Natalie And Crew Plying The Tyrrhenian Sea

favouritism.

quick tiger-sphinx creature drawings

durge embroidery 🩸

sketch/idea : @thequndemands

I've had a hard time articulating to people just how fundamental spinning used to be in people's lives, and how eerie it is that it's vanished so entirely. It occurred to me today that it's a bit like if in the future all food was made by machine, and people forgot what farming and cooking were. Not just that they forgot how to do it; they had never heard of it.

When they use phrases like "spinning yarns" for telling stories or "heckling a performer" without understanding where they come from, I imagine a scene in the future where someone uses the phrase "stir the pot" to mean "cause a disagreement" and I say, did you know a pot used to be a container for heating food, and stirring was a way of combining different components of food together? "Wow, you're full of weird facts! How do you even know that?"

When I say I spin and people say "What, like you do exercise bikes? Is that a kind of dancing? What's drafting? What's a hackle?" it's like if I started talking about my cooking hobby and my friend asked "What's salt? Also, what's cooking?" Well, you see, there are a lot of stages to food preparation, starting with planting crops, and cooking is one of the later stages. Salt is a chemical used in cooking which mostly alters the flavor of the food but can also be used for other things, like drawing out moisture...

"Wow, that sounds so complicated. You must have done a lot of research. You're so good at cooking!" I'm really not. In the past, children started learning about cooking as early as age five ("Isn't that child labor?"), and many people cooked every day their whole lives ("Man, people worked so hard back then."). And that's just an average person, not to mention people called "chefs" who did it professionally. I go to the historic preservation center to use their stove once or twice a week, and I started learning a couple years ago. So what I know is less sophisticated than what some children could do back in the day.

"Can you make me a snickers bar?" No, that would be pretty hard. I just make sandwiches mostly. Sometimes I do scrambled eggs. "Oh, I would've thought a snickers bar would be way more basic than eggs. They seem so simple!"

Haven't you ever wondered where food comes from? I ask them. When you were a kid, did you ever pick apart the different colored bits in your food and wonder what it was made of? "No, I never really thought about it." Did you know rice balls are called that because they're made from part of a plant called rice? "Oh haha, that's so weird. I thought 'rice' was just an adjective for anything that was soft and white."

People always ask me why I took up spinning. Isn't it weird that there are things we take so much for granted that we don't even notice when they're gone? Isn't it strange that something which has been part of humanity all across the planet since the Neanderthals is being forgotten in our generation? Isn't it funny that when knowledge dies, it leaves behind a ghost, just like a person? Don't you want to commune with it?

a tired mime on break leaning against nothing and smoking an invisible cigarette

blinks at you slowly. hai

I was about to write: I love the fact that Katniss‘ first reaction to Haymitch‘s absolutely traumatising story is „You need some goose eggs. Goose eggs will help.“

And then I realised… She‘s mimicking Peeta. Peeta comes back to 12 and the first thing he does is plant primroses. And somehow… that helped her. So she‘s doing the same thing for Haymitch.

This episode changed my life

My favourite goth guy who steals rubbish bins

Thinking about how Wyatt Callow is proof that Dr. Gaul’s and Snow’s assertion that humanity’s essential nature is violent (which is part of their argument for the Capitol’s control being necessary) is false. That “What happened in the arena? That’s humanity undressed… A boy with a club who beats another boy to death. That’s mankind in its natural state.” is false.

I’m sure he had it all calculated. He knew exactly what choices would give him the best odds of survival. He knew that the faster he got out of the initial bloodshed the better his chances would be. He knew that letting other kids die would benefit his odds of survival. He knew exactly what he should’ve done to preserve himself.

And yet, he threw all those statistics and odds, all that reason and logic out the window in the name of protecting Lou Lou, a girl that wasn’t even from his district. He threw it all out the window in the name of helping another human being that was in an unfair situation and had worse odds than him. He knew who the real enemy was; he knew it wasn’t the other kids being taken advantage of by the Capitol just like him.

That is humanity.