hey look, a cause that affects me directly! and a petition that could actually accomplish something! please sign and share~
this is about powell’s books, the world’s largest independent bookstore and portland’s most beloved local institution, brazenly violating their union contract by engaging in external hiring when they still have more than a hundred furloughed union workers waiting to be recalled. it’s hard to read this as anything other than a deliberate move to destabilize the union, and the powell family needs to know they can’t continue to cash in on their image of being a “friendly local business” when they treat workers like trash.
heyhey, this is where i worked (up until the pandemic dropped) and hope to return to, if you’re a powell’s customer or fan of labor rights please show us a little love with this moveon petition. support on it has already got the employees’ attenion and has been great for morale among working and furloughed staff, help us get our union’s side of the story out and make the company do the right thing!
“Recently, my son said to me after seeing a ballet on television: ‘It’s beautiful, but I don’t like it.’ And I thought, Are many grown-ups capable of such a distinction? It’s beautiful, but I don’t like it. Usually, our grown-up thinking is more along the lines of: I don’t like it, so it’s not beautiful. What would it mean to separate those two impressions for art making and for art criticism?”
— “59. it’s beautiful, but I don’t like it” from 100 essays I don’t have time to write: on umbrellas and sword fights, parades and dogs, fire alarms, children, and theater, sarah ruhl (via likeniobe)
some very un-referenced evocation of thom yorke in his “anima” short film
costume scribbles of my current d&d character, a gloomstalker ranger named imogen. at left in her standard gear, at right in a more formal getup provided by faeries as appropriate attire for a fancy party we’re crashing in the feywild.
Um…at the risk of sounding snobby here: Do the elitist GOP get that the house doesn’t even look that good?
Not that I’m judging: I grew up in some mediocre places too. It’s fine, and there are certainly worse places. I agree with her: It was likely fine to grow up in.
But it’s a pretty mundane and rundown. By any standards.
But it’s a standing house. So apparently, per the Republicans, she’s a limousine liberal.
I second this, I grew up poor and this house…well, it’s not a “dump” or anything, but is no better a house than I was raised in with two parents barely making enough money to make the mortgage payments.
That’s what I can’t get over.
They are acting like this is some big Hollywood mansion.
And it’s really not.
This reminds me of the time Fox News tried to paint poor people as rich because 97% have a refrigerator
they got us busy on defense for obviously meritless bullshit like this, and when we engage with it—and i definitely understand the temptation to engage—we already concede their premise that someone’s background can disqualify their advocacy for a better world. and i think this is a particularly thorny one, because that kind of purity testing is something i see a lot of on the left as well, so they got us pegged. we need to get away from that if we want to grow this movement. AOC is right: they see a threat in her reality, and they see millions of potential threats in everyone who can identify with her. if we’re gonna be for the many, not the few, we need to talk inclusively, so these kinds of gatekeeping claims fail as soon as they leave the mouths of the right’s hate machine.
aaaand tumblr’s absolutely wild, quality-destroying automatic image resizing algorithms strike again. the fact that in all these years there has never been a reliable way to control, anticipate, or avoid tumblr making a fuzzy mess out of an image? legendarily inept.
got all into taking these photos of my kitchen knives last night, and they all just kinda look like ebay listing product shots? maybe? idk. anyway.
years ago i put my kitchen knives on my flatbed scanner and posted the results, one of my first posts to tumblr. it’s evident that i had no idea what to use this platform for.
later, tumblr staff got hyped to have artists use this platform as a portfolio host, so i jumped on that for a while. when it became clear people were largely using all this content to make uncredited art curations for their own social capital, arist participation tapered off sharply. i was never really part of either community, but i dropped off my sketch posting habit and started putting my photos on instagram instead. this account has become a ghost town for sure, as are nearly all the artist accounts i followed in that heyday.
so it feels somewhat appropriate to post my kitchen knives again, reblogged from my side account i created just to not mix my “portfolio” with, like, actual social media participation.
anyway, top to bottom:
- pallares solsona carbon steel 3.5” paring knife. something i found thanks to tumblr, actually. it’s very cute and photogenic in that kinfolk magazine kind of way, and shows up as a prop in a lot of rustic food photography on the interwebs. thankfully it’s also useful, we cut heck of fruit with it.
- old ikea stainless santoku, 7”. found at a thrift shop, it’s pretty decently balanced and durable enough to hold a good edge. honestly you could do a lot worse than a second-hand ikea knife. we use this all the time.
- tosagata bunka 160mm, blue #2 carbon steel, iron cladding. my first japanese knife, & first hitachi steel. it gets pretty sharp and is very cute, fairly reactive though and gets rust spots easily. nicely blue in color, heck of photogenic.
- tadafusa 165mm blue #2 santoku, stainless clad with a nashiji finish. i saw a wa-handled version in a fancy british interior decorating magazine my mom had, and managed to find a far more reasonable priced one on ebay. this is really our workhorse knife. very pretty.
- old montgomery ward carbon slicer. i don’t really use it, it’s honestly kind of weird. rugged af tho.
- tanaka 150mm petty, vg10 with pattern welded cladding. another ebay find. the handle is basically terrible but the blade is solid and eye-catching. idk man i like it but the damascus pattern weld stuff is only barely my kind of extra? i wouldn’t go for something larger with this sort of texture.
also this one didn’t make it into the first post somehow: kurosaki AS 210mm gyuto. i got it instead of gettin something similar from my friend’s knife shop bc i was too taken by its aesthetic, and the guilt haunts me ever since. it’s beautiful and sharp i love it but i feel like a bad person, but here we are anyway. maybe someday i won’t be as bothered, idk. 😑
