Go back to see/read about travels through Eastern Europe.
Go to tessandalistairphotography.tumblr.com for, well, photography.
Found out that one of our favourite cafe’s around the corner from our place in Berlin has been replaced by a bar.
The Cafe’s name was Pasternak.
The Bar’s name is Gagarin.
I can’t help but feel that a couple of Russian families are having an arts vs. science war via the corner block of a quiet Prenzlauer Berg backstreet.
Source: catbus
Contour House in New South Wales, Australia, by Peter Stutchbury Architecture
I don’t really understand what’s going on here, just reblogging for the Australianness of the bush outside.
Source: kateoplis
purely because he is so logical that it is damn impossible to ‘analyse’ his arguments without saying “yep, he’s right here…oh, yeah, logic still works there…uh huh, yep, valid argument once again, Mr. Singer, why do we plebeians even bother trying to argue against this with anything other than BUT I WANT TO SPEND MY MONEY ON NEW SHOES!”
The left, no matter whether it’s from America or Europe, defends the Muslims at all cost, while making Israel out to always be the bad guy. We are fighting Islamic extremist, and their biggest allies are sitting inside our own government, the Democratic Party. With Huma Abedin Weiner having access to so much classified material, the radicals know our every move.
I have written in the past asking why we have not experienced any major terrorist attacks. I now know the answer. They have no need to destroy or attack what they are taking over from within. The Islamic radicals learned from history when Nikita Sergeyevich Khrushchev, the former head of the Soviet Union, said that the communist would take over the USA from within, not with weapons. The left is using our schools and televisions to slowly, methodically give over our country to the radical Islamists, who are also the radical left.
—
Conspiracy theory of the day: Tea Party Nation blogger TLC thinks Anthony Weiner’s wife, Huma Abedin, is an Islamic extremist who wants to destroy the U.S. from within.
Actually, nope, this might be the conspiracy theory of the month: In early June, Village Voice’s Roy Edroso linked to blogger Right, Wing-Nut, who believes Huma Abedin is a Saudi agent.
(via pantslessprogressive)
50% reblogged for the absurdity of the text, 50% for the Tennant gif.
(via pantslessprogressive)
Source: teapartynation.com
Source: theydothingsdifferentlythere
I’m starting from the very first photos that I ever took - of Venice in late ‘09, early ‘10 - and I’ll be uploading an album a day for a while of every country that I travelled through.
If you’re nostalgic for the days when this blog was more interesting, or are into travel photography, check it out. Flickr is a much more effective way of organising photographic material than tumblr, and I probably should have set one up a year ago. Oh and tell me if you have a Flickr. I have no friends.
He definitely got this idea from me. Anyway, my flickr is here. I have no idea how to use it/whether it’s worth it/what the point of it is, but if any of my followers (how and why are you still there!?) use it, your wisdom is most welcome.
Source: theydothingsdifferentlythere
This article talks a bit about my college, St Paul’s. International readers will be unaware, but St Paul’s has a somewhat infamous past with this topic.
This has left me, as a feminist guy concerned with sexual assault issues, in an awkward position, and it is one that I’ve had to navigate carefully this semester. I’ll write about it in more detail shortly.
For now I want to say that the Sydney Morning Herald’s coverage of campus rape has been cheap, unprofessional, and detrimental to women. They have sought to sell the story of campus rape with little mind for facts; to create a narrative that targets a single institution rather than a broader culture; and to artificially set up an Enemy that they may focus their anger upon. The paper’s overriding message - consciously delivered or not - is that St Paul’s College is an instution of rapists, and that the majority, if not all, of Paulines are in some way pro-rape.
The linked article, while not fully indicative of the paper’s view of Pauls, includes the typical namedropping that I’ve come to expect from the paper. In many ways, this piece is better than the usual Paul’s sledging fare. The author is right to call for more - and better - research into campus rape. She also would be right to attack the widespread misogyny and rape culture that exists between all Sydney colleges. She would further be right to attack the widespread rape culture that exists in Universities. But more importantly, she would be right to condemn the widespread rape culture that exists in Australia, and that exists in the world.That the Sydney Morning Herald consistently attacks St Pauls College, and not Australia’s ingrained rape culture, is telling of the paper’s personal contribution to the fetishisation of rape as a news source. People want to read ELITE COLLEGE INSTITUTION ENCOURAGES SEXUAL ASSAULT, but they don’t want to read WHITE AUSTRALIAN CULTURE ENCOURAGES SEXUAL ASSAULT. People want to have someone to blame, lest they realise they are part of the problem. An elite, all male instituion of 200 men is the perfect scapegoat - visible enough to be known, small enough that its inhabitants be anonymous.
The SMH engages in a bizarre form of self-interested scapegoating when it attacks Paul’s - the scapegoating of rape culture as a distinct and devastating symptom of patriarchy. I really, really wish it would stop.
I have a lot of close friends who go and have gone to colleges across Australia. Of the dozen+ instances of sexual assault and rape that have occurred within that circle of close friends and their close friends, 1 was perpetrated by a St Paul’s kid. Only about one third took place within the college ‘niche’.
The problem is not “male-dominated institutions”. The problem is an over-arching rape culture that I have been painfully and increasingly aware of since the age of 10, when an over-developed boy shoved his tongue down my friend’s throat in year 6 and said “she didn’t say no.” Now, my friends and I are in the midst of this culture, hyper-sensitive of our place in it, hyper-aware that dressing and acting in a certain way will have us labelled as “sluts”. Not just by the penis-endowed, but by our female friends, too.
It’s a culture that sees humour in gross deprecation of girls, in treating them as a means to an end. It’s a culture in which girls are seen as pursuits to be conquered, and once they have been, thrown out the window like the condom that probably wasn’t used. It’s a culture that fails to discern between consent and non-consent, between a girl dressing up because she feels good about herself and what is deemed “slutty”. It’s a culture of slutshaming and justifying sexual assault with arguments like “she shouldn’t have been so drunk”, “she shouldn’t have gone back to his room”, “if she was so upset by it, why didn’t she go to the police?” or “he was drunk, too”.
This isn’t just occurring in St Paul’s College, or Wesley College, or Lincoln’s, or King’s. It isn’t just occurring within universities. It’s a part of Australian culture, and SMH should fill their columns with actual research into the problem, rather than seeking to blame one particular type of young men for a problem that isn’t contained to class, location or political association.
I was assaulted earlier this year. It was by a young man, full to the brim with alcohol. He was not homeless, I do not believe he was mentally disabled (other than the effect alcohol had had on him). He was wearing a button-up shirt, nice shoes and under the stench of alcohol I could detect a not-too-cheap cologne. It wasn’t sexual assault, but if he hadn’t been quite so drunk, things probably would have ended differently.
I’m not terribly inclined to repeat the things he said here, but like I said, whilst it wasn’t a sexual assault, it had the potential to make me feel cheap, used, and like I shouldn’t wear a nice bra even though it makes me feel good about myself. My point is, he wasn’t a uni student, he certainly wasn’t a college student. He was a regular Australian guy who’d had too much to drink and was lost on his stumble home on a Friday night.
If SMH want to write hard-hitting journalism, they need to research what is actually happening, instead of trying to fulfil their vendetta against one particular institution. Paul’s is a (rather minor) thread in a web that stretches across Australia, and blaming one group of privileged, white boys isn’t going to get us anywhere. Those privileged white boys didn’t become sexists or rapists the moment they stepped through the doors of St Paul’s College. In fact, I think the majority of them resent SMH’s allegations that all of St Paulites are misogynistic assholes.
The fact is, the masses need someone to blame, and who better than a group of elite, advantaged young men? As Alistair said, no one wants to know they’re a part of the problem, they just want a select, identifiable and slightly-removed-from-the-rest-of-society ‘someone’ to point the finger at.
Source: theydothingsdifferentlythere
‘A Night at the Opera’.
Tess.
So, we’re back into posting photos. After a 2-3 month lull of returning to Australia and then “holy shit Sydney is overpriced”, we’ve sucked it up and are back into clicking the shutter-release, if only to satisfy our own egos.
There has been (sacriligeous yet enticing) discussion of digitalising ourselves, but we don’t really know yet. There’s just something about film that we get all romantic and giddy about so we hope you enjoy these ones for now.
Source: tessandalistairphotography
If you have a couple of hours to spare, or a few minutes a day for a while, learn to read and write Korean (Hangul). This is a good place to do it, plus here for the stroke order. You won’t be able to understand anything, of course, but being able to at least read out anything you encounter…
Another tip: If you feel like fully embracing your own mediocrity/laziness, and the awesomeness/insatiable productivity of your friend, be mates with this guy.
Thanks, dude.
Although the range of ‘original’ things I can post on tumblr are fairly limited.
a) There’s this dangerous line of detachedness/personalness in blogging that I am very wary of and have, in the past, crossed much to my current annoyance. This blog has too little anonymity for me to be able to post about the truly fascinating aspects of my life.
b) The only other kind of original content I would post would be my arrogant, rambling, enraged diatribes on issues that everyone else in the blogosphere has already spoken about in much more eloquent passages than I could, and on which I am all too aware that I have very little idea what I’m talking about. Not to mention I’d look back on those posts in less than six months and violently cringe at myself.
That being said, the general (and generally justified) attitude on tumblr/wordpress/blogspot is that if you’re not a 25+ year-old photographer, writer, designer, protester, generally freelancing and successful vessel of irony, then anything you post is garbage. Which is, as I said, often justified.
I almost feel like exorcising myself from this blog so that I can start a new one on which I will be able to present a witty, intelligent, generally impressive persona.
Then I remember that I have absolutely nothing to write about.
Why am I continually being forced to choose between never having sex with an intelligent woman again and having to agree that yes, all men are scum I tells you, crotch-staining trouser scum? I say this because I am attracted to intelligent women, intelligent women tend to be feminists, feminists…
I wasn’t going to reblog this, but here goes:
You need to focus on meeting a better grade of people if all the “feminists” you meet are apparently man-hating “every-penis-is-a-tool-of-the-patriarchy-and-thus-must-be-strung-up-by-the-short-and-curlies” types.
Pretty much everything you’ve mentioned is ripped straight from the annals of post-feminist whining. “No labels, maaaan” and “why can’t we all be equals” types of arguments are typically lazy, derailing turns of phrase that are used to silence debate by people who actually have nothing to back their arguments up.
Feminism does not mean having to like everything that every woman does, ever. Fuck, where did you get that definition from, the back of a Weeties box? Liz Lemon isn’t a feminist icon, neither is the lazy appropriation of Beyonce’s Girls (it’s not an empowerment anthem if you just steal someone else’s song and holler all over the top of it).
Gender does not play a part in whether art is good or bad, and anyone who thinks it does is laughably behind the eight ball.
What it does play a part in is people’s ability to live their lives: equal pay, lack of childcare, male politicians dictating reproductive rights and curtailing access to late-term abortion, low rates of rape reportage, the right to vote, the right to work, the freedom to live without fear of persecution or violence. Look at the women protesting in Saudi today for the right to drive a car and tell me there’s no place for feminism in the world. I dare you.
You see, I find it hard to understand is why people would choose not to be feminists.
As for the rest, whining about ableism in the context of it somehow squashing personal expression is pretty lazy (read Derailing For Dummies lately?), particularly as a writer. It doesn’t bode particularly well for one’s writerly abilities when the “right” to call something “retarded” is something apparently requiring concern. I used to say “spastic” a lot - it’s an Australianism, that’s for sure - until I learned about ableism.
Did I rant and rail and, spittle flying, complain that my freedom of expression was being diminished? No, I realised my vocabulary had shrunk to that of a 15-year-old boy’s and I did something about it. I realised how hurtful it was to friends of differing abilities and decided that their feelings were more important than the brief, explosive satisfaction that comes from saying “retarded”. It’s simple human decency.
People who complain that they can’t say “fag” or “bitch” or “retard” (etc) in whatever context they please and couch it as an expression issue - or, worse, some sort of crusade to preserve the vibrancy of language - tend to be revealing a deep vein of asshole.
And as far as hinging all of this on the type of women you get to have sex with, man, you sound like one of those ’70s bro-dudes who was shocked to find that women who’d discovered the Pill and read The Female Eunuch mysteriously didn’t want to have sex with them.
And if at the end of all of this you think me a sexist, chauvinist, misogynist or whatever term you use to call those whom you paint with that ridiculously broad brush, that’s fine. I don’t care anymore. Because I probably didn’t want to have sex with you anyway.
Phil, I wouldn’t have sex with you if my cunt was steel-lined and lubricated with Purell.
Go buy a nice, non-feminist Fleshlight.
I just discovered that it is, indeed, possible to fall head-over-heels into a girlcrush via one blog post. Clem Bastow, you are legend.
(via clambistro)
Try to be like the Dalai Lama and giggle at the world.
— The Best Advice My Mother Has Given Me in The Last 19 Years.
galaxyrise-deactivated20130512 asked: Hey, you're back on Tumblr! Since email is probably a lost cause, this might work better... How's things? You must be coming up to exams at uni, right? Still working? reply here or just send me another ask when you get a moment
Hey, no, not really! I just occasionally reblog things for the few people who might still go on tumblr, which basically means you, Pete Grover, and Casey (onebloceast).
Things are good, despite the fact that I have let half a semester worth of work cumulate to fall on my head smack bam when I have exams. I pat myself on the back for this.
Yeah, still working. Although my three jobs is soon to become two. I got into a nasty and really carthatic fight with my boss, told him he’s a criminal, and so this is my last week at that place, and I can’t say the other two have enough hours or frequency to hold me up, so I’m considering my options. Which are, at the moment:
a) dancing on the street for cash
b) selling all of my belongings
c) becoming a hacker and diverting funds from the Packer Family Trust.
Now that we have covered the overwhelmingly inanity that is my life, WHAT HAVE YOU BEEN DOING IN CHINA?
A Warm Feeling For the Arctic | NYT
To many Americans, Wasilla, Alaska, seems like a very distant corner of the national map. For the photographer Bill Hess, 60, it is just the starting point.
He has spent about half his life traveling from his home in Wasilla to the far more remote realms of the North Slope Borough, where the Inupiat people live. He pilots his own bush plane and, once on the ground, travels by snowmobile or dog sled. He is home.
“Alaska speaks to me as no other place I have ever been,” Mr. Hess said. “I love Alaska with every piece of flesh and spirit that is me. It speaks most strongly in the communities and camps of its native people, for they have ties to the land, sea and animals — and knowledge of the same — that is possessed by no one else. I can feel that when I am with them. When I am not with them, I miss that feeling.”
Above: Ralph Ahkivgak assured a gray whale in Barrow that it would be rescued from the slush ice in which it was temporarily trapped. The Inupiat do nut typically hunt grey whales.
Sigh. Alaska.
Source: kateoplis
