“No Small Thing, A Bee’s Sting, When It Enters The Heart.”

Batman is a showman

So I read something recently where someone said that Batman wasn’t a performer for some reason (I don’t really remember the rest of it) and my brain just kind of went. wait. Yes he is.

I mean he totally is! He’s a total showman, in the sense that he does things in a very dramatic way. Everything about his hero persona is calculated and very performative. And yeah, he’s an urban legend (or at least he starts off as one) but that’s a deliberate performance too! And it’s about intimidation. He doesn’t have all the fancy powers of other heroes. What he does have is psychological warfare and intimidation tactics. Despite his lack of powers, he’s generally considered one of the scariest heroes around. There’s a reason for that. He makes it that way. He deliberately uses fear to his advantage. The costume, the dramatic appearances, the disappearing when someone’s talking to him…. in short. Yeah. Batman is a showman. A performer. It may not be for fun or entertainment, but that’s still totally what he is.

Nothing can convince me otherwise.

....this sounds weird, but this post kind of invaded one of my dreams last night. So in my dream, I was trying to explain this whole problem with reconstructions to someone. I was trying and failing to describe how a penguin’s skeleton has a very long neck and actually looks a great deal like a plesiosaur’s skeleton and the implications of that, and then I didn’t have to try and explain anymore because a giant plesiosaur-penguin was swimming through the air toward us.

(After that, there was a thing with a restaurant that was inside a glass bubble and then I had to fold a parachute in a specific way so that when I opened it after jumping out of a plane it would be hard to see, so no one would know I was alive and I could fake my death for mission. And then I had to say goodbye to my friend who had just arrived for a performance but I couldn’t tell her it was the last time I would ever see her, and then I wandered off into the woods with other agents and my specially folded parachute in my backpack. There was a bunch more stuff after that, but it’s not very relevant and I’ve probably already shared way too much of my weird dreams.)

Humans are awesome

US Elevation.

by @cstats1

From death, life.

They stand before her, and they brandish their weapons callously, carelessly. She knows they mean to kill her – she’s of no use to them. “Don’t run and we’ll make it quick, little girl,” one of them says. “You can join your family.” She knows that he is lying. The world is open before her, and she knows all that may be known.

She can see the silence behind them, the darkness. Death. The void awaits.

The men smirk. They are empty of life and humanity, worn to blood, bone, and sharpened teeth by violence. They expect her to beg. They do not know.

She stands before them, small. Her spine is straight, and her head is high. She meets his eyes.

“No,” she says, and her voice is strong and clear. It is still a girl-child’s voice, but there is something more behind it.

He is taken aback, but something nasty quickly enters his eyes. “More fun for us then,” he tells the others.

“No,” she says again.

“I am not afraid to die.” She tells them, and there is a universe under her skin. She feels her life like a star in her chest, and death like tides in her blood.

They roar with laughter and start forward. They step with heavy feet on soil rich with death. They do not know.

The darkness is behind them, within them, between every atom in the air and in the earth. It is within her. The silence.

“I am not afraid to die,” she repeats, “but today is not my day to die. It is yours.”

The raucous laughter enters the air again, but she can see something like fear rising in the eyes of the wiser ones.

The time for words is over. The silence is here.

She closes her eyes - and breathes. Life is here, she thinks. Death is here, she thinks. Truth rings strong in the silence.

The darkness rises in her like the tides. The empty space between the stars is here, between the pieces of the universe. Void calls to void. The hungry dark will devour all. The shadows grow, and –

She opens her eyes, but there is nothing to see. The dark presses like a living thing against her skin, but she is not afraid. She is part of it, and it a part of her. There is no sound, because the dark and silence swallow all. But she can feel them. She can sense their light growing dim. Their fear grows, as the darkness within answers to the call of the darkness without.

She holds both death and life, light and dark, silence and sound, void and star – in her hands and in her heart. Her light does not fade as the darkness grows. There is no fear in her. She has already passed through the void and emerged.

The lights in the darkness are gone. The sense of nothing presses against her skin. She waits. She knows it is not yet done.

She waits, and the dark waits also, hungry. It is restless and chaotic, and it would consume her given the chance. She remembers the star in her chest. And waits.

And in the consuming darkness, the void of chaos and nothingness, something starts to grow. She smiles in the blackness, and breathes in, bringing air into her lungs where there was none. The light in her chest flares. Her star fills her whole self. The shadows recede. She blinks in the sunlight. There are no men in front of her. There are no more bodies in the streets. There is only rich black soil.

She steps forward and kneels, brushing the dirt away from a bright green seedling. Life.

“Your bruises and your scars

Tell a story on your skin.

They tell us who you are

And they map out where you’ve been.”

- me.

Honestly the biggest disappointment I had researching ABC was that medieval authors did not, in fact, see the creatures they were describing and were trying their best to describe them with their limited knowledge while going “what the fuck… what the fuck…”

Worshippers trapped inside Al-Aqsa are now being subjected to explosives, gas, stun grenades, and bullets. This video shows heavily armed soldiers throwing grenades, point blank, into a group of women and children trapped inside.

Women and children are being targeted, specifically.

Palestinians are being run down on the street in broad daylight. I chose to share screenshots instead of the video because it was too violent. Police and Military are protecting and endorsing this.

This woman was arrested after she fainted from exhaustion watching over her own home and trying to protect it. Then they arrested her entire family, too. Another woman was arrested for intervening and attempting to stop a soldier from kicking a little girl.

In further retaliation from the government, airstrikes in Gaza. The Arabic captions mention that women and children were the victims, among 9 others martyred.

These aren't "clashes" between two equal parties. This is a targeted campaign of violence and ethnic cleansing by an apartheid government funded by the USA and enabled by cowardly countries in the Middle East who have decided to turn a blind eye. If you pay taxes in the USA - know that over three billion dollars a year get sent in aid, which is used to fund this terrorism.

Media organizations only continue the colonialism by whitewashing the rhetoric and blocking hashtags and silencing voices.

One of our holiest sites is being desecrated in the holiest days of the year. The blood of the innocent is being shed. Children have been slaughtered, homes taken, bombs dropped, sexual violence runs rampant, and the western world continues to look the other way.

Do not be silent.

[unrelated] This is a restaurant in vietnam and its so cool??

I love how the Earth is this giant, beautiful tectonic mosaic