it sure fucking is buddy

one of the most signs ever

oh! I have to tell you guys a great story one of my professors told me. So he has a friend who is involved in these Shakespeare outreach programs where they try to bring Shakespeare and live theatre to poor and underprivileged groups and teach them about English literature and performing arts and such. On one of their tours they stopped at a young offenders institute for women and they put on a performance of Romeo and Juliet for a group of 16-17 year old girls. It was all going really well and the girls were enjoying and laughing through the first half - because really, the first half is pretty much a comedy - but as the play went on, things started to get quiet. Real quiet. Then it got up to the suicide scene and mutterings broke out and all the girls were nudging each other and looking distressed, and as this teacher observed them, he realised - they didn’t know how the play ended. These girls had never been exposed to the story of Romeo and Juliet before, something which he thought was impossible given how ubiquitous it is in our culture. I mean, the prologue even gives the ending away, but of course it doesn’t specify exactly how the whole “take their life” thing goes down, so these poor girls had no idea what to expect and were sitting there clinging to hope that Romeo would maybe sit down for a damn minute instead of murdering Paris and chugging poison - but BAM he died and they all cried out - and then Juliet WOKE UP and they SCREAMED and by the end of the play they were so upset that a brawl nearly broke out, and that’s the story of how Shakespeare nearly started a riot at a juvenile detention centre

Apparently something similar happened during a production of Much Ado at Rikers Island because a bunch of inmates wanted to beat the shit out of Claudio, which is more than fair tbh

honestly Shakespeare would be so pleased to know his plays were nearly starting brawls centuries into the future

I played Claudio once and I fully support this

“When we took Shakespeare’s “Measure for Measure” into a maximum security woman’s prison on the West Side…there’s a scene there where a young woman is told by a very powerful official that “If you sleep with me, I will pardon your brother. And if you don’t sleep with me, I’ll execute him.” And he leaves the stage. And this character, Isabel, turned out to the audience and said: “To whom should I complain?” And a woman in the audience shouted: “The Police!” And then she looked right at that woman and said: “If I did relate this, who would believe me?” And the woman answered back, “No one, girl.” And it was astonishing because not only was it an amazing sense of connection between the audience and the actress, but you also realized that this was a kind of an historical lesson in theater reception. That’s what must have happened at The Globe. These soliloquies were not simply monologues that people spoke, they were call and response to the audience. And you realized that vibrancy, that that sense of connectedness is not only what makes theater great in prisons, it’s what makes theater great, period.”

Oskar Eustis

May your pain medication always kick in right after you take them. May your compression garments always slip on your body with ease. May you always find your footing when you walk. May you wake up with energy and zest. May your sinuses always be clear

“May your sinuses always be clear” has to be the best blessing of all time.

i really hate coming out but still want my extended family to know, so my mother took it upon herself to invent the game “guess which one of my kids is gay.”

the rules are simple.

This isnt coming out of the closet. This is coughing loudly from within the closet to scare the people outside of it, which is immensely more entertaining.

certified iconic post

NOTE TO SELF-SLOW THE FUCK DOWN!

Slow the fuck down is also the way to avoid scams, social engineering, phishing, etc.

“Oh, no the CEO of my employer is having an emergency and I need to click this link right now!!!”

Slow down…

“Why would the CEO be emailing ME of all people? Maybe this email is a phishing attack that would get my employer hacked and me fired for allowing it.” (It probably is a phishing email.)

In general, “Slow the fuck down” is an extremely powerful information literacy skill.

Genuinely thinking about showing this to my freshmen instead of the CRAAP test

Facts about your body after you turn 25, AKA things I wish someone had told me:

tiktok is such an awful app, it's almost designed to feed you misinformation and expose you to insane discourse. unlike beloved tumblr, the app that feeds me misinformation and exposes me to insane discourse

No, no, no, you see on tiktok an algorithm feeds you misinformation. On Tumblr I feed myself misinformation from my charcuterie board of hand-selected unhinged mutuals.

None of that mass market junk. Only artisanal, small batch, sustainably cultivated, fair trade horseshit.

@Fanfic writers:

My friend send me this link, is a series on a profile on Ao3 (tumblr) that has different tutorials to insert things to fanfics via html code, I thought I would share bc it’s really cool

Lists of tutorials:

This is a tutorial/live example on how to make large images fit on mobile browsers but remain normal size on desktop browsers.

This is a tutorial/live example on how to mimic the look of letters, fliers, and stationery (as well as other forms of written media) without using images. For all your epistolary fic needs.

This is a tutorial/live example on how to create a "Choose Your Own Adventure" fic. While this has been explained before (see here), this particular tutorial shows you how to use a work skin to hide the next parts from the reader until they click through to get to them.

This is a live example of how an author can create linked footnotes in their work with only a little bit of HTML and no workskins required. This is best viewed by clicking "Entire Work". While I've included the actual coding in bold and italic once you click "Hide Creator's Style", there's a more detailed explanation here.

This a tutorial/live example on how to have text change or appear once a cursor is hovering over it. Helpful for pop-up spoilers, language translations, quick author's notes, etc.

Anonymous on tumblr: do you have a skin that would mimic the author’s notes and review/kudos buttons section from the end of a fic? the desired effect being that the fic could go on after the “end” of the fic, so after the author’s notes and review/kudos buttons

Here's a tutorial/live example to do just that, with some of the buttons actually functioning. I'll explain more inside!

This is a tutorial/live example on how to align images to the left or right of the screen and have text wrap around them.

This is a tutorial/live example on how to mimic email windows on AO3 without the need to use images.

This is a tutorial/live example on how to mimic iOS text messages on AO3 without the need to use images. There's also a chapter on how to have emojis displayed on AO3 as well.

Bored with the default page dividers? This is a tutorial/live example on how customize your page dividers with no images needed (though I do show you how you could use images if you wanted to do such a thing).

This is a live example how to make invisible text that can only be seen by highlighting the text. Tutorial is included in text, and you can always leave comments about questions you may have.

MOBILE USERS: Sadly, this probably won't work for you, since highlighting in a mobile browser is different than web. I've tried correcting this, but have yet to find a solution.

Original coding and design is from layouttest. I make no claims for it, just tweaked it so it will work on AO3.

This is a live example of my AO3 skin that allows the author to recreate the look of lined notebook paper in their work. To learn more about it, you can find the tutorial here.

This is a live example of my AO3 skin that allows the author to recreate the look of sticky notes (aka Post-Its) in their fic. To learn more about it, you can find the tutorial here.

This is a live example of my AO3 skin that allows the author to recreate the look of Deadpool's thinking boxes in their fic. To learn more about it, you can find the tutorial here.

This is a live example of my AO3 skin that allows the author to recreate the look of a newspaper article in their work. To learn more about it, you can find the tutorial here.

This is really useful and I'll always reblog it.

Tell me a soft memory

we would find out later i had burned off my entire cornea - about 65% of my eye. my doctor told me it is the organ with the highest concentration of nerve endings - i was in an amount of pain that can't be spoken.

and i was blind. for the first time in my life, i was totally blind. i kept thinking about reading, about writing. weirdly, just once, about driving. we had no idea if i would ever see again. just like that - my entire life was different.

it is a strange place to reference for a soft memory, to begin here.

my siblings were taking excellent care of me, but there was a moment in the hospital where, just through bad luck and timing - both of them had to step away for a moment. i was crying at that point; not emotionally. for 3 days after this i would still be crying, my tears, like a mermaid's, a frothy pink with blood.

my brother worried about leaving me. he had another, just-as-bad emergency.

"i got her," someone said. "don't worry."

a soft hand held mine, and then she started talking.

her name was jess. she has a wife named clyde. they live a few blocks up the street. clyde fell down, but the x-rays seem to be coming back better than expected. jess says she's got long dark hair and "more wrinkles than an elephant". jess describes every chair in the room and every person. she talks about her two kids and her cats and her favorite memories from college.

a doctor came. i had to switch to a different waiting room. i tried to stand up to follow the voice - i found jess's hand, following me. she didn't let go. she kept talking the whole way: lamp to your left, just a few more steps, okay to your right is the ugliest painting, good, now a little more walking straight, you got it baby

in the new silence of the next room she sat me down and called my brother for me, telling him where we'd gone to. and she stayed there for a bit, just chatting, her voice echoing in the eerie quiet. gently describing the room to me. and then someone was rude. from the sound of the voice, a kid, i think.

"why is she crying?"

"she just lost her vision," jess said. "she can't see."

"oh." said the kid. "that's scary."

the kid tells me he is here because he has peas stuck up his nose. that makes me laugh, his mom (?) groans. she tells me about the kid (he's 6, he likes paw patrol and eating cheese), about herself, about moving from cali.

jess says she's sorry, but she has to leave now, she's gotta go check on her wife.

"don't worry," says the mom. "i got her." and then i felt her hand press into mine.

for hours like that: i am taken care of by strangers. each person just talking with whatever comes to their head - not for any reward or celebrity or real reason, i guess. just because i am scared and alone and in the hospital and blinded and need to be distracted. not everyone even got told the story - they would just pick up in the silence with - oh by the way the television is playing HGTV - do you like that kind of a thing? yeah, me too, but could never quite get into those open-floor plans, i'll tell you -

by the time my brother is able to come back, the room is buzzing. we talk to each other like old friends, laughing, cracking jokes about if you don't like hospital food wait until you get on an airplane and can't believe i'm up past two in the morning what a party animal i'm becoming. i am holding the hands of someone named drew, who likes my crow tattoo and making crochet snails.

there are many dark moments full of pain in this world. this - in the low of absolute-dark, absolute-pain: people find a way to paint in it anyway. the color splash of their voices: this triumphant, radiating kindness of - let's be here together, let me help you, let's keep going.

i never saw their faces. i can't remember many of their names. but i think about them often, and the way we all took a deep breath - and did something gentle amongst the pain.

some other taxonomic facts for you to get mad at evolution for, instead of "birds are dinosaurs"

I dislike this, because it obscures the important differences between facts that are just about cladistics, such as dolphins being in Artiodactyla, vs facts that are about any sensible taxonomy (whether based on phylogeny or phenotypy), such as birds being dinosaurs. So you get confusion, e.g. @dappergamelord's comment:

It's not your fault, dapper game lord: you've been actively misled. Birds being dinosaurs is the only logical way to think about dinosaurs, whereas most "erm X are actually Y" are indeed dumb nerd gotchas. (Of course I also love dumb nerd gotchas! But they're very different things.)

Relatedly, I'm malding and frothing at everyone saying "there's no such thing as a tree" or "fish don't exist". Yes, it sounds clever, but it's obviously false and misleading, for the sake of sounding clever. Polyphyletic and paraphyletic groups clearly exist, and are often useful. If you must, say something like "if you only care who's related to whom, then there's no such thing as a tree", or "fish aren't a family unless you add us too".

So, taking the statements one by one:

"Insects are Crustaceans" (🤷)

Ehhh, okay. I usually define crustaceans as the paraphyletic group Pancrustacea minus Hexapoda. It's a useful definition, since you often want to talk about shrimp-lookin' guys.

But you might also want to talk about pancrustaceans themselves (basically, arthropods except the families of spiders and milipedes/centipedes). Personally I'd prefer specifying "pancrustaceans" rather than plain "crustaceans", but I won't get Mad Online over it.

"Dolphins are Hoofed Mammals" (👎)

The plain meaning of "hoofed mammal" isn't Euungulata, it's "mammal which is hoofed". Dolphins don't have hooves. (Like and follow for more amazing facts.) Yes, "ungulate" means "hoofed", but there's a reason we give classes unreadable Latin-Greek names instead of plain ones.

More honest ways to put it:

To @dragonfly-general who wonders about dolphin kashrut (and I love that): kosher mammals form a clade! (This is unusual: kosher birds and kosher fish don't.) All species in Pecora are kosher, and no mammals outside Ruminantia are kosher. It's less clear where exactly the line is drawn: mouse deer are in Ruminantia but outside Pecora, and there's disagreement on whether they're kosher. Dolphins are definitely outside that clade, though.

"Mushrooms are closer to Animals than they are to Plants" (👍✅✔️💯)

Yep, straight-up true. This doesn't just mean evolutionarily closer, either: it shows in the way they feed and store energy, life cycle, structure of motile cells, and more.

The only reason most people think mushrooms are plantlike is because we think of animals as motile (it's even in the name) and plants+fungi as sessile, but that's not true in general; it's just what we're likely to encounter in everyday life — and then only if our everyday life doesn't involve too many barnacles.

"Hyenas are Cat-like" (🤷)

Even with the capital C, I'd understand that as meaning not Feliformia, but simply cat-like in appearance or behaviour. But they kind of are, so it's not wrong either.

Clearer ways to put it:

"Herpetology is a LYING BASTARD" (👎🙅❌😡🤬💢)

For something like "dolphins are Hoofed Mammals", you can claim you're translating the name of a clade, and our disagreement is just whether that phrasing is helpful. Here, the statement is clear and unambiguous: "there's no reason" to have a field of study that isn't about a clade, birds "should" be included.

That's completely wrong! You don't have to study monophyletic groups: you can study plants of Antarctica or animals of the Sargasso sea, grouping them by geography rather than by relatedness. You can study trees, or human-cultivated crops.

In practice, it is in fact useful to study herpetology; amphibians and non-avian reptiles have a lot in common, in terms of anatomy, metabolism, environmental needs, and behaviour. Birds are rather different and it makes more sense to study them separately. Clade-based taxonomy is useful for many purposes, but there's no need to shoehorn it here.

"really, we're all just fish" (👎)

Okay, yes, I enjoy describing a cat as a lobe-finned fish, you caught me. But the concept of "fish" isn't useful if it's simply a synonym of "vertebrate" — we already have the word "vertebrate" for that.

Conversely, it's very useful to have a word for the paraphyletic group of vertebrates minus tetrapods, and the word "fish" is great for that

For some purposes, you might want to define it more narrowly — as jawed fishes minus tetrapods, as bony fishes minus tetrapods, as ray-finned fishes — and I won't protest. Usually though, people will tend to think of fish (e.g. culinarily) as encompassing lampreys, rays, carps, but not pigs.

Better ways to put it:

I do love weird facts about taxonomy, keep 'em coming! But it's really helpful to use clear language about species being usefully similar in practice, or dissimilar but descended from the same ancestor.

no no that’s a bop, i love it

“Woman!” cried I, somewhat tearsome,

“Who are you to stand so fearsome

With your wavy locks of auburn hair and eyes of emerald green?”

Quoth the woman, “I’m Jolene”

rule #1 of the world is that love is stored in the kitty cat

my apologies to puppy dogs everywhere

rule #1 of the world, fixed: love is stored in the Creature

rule #2 of the world is that biting is also stored in the creature

rule #3 is never talk to the police

i ended up liking how gendered french is solely because i can say that i want people to use he/him pronouns for me the same way they use it for angels, blood and blunts

i asked a trans friend to give me her fem version of this and she said that people should use she/her with her the same way they use it for the sea, flesh and stuffed toys

I don’t speak French but I speak Spanish and I’m nonbinary so the whole gendered language thing is… difficult. I couldn’t get this post out of my head and so I wrote a poem. It's a first draft but i just had to get it out there

It’s called “Masculino como el amor, femenino como la espada”

Translation: Masculine like love, feminine like the sword

no one speak to me this poem cut me open

alsdkfjalsdkj thaaaaanks! I made a few typos but i'm fairly proud of it hehe

Could a homosexual lend me, an asexual, a single use of the word flaming?

YOU have obtained:

I, a flaming asexual, need someone to please call the fire department. It is an emergency.

Perfectly executed joke, no notes

DYING

Veni vidi conveni consedi

I came I saw I fits I sits

@theshitpostcalligrapher

We're on a new platform with a totally different audience...we have to prove ourselves all over again...convince a totally new group of people to think we're funny and worth your attention....so allow me to drop some of my "A" material....the funniest thing I got.......here goes....... jeef berky

This always got me laughing for three whole years straight since I first read it

I have and I was like??? What do you mean?

One thing I don't think the Spoon metaphor has helped able-bodied people understand is that you can overdraw.

Generally, for most conditions, running out of spoons doesn't mean you collapse, doesn't produce an effect they can actually see. What it means is that you run on life support, quite possibly unsafely, until you get to a safe place and can stop. But you'll owe those spoons back, with interest. You'll have hurt yourself to do it.

Sometimes I hang out with a friend and they'll be like, wow, I'm really glad you had a good day. And I have to decide whether to make them feel bad by explaining that in fact they did not catch me on a good day, and tomorrow will probably be bad. I just made choices.

"Hey, y'know that anime trope where a spellcaster runs out of mana, but like his friends and family are counting on him to win or keep the shield up or whatever, so he starts to draw from his own life force? And then the battle is won and everyone's all "YAAAAAYYYY" but he just fucking... collapses and has to rest for a few days because he literally vampired himself to win? It's kinda like that."

"I borrowed spoons from tomorrow for today and my loan shark is gonna break my kneecaps as soon as I get home."