A series of events:

1. I put in an Annual Leave request form almost 3 weeks ago and my boss has not approved it yet

2. I went into my office today and replaced every single writing utensil with crayons in preparation for April Fools Day on Monday

3. Whilst searching for pens to remove, I found my unsigned Annual Leave form in my boss’s drawer

4. I placed my unsigned Annual Leave form in a photo frame and put it on his desk

5. The frame I used was from a photo of his kids that I deemed less important than my Leave form

6. My boss sometimes goes into the office on Saturdays to work

7.

Happy 2 year anniversary to the post that my old boss allegedly now has framed in his office, next to the recovered photo of his children.

It looks like someone did unethical breeding practises to a regular train. It's a sickly beast.

Fun fact they had to balance the coaches and wagons with passengers and goods for them to be able to run properly

They had to include a glorified portable footbridge as part of the train so they could direct passengers to use both sides so it didn't tip over

my day just keeps getting better

Reblogging things I like feels a lot more goblinesque than upvoting ever did. The upvotes felt like "hmm yes, I approve *golf claps*" while reblogging feels like furtively staring at something before shoving it in your mouth and scurrying back underneath the nearest piece of furniture.

Which isn't to say that I don't like it. But I definitely find myself going "maybe I shouldn't reblog this because I've already reblogged a bunch of things today and I don't want to look like I don't have a life," I say as I close the app and reopen it like one of those little automatic box toys with the switches.

lansia viva

Just realized that the reason I love making friends on tumblr is because it’s exactly how you make friends on the playground as a six year old. No, I don’t know their name but they love mermaids too and built this awesome sand castle. No, I don’t know their age but their imaginary cheetah is friends with mine. You like this show? You like this character?? You can sing the theme song really loud??? Here is a flower crown. Here is a juice box. You can share my time and I might never see you again but part of you stays in my soul forever. In my mind we’re still on the swing set and the sky is blue and nothing will ever be wrong again.

So that’s why I could never make friends when I was six.

I wanted to try the color wheel challenge :)

More and more I’ve been getting distressed over how “long ago” certain “chronological events” were. But I think I’ve come to the conclusion that time is not linear and anyone who claims it is is a scammer or a cop.

2013 was 10 years ago. 2014 was 6 years ago. 2017 was recent, but the kind of recent with a comfortable buffer of aged time around it, like a nice cheese. 2019 likely did not happen, and if it did happen it was a filler year that is optionally skippable and doesn’t actually contribute to passing time. 2020 lasted 2 years but in a side timeline that does not actually push 2014-2018 any farther back. 2021 and 2022 were a single year. 2018 was 2.5 years ago. The last 9 months were the void where the tape recorder runs out. Do you get it?

Yes. 2000 was 10 years ago but also no one was alive back then, including me, when I was 7. 1998 was six months ago.

i’ve heard a lot of people say “don’t reach out to your friends first and see how many people will remain in your life. those are your true friends” and i get it. it sucks and it’s tiring constantly being the one to message first, to initiate hang outs but don’t take this so literally. some friendships require initiation. i have lost touch with so many people who genuinely cared about me and wanted me in their life because i stopped reaching out. it’s a hard pill to swallow but honestly some people just suck at it and it doesn’t mean they don’t love and value you. i’ve reconnected with some people over the past few months and it’s crazy how genuinely happy they are to see me and how engaged they are in the conversation. i just think sometimes we’re too harsh on each other & too quick to emphasize other peoples flaws and remove them from our lives but then we’ll all be alone and what’s the point of life then!!!!

I lost a lot of friends because I don’t reach out much or reply regularly. They thought I hated them.

Unfortunately I just had ADHD.

Some people need more attention than I’ll ever be able to reliably give, though, and I’ve made peace with that. I keep the ones that don’t.

Due to the lingering effects of his parents’ latest gadget, Danny’s ghost powers are on the fritz leaving him stuck in the body of the next person he overshadows.

Make him live as Paulina

here’s the thing about adulthood-

you will go for like three months with nothing happening and you’re bored as hell and then in the span of two weeks eight different things happen at once - some fantastic and some shitty and some just plain bonkers - and you’re just running around like a chicken with your head cut off and no clue what the fuck is going on

You forgot the part where you’re running around like a chicken with it’s head cut off but as soon as someone asks “what’s up lately” every single one of those crazy things boils down to “idk I haven’t done much since last year, what’s new with you?”

I feel cheated. no one on Reddit told me that tumblr is a serotonin factory. Keep liking and reblogging my posts please thanks

Just wait until the stupidest thing you’ve ever said goes viral and people pass it around for the next ten years

A+ to the commenter who mentioned that actually medicine tends to taste bad so people (particularly children) don’t eat them like sweets. Stuff like my ADHD stimulants hardly need to be more addictive than they already are, and I don’t think I want someone swallowing half a bottle of my heart meds because they taste nice either.

That said, good god my heart meds taste about as good as I imagine a Nintendo Switch game cart tastes. And what is up with my long acting melatonin smelling like permanent marker?

I thought this was good commentary.

Btw, who wants a fun story about the kids that my mum was teaching at a horse riding camp who broke into her cupboard and took all her anticonvulsants?

“PLEASE DON’T TELL MUM AND DAD,” they begged.

Mum did worse than tell mum and dad.

Mum took them to hospital to get their stomachs pumped.

(Also funnily enough, American melatonin tastes like nothing but Australian melatonin tastes like permanent marker. I presume it’s something to do with the medium.)

My take on "why there are many adults that only read YA novels" is pretty simple

The YA book explosion of the mid 2000's-mid 2010's was mostly scifi and fantasy genre, and trying to "get into" adult SFF is a punishment from hell

Sci-fi, fantasy, and other spec fic is collectively a very heterogenous group and poorly organized.

Want to know the tone, mood, themes, narrative style, level of worldbuilding, scope of the plot, pace, qualities of the main character(s), central tropes, and sensitive content within the book you just pulled off the library shelf? Step 1: Put an end to your paltry life

Like yes there are great books out there that you will love, but if you go through a list of the most popular adult fantasy books and read them, there's a good chance you will have the worst book experience of your life

If you just pull a random fantasy book off the library shelf, there is also a good chance you will have the worst book experience of your life

I love SFF books and prefer adult SFF over any other genre or category (I haven't enjoyed YA in a long time) but i'm not going to lie, a lot of the people writing it hate fun and/or MUST rub grime and sexual violence on every page or otherwise make it scrungy and gross and require eyebleach

I think one major thing former YA lovers are chasing when they try to find new books to read is that playful, adventurous, interest-grabbing way of exploring an unfamiliar world where the story shows you glimpses of just a fraction of the fascinating creatures, magic, settings, etc. that exists and makes it so fun to imagine encountering or experiencing those things. Basically asking, "Wouldn't it be COOL if THIS was real?"

And it's always clear that what you the reader are seeing is just a glimpse, and there's SO much more out there in this world, and it makes you want to pry the book open and jump inside just so you can learn about all the cool stuff in this richly drawn reality

And I've found some adult SFF that totally has this (The Divine Cities trilogy by Robert Jackson Bennett is one of my faves) but so many of them abandon fun and fascination and it's sad.

Another note—

At the same time, adult SFF is getting YA-ified—newly published adult SFF books resemble YA stylistically more and more.

Which I HATE, because it just homogenizes a bunch of writers' potentially unique styles and makes everything sound the same.

I encountered this while trying to read Robert Jackson Bennett's newer book Foundryside. While the book shares the clever and absorbing worldbuilding of the Divine Cities trilogy, I ultimately didn't enjoy it as much because the writing style seemed very generic-ified.

One of the most noticeable things was the swearing. The Divine Cities trilogy had characters say "fuck" and it made sense and it fit. Foundryside replaced the fuck word with...some nonsensical Fantasy Swear Word that was like "skiffing" or something. It was silly and felt so weird and condescending like...just use grown up words okay

Also a lot of these newer adult fantasy books have young/teenage protagonists and a "coming of age" type story anyway?

When I read summaries of books like The Poppy War it sounds like a YA book that was made "adult" by including graphic rape scenes and genocidal violence.

Which I'm pretty sure is the opposite of what readers struggling to transition from YA to adult fiction actually want!

We want to read books with adult characters and plots that are more applicable to adults, with more emotional and stylistic complexity, but with an engaging approach to worldbuilding and less of the sad presumption that a Serious Mature story has to be painful and unfun. Not a book that is stylistically and characteristically YA but with more grimdark.

I posted this mostly because I'm just getting...exhausted with trying to find books to read that I will like.

Like yes yes read reviews, do research on authors, find recommendations from people who share similar tastes, just put aside books you don't like, use StoryGraph's content warnings...but consider this. I am tired. The amount of work and practiced skill it takes to narrow down a pool of potential books that I have a chance of liking is EXHAUSTING.

I don't like reading reviews, because I don't like having random other people's opinions shape mine before I read a book. And not only are reviews downright useless for lots of recently published books because all the top reviews are by youtubers who got ARC's, even reviews by presumably impartial random people fail a surprising amount of the time to warn me about things like "this book talks about characters peeing themselves like 30 times and there's a scene where the love interest licks a puddle of pee in the street"

It's not necessarily that I'm looking to avoid "grimdark" content, either. The Malazan series is one I enjoy and it is plenty "grimdark."

Nor am I really bothered or repulsed by sex.

What I truly hate is books where the author seems so up their own ass about writing a Serious Novel that nothing is fun. There's no vibrancy and richness and enthusiasm radiating from the worldbuilding.

Malazan is so absorbing to me because you can tell Steven Erikson is absolutely OBSESSED with his world and characters and concepts and he writes things just because they're fucking cool. Sometimes it's "Wouldn't it be awesome if there was an army of giant undead wolves and they were in a war with an army of giant sapient velociraptors with swords for arms. Fuck yeah." And sometimes it's "What if there was a scungy guy who bickers with his wife like Miracle Max from the Princess Bride and sometimes his wife shapeshifts into thousands of spiders? Fuck yeah."

That series is basically the worst possible series to recommend to someone trying to get into adult SFF, since there is a lot of sexual violence (there is war happening and the impacts on civilians get a lot of focus) and also every book is like 1200 pages long, has over a dozen POV characters, and requires active note taking to comprehend. The author is an anthropologist and It Shows. I haven't moved on to the sixth book because I don't know if I have the space in my brain for it.

But despite the overall inaccessibility and the number of criticisms I could make, the Malazan series obviously came about because the author's brain worms Compelled him. You read these books and you're like "this guy probably can't carry on a regular conversation about anything except orc burial mounds." Steven Erikson has something deeply wrong with him and if he didn't write 200k words a year about it he would just die.

Books that exist because the author was Compelled By The Brain Worms are different. With many recently published novels, I get the impression that the author did only exactly as much worldbuilding as they thought would be sellable and marketable, and no more.

We don't like that. We like the brain worms.

A+ to the commenter who mentioned that actually medicine tends to taste bad so people (particularly children) don’t eat them like sweets. Stuff like my ADHD stimulants hardly need to be more addictive than they already are, and I don’t think I want someone swallowing half a bottle of my heart meds because they taste nice either.

That said, good god my heart meds taste about as good as I imagine a Nintendo Switch game cart tastes. And what is up with my long acting melatonin smelling like permanent marker?

....you’re lying...you must be...

noooooo

Et tu, Canada? We went through this in Aus for weeks a couple years ago.

btw. your search for the most morally upright and ethical piece of media that has the most correct “representation” will destroy your ability to find the most profound and beautiful and human of stories. and may even destroy the stories themselves before they are created. if you even care.

a study i did because i realized idk how to draw environments at all LMAO

STOP SCROLLING THIS IS A PAINTING