In King Ludwig II’s defense, if I had basically infinite discretionary funds, was accountable to absolutely no one, and was king of a country full of picturesque landscapes, you couldn’t stop me from building myself a big gay fairytale castle on a mountaintop either.
This post is spreading and I feel bad about it because it contains misinformation, so for the record: Ludwig II did not in fact have infinite discretionary funds. He only acted as if he did. He never dipped into the public coffers for his building projects, but he spent his own fortune extravagantly and borrowed heavily from everyone he could think of. By 1885, the year before his death, he was 14 million marks in debt.
~ ✨✨ 14 million marks in debt ✨✨~
I always find this inspiring because try to name another prince of a German state. What did the rulers of Hamberg do? The Grand Duchy of Hesse? Gone with the wind, no one knows them anymore. But Mad Lad Ludwig built a top 5 most famous castle in the entire world. Money is fake, castles are real. Go broke and die like a winner.
EXCUSE ME, this is still wrong. He built 3.
Neuschwanstein, literally the inspo for the castles in Disney’s Sleeping Beauty and Cinderella
Hohenschwangau, the practical castle
Linderhof, the final, the smallest, and the MOST fab.
Every room is incredible and the park is beautiful, but shoutout to The Bedroom, the biggest room
The Hall of Mirrors, which he probably wandered by candle light because he was a serious night owl
The Dining Room, with a wishing table that lowers to the kitchen, and rises with a crank, returning magically full of food
The Venus Grotto, constructed for the sole use of Ludwig to larp to his heart’s content
A full artificial cave, it features a waterfall, fake stalactites, and a custom-designed swan boat floating on an artificial lake. The first electricity in Bavaria was generated here, to change the colors of the stage lights and to power Ludwig’s fountain and wave machine.
Now THAT’S ~ ✨✨ 14 million marks in debt ✨✨~
I love that- and I cannot emphasize this enough -none of this was tax money
the public paid for zero of his fairytale castle hobby
rare European monarch W as far as spending money lavishly goes
Body awareness is absolute shit for chronic illness. “Become aware of your body. Pay attention to how your body feels” great now I’m noticing the bone aching soreness that is permeating my entire body, thanks for that. My mind was automatically filtering that out for my but I sure am aware of it now!
I need like the opposite. I need “leave your body entirely and forget it exists” meditation.
OK I’m going to be That Guy™ for a second
because I teach meditation and this is 100% objectively true If you’re in pain, especially chronic pain, you are already way too aware of your body. Doing a meditation that is focused on your body is the opposite of helpful, and especially body scan meditation (the one that starts with notice how your toes feel and moves up through the body). Any meditation that is about focusing on a single thing to the exclusion of everything else I call black spot meditation (my term, but it works)
There is a meditation that is all about leaving your body entirely and forget it exists, and I call it white spot (I promise there’s a reason I name them that). White spot is what I was doing when I would ride my motorcycle. It’s about trying to maintain as much awareness of the world around you and not yourself. It’s like situational awareness turned up to eleven. And just like with black spot, this isn’t going to be good for everyone or every situation
The problem is that far too many meditation teachers have learned a method or two that work for them, and try to teach that as the One True Way. There are very few things that the right meditation can’t make easier, but it has to be the right meditation for what you’re trying to improve
(meditation is complicated. Anyone who says it’s simple is lying)
(I’m not really any kind of a guy)
Adding another technique that’s bad for some: focusing on your breathing. I meditated with someone who has asthma and trauma around it. It’s good to recognize when something doesn’t work for you — even if it works for a lot of people — and to look for alternatives instead of shaming yourself about the technique not being for you
Wait. Am I not the only one for whom focusing on breathing causes panic?
Dr Suess art posting for no reason at all on this very normal day.
You know somehow it never occurred to me that Dr Seuss might have done illustrations like these? (I guess in my mind he wasn’t around then, he existed in my head in some nebulous time period outside of actual history. Idk why.) But damn are they good.
Seuss did a metric fuck load of political art. Not all of it is especially good and just comes off as angry. Suess drew a lot of racist depictions of Japanese people as well as a warning if you do wanna look deeper. But these ones specifically are timeless bangers.
The thing I dislike about alt histories where real life monarchs have been made both gay and unproblematic is that it seems to imply that gay monarchs have not existed in history but if they did they would be cool. Which isn’t true. They have existed and they were just as bad as straight people. And I think it is disrespectful to real queer history to pretend that queer people have never been absolute bastards
i love explaining the etymology of the word “rickroll” because the story starts with “ok, so at one point 4chan applied a filter to everyone’s posts that changed the word egg to duck”
You can tell if someone’s actually pro intersex liberation by seeing their reaction to the phrase “abolish the sex binary” Yes I said sex. Like biological sex. It’s not binary.
the funniest thing about jealous dan is that he truly has nothing to be jealous about. phil took one look at him 16 years ago and did a generational lock in, he locked in so hard he went back into the closet, phil was watching that nerd play ddr and was actively falling in love with him
