The Daily Times, New Philadelphia, Ohio, July 9, 1924
theroomyouneverenter
whoever wrote this paper has the funniest phrasing possible
happy turtle bit off a cop’s toe in the hudson river day for those who celebrate
Honestly, even if Reddit stopped being terrible I would continue being way more active than before on this site. I'm having a gay old time here rn
reminding myself there are no truly "bad days", because every single day, someone somewhere in the world has taken a photo of an extremely tiny animal and shown it to someone else, and that's very good actually
look at this absolutely fucking MINISCULE rabbit. i am sharing it with you. i hope it improves your day
(photo credit to frobunnius on twitter)
Its kind of fascinating to see the most recent intersection of not only Reddit and Tumblr, but of TikTok and Tumblr. There are people on Tumblr who are only just getting the chance to interact with John Green as more than a legend of a darker time in Tumblr's history. And while John was only a legend here,, he has been one of the hearts of multiple TikTok communities for years, and its great to see them learn who John Green really is.
There are people who have never read his books who will be exposed to them now.They get to find out about Tuberculosis and Socks and Coffee, and how genuine of a person John is. How he'll delete his posts if they make him too anxious and how we support him in that.
In some ways for me John's previous experience on Tumblr serves as one of the most visible reminders that everyone we interact with on the hellscape that is the internet is a person first and foremost, and anonymity and humor are no excuse to treat people badly.
when your art program’s closing message hits you straight in the heart and makes you stop and contemplate the state of it all
because of the huge response to this post, I decided to make a version of the art that includes the text
I’ve also uploaded this design to INPRNT, and all sales proceeds will be donated to environmental and humanitarian charities!
Even saying ”I’m so sorry, I completely forgot” sounds marginally better than ” I’m so sorry, I didn’t completely forget, I actually completely remembered. I thought about it the whole time and it stressed me out so much my brain built an insurmountable wall around it.”
what farming items in mmorpgs has taught me: i used to think using ice trays to make ice cubes was free but after thinking about it i have to pay the electric bill to power the freezer so every moment that i’m not freezing new trays of ice cubes is a moment that i’m underutilizing the freezer and increasing the cost of ice cubes. i have to constantly swap out ice trays for new ice cubes on an hourly rotation on a 24 hour basis or else i won’t produce the maximum amount of ice cubes possible and will underutilize the full potential of my electric bill. i need to stop using all other appliances and utilities in my home to make more ice cubes
Love how tumblr has its own folk stories. Yeah the God of Arepo we’ve all heard the story and we all still cry about it. Yeah that one about the woman locked up for centuries finally getting free. That one about the witch who would marry anyone who could get her house key from her cat and it’s revealed she IS the cat after the narrator befriends the cat.
Might I add:
The defeat of the wizard who made people choose how they’d be to be executed
The woman who raised the changeling alongside her biological child
The human who died of radiation poisoning after repairing the spaceship
The adventures of a space roomba
Cinderella finding Araura (and falling in love)
I don’t know a snappy description but the my nemesis cynthia story certainly lives in my head
hilariously, these are almost all in my fic tag. so, a compiled list from the notes (and some extras):
- The God of Arepo (graphic novel 1 / 2 / 3) (ebook)
- The Monster of Sentan
- The Witch’s Cat
- Raise Both Children
- Stabby the Roomba (honorable mention)
- Cinderella Marries the Prince (comic)
- My Arch Nemesis Cynthia
- Pirates and Mermaid
- Eindred and the Witch
- The Demon King
- The Cornerwitch
- Grandmother Beetroot
- Apocalypse Daycare Worker
- Grandmother Accidentally Summons a Demon
- New Year Saga
- A Story About Changelings
- Ranger in the King’s Forest
- The Difference Between a Hare and a Rabbit
- Goblin Men (Canines)
I am in love with you /p
adding the Doctors Without Borders one
I LOVE tumblr storytime, so here’s a bunch more your weekend reading. Enjoy!
26. Haunted house
33. Narrative Town
35. Robot Apocalypse
37. Kushiel
38. Tooth Fairy
39. Alien abduction
42. Space cousins
WAIT REBLOG THIS VERSION INSTEAD
Seeing Lockwood & Co get canceled just reinforces how important the writers’ strike is, I think. The WGA’s demands are confronting the corporate shift spearheaded by Netflix which tosses aside at a moment’s notice the stories that people love, even if a show is watched and discussed and profitable. The point of a strike is that there is no reason this business has to be done in the way that the executives have chosen. All people involved in the creative process deserve a fair wage. Viewers deserve to see the stories they love—and support with literal money—continued.
By Netflix’s own metrics, there was no reason to cancel Lockwood & Co. The entire media landscape does not need to be made exclusively of blockbusters. The people working in the entertainment industry do not need to be scraping by to make ends meet while being turned from valued employees into discardable gig workers. None of this has to be the way it is—people are making choices. And the WGA is absolutely right to say no.
Becoming more active on Tumblr has me, unsurprisingly, giving more thought to my gender identity and sexuality than I have in a while. Not that it hasn't constantly been simmering in the back of my head for years, its just more prevalent in my thoughts these days.
Sometimes I feel like I'm skipping steps or bouncing around in them. Accepting that my identity is queer, regardless of the specifics, content in accepting that I am not the picture of cisheteronormativity. But then bouncing between doubting myself and reassuring myself that cishet people don't question themselves like this.
Then I wonder if I've even found myself yet. Have I dug down deep enough. How much of who I am today is the real me and how much is the mask I made without realizing it to protect myself from hurtful words and conservative religion when I was younger? How much internalized homophobia and transphobia do I have? Am I trying to heal from my past or am I just trying to distance myself?
I tell myself that labels aren't important to me because they aren't. I don't need to define myself by a label. And yet I find myself looking at flags, looking at labels, looking at other peoples identities trying to find what fits. Trying to see if it feels like me.
I'm still looking to see if there are people who experience life the way I do.
It’s not your fault the world ended, you tried your best. And it’s not like you were the best one for the job either. Just some random person who couldn’t stand by and do nothing. You didn’t really have any hope of succeeding anyway —the King’s army, the Grand Mages, the Guilds— all had fallen against the might of the Dark Lord. But doing nothing never really felt like a choice to you or the rest of the ragtag group of strangers that had become your companions.
In a way you were quite proud of yourselves. You had made it farther than you could have ever dreamed, and as your blood stains the cobbled stone floor of the Dark Lords keep, surrounded by the cooling corpses of your unexpected allies, you watch as he hesitates for a moment before completing the ritual that will grant him complete control. Part of you thinks that’s odd, but the rest of you feels very cold, and has a hard time focusing, and you are so so tired, and maybe you’ll just close your eyes for a little bit. If only that light wasn’t glowing so brightly.
You wake up, and the world is still here. Your limbs are all in their proper place and your blood is inside you where it belongs. It’s not quite clear what happened at first, but you catch on quick. After all there are only so many possible explanations for your village to suddenly be unburned and the dead unharmed. Despair and relief fill you as you realize you have time, time to convince the King and the Mages and the Guilds of the danger, time to fix things, time to save the world properly this time.
The King will not see a lowly peasant such as you, and the Mages scoff that their mighty magic could fail to withstand any enemy. After your third time trying to force your way in to see the Guild heads you are thrown in prison, and there you wait until the world burns. It comes quicker this time, and you wonder if maybe you really had made a difference after all that first time.
You wake up again, and you seek them out, that mismatched collection of strangers bonded by blood and fire. Tears of joy run freely as you come together piece by piece and realize that you all remember. Gods or Fate must have their eyes on you, to give you these chances, and you will not fail them. You are smarter in your approach this time, you know of many of the dangers posed by the Dark Lord and his forces and the risks are lower. You are slaughtered once again, and the world ends.
Who are you to save the world, a collection of nobodies, peasants and traders, urchins and outcasts. You have time though. Time to grow, to become more than you are. Time and time and time again. You learn to fight, you seek out strange and powerful magics, and you learn with each death to hate the Dark Lord with all your might.
With each death a new life, and the bonds of blood and fire are surpassed by bonds of trust and true friendship. Your rabble of nobodies become a band of mighty heroes, and you are no longer slaughtered without effect. The Dark Lord’s plans are thwarted, and he adapts. You save the world, only for it to die another way. You fight and you fight, sure in the knowledge that Time is on your side, and one day, sooner or later you will win. Gods and Fate have decreed it.
It has been countless lives. Countless deaths. This time is different, your plan is without flaw, your teamwork without error. You move together as if by one mind. The keep is stormed and the ritual disrupted, and this time, it is the Dark Lord whose blood stains the stones of the keep. He laughs despite the mortal blow and a shiver runs up your spine. He speaks and oh how you hate the sound of his voice.
“Thank you all so very much.” he says. “I’ve had so much fun.”
He coughs, and blood stains his chin.
“You cannot imagine what it felt like to stand on the precipice of victory after years of planning and preparation. To see everything fall into place without fault, every contingency accounted for, every resistance preemptively countered. Success guaranteed.”
He stares into your eyes and you glare back.
“Empty. It felt so empty. My whole life I dedicated to this fight, to this goal. What would I have once I won? Nothing. And there you were, so young, so foolish, so… unexpected. A fun little diversion, perhaps the most fun I had in the entire ordeal. And why shouldn’t I have a little fun? Victory would always be mine if I wanted it. I had time.
“So let’s play this game again one last time, and please do try your hardest. Make it count.”
You thrust with your sword a second too late, and golden light blinds you.
“I don’t get it,” says the demon, “This person’s lived a perfectly good and virtuous life. Why are you sending them to hell?” The angel nervously rubs the back of their head. “Honestly? We’re pretty sure they’d be happier in hell than heaven.”
Where the fuck is Ronald Reagan time.
I miss cradle already wtf
Come write fanfiction. Its the only way. Fan paths are always fun to write, Peggy Sue fics were popular for a while. Its a very very small fanfiction community and a lot of it is decentralized between reddit, discord, and ao3, but there are definitely some good pieces out there.
Having your own personal blog is honestly quite a nice change of pace compared to Reddit. I could put a funny GIF of George Bush getting hit by a shoe on here and the worse case scenario is that no one even notices.
You put that on a big subreddit and you get your eyes gouged out and a heap of political discourse underneath your post.
Oh ho ho. What about the worst case scenario being that everyone saw it and no one interacts with it because they all secretly hate you.
I’ve been thinking some thoughts about cringe lately and how people handle it themselves and in particular in younger generations. Older generations constantly making remarks about slang, clothes, trends, hair, dances, and every little thing that brings joy to teens and young adults.
“Oh, you’re going to cringe so hard at that when you are older.”
And yes, people do get older, and they do look back and cringe at their younger selves. But there isn’t anything wrong with that. You cannot and should not interfere with non-dangerous aspects of adolescence. You cannot protect someone from cringe, and any efforts to do so do nothing more than undercut and isolate those they are trying to “protect”
“Don’t engage in the fun social behavior your peers are engaging in, because I think it’s lame, and in a few years you will too.” Doesn’t add any joy to a child’s life. It adds an undercurrent of shame if they choose to still participate, and if they don’t then they lose out on fun and bonding and *life*.
It creates the unhappiness of aimless counterculture. Where a person does not define themselves or find community in what they enjoy and what brings them happiness but in a false sense of superiority and maturity that comes from what they are not.
And sometimes it comes from a supposedly good place. Parents, siblings, older friends and more wanting the youth in their lives to have a good childhood, because children can be cruel, and children who are odd and different can be targets. So they push and prod and encourage children to be more normal, to hide the parts of them that are special and unique, because it will just be so much easier for them that way. Its to protect them. And they never notice that in doing so they become the first to bully the child for this.
TLDR: Stop fighting against cringe. Its a canon event. Its part of growing up. Efforts to “save” people from it only cause harm.
“Authors should not be ALLOWED to write about–” you are an anti-intellectual and functionally a conservative
“This book should be taken off of shelves for featuring–” you are an anti-intellectual and functionally a conservative
“Schools shouldn’t teach this book in class because–” you are an anti-intellectual and functionally a conservative
“Nobody actually likes or wants to read classics because they’re–” you are an anti-intellectual and an idiot
“I only read YA fantasy books because every classic novel or work of literary fiction is problematic and features–” you are an anti-intellectual and you are robbing yourself of the full richness of the human experience.
"you are functionally a conservative" is such a good and clarifying insult
Literally right after I saw this post, I saw another post in a discord chat for BOOK EDITORS in which an outspokenly liberal editor talked about how Nabokov should have never been published because he wrote about p*dophiles and described women's bodies in ways that made her uncomfortable. She described his writing as "objectively terrible" and said she wanted to burn his books. And other editors were bringing up classics they didn't like and talking about how they wanted to throw them in the trash. This wasn't like a light "unpopular opinion!" conversation. This was actual book editors talking about how books should be destroyed and censored.
There is something so scary and toxic in global culture right now. The revival of fascism is influencing everyone's mindset and approach to art, regardless of where they fall on the political spectrum.
I see far more books being censored today than when I was a kid. Librarians handed me The Catcher in the Rye, The Sexual Politics of Meat, and Animal Farm when I was literally 8-11. My mom would never have taken a book away from me. I read everything from the Tao Te Ching to the Qur'an to atheist texts under my desk at school. Teachers thought nothing of it or encouraged it. Books seemed universally acknowledged as sacrosanct to me.
Now I can't find any adults who don't hesitate or want to make exceptions when it comes to censorship. Even the most liberal social activist librarians I know go, "well except for book X..."
Functionally conservative. It's so important to have the language to express that.
Thank you for this addition!
And, following up on the previous post …
“This makes me uncomfortable” is NOT a valid reason for censorship
These fucking book editors should remove themselves from the profession ASAP 😡
Some things are meant to make you uncomfortable.
Take the famous Maus by Art Spiegelman.
I had someone try to argue with me that it shouldn't be in schools because the themes were too scary.
I'm like... Bro. It is a Holocaust Memoir. It is supposed to be scary!!!!
Would I read it to a bunch of kindergarteners? Of course not.
But Grade 5 kiddos can learn about these things because they have the emotional intelligence to understand it.
There is also a giant warning label on the front page reminding readers that this is really frightening subject and if they don't think they can handle it at the moment (which is fair) then they are advised to put it back on the shelves.
Telling someone ahead of time that something contains themes they may find uncomfortable is an infinitely better solution than taking away their ability to engage with it all together.
Thinking about the concept of the “Right to Comfort” and it’s place in upholding not only White Supremacy, but all forms of oppression and control. It’s baked into the belief systems that uphold these institutions. “Me not being uncomfortable is more important than anything else”
another book on neuroscience will fix me...
Me looking at the ~20 books on neuroscience, autism, and trauma that I acquired last night.
Tried to do some writing today. Ended up just looking through all of my WIPs, hating them all, and closing google docs. High productivity day.