Now Doesn't It Make You Feel Better

Sam Hensley’s Creamthing made from repurposed plush by Cat’s Chimerical Creations

Absolutely obsessed with Creamthing by @samsketchbook​ so I made one out of an old charity shop stuffie!

And remember, you can unlock one fun fact about any repurposed Beanie Baby hybrid plush beast of your choosing by donating over at https://ko-fi.com/catschimericalcreations!

Moss-mimic Bugs from Ecuador

All photos by Andreas Kay

1. Caterpillar, Saturniidae 2. Katydid, Championica sp. 3. Inchworm caterpillar, Geometridae 4. Stick insect, Trychopeplus thaumasius? 5. Grasshopper, Sciaphilacris sp. 6. Mantis, Pogonogaster latens? 7. Unidentified caterpillar 8. Katydid, Anaphidna sp.

john carpenter’s the thing is a movie about how the hyperindividualism and lack of emotional intimacy between men (specifically men in the united states military) immediately crystallizes into distrust and alienation in crisis. how kurt russel with an absurd callsign name and the goofiest hugest cowboy hat imaginable is the Man, running the whole show and managing the crisis until he fails because when faced with having to truly understand and connect with his last remaining ally he can’t, because all he knows how to do is sit in the snow and die next to him. It is a movie about losing control over your own body in the most horrific way possible. It is a movie about cold war paranoia and fear of bloodborne pathogens. It is a movie about how dread is an incredible force and even so sometimes what you CAN see is worse than what you can imagine. It is a movie about how the scariest thing men can conceive of is something that looks exactly like a man and acts exactly like a man but yet on some fundamental level…isn’t. It is a movie, as one of my eleventh graders pointed out this week, about “playing among us in real life.” but most importantly, john carpenter’s the thing is a movie about a dogy who is my friend and wants to become me :)

I want to be like “hello tumblr it is I, I have returned, to the land of online socialization” but that would be a lie probably

Interstellar by Matt Walker Via Flickr: It’s been a while since I’ve posted a Milky Way shot on Flickr, so here is one from our recent trip to the PNW. This place is called Secret Beach in the Samuel H Boardman area. It’s no secret though, and it has been heavily photographed in recent time. It’s a really cool beach with tons of sea stacks. We shot into blue hour, and captured a pretty decent sunrise too. Thanks for looking!

Could you recommend other Latin American communists than José Carlos Mariátegui?

I should preface this by saying I’m mostly familiar with Mexican Marxism.

Ricardo Flores Magón and Enrique Flores Magón (extremely influential, communists in the rest of Latin America basically saw them as the ideologues of the Mexican Revolution),

César Vallejo (poet and associate of Mariátegui, his political writings are neglected),

M.N. Roy (very influential for the development of international communist anticolonial strategy),

Tristán Marof (was cooking some kind of insane things about Tawantinsuyu but interesting because of that),

Aníbal Ponce (historian and critic of education, a big missing piece if people only look at European critical theory and some of his takes on it precede Paulo Freire),

Aimé Césaire (Notebook of a Return to the Native Land is one of the greatest poems about the Caribbean)

José Revueltas (great analysis of the world significance of the Mexican Revolution and the repression of the social revolutionary elements of it),

Che Guevara of course (you’d be surprised how little Anglophone people actually read anything by him),

Walter Rodney (Groundings with my Brothers is a great book)

Pablo González Casanova (great sociologist, a lot of what he wrote goes well with Henri Lefebvre, influenced the EZLN),

Ruy Mauro Marini (one of the greatest dependency theorists, does a lot of interesting things with Marx’s Capital),

Beatriz Nascimento (one of the main theorists of the Movimiento Negro in Brazil and influenced a lot of the reassessment of maroons),

Michael Löwy (great for connecting critical theory, Latin American Marxism, and the concept of utopia),

Gustavo Esteva (critic of developmentalism and one of the better radical democracy theorists), René Zavaleta Mercado (also a great theorist of radical democracy),

Andaiye (formerly worked with Walter Rodney and influential for the development of feminist social reproduction theory),

Álvaro García Linera (one of the theorists who I think is the most consistent defending Lenin’s position on governance, for better or worse, and a meeting point between autonomist Marxism and indianismo), and

Aníbal Quijano (great work on the world historical significance of colonialism and imperialism in the Americas)

Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui (revolutionary decolonial theorist and critic of North American academic decolonial theory, has some very interesting interpretations of abstract labor and language)

why are all the star trek games based on war and ship command and galactic fighting and war. i want diplomat simulator. i want skyrim for star trek. i wanna talk to a bunch of aliens about their farming rivalry and then go to the planet where everyones an italian mobster. i dont give a shit about upgrading the torpedoes on my battle cruiser to level up and destroy other ships in the New Online MMORPG. i want my entire ship to malfunction because an alien laid an egg in the nacelles and then i want to fix it by raising the alien as my own and then tossing it into space. what’s so hard to understand.

Day 5! Mae from Night in the Woods!

Put in the tags the movie(s) that defined your very, very early childhood, the first movies you have any recollection of watching.

I would like to play video games but unfortunately in order to be allowed to play video games I have to solve a secret puzzle inside my head that I do not understand and am only dimly aware of.