Last week I accidentally took an edible at 10x my usual dose. I say “accidentally” but it was really more of a “my friend held it out to my face and I impulsively swallowed it like a python”, which was technically on purpose but still an accident in that my squamate instincts acted faster than my ability to assess the situation and ask myself if I really wanted to get Atreides high or not.

Anyway. I was painting the wall when it hit. My friend heard me make a noise and asked what was wrong—I explained that I had just fallen through several portals. I realized that painting the wall fulfilled my entire hierarchy of needs, and was absolutely sure that I was on track to escaping the cycle of samsara if I just kept at it a little longer. I was thwarted on my journey towards nirvana only by the fact that I ran out of paint.

Seeking a surrogate act of humble service through which I might be redeemed and made human, I turned to unwashed dishes in the sink and took up the holy weapon of the sponge. I was partway through cleaning the blender when it REALLY hit.

You ever clean a blender? It’s a shockingly intimate act. They are complex tools. One of the most complicated denizens of the kitchen. Glass and steel and rubber and plastic. Fuck! They’ve got gaskets. You can’t just scrub ‘em and rinse them down like any other piece of shit dish. You’ve got to dissemble them piece by piece, groove by sensitive groove, taking care to lavish the spinning blades with cautious attention. There’s something sensual about it. Something strangely vulnerable.

As I stood there, turning the pieces over in my hands, I thought about all the things we ask of blenders. They don’t have an easy job. They are hard laborers taking on a thankless task. I have used them so roughly in my haste for high-density smoothies, pushing them to their limits and occasionally breaking them. I remembered the smell of acrid smoke and decaying rubber that filled the kitchen in the break room the last time I tried to make a smoothie at work—the motor overtaxed and melted, the gasket cracked and brittle. Strawberry slurry leaked out of it like the blood of a slain animal.

Was this blender built to last? Or was it doomed to an early grave in some distant landfill by the genetic disorder of planned obsolescence? I didn’t know, and was far too high to make an educated guess. But I knew that whatever care and tenderness and empathy I put into it, the more respect for the partnership of man and machine, the better it would perform for me.

This thought filled me with a surge of affection. However long its lifespan, I wanted it to be filled with dignity and love and understanding. I thought: I bet no one has hugged this blender before. And so I lifted it from its base.

A blender is roughly the size and shape of a human baby. Cradling one in your arms satisfies a primal need. A month ago I was permitted to hold an infant for the first time in my life, an experience which was physically and psychologically healing. I felt an echo of that satisfaction holding my friend the blender, and the thought of parting with it felt even more ridiculous than bringing it with me to hang out on my friend’s bed.

when youre writing but you forget a word that was in your head milliseconds ago so you just die for the next 93 years

Love how this implies that after the downfall of humankind that doge is the species to supercede us

couldn’t resist adding the rest

i am so tired of radical vulnerability discourse that locates empowerment in divulging personal pain and i really worry about the implications of a young creative culture where your influence and your popularity and your follower count is implicitly tied to your willingness to talk about your personal trauma, your willingness to let thousands and thousands of strangers know what happened to you, your willingness to make your most private pain public. 

like i really worry that our culture is commodifying trauma? a band i really like, led by a young woman about my age, they released a song in early 2015 that was quite clearly about sexual assault. and it was a great song, and it earned a very deserved warm reception, but interviewers would persistently ask the lead singer if it was “a personal account,” and she would always say that it was an observation on rape culture and leave it at that. and then about a year later she released a personal essay saying that, yes, it was about her own experience of sexual assault, and then there was another wave of secondary clickbait-y thinkpieces congratulating her for being so brave and so open.

so we have a great song addressing sexual assault, which can more than stand on its own as a piece of art. and we have a young woman who, after a year of getting the same question from reporters, says, “i was raped; the song is about me.” and then we have another wave of reporters coming in to write identical stories repeating her words, calling her brave, and collecting ad revenue.

and that’s what i mean: for every act of personal disclosure of trauma, there is this weird media apparatus that feeds on publicizing that trauma and collecting fat stacks of ad money. publications are taking what might be an empowering process for some people and they’re incentivizing and monetizing public trauma disclosure. it’s deeply fucked up.

so like. you don’t owe the world the story of your trauma. you don’t need to make your grieving and healing a public process. you are not less courageous or less creative or less empowered because you choose to go through something privately. and you should be very wary of publications that traffic in underpaying marginalized young people to describe their trauma in detail. imo.

i wrote this post four years ago and apparently it’s been getting notes recently. the really disheartening thing is that this phenomenon has not only intensified in the years since i wrote it, but actually gotten worse. there is an expectation now that you must disclose your own personal history of trauma in order to make any art at all about trauma, or else be treated as a suspect interloper - e.g., wendy ortiz’s shameful false accusation of plagiarism against kate elizabeth russell, which ultimately forced russell to publicly disclose her own history of CSA. even the personal essay industrial complex at its mid-2010s peak was never so draconian. 

and, of course, when i wrote this post, i was talking about the phenomenon of “publications that traffic in underpaying marginalized young people to describe their trauma in detail.” a lot of these publications no longer exist, and the personal essay boom is no longer in full swing. which, regrettably, means that marginalized young people are now just expected to publicly disclose their trauma on social media without any compensation whatsoever in the service of dedication to some amorphous “movement.”

anyway. to reiterate. you do not owe thousands and thousands of strangers the story of your trauma. you are allowed to grieve and heal in private. you are not failing any movement if you choose to do this. if you do choose to make art about your trauma, you don’t owe anyone the “real story” behind your art. imo.

i don’t tell people online about my trauma because your audience is not your friend and you don’t deserve to live inside-out, with all your guts in public. fuck anyone who pushes for disclosure, fuck anyone who wants to profit from your pain. you don’t owe them anything. 

At first Netflix said, come write for us. We’ll save your cancelled shows and write about whatever niche story you want. Our algorithm says people will watch it!

Then a few years later they said, regardless of our promises or contract obligations we are cancelling shows after two seasons without telling anyone. Turns out no matter how loved a show is, we get less subscriptions after the second season.

How many subscriptions did we bring you? Netflix won’t say.

So writers started writing two season shows. Just give us two seasons, Netflix. Like you promised.

Then Netflix said, oops sorry! Turns out your show didn’t premiere at #1 and the views in the first day weren’t what we wanted so we’re cancelling your second season.

What were the numbers? How many people watched our show? Netflix doesn’t say.

Then, they did something extra special. They started taking shows and splitting their first season into two halves. Inside Job was not two seasons. It was one season split in half.

Oops! Sorry! The second half of your first season didn’t do as well as the first half, so now your show is cancelled!

Why? How many people? How much money? These companies are making cash hand over fist and they refuse to tell people the truth: people loved your show. Loved it. But some corpo exec wanted an infinite money making machine. Do you know how long shows are in production for before you watch them? Years. Like, 5+, even 10+ years. And Netflix gives it less than a week before they decide whether you’re getting cancelled.

Support #WGA Support #SAGAFTRA

Looking out for the community

"why are tv shows bad when they're made by teams of people who trained for years to make them good" "why do social media sites keeping torpedoing themselves with blatantly bad ideas" the answer to questions like these is almost inevitably "because it's not the people who do the work and know what they're doing who make all the big calls, it's the people whose job is Investing Money, because our society has somehow decided that Investing Money in a thing makes you more of an authority on that thing than the people who have spent their whole lives working on it. those people feel themselves creep closer to the grave every time you open your mouth."

May you wake up with pointed ears, curled horns, sharp fangs, pitch black eyes, and whatever other inhuman parts you would like to have.

suck it, cunt

why is “report hate speech” not one of the default options with “report spam” instead of “report sexually explicit material”. i’m not a cop so i don’t care if people post hole & pole but i would love if i didn’t have to explain every time why it’s bad when there are nazis

i couldn’t find this on tumblr to reblog but truly, honestly? this was one of the most life-altering moments of adventure time.

this is especially fun in retrospect because this scene is from season 3 when we all thought marceline and bubblegum were just going to be wlw subtext forever and the show would never do anything real with them… but this scene still hit differently… then comes the show finale and they kiss and live happily ever after… we dined well. we dined well.

The world is a little happier with you in it.

The world is a little brighter with you in it.

The world is a little sweeter with you in it.

The world is a little softer with you in it.

The world is a little sunnier with you in it.

The world is a little lovelier with you in it.

The world is a little warmer with you in it.

the gimmick blogs are like tumblr’s rogue gallery. yes we’ve got some heroes, yes we’ve got some villains, but more importantly if you look over here you will see some freak who devotes all their time to counting the number of “t’s” in a post

T Count: 15

Letter Count: 198

Your T Percentage: 7.58%

Average T Percentage: 6.95%

You used the letter T 1.09 times as much as average!

YOU EXIST???

Sometimes you create a guy and it turns out they already exist

Every time I see my mutuals post in their native tongue that I don't understand I'm like yes 🥰 that's language babes 💖

고추

hehe i said penis

was trying to find something in google images and got side tracked when they said "look at the anime images you have!" and I was like what fucking Anime images do I have. what the hell. and it was just these two

the girls are fighting

im so cold right now, can we cuddle naked for warmth?

“and the fans are throwing celebratory rats on the ice” god I love hockey

the beautiful game!!!!!!

The crowd once the game concludes:

You guys know that some people paint their rats right