Tom Bubul
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tombubul.bsky.social
Tom Bubul
@tombubul.bsky.social
570 followers 160 following 1.4K posts
Art, thinking, goofing around
twin cities, MN
https://tombubul.info
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tombubul.bsky.social
Tom Bubul @tombubul.bsky.social · May 9
My pope story is out from behind the paywall www.nplusonemag.com/issue-48/fic... . Nevertheless the edict to subscribe to this magazine remains in effect
Reposted by Tom Bubul
bryanthomasdaly.bsky.social
in the bathtub trying to sweat out a fever
February 3, 2026 at 2:04 AM
tombubul.bsky.social
Got a nice clean batch of febs this year , four of each daily flavor . Don't hoard , but don't just eat all the saturdays at once either
February 2, 2026 at 3:58 PM
tombubul.bsky.social
Bela's new column :) www.nplusonemag.com/online-only/...
Introducing Miss Translation | Bela Shayevich
You may have noticed that this column feels a little incestuous (there is that Saskia Vogel again . . .) but that’s our world in translation. It’s small, and its actors, often by necessity, are prolif...
www.nplusonemag.com
January 28, 2026 at 3:47 PM
Reposted by Tom Bubul
bryanthomasdaly.bsky.social
get amazing art! help our students! ICE off earth!
January 27, 2026 at 2:45 PM
tombubul.bsky.social
Charlie's piece is good www.nytimes.com/2026/01/25/m...
Watching America Unravel in Minneapolis
www.nytimes.com
January 26, 2026 at 4:29 PM
tombubul.bsky.social
Abt to consume my daily purple
A big glass of purple
January 21, 2026 at 7:46 PM
tombubul.bsky.social
Jesse calls these "practical effects"(!!!!!!) ... I agree , post more bsky.app/profile/tomb...
tombubul.bsky.social Tom Bubul @tombubul.bsky.social · Jul 17
Open call for my friends to post more . Selfies , food , pets , mom when she was young , vacations , home decor , arts & crafts , event & birthday announcements , merch for sale , movie recs , quotidian stuff , "solid" posts ... all welcome
January 21, 2026 at 4:19 PM
Reposted by Tom Bubul
jessemcmanus.bsky.social
as a consumer i have seen enough rage-posting against the common enemy of AI that i am now pleading that you bring more practical effects back to bluesky, i'm saying every time you are mad at something show me what your lunch was, new pair of socks, hell, maybe a drawing without context
January 21, 2026 at 4:11 PM
tombubul.bsky.social
Drawing is BACK
January 20, 2026 at 4:45 PM
tombubul.bsky.social
Attached in full & worth reading , alt text is across all four bsky.app/profile/cmon...
Renfrew Christie, a South African scholar whose undercover work for the African National Congress was critical in hobbling the apartheid government’s secret nuclear weapons program in the 1980s, died on Dec. 21 at his home in Cape Town. He was 76. The cause of death was pneumonia, his daughter Camilla Christie said. President Cyril Ramaphosa of South Africa paid tribute to Dr. Christie after his death, saying his “relentless and fearless commitment to our freedom demands our appreciation.” The A.N.C., in a statement, called Dr. Christie’s role “in disrupting and exposing the apartheid state’s clandestine nuclear weapons program” an “act of profound revolutionary significance.” From the doctoral dissertation he had written at the University of Oxford on the history of electricity in South Africa, Dr. Christie provided the research needed to blow up the Koeberg Nuclear Power Station; the Arnot coal-fired power station; the Sasol oil-from-coal facilities that produced the heavy water critical to producing nuclear weapons; and other critical sites. The explosions set back South Africa’s nascent nuclear weapons program by years and cost the government more than $1 billion, Dr. Christie later estimated. By the time the bombs began going off, planted by his colleagues in uMkhonto we Sizwe, the paramilitary wing of the A.N.C., Dr. Christie was already in prison. He was arrested by South African authorities in October 1979 on charges of “terrorism,” three months after completing his studies at Oxford, and spent the next seven years in prison, some of that time on death row and in solitary confinement. “While I was in prison, everything I had ever researched was blown up,” he said in a speech in 2023. Terrorism was a capital offense, and Dr. Christie narrowly escaped hanging. But as he later recounted, he was deliberately placed on the death row closest to the gallows at the Pretoria Maximum Security Prison. For two and half years, he was forced to listen to the hangings of more than 300 prisoners. “The whole prison would sing for two or three days before the hanging, to ease the terror of the victims,” Dr. Christie recalled at a 2013 conference at the University of the Western Cape on laws regarding torture. Then he recited the lyrics of an anti‐apartheid folk song that reverberated in the penitentiary: “‘Senzeni-na? Senzeni-na? What have we done? What have we done?’ It was the most beautiful music on earth, sung in a vile place.” “At zero dark hundred,” he continued, “the hanging party would come through the corridors to the gallows, slamming the gates behind them on the road to death. Once they were at the gallows there was a long pause. Then — crack! — the trapdoors would open, and the neck or necks of the condemned would snap. A bit later came the hammering, presumably of nails into the coffins.” In an interview years later with the BBC, he said the “gruesome” experience affected him for the rest of his life. Dr. Christie acquired his fierce antipathy to apartheid at a young age, growing up in an impoverished family in Johannesburg. Many of his family members fought with the Allied forces against the Germans in World War II, and “I learned from them very early that what one does with Nazis is kill them,” he said at a 2023 conference on antinuclear activism in Johannesburg. “I am not a pacifist.” At 17, he was drafted into the South African Army. A stint of guard duty at the Lenz ammunition dump south of Johannesburg confirmed his suspicions that the government was building nuclear weapons. “From the age of 17, I was hunting the South African bomb,” he said at the conference. After attending the University of the Witwatersrand, he received a scholarship to Oxford, which enabled him to further his quest. For his doctoral dissertation, he chose to study South Africa’s history of electrification, “so I could get into the electricity supply commission’s library and archives, and work out how much electricity they were using to enrich uranium,” he told the BBC. From there, it was possible to calculate how many nuclear bombs could be produced. Six such bombs had reportedly been made by the end of apartheid in the early 1990s; the United States had initially aided the regime’s nuclear program. Thanks to the system of forced labor, South Africa “made the cheapest electricity in the world,” Dr. Christie said, which aided the process of uranium enrichment and made the country’s nuclear program a magnet for Western support. (South Africa also benefited from its status as a Cold War ally against the Soviet Union.) Dr. Christie turned his findings over to the A.N.C. Instead of opting for the safety of England — there was the possibility of a lecturer position at Oxford — he returned home and was arrested by South Africa’s Security Police. He had been betrayed by Craig Williamson, a fellow student at Witwatersrand, who had become a spy for the security services and was later granted amnesty by South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission. After 48 hours of torture, Dr. Christie wrote a forced confession — “the best thing I ever wrote,” he later told the BBC, noting that he had made sure the confession included “all my recommendations to the African National Congress” about the best way to sabotage Koeberg and other facilities. The Koeberg Nuclear Power Station in Cape Town was one of the sites Dr. Christie helped sabotage, setting back apartheid South Africa’s nascent nuclear weapons program. Credit...Esa Alexander/Reuters “And, gloriously, the judge read it out in court,” Dr. Christie added. “So my recommendations went from the judge’s mouth” straight to the A.N.C. Two years later, in December 1982, Koeberg was bombed by white A.N.C. operatives who had gotten jobs at the facility. They followed Dr. Christie’s instructions to the letter. “Of all the achievements of the armed struggle, the bombing of Koeberg is there,” Dr. Christie said at the 2023 conference, emphasizing its importance. “Frankly, when I got to hearing of it, it made being in prison much, much easier to tolerate.” [...] He attended King Edward VII School in Johannesburg and was conscripted into the army immediately after graduating. After his discharge, he enrolled at Witwatersrand. He was twice arrested after illegally visiting Black students at the University of the North at Turfloop, and was also arrested during a march on a police station where he said the anti-apartheid activist Winnie Mandela was being tortured. He didn’t finish the course at Witwatersrand, instead earning bachelor’s and master’s degrees from the University of Cape Town in the mid-1970s before studying at Oxford. At Cape Town, he was a leader of the National Union of South African Students, an important anti-apartheid organization. On June 6, 1980, he was sentenced to 10 years in prison under South Africa’s Terrorism Act, with four other sentences of five years each to run concurrently. “I spent seven months in solitary,” Dr. Christie said in the 2023 speech. “Don’t let anybody kid you: No one comes out of solitary sane. My nightmares are awful.” After his years in prison, he was granted amnesty in 1986 as the apartheid regime began to crumble. (It officially ended in 1994, when Nelson Mandela became the country’s first Black president.) He later had a long academic career at the University of the Western Cape, retiring in 2014 as dean of research and senior professor. [...] Asked by the BBC whether he was glad he had spied for the A.N.C., Dr. Christie didn’t hesitate. “I was working for Nelson Mandela and uMkonto we Sizwe,” he said. “I’m very proud of that. We won. We got a democracy.”
January 19, 2026 at 10:20 PM
tombubul.bsky.social
Admire Nonni
A crumpler named Nonni is interrupting you
January 18, 2026 at 11:54 PM
tombubul.bsky.social
If you listen to too much slowed-down music all regular speed music sounds like flight of the damn bumblebee
January 18, 2026 at 8:14 PM
Reposted by Tom Bubul
nplusonemag.com
www.nplusonemag.com/online-only/...
At 9 AM I fall in love with Amy. We’re in my friend’s old Corolla, following an Immigration and Customs Enforcement vehicle in our neighborhood. We only know “Amy” through the Signal voice call we’re on together, alongside more than eight hundred others, all trying to coordinate sightings throughout South Minneapolis. Amy drives a silver Subaru and is directly in front of us, expertly tailing a black Wagoneer with two masked agents in front. The Wagoneer skips a red light to try and lose us, but Amy’s fast. She bolts across the intersection, Bullitt-style, and we follow just behind, shouting inside the car, GO AMY! WE LOVE YOU! “I’m gonna fucking marry Amy,” my friend says. “You think it’s chill to propose over this call?”
January 18, 2026 at 4:48 PM
tombubul.bsky.social
Jillian's is the best account on this platform imo
January 17, 2026 at 8:16 PM
Reposted by Tom Bubul
dirtbagg.bsky.social
November 16, 2025 at 6:53 PM
Reposted by Tom Bubul
dirtbagg.bsky.social
January 1, 2026 at 11:46 PM
Reposted by Tom Bubul
feather.bsky.social
@tombubul.bsky.social seen here with tumblecat's xray of a fart
January 17, 2026 at 7:36 PM
Reposted by Tom Bubul
spiderbabby.bsky.social
@tombubul.bsky.social
January 17, 2026 at 1:47 PM
tombubul.bsky.social
Photographing my black cats in my black room , black second hand ticking on the black clock
January 17, 2026 at 4:37 AM
Reposted by Tom Bubul
sludge.bsky.social
New: We built an interactive map of every ICE contractor working with the Trump administration.

readsludge.com/2026/01/16/t...
The Companies Behind ICE
Sludge built an interactive map of every ICE contractor working with the Trump administration.
readsludge.com
January 16, 2026 at 8:19 PM
tombubul.bsky.social
Bumping this , if you know anyone thinking abt , let them know they shd just do it , ideally by this weekend . Visit our extraordinary city bsky.app/profile/tomb...
tombubul.bsky.social Tom Bubul @tombubul.bsky.social · Dec 30
Opening tph for residency applications in 2026 tombubul.info/residency-20...
January 14, 2026 at 6:24 PM
Reposted by Tom Bubul
sweetvoiced.bsky.social
🌕👥🪴🌄
epiphyllum cactus fanning outward of its taupe terra cotta pot on big heavy wicker plant stand in barely visible blue-skied window; to the left its stark golden hour shadow is cast over a red and cream wall print of a moon shape
January 13, 2026 at 2:36 AM
Reposted by Tom Bubul
fruitbat.bsky.social
the full story of this is that i thought it would make a nice companion piece to this painting my friend won at an auction of a piano tuner in paradise... he likes it so much we recreated it for his 30th birthday.... maybe next time this gal will show up too
painting shows a piano tuner in paradise photo of me in old age makeup as piano tuner in paradise
January 9, 2026 at 2:28 AM
Reposted by Tom Bubul
nplusonemag.com
The US is filled with “pretty nice guys” who are ready to inflict, who have already inflicted, senseless and life-shattering violence on innocent, impoverished people. www.nplusonemag.com/issue-51/pol...
Two Days Talking to People Looking for Jobs at ICE | Yanis Varoufuckice
Naturally there were lots of law enforcement types hanging around the convention — men with military fades, moisture-wicking shirts, and tattoos of the Bible and the Constitution and eagles and flags ...
www.nplusonemag.com
January 7, 2026 at 9:15 PM
tombubul.bsky.social
John Fleischer told me (paraphrasing) , The impulse to make larger work & fill the space is conditioned by capitalism ... it puts 'the space' before the work & betrays the proper scale of the work's ideas ... & what is 'the space' & its function anyway?
January 6, 2026 at 8:20 PM