You telling me that Jack Black would not be 1000% down to be kidnapped by the muppets for a shenanigan, or possible a hijink?

Mr. The Frog still sends me more than “we all agreed a celebrity is not a people”

"If you smile too much you'll get laugh lines!!!!!" what a horrible curse, to be afraid of having happiness permanently placed onto your body

I often write from an elf's perspective and my favorite thing to do is to write how much they adore their mortal loved one's laugh lines and crow's lines. How wonderful it is to show signs of how happy you've been!

In the novel The Princess Bride, there’s a bit where it’s running through Most Beautiful Women In The World Prior To Buttercup, and one of them comes to the realization that she’s perfect except for the fact that having facial expressions will eventually give her wrinkles. Which causes her enough anxiety that she gets fretful, which aggravates the wrinkle problem and ruins her life over nothing.

That passage has committed me to smiling as often and as broadly as I can. I may not be able to change the fact that I will wrinkle and age, but by golly I can try to make sure the smile lines outweigh the others, and if I can’t manage that at least I can laugh at my own vanity instead of curling into a ball of shame.

@x-ca1iber this is for you

While we're on the subject, does everyone know what the "Sainsbury's Plant mister... Do you feel lucky?" was a reference to?

I know the order goes Dirty Harry, Good Omens, The Mask (1994). I do. There’s zero connection between the latter two. However, the fact remains that I saw The Mask at a relatively young age, read Good Omens much later, and have never seen Dirty Harry, so it *feels* like Crowley is referencing this:

... and I know Crowley wants to be cool, but honestly (don’t tell him this) he works better as a comic agent of pure chaos.

I’m sitting here trying to think: is there a Shakespeare play that *doesn’t*? Shakespeare does seem to enjoy his “country matters”.

reblog this if you think the toggle for tumblr live should be permanent instead of a 7-day snooze

trying to prove something to @staff

User hostile UI design is why I left Instagram for tumblr, don’t let the UI become awful here too

There is no reason "don't show me this thing" should be temporary, for any aspect of the UI.

Tumblr Live should be no different. People who don't want it, should not have to keep saying so.

AND when the toggle switch says "snooze," it should be OFF. You shouldn't have to turn it ON and then BACK OFF to snooze it.

*blinks* Is it possible to summarize the story WITHOUT making it sound like a fever dream?

A story which covers the End of the World largely from the point of view of an angel and a demon who have inadvertently fallen in love with each other and the world, as well as the Antichrist and his fellow not-quite-pubescent children, a Witchfinder Sergeant, a Witchfinder Private*, a part time medium/part time prostitute/part time dominatrix, a witch/occultist/psychic**...

... and “Full Chorus of Tibetans, Aliens, Americans, Atlanteans and other rare and strange Creatures of the Last Days.”

The FULL title says all you need to know:

* whose main task, as assigned by the aforementioned sergeant, is to comb through every single news publication available to cut out stories relating to, I quote, “witches” and “Unexplainable Phenomenons. Phenomenatrices. Phenomenice. Things, ye ken well what I mean.”

**who, being sensible, relies on a bread knife for personal protection rather than magic

***not quite as many footnotes as the average footnoting GO fanficcer, tho

filipino here and i once came across a tiktok abt an american comforting others abt the prospect of having lice. which is MIND BOGGLING to me since filipinos literally pick lice out in the open during recess or even on the sidewalk. even hair stylists dgaf if u have lice

so anyway answer my poll

if u voted i genuinely need u to reblog and add what country ur from + answer bc thats the basis of this research ok thanks

“One of my favourite Steve Jobs stories was the time the engineers working on the iPod brought their finished prototype to him in his office. He said it was too big, they needed to make it smaller. They said it was as small as they could make it, it couldn’t be made any smaller. So he took the prototype over to his aquarium and dropped it in. The iPod sank to the bottom, and as it did, tiny little bubbles came out. ‘See those bubbles,’ he asked. ‘They’re air inside the iPod. Make it smaller.’

“Another story about Steve Jobs was when they brought the prototype for the iPad 2 to his office. The engineers told him it was faster than the first iPad. He took it over to his aquarium and dropped it in. ‘Look how slowly it sank,’ he told them. ‘Make it faster.’

“One time a newly hired intern had been sent out to get Steve a sandwich. When she brought it to him, he looked at it. ‘I thought I ordered the beef on rye,’ he asked. She told him it was indeed beef on rye. He took it over to his fish tank and dropped it in. ‘Does that look like beef on rye?’

“He was always dropping things in that fish tank. We couldn’t stop him. We told him he had to stop, he wouldn’t listen. It was full of stuff that shouldn’t be in an aquarium.

“The fish had all died years ago. One had been crushed under an early generation iMac. The others were all poisoned. He didn’t care.

“It got to the point where there was no room for anything in the fish tank. When we emptied it after he died, we found a body in there. We never found out who it was.”

“is this real” Tumblr please I’m begging you to ever remember what normal everyday written comedy looks like 😞

I dunno. I never for one moment thought this whole thing was literally true, but I did wonder if the first story is based at least on a story that was genuinely circulating before this post, whether a true story or urban legend.

Turns out the first story is 100% a thing. So... real-ish? (Also found a source that’s earlier than the post, but there’s a paywall, so...)

Anyway, curiosity satisfied. Also, clearly the body also was wasting space with air; those lungs could be better used for something else, surely? :P

Why don't they make stained glass fish tanks? Give those fish Catholic guilt

Yeah, probably, if the tank was *only* made of stained glass. But stained glass attached on top of a conventional tank? That would work, wouldn’t it?

watching the 2018 milwaukee ballet production of dracula and y'all the dracula/jonathan pas de deux is amazing

it's beautiful and creepy and sensual and horrifying all at the same time

crap, i don't know enough dance terminology to make this coherent, but the way they've been utilizing going en pointe in act 2 is fascinating. like, aside from when they're doing turns and stuff like that, all the women are walking around on the flat part like regular people. but then dracula bursts in and everyone is down in the dark except lucy, who is now on her tippy toes and basically floating across the floor to him in a trance and the contrast is so eerie

also i just realized it was mean of me to talk about this without telling anyone where to watch it. here's a link to the official video from the milwaukee ballet account's @ Home series https://vimeo.com/469873929/5ee47dee00

continuing the trend of being both sensual and beautiful and horrifying, the drac+lucy pas de deux is also fantastic.

also, repeated theme the way dracula just kind of flings them around at times, like they're not dance partners but just toys to be played with and literally tossed aside. in the jonathan one he just like yote him 15 feet or something crazy across the stage, and in this one he's just positioning her like a ragdoll, the choreo is so good

agh no no no i hate this! D: lucy! :(((

looking forward to and dreading the drac+mina one if they're all gonna be this good but also upsetting lol

oh good, an ensemble mourning scene, that's cool that's fine i'm handling this gracefully

oh damn, though, she does feral really well too. cool thanks this is a great place for an intermission because i'm feeling totally emotionally stable (:

WHAT I MUST PUT THIS IN MY EYEBALLS

i personally do lateral tripod. dynamic tripod is the "proper" way and i believe most common, feel free to correct me.

That's the best idea ever

Or - hear me out - season 4 of Ted Lasso.

I'm just sharing this because this story made me tear up. <3 <3 to all the Connies and especially all the moms of all the Connies!

I'm not a subscriber so I can't gift this article, but if you can't afford to subscribe and don't know how to load it otherwise, the phenomenon described in the article (which is a great read!!) has spawned a wikipedia article (screenshot under the cut). There's also a great Twitter Thread by Marian Wang (that includes a video of Connie speaking about voting) with some links to scoot around reading other people's experiences as well (Full disclosure, I went searching to see if there was a link by a subscriber to gift the article, so more of you could read it! No luck yet).

Wait maybe I got it? I'm just an idiot? Try that?

FOR THOSE ON FIREFOX, a way to get around some of these access problems (including for NYT):

1) Click link to open the page. I like to do it in a private window, since there are some cases where cookies make a difference and I don’t care to bother remembering which.

2) Select the Toggle Reader View button near the end of the URL window (or select Enter Reader View from the View menu):

3) This should activate reader view...

4) Hit ‘reload’ to get the rest of it.

Doesn’t work on everything by a long shot, and often omits most images, but does work for text on most major news orgs.

you ever learn something you wish you didn't? I, for example, just learned that between 2008 and 2015 not a single episode of Doctor Who aired that was written by a woman. Between The Sontaran Stratagem, a story with David Tennant as the Doctor, and The Woman Who Lived, a Peter Capaldi story, not a single episode was written by a woman.

Okay, going to nitpick a technicality here:

- There was a single episode written by a woman in there, because Helen Raynor wrote both The Sontaran Stratagem and its immediate sequel, The Poison Sky.

That’s it for nitpicks with OP. Now for the tags...

Because this steps on a pet peeve of mine:

How about: a child wanting to participate and contribute, and someone helping him do so in a way that also provides the child entertainment?

I started with Coraline because—wait for it—the cover interested me. Yes, I completely disregarded the old advice. What kind of book, I wanted to know, would have a cover like THAT in 2006? And I knew it had to be relatively new, because I found it at Walmart. This was a new story with a very old-fashioned cover, and I wanted to know more.

(This was the cover. I am here to report absolutely zero regrets.)

I tore through it in a couple of hours and mentioned it to a friend. Turns out she’s a big fan of American Gods, so she let me borrow it. I tore through that one, too. It took me a couple of days because, you know, schoolwork, but it still didn’t take long.

So my recommendation is, go through some of Neil’s book covers and find one that speaks to you. You’ll find at least one. Start there. Because apparently “what kind of book in 2006 has a cover like THAT?” is not actually the worst way to judge a book.

“Don’t judge a book by its cover” is supposed to refer to things like wear, tear, material quality - things that have nothing to do with the contents of the book.

It’s an insult to all cover artists and cover designers to say that you can’t get a rough feel for a book by the art which is supposed to relate to the contents.

(Not to say some cover artists and cover designers don’t deserve the insult - I’ve seen a few bad book covers in my time - but most book design tells you *something* useful.)

For my linguistsics degree, I did a project on why I'm seeing more people saying "on accident" instead of "by accident." I looked at almost a million pieces of writing pulled from news sites, blogs, academic articles and television transcripts. I found almost three hundred cases of "on accident" being used. It was a surprisingly even spread across sources. Even more interesting, I organized the hits by date and tracked an upward swing in use as time goes on. This means that the use of "on accident" is increasing over time, and may eventually supplant and drive out the classic usage of "by accident." I like to call this prepositional shift.

Now, looking at my data and looking at the age ranges of the writers or speakers, the majority of them were under the age of thirty. So I interviewed a panel of people, choosing twenty with a spread of about half above thirty, and half below. Those older than thirty years of age felt "strongly" or "very strongly" that "on accident" was wrong in all cases, and that "by accident" was the only correct phrase. However, those younger than thirty were much less rigorous, with more than half feeling "ambivalent" or "less strongly" about which was correct. This demonstrates a generational link in preposition usage.

When presented with options for the definitions of "by" and "on," we also get some interesting data. For by, there are two main definitions according to the Oxford English Dictionary: 1. Identifying the agent performing an action. Or 2. Indicating the means of achieving something. Whereas "on" has many more definitions, the pertinent ones being 1. To indicate the manner of doing something or 2. To indicate active involvement in a condition or status. By the above definitions, either "by accident" or "on accident" is a correct usage of the term. However, native speakers of English could not successfully define either preposition, instead just choosing one, the other, or both as "sounding correct."

The only evidence for a rule-based shift that I could find was a correlation with the paired phrase for the opposite condition "on purpose." While the younger interviewees were ambivalent about the correctness of "on accident," they uniformly rejected the correctness of the suggested phrase "by purpose." So the shift can only be in one direction according the the native ear, towards the preposition "on."

Whether this means that the particular usage of "by" is becoming archaic or the definition of "on" is expanding is a possible subject of further study using a wider range of phrases. But I found the wider acceptance of "on accident" versus "by accident" to be a fascinating look at how prepositions can shift meaning and usage over time.

So now I'm curious, five years from my initial study (and itching to try the Tumblr poll feature):

I believe “on accident” is a regionalism? So possibly it’s becoming more prevalent among younger people because the internet is exposing people to geographically widespread speech patterns.

That said, I’m surprised at how high the percentage of people saying both are correct is.

Where’s the answer for “it’s WRONG WRONG WRONG according to my brain’s grammar check but I’m fine with the language shift for everyone else”? Because I need a way to distinguish how I feel about “on accident” from a figurative speech emphasized with “literally” (people, please stop this, I need a quick way to indicate that I’m not being figurative or hyperbolic no matter what it sounds like, and I will figuratively die on that hill)

Ted Lasso ‘La Locker Room Aux Folles’ (3.09)