said works after they’ve been published like proud parents *find 52 mistakes at first glance, 38 typos and 14 grammatical errors with a bunch of inconsistencies and plot holes*
at any given moment part of my brain is screaming I SHOULD BE EATING SMOKED SALMON RIGHT NOW. torment
I went to a college farther north from what I was used to. Not by much, but the cold weather, short days, and long hours spent in class or studying meant I was barely getting any sunlight and my mental health was tanking.
One night, after a good hour or two of stress-crying on my dorm floor, I went grocery shopping.
When I saw the canned fish section I was struck with such a profound craving that I dumped a whole assortment of packets and cans of fish into the cart- smoked herring, salmon, sardines, pre flavored tuna, just so much fish. I grabbed crackers to eat it on almost as an afterthought.
In the produce aisle they had herb plants and the smell of the rosemary almost made me cry again, so I grabbed one of those too.
When I got back I almost immediately started eating fish and crackers. I think I ate like two or three cans of what I bought? And I just felt so much better afterwards it was crazy. I planted the rosemary in a large mug and everything felt lighter, just a little less stressful.
I looked it up some days later and yeah, the omega 3s, vitamin D, zinc, and magnesium in fish are all things that can help with seasonal affective disorder and depression in general.
So my advice is if you find yourself craving fish, especially in the winter, just do it. Buy some salmon. Buy some kippers. Eat 👏 some 👏 fish! 👏 Your body might be telling you something, and you’ll probably feel a lot better.
Discord servers are great but all it takes is one ‘That Guy’ to ruin it.
By ‘that guy’, I’m talking about the kind of people who aren’t necessarily breaking any rules but are still unpleasant to be around because they make every conversation about them or spam the chat with some “hilarious” meme only they find funny while people are trying to have a conversation. And you can tell the admin wants to ban their ass but doesn’t want to go through the inevitable tantrum and/or tumblr drama for it.
For the last couple of years I’ve been seeing ‘don’t be a dick in general’ as one of the rules in discord servers and I’m convinced it’s because of these types of people.
So I posted these two images that I made in a post together just shy of a year ago, and the post got 10,000+ notes. Today I saw a meme with a text convo of someone sending one of them to a military recruiter (which is extremely funny) and I thought “oh I should find that post again”
but when I went to find it, it had completely vanished. not just the original post, but even reblogs of it. I couldn’t even find screenshots anyone had taken of the original post. it wasn’t brought to my attention as a reported post, tumblr never even contacted me about deleting it, it just… disappeared
really gets the noggin joggin
so that’s the line huh tumblr. that old post just went too far and you had to poof it.
Reblog to remember the post before it gets deleted again
I swear I get sad if I wake up and one is on the floor
They are exploring under the bed! This is normal stuffed animal behavior, as they are trained to protect you from monsters and shadow creatures, so it’s natural that they want to keep an eye out. Don’t be sad, thank your friend for doing such a good job.
I think I already reblogged this but im gonna do it again because this is a good reminder on how toxic gatekeeping it.
I’m reblogging this for the amount of thought that was put into figuring out the necessary configuration for a mertaur wheelchair.
MMMMM, the LAYERS to this.
She’s technically a monster too. She might not look it at first glance and seems mostly human, but it isn’t deniable even despite her looks compared to the other monsters.
But she realizes that she is still not like the rest of the monsters either and may not have entirely the same experiences as them, which is why she feels that she might not belong to or deserve to go to the support group. By sometimes passing as human, she feels she isn’t worthy of the space.
The sad reality though is even though she’s mostly human in appearance, that tail she has undeniably would still cause her some struggle. Humans are still gonna look at that tail and think she’s a freak. There are probably still accommodations she needs because of the tail that she may still struggle to have access to. Even if it is just the tail, that tail is still enough to other her from humans and cause her problems and discrimination.
She should get to belong in that support group even if she gets told she’s not monster “enough”. She still shares some of the same struggles as them that are caused by being a monster, and needs support.
This is an excellent demonstration of the flaws in the concept of passing privilege. Bravo to the artist.
