only one in three million tiktoks are this worth watching

The more we intrude on nature, the angrier we get with it for bothering us.

Oh this is a very good article.

Shout-out to people in notes saying they are/have been/are now going to reevaluate their relationship to wasps.

That actually takes courage to do, and I am proud of all of us for learning more and doing better. Are we still scared? Probably! Are we gonna start taking the ladies outside anyway? Heck yeah! They’re just lost!

“average person eats 3 spiders a year” factoid actualy just statistical error. average person eats 0 spiders per year. Spiders Georg, who lives in cave & eats over 10,000 each day, is an outlier adn should not have been counted

An actual World Heritage Post

how does this post not have a million notes but anyone online can quote it

Anyone else feeling burnt out by streaming services because any time you start a show the company expects an immediate audience and a fucking worldwide campaign of support or they’ll cancel it.

Stuff like “watching things in your own time around your busy life and work schedule might cause your show to be cancelled” is insane

i did not have “born in the wrong body” childhood transgender angst i had “blissfully unaware of the concept of gender until the world lucifer’d me and made me bite that fucking awareness apple and then suddenly everything was Wrong” angst

Literally such a funny concept

This is better than all Black mirrors combined.

Happy martin birthday

Overly Sarcastic Production's Apollo, the god of prophecy.

And the dodgeball he throws at random internet users.

You want to know why Inigo Montoya remains such an iconic and beloved character even 35 years after the Princess Bride came out?

It’s because he’s one of the few characters in fiction who has a story where he has dedicated his life to revenge, his whole motivation is about getting revenge….and he gets it! and then he isn’t empty or despairing! he doesn’t regret it! he’s totally satisfied!

because so many stories about revenge or rage are about characters “seeing the futility of their actions” or learning “their desire for revenge has only made them the monsters they hated” FUCK THAT.

Inigo Montoya kills the man who kills his father, is allowed to live in the narrative after and be happy about it and it is so satisfying. it’s fantastic. it’s iconic.

let more characters rage against the world, bring it down with bloodied hands, and let them be FUCKING RIGHT about it. Let them celebrate their success with sharp grins, and let them live happy, full lives where they always remain proud/fulfilled for what they’ve done

Another thing that set Inigo Montoya apart from other characters with vengeance arcs is that Inigo’s vengeance drove him but it didn’t consume him. He was wronged and wanted - needed that injustice to be corrected - but his vengeance was focused. Rather than taking his pain out on the whole world, Inigo was a charming, pleasant, good-humored person that treated everyone respectfully, even folks he was fighting. He even asks politely to people he meets about any extra digits they may have.

Would a bitter, angry, vengeance-consumed man swear on the life of his father and help a guy he was planning to duel, then give him time to catch his breath? Would he hand his sword over to his future opponent to lovingly show off his late-father’s skill as a swordmaker?

“You seem a decent fellow. I hate to kill you.”

I think part of what makes Inigo so iconic and beloved is because while vengeance was his story, it wasn’t who he was, so when he achieved his vengeance it was less an emptiness and more of a satisfaction, a story completed, a wrong made right, and a man suddenly baffled at the possibilities before him, not sure what his next story would be.

Always gonna promote older people living their best life because it is so damaging the way our society acts like your life is over as soon as your youth is spent. Alternatively, youth is a flawed concept and can actually be applied to any age as long as you are still growing and enjoying life.

Art by Lin Sun

(A poetic story based on the get-rich-quick video by Brian David Gilbert.)

In highschool I wrote a story about a middle-generation of stellar travelers. Their parents were born on earth and left as children, and the middle generation will not live long enough to see their destination. They live their entire lives on the ship and I wrote about them trying to find their place in everything. They will never know blue skies and warm beaches and open fields with warm breezes. They’ll never know birdsong or crickets or frogs. They’ll never hear the rain on the roof of a dreary day. I never could find the right way to end the story. I wanted it to be a happy ending, but I didn’t know how to do it.

I realize now that it was a book about me dealing with depression before I even knew it. Looking back at how blatant the projecting was, it’s obvious now. It wasn’t then.

In the story, the middle-generation people are lost. They’re apathetic. They’re just a placeholder. The only job they have is to keep the ship running, have kids, and die. As the middle generation of people began becoming adults, suicide rates were skyrocketing. Crime and drug rates were jumping. This generation was completely apathetic because they felt that they had no use.

In the story, a small group of people in the middle-generation create the Weather Project. They turn the ship into a terrarium. They make magnificent gardens and take the DNA of animals they took with them and recreate them and they make this cold, metal spaceship that they have to live their entire lives on into a home. They take what little they have and they break it and rearrange it into something beautiful. They take this radical idea and turn the ship into a wonderful jungle of trees and birds and sunshine.

And I realize now how much it reflects my state of mind as I transitioned from a child into an adult while dealing with depression. You always hear “it gets better” and “when you’re older things will be easier” and I was so sick of waiting for it to get better. I was in the middle-generation stage. And I was sick of it. I was so sick of waiting.

When I was in highschool I didn’t know how to end the story. I didn’t know how to have a happy ending. I didn’t have the life experience then to finish the story in a meaningful way. I didn’t know how to make it better for these middle-generation characters.

But now that I’m older, I’m learning. That if you sit and wait for things to get better, it never will. You have to take your life and break it apart and rearrange it into something beautiful. You have to make the cold metal ship into the garden that you deserve. You have to make your own meaning. You have to plant your own garden.

You have to teach yourself that being happy is not a radical idea.

God you guys I never thought this would become so popular 😱 I was gonna name it The Weather Project after the art installment that inspired it

By Olafur Eliasson

This actually made me a bit teary ngl

this is ART

This is your doctor speaking. As a mark of respect for Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II, we’ll be switching off your life support.

What I need y’all to understand is, when the NHS gives you an appointment they literally give you an appointment. You don’t get to schedule it, they hand you one and you had better be able to attend. If you can’t for any reason and need to reschedule, even if it’s because they handed you an appointment on your wedding day or you have to go to a funeral or (and this has happened to me) you already have a different NHS appointment at that time, the process of rescheduling it is:

- you have to wait months for another one

- it’s written down in your record that you “refused the appointment” you were given.

- ie. that you are at fault for any inconvenience or subsequent complications stemming from your appointment being delayed by, again, months.

The NHS is so broken that they will literally put your health at risk and then be affronted if you so much as question why they would do so.

In case anybody thought I was being hyperbolic when I said this would literally kill people.

Man rescues crying lost lamb on a steep mountain and reunites it with its family

king

the tendency for racists and white supremacists to go gaga over their idea of ancient Rome is so darkly hilarious because of how entirely wrong it is. It’s not a twisting of some kernels of truth, it’s not a misinterpretation, it’s just the exact opposite, and people in Western Europe has been doing it for so long. For centuries people in Britain and Germany would be like/have been like “ah yes, we are special and superior because we are the heirs of the superior Romans” while next to a giant pile of writings by respected Ancient Romans who went “god, Britain is a dump and Germany is full of idiot barbarians. I wish I lived somewhere cool and cultured like Syria or Tunisia.”

#the amount of letters i read about roman soldiers bemoaning the lack of olives in britain is astounding

been reading a lot of conversations about space since the james webb images were released particularly wrt to light speed and the fact that we are technically "looking into the past" because the light that actually reaches us is millions or billions of years old, and so we only see these places as they were when the light left, not as they are right now. cool & fine & very interesting

but i just saw someone (shoutout sylverthewordsmyth in the tiktok comment section) reframe this as "the future can see us" and despite this being a natural and logical extrapolation from us seeing the past, it has shaken me to my core. if there's anybody to look at us from far away, millions and billions of years in the future, they would look at us and see... us. they would look and see the same planet we live on right now, with the same continents and oceans. and it will be already long gone but to them it will be as alive as it is to us right now, the same way we see still see stars that have already gone out. i have to lay down

glad to see those spreading the truth

Rb to force new people from twitter to eat bees

Oh, hey, I was wondering when I’d get to use this again.

did you just fucking have this

honestly i am lowkey obsessed with how terrible we didn’t start the fire is at being a song while also being among the the catchiest songs ever 

this is a song that includes a man screaming CHILDREN OF THALIDOMIDE and then the next lyric is buddy holly, ben hur / space monkey, mafia

it is just one man, listing historical events more or less in order with no context or end and then layering in a chorus so catchy you will BEG YOUR BRAIN to stop thinking about it

i just appreciate that level of aimless, technically skilled chaos for some reason

(via @lytefoot)

I always considered the we didn’t start the fire as a rebellion song PRECISELY because it doesn’t need to have “proper” lyrics talking about stuff but it feels literally like scrolling through news article headlines and it’s one bullshit after another until the chorus where you get to the rage of the person watching it all happen. It’s a BRILLIANT concept for a song

In all the remakes I’ve seen of We Didn’t Start the Fire, the ones where people add more modern events, not one has even come close to the feeling of the original.

And, barring the fact that the people making these remixes aren’t….you know, Billy fucking Joel, the main reason they can’t nail it is because they don’t understand the original message of the song.

All modern remixes ONLY include shitty political events. And, while those are definitely mentioned in the original, Billy Joel also puts an emphasis on things that seem otherwise mundane.

Hula hoops. Joe DiMaggio. Television. Marilyn Monroe. Rock Around the Clock. Einstein. Peter Pan. Elvis Presley. Disneyland. U2. Punk rock. Wheel of Fortune.

The chorus literally says:

“No we didn’t light it, but we tried to fight it.”

The song is about all the shitty stuff that happens in the world, but it’s also about all the ways humanity and goodness and art have persisted in spite of it. The remixes never do well because people forget that humanity is, at it’s core, good, and that people as a whole are trying to fight against the negativity they see everyday.

To make a current version of We Didn’t Start the Fire as significant as the original, we need to acknowledge that good things still exist.

How do I explain to you people that interracial relationships are okay

Not every white person dating a POC is fetishizing. White people can be respectful and responsible when it comes to culture and relationships and not everyone has bad intentions.

Asian people can date Black people without you saying shit like “your kids will be so pretty” they’re not dating for pretty kids. They’re dating bc they like each other.

Someone can dress their partner in clothing from their culture if they want. Someone can take their partner to cultural events if they want.

People in relationships can share cultures, experiences and love without it being toxic or skin deep.

Their partner isn’t culturally appropriating. Their partner is being shown the ultimate form of love, bc their partner trusts them and loves them enough to share their history and heritage.

Yeah, dating someone from your culture is nice bc you automatically have similar experiences. But you’re not limited to dating people with the same experiences. Loving someone is sharing and growing and being together.

Interracial relationships aren’t always toxic, and some of y’all need to stop projecting onto other people.

👆 THIS 👆 👏👏👏

Calling ineterracial relationships toxic or fetishizing just seem like anti race mixing or racism with extra steps

This reminded me of this