A Roman Senator ₍ₓ₂₃₎

I feel like a lot of Duolingo discourse should acknowledge that the reason that they have basically every national European language on there is not because of a “European bias” but because of refugees. A huge number of refugees in Europe use it to learn the language of whatever country they’re moving to or living in; the site even talks about it in the “fun facts” on their waiting screen. Languages like Swedish and Norwegian aren’t there primarily for Minnesotans getting in touch with their heritage, but for African and Asian refugees in Sweden and Norway, and indeed they make up the majority of people using Duolingo to learn those languages. The site does need to add more non-European languages; it’s gradually doing this, it recently added Zulu, Xhosa and Kreyòl, and its focus on indigenous languages like Navajo and Hawaiian is especially commendable, but there are still some glaring omissions of major world languages from Asia and Africa that need to be addressed — and even “they’re edited by users” doesn’t cut it with how many people worldwide speak those whom they could seek out! But the fact that a free language app is doing its best to provide the language learning services that those actual countries routinely deny desperately-poor refugees is a good thing actually. Reserve your rage for the inclusion of Esperanto, Klingon and High Valyrian over Tagalog and Farsi.

Laika's still up there. not her body, sure, but her soul is. i saw it through my telescope one night when i was looking for aliens. she was sniffing for table scraps under saturn's ring. she chases comets and bites down on satellites. i saw her napping by neptune, she was kicking her feet. passing through the oort cloud is like the stroke of a hand on her fur. eyes like marbles and four little paws like flames. she bobs through jupiter's moons like cold moscow streets. up there the stars are a great big field. and look, she's running so fast. god damn, look at her go.

Flock of Mareep

dni: harry truman, doris day, red china, johnnie ray, south pacific, walter winchell, joe dimaggio, joe mccarthy, richard nixon, studebaker, television, north korea, south korea, marilyn monroe, rosenbergs, h-bomb, sugar ray, panmunjom, brando, “the king and i” and “the catcher in the rye”, eisenhower, vaccine, england’s got a new queen, marciano, liberace, santayana, goodbye, joseph stalin, malenkov, nasser and prokofiev, rockefeller, campanella, communist blog, roy cohn, juan peron, toscanini, dacro, dien bien phu falls, “rock around the clock”, einstein, james dean, brooklyn’s got a winning team, davy crockett, peter pan, elvis presley, disneyland, bardot, budapest, alabama, krushchev, princess grace, peyton place, trouble in the suez, little rock, pasternak, mickey mantle, kerouac, sputnik, chou en-lai, “bridge on the river kwai”, lebanon, charles de gaulle, california baseball, starkweather homicide, children of thalidomide, buddy holly, ben hur, space monkey, mafia, hula hoops, castro, edsel is a no-go, u2, syngman rhee, payola and kennedy, chubby checker, psycho, belgians in the congo, hemingway, eichmann, “stranger in a strange land”, dylan, berlin, bay of pigs invasion, “lawrence of arabia”, british beatlemania, ole miss, john glenn, liston beats patterson, pope paul, malcolm x, british politician sex, jfk, birth control, ho chi minh, richard nixon back again, moonshot, woodstock, watergate, punk rock, begin, reagan, palestine, terror on the airlane, ayatollah’s in iran, russian in afghanistan, “wheel of fortune”, sally ride, heavy metal suicide, foreign debts, homeless vets, aids, crack, bernie goetz, hypodermics on the shore, china’s under martial law, rock and roller, cola wars, and finally: if you didn’t start the fire

category five bruce springsteen i’m on fire moment.

Due to incredibly foreseen circumstances, I must now learn every art known to man.

Happy weed day y’all

A short comic I made about my experiences as a seasonal worker, and the way places change you.

🌹 a flower for everyone not feeling their best today