Elliott Mason

@2ells2tees.bsky.social

135 Followers 273 Following

Filker, craftsman, dad, husband, voracious reader, Chicagoan, transit fan, AudHD, transgender. Still masking.

[Pull quote from Ta-Nehisi Coates article published 15 Jun 2026 in Vanity Fair] Perhaps it is naive to expect Harris, a candidate for the American presidency, to speak in the same register as Hamer, who was its antagonist. But it was that very antagonist whom Harris and her party claimed as a champion. The dynamic is familiar-Barack Obama's claim of Martin Luther King Jr. was similarly incongruent. That is because a black presidency is a contradiction-it owes its power to a movement against racist state violence at home but seeks an office which has always practiced racist state violence abroad. But what was known in 1964 was largely abandoned in 2024, and what was offered instead was a questionable survivalist theory of democracy-one that proposed to erect a shield over one group while providing weaponry to destroy another. For reasons moral, pragmatic, and perhaps mostly ancestral, the next black presidency will have to think bigger. To its list of adversaries-which include a renewed white supremacy, a rapacious billionaire class, an energetic Christian nationalism-it must add another, perhaps more formidable than them all: empire. The portrait of America as an imperial power cuts against its self-image as a righteous cradle of democracy. But from its inception, the country has been aggressive and expansionist, seizing land from its Indigenous population, paying off some European powers while menacing others.
[ Tumblr post from prokopetz on 20 Jul 2026 ] [quoting tags from flameintheblackknight] #i think this is that thing where 19th century authors had to contrive a series of events for the manuscript to "appear" in their possession #complete with justifiable narrator and with total disregard for the rest of ways the rest of the text break reality #"yes it is entirely possible that a guy was briefly in another world and made it back here to give me his journal before leaving entirely" #"don't think too hard about it" (via @flameintheblacknight) [post begins] Say what you will about 19th Century literary critics' inexplicable hate-boner for the third-person omniscient perspective, but the lengths that 19th Century authors often went to in order to avoid getting CinemaSins dinged for failing to adequately contextualise how the narrator could possibly know all this are frequently the funniest stuff I've ever read.
[ Tumblr post from prokopetz, posted 14 May 2026 Cosmic horror story about the protagonist being driven mad by having forbidden knowledge seared into their mind in which it gradually becomes clear that the protagonist is a housecat and the terrible gnosis that renders even their most familiar intimacies alien to them is the ability to do first grade math. They have difficulty functioning in their daily life because they're constantly seeing maddening patterns beyond mundane perception, but those patterns are merely the product of being able to count higher than three. All forgetting to eat as they obsessively count the pieces of dry kibble in their bowl. #concepts #media #tropes #horror #cosmic horror #metatextual wankery #food mention
Cursive-learning wall poster showing the whole alphabet in upper and then lower case, published by Zaner-Bloser in the 1980s.
[ text in screenshot ] ErinLindiCairns @e... 5mo Here is my report on my experience with unethical behavior and bad faith dealings of Oghenechovwe Donald Ekpeki. ODE_Ethics Report © ethicsreport.tiiny.site
"If you get tired, learn to rest, not to quit." —Banksy
We are not created for any grander purpose than the ants that are there or the flies that are hovering around us or the mosquitoes that are sucking our blood. - U. G Krishnamurti