might seem like a harmless quirk but once you start typing in exclusively lowercase you can never capitalize anything again outside the designated midsentence Gay Emphasis Zones or anyone following you for longer than a week will think you’re about to commit murder

honestly fuck viruses they’re not even alive they’re just strands of punk ass DNA that go around fucking up us normal and god fearing life forms you don’t even have a nucleus you stupid bacteriophage looking horizontally transmitting RNA clump

Me as a writer: It must be perfect, or they will all know I am a fraud, and no one will love me.

Me as a reader: Give us your tired verses, your poor prose, your half formed 2am conceptions yearning to be realised-

might fuck around and read a 500 page physical published book in one sitting like it’s 2006 and I’m being bullied in middle school so I take refuge in the library and inhale books at a frightening speed that I have not been able to replicate since

Damn op you didn't need to just kill everyone who grew up with undiagnosed ADHD like that.

you know what'd be cool? if ao3 had a button to like comments. like,, why do you think i became a writer? it sure as hell isn't b/c i can communicate like a normal person

Actually life is beautiful because the sound I make while trying to breathe around hot food sounds like my dog trying to eat an apple. When I yawn my cat tries to put his face in my mouth like a little dentist man and when he yawns I put my finger in his obligate-carnivore trapzone and we both know he will not hurt me. When I do not fold my clothes, they do not hold it against me.

I am demonstrably sad, and lonely, and full of fear. But there are other people who will hold my hand, who will point out the hawk overhead, who will give you That Look in a public place. The other day at a coffee shop a child said "look! It's snowing!" so all of us strangers went to go look out the windows. It wasn't the first snow and it won't be the last but wasn't it lovely like that?

How wonderful to live in a world where birds and frogs both say beep! How wonderful to have an ocean of beautiful sharks with their dinosaur teeth! How wonderful the moon and her changing face, how wonderful the bees and their dancing to communicate, how wonderful shrimp and their forbidden layers of vision! How wonderful, you, and what you will give the world! The way we love things enough to spend entire blogs devoted to them? How people will let me explain my Pokemon team to them? How we will both jump at the scare in the movie, how we laugh so loudly, how it feels to give someone your baking? How wonderful to be alive. I am sorry for forgetting.

This is the process of getting better. With wonderful people and wonderful strangers and wonderful friends: I am getting better, slowly. Thank you, whoever you are. In some way, you've been wonderful, and left a wonderful place in the world to ripple out to me. In some small way - isn't it beautiful - I promise, you've been helping.

my brain every night:

had a dream griffin mcelroy was giving tours at the aquarium as like a special guest kind of thing and every time he’d stop in front of an animal he’d be like “alright gang gather round. i have no idea what the FUCK this is” and then we’d move on

yes, I’m a DM, yes, I love writing, no, I don’t know how distance works. Is that building 100 feet away or 40 feet away? Should you be able to see something ten minutes down the road? Is 1,000 feet long? Is 30?? Is 6??? Can you walk across the continent in 2 weeks or 2 years? I hate this. I hate travel. I hate measurement. Fuck you.

Things fanfiction authors do

*posts chapter*

*checks page to make sure chapter hasn’t transformed into 100% typos*

*refreshes to check for reviews*

*refreshes again*

*resolves to go to bed and not check until morning*

*goes to bed, turns on phone, checks for reviews*

*finds ninety-eight typos four weeks later*

I have become obsessed with long term nuclear waste disposal warnings

LOOK AT THE HOSTILE ARCHITECTURE PROPOSED TO WARN FUTURE CIVILIZATIONS I'M GOING TO CRY

Like this is the closest thing we're ever gonna have to old gods I'm really losing my mind

@jonathan-sins​ EXACTLY... THAT’S WHAT I’M TALKIN ABOUT BABY

"we sure are a species huh"

this fails to include all of the UN's proposed companion text, which reads:

"This place is a message... and part of a system of messages ...pay attention to it!

Sending this message was important to us. We considered ourselves to be a powerful culture.

This place is not a place of honor ... no highly esteemed deed is commemorated here... nothing valued is here.

What is here was dangerous and repulsive to us. This message is a warning about danger.

The danger is in a particular location... it increases towards a center... the center of danger is here... of a particular size and shape, and below us.

The danger is still present, in your time, as it was in ours.

The danger is to the body, and it can kill.

The form of the danger is an emanation of energy.

The danger is unleashed only if you substantially disturb this place physically. This place is best shunned and left uninhabited."

which gives a nice drizzle of cosmic-dread inspiring je-ne-sais-quoi to te whole thing imo

You’re my personal plethora of ultra euphoric nostalgia.

there’s something endlessly hilarious to me about the phrase “hotly debated” in an academic context. like i just picture a bunch of nerds at podiums & one’s like “of course there was a paleolithic bear cult in Northern Eurasia” and another one just looks him in the eye and says “i’l kill you in real life, kevin”

I heard a story once about two microbiologists at a conference who took it out into the parking lot to have a literal fistfight over taxonomy. 

have i told this story yet? idk but it’s good. The Orangutan Story:

my american lit professor went to this poe conference. like to be clear this is a man who has a doctorate in being a book nerd. he reads moby dick to his four-year-old son. and poe is one of the cornerstones of american literature, right, so this should be right up his alley?

wrong. apparently poe scholars are like, advanced. there is a branch of edgar allen poe scholarship that specifically looks for coded messages based on the number of words per line and letters per word poe uses. my professor, who has a phd in american literature, realizes he is totally out of his depth. but he already committed his day to this so he thinks fuck it! and goes to a panel on racism in poe’s works, because that’s relevant to his interests.

background info: edgar allen poe was a broke white alcoholic from virginia who wrote horror in the first half of the 19th century. rule 1 of Horror Academia is that horror reflects the cultural anxieties of its time (see: my other professor’s sermon abt how zombie stories are popular when people are scared of immigrants, or that purge movie that was literally abt the election). since poe’s shit is a product of 1800s white southern culture, you can safely assume it’s at least a little about race. but the racial subtext is very open to interpretation, and scholars believe all kinds of different things about what poe says about race (if he says anything), and the poe stans get extremely tense about it.

so my professor sits down to watch this panel and within like five minutes a bunch of crusty academics get super heated about poe’s theoretical racism. because it’s academia, though, this is limited to poorly concealed passive aggression and forceful tones of inside voice. one professor is like “this isn’t even about race!” and another professor is like “this proves he’s a racist!” people are interrupting each other. tensions are rising. a panelist starts saying that poe is like writing a critique of how racist society was, and the racist stuff is there to prove that racism is stupid, and that on a metaphorical level the racist philosophy always loses—

then my professor, perhaps in a bid to prove that he too is a smart literature person, loudly calls: “BUT WHAT ABOUT THE ORANGUTAN?”

some more background: in poe’s well-known short story “the murder in the rue morgue,” two single ladies—a lovely old woman and her lovely daughter who takes care of her, aka super vulnerable and respectable people—are violently killed. the murderer turns out to be not a person, but an orangutan brought back by a sailor who went to like burma or something. and it’s pretty goddamn racially coded, like they reeeeally focus on all this stuff about coarse hairs and big hands and superhuman strength and chattering that sounds like people talking but isn’t actually. if that’s intentional, then he’s literally written an analogy about how black people are a threat to vulnerable white women, which is classic white supremacist shit. BUT if he really only meant for it to be an orangutan, then it’s a whole other metaphor about how colonialism pillages other countries and brings their wealth back to europe and that’s REALLY gonna bite them in the ass one day. klansman or komrade? it all hangs on this.

much later, when my professor told this story to a poe nerd friend, the guy said the orangutan thing was a one of the biggest landmines in their field. he said it was a reliable discussion ruiner that had started so many shouting matches that some conferences had an actual ban on bringing it up.

so the place goes dead fucking silent as every giant ass poe stan in the room is immediately thrust into a series of war flashbacks: the orangutan argument, violently carried out over seminar tables, in literary journals, at graduate student house parties, the spittle flying, the wine and coffee spilled, the friendships torn—the red faces and bulging veins—curses thrown and teaching posts abandoned—panels just like this one fallen into chaos—distant sirens, skies falling, the dog-eared norton critical editions slicing through the air like sabres—the textual support! o, the quotes! they gaze at this madman in numb disbelief, but he could not have known. nay, he was a literary theorist, a 17th-century man, only a visitor to their haunted land. he had never heard the whistle of the mortars overhead. he had never felt the cold earth under his cheek as he prayed for god’s deliverance. and yet he would have broken their fragile peace and brought them all back into the trenches.

my professor sits there for a second, still totally clueless. the panel moderator suddenly stands up in his tweed jacket and yells, with the raw panic of a once-broken man:

WE! DO NOT! TALK ABOUT! THE ORANGUTAN!

Wait, there’s physical copies of Fallout Equestria? That’d have to be massive.

The first run was five hardbacks of progressively increasing girth. The stack is hefty, but the books are comfortable. Each chapter has chapter art too, which I consider a plus in all fantasy books.

Later runs were single-book softcover monstrosities. I think I saw another five-volume hardback run recently, but I’m not deeply involved in the fandom anymore.

The second print run was two volumes, hardback, with jackets.  Dunno about any subsequent runs.

I still think the 5-volume split was the best option.  It’s a big damn story.

(For anyone who hasn’t read it: yes, that’s a functional replica of the main character’s go-to weapon.  No, I didn’t customize it like that; I bought it from the person who did.)

anon PLEASE tell me your teacher is the author of this

Ok, I Kind of hate that I know this, but I’m pretty sure that anon’s teacher did NOT write the books the others are showing off. He wrote the darker, edgier and somehow even longer fanfic OF that fanfic called Project Horizons.

Original Fallout Equestria was written by someone known as Kkat who I’m 90% sure is a woman and the story only has some PG-13ish scenes at worst (you know, aside from the violence and gore that comes with a Fallout setting.) Project Horizons was written by a guy known as Somber, who I remember him mentioning in the post-chapter notes that he got fired for failing the wrong student once and the fic itself includes multiple explicit sex scenes.

it’s important to me u know what the 3rd printing looks like. please note the gilded pages

one of tumblr’s secret trump cards is its ability to deliver absolutely OBLITERATING gut punches like this post without any context or warning whatsoever

@throesofangels @rosswood the haunting continues

*walks up to straight couple* which one of you is the bee and which one of you is the fully grown adult woman who left her fiance for the bee?

@throesofangels

It's always fascinating to me how little I know about the people whose words moved me most.

In published literature, there's often a picture, a name, a biography - I can try and make some wild guesses about what that author is like from those tiny clues, what kind of life they've had, maybe look them up on Wikipedia.

But with internet fanfic? When the profile is blank, the pseudonym absurd, the language one of convenience - and still there's those words that rattled me like a tempest, those stories that moved and changed me, thrown into the void by someone, somewhere, whose name i'll never learn, whose face i'll never see. Still there's that really powerful link.

It's such a unique form of communication.

me consuming fictional work after fictional work to distract myself from the fact that i exist: i can have a little escapism. as a treat.