Avatar

Geeking Randomly And Writing Occationally

@purplebronzeandblue

Reblogging whatever I happen to be into, and sometimes writing things as well. 20, aspiring writer (Find me on AO3 under BlueandBronze!)

If you’re an adult, do the stuff you couldn’t as a kid.

Like, me and my sister went to a museum, and they had an extra exhibit of butterflies. But it cost £3. So we sighed, walked past, then stopped. We each had £3. We could see the butterflies. And we did it was great. We followed it up with an ice-cream as well because Mum and Dad weren’t there to say no.

I was driving back from a work trip with 2 other people in their early 20s, and we drove past a MacDonalds. One of the others went “Aww man, I’d love a McFlurry.” And the guy driving pulled in to the drive through. It was wild. But it was great.

I went to a park over the weekend and I was thinking “Man, I’d love to hire one of those bikes and cycle round the park.” It took me a few minutes to go “Wait, I can hire one of those bikes!”

I guess what I’m saying is, those impulsive things you wanted to do as a kid - see the dinosaur exhibit, play in the fountains with the other kids, lie in the shade for 2 hours - you can do when you’re an adult. You have to deal with a whole lot of other bull, but at least you can indulge your inner 8 year-old.

Avatar
nxvixtion

this is the purest-realist shit ever

Avatar

maybe i am too old for tiktok

My son once came back from a record shop visit with his uncle and with wide eyes and excited smile presented me with a cassette tape. “Look what I found!” As though he’d unearthed ancient pottery at a dig sight.

I love it. I love when my kids discover something that I take for granted. I hear songs with new ears because they are in a state of wonder. My son played me “Paint it Black” the other day, I’m like yeah Rolling Stones so what? And then I see his face and that LOOK like he just discovered sunsets and he’s like yeah but listen to this part, listen to the guitar right here - and I hear a song anew. Like watching a puppy see a bird for the first time, and oh oh right yeah birds are fucking amazing, forgot about that.

#finally a comment that doesn’t have disdain for kids discovering old things #isn’t it cool that someone didn’t know Queen and they got to hear it for the first time? #isn’t it cool to witness that excitement?

I think this is largely why “react” channels on YouTube have become so popular. Watching someone experience something you love for the first time is exciting. Rediscovering that thing through their eyes is also exciting. 

i feel compelled to add this video of a nigerian (i think?) man listening to bohemian rhapsody for the first time, because it is an experience of such pure joy.

I was so excited and emotional watching him experience this for the first time! It was like I got to experience it for the first time all over again.

Avatar

also absolutely hate when people say "this is set a million years from now and there's still racism and homophobia? #problematic" and then you read it and it's a scathing and concise yet meticulous examination of our current views on race and gender and sexuality. you don't understand what the point of science fiction is. escapism is not the pinnacle of the written form that all genre fiction should aspire to. you're annoying me

Avatar

i get why a lot of people don’t like reading mockingjay as much as the rest of the trilogy, but i think it’s actually so essential to understanding the central thesis of the entire hunger games series.

the whole point of the hunger games is this: all human life is valuable, and artificial divisions between people keep them weak. and the only way out is radical love.

and this is something that is literally echoed again and again in the books. take, for example, gale. why is gale such an interesting, complex, and yet reprehensible character? yes, it’s because at the end katniss cannot separate his bomb from prim’s death. but it’s deeper than that. why does gale build the bomb in the first place? it’s because gale doesn’t see every human life as valuable. gale is willing to kill people and to deny them their humanity simply because they are his “enemy.” so, there’s the obvious example of his willingness to blow up the nut with everyone inside and his disregard for the human casualty. and the people in the nut aren’t even from the captiol, he just wants to do it because the stereotype of that district is their allegiance to the capitol, and gale hates that.

but there’s another scene, also in mockingjay, that i think goes under-discussed which is his view of katniss’ prep team. when katniss finds her prep team literally imprisoned in 13, she’s horrified and upset by the conditions they are in. but gale isn’t. and he’s confused about why katniss would care for them! her response is to say that it’s because they cried when she went to the quarter quell. and gale is like, “sure, but they’re still from the captiol.” and this argument is so important. because katniss argues that the prep team deserves to be treated as human beings, and when he presses her on why, she basically says because they treated her as a human being. but gale can’t see that–all he can see is that they’re from the capitol, and he’s confused about why katniss should care.

and this is, so crucially, what katniss learns in the hunger games. she realizes that she doesn’t want to kill the other tributes just because they are from the other districts. she hates the fact that they have turned her against people who are, in their core, just like her. frightened children who have been manipulated to kill other children against their will, all selected based on their district, a social divide that has literally been invented and imposed on them.

and another just absolutely essential thing to understand here is that peeta knows this all along. we talk at length about how peeta’s defining trait is his kindness. but what’s so important about peeta’s kindness is how it transcends any boundaries of social class or social division.

when peeta gives katniss the bread, it’s important to note that just before he does that, we hear his mother talking about “seam brats pawing through her trash.” peeta’s mother buys into the social divides in district twelve–she views herself as better than someone from the seam simply because of her standing as a merchant, and reinforces these class divides by refusing to extend the simplest humanity to a child from the seam. she literally refuses to feed a starving child on the grounds of a social divide, within a world that already has divided them into districts. but peeta doesn’t see it like this. peeta refuses to deny katniss food just because she’s from the seam. peeta gives her kindness. peeta gives her humanity.

and he does the same thing in the games! his entire first interview, the dramatic king focuses, not on the games, but on his genuine love and adoration for another tribute. how radical! to refuse to subscribe to a system which asks him to hate her? to want to kill her? and to instead confess his love for her? sure, katniss ends up being the mockingjay. katniss might have held out the berries. but peeta in that moment is the one who sets the rebellion in motion. peeta is the one who refuses to engage in the senseless hatred of someone who “should” be his enemy. instead, he reaches out in love.

and it all culminates at the end of mockingjay, when katniss votes for the capitol hunger games to gain coin’s trust. and peeta is utterly horrified by this. because he can’t understand how she could have been through everything he has been through and not understand that continuing to senselessly kill human beings (children!!) for some kind of revenge just reinforces these binary modes of thinking. but the thing is–katniss DOES see that. and when coin proposes it, that’s when she knows she has to stop her. because coin, like gale, like peeta’s mother, and like so others many around her, is still buying into these divides. is still viewing the captiol as the enemy. is still viewing a human life as expendable. 

and there’s a quote in mockingjay that i think lays this out pretty explicitly. katniss says, after she kills coin and is recovering, point blank: “they can design dream weapons that come to life in my hands, but they will never again brainwash me into the necessity of using them.” she’s realized the crux of the entire hunger games–that manipulating us to hate and kill our fellow humans, that drawing up divisions between people because of where they live and what they produce, that believing that hating someone on the basis of any of these is justification for their death, is all a farce. it’s all a distraction. it’s all pretend. she says, in the same chapter: “no one benefits in a world where these things happen.” not the districts. not the capitol. not the victors. no one.

the entire arc of the hunger games is really just about katniss catching up to what peeta has known from the start. katniss overcoming all the manipulation from those around her, all the glitz and glamour, all the artificial social and class divides to see what peeta has seen clearly from the start: love.

I’m job hunting for the first time in about a decade and what the fuck happened to the application process. I mean it has always sucked but why are there personality tests now. I applied to work at Red Rooster and they sent me a list of words and told me to pick the ones that best describe me. What is happening I am offering to cook chicken for minimum wage WHY are you asking me if I am introverted or self-critical or have high self esteem WHAT DOES THIS HAVE TO DO WITH SELLING BAD CHICKEN TO DRUNK PEOPLE

Avatar

the “bad guys” in hallmark movies end up always being the most respectful men ever.

because they will find out their girlfriend of 3 years (that they were about to propose to) went off to a random farm in minnesota, hours away from were the two of them built a life together, and she decided to just… stay there without even consulting him.

and then he decides to take a trip to make sure she’s okay, because this is generally alarming behavior, and then sees that she literally fell in love with her ex within one (1) week- and he wasn’t there, but you can TELL that they’ve made out a couple times.

and then she just strings him along for a few days, until fucking christmas eve, when she just breaks up with him and is like “i know we used to have the same values, but i’ve never loved you. mark makes me happier than you ever did. and you ONLY care about work, whereas i like christmas and fun, like a Good Person.”

and then, after finding out his entire relationship was a lie and he had his life turned upside down in a week and he got dumped on christmas, this guy’s just like “ok yeah that makes sense. i only wish you the best of happiness with mark. i hope you guys build a great life together in christmastreefarmville. thank you for everything.”

An AU where two Hallmark Christmas Bad Guys are both getting flights back to New York after being dumped by their respective Smalltown Blonde Girlfriends, and they bond over their shared experiences and fall in love in the departures lounge

@teashoesandhair your wish is my command :)

Probably, Levi should be more upset.

Probably he is still in shock. Right? He looks out of his taxi window (it's not technically a taxi, just some guy named Corey who offered him a ride to the airport, because Uber doesn't operate in fucking Tinyville, Bumfuck Middle-Of-Nowhere, Utah) and tracks water droplets racing each other down the glass, because of course it's raining, and his bad knee is killing him. 

Levi sniffs and rubs at his eyes and then pulls out his phone and books a ticket back to New York, wincing as four hundred and twenty-six dollars are deducted from his bank account. 

And, like, he should definitely be more upset.

He just got broken up with. He was engaged, for God's sake. A four-year relationship… over. Just like that. 

Corey says, "Ten minutes to the station." 

the best part about polls is that by now most poll takers are on some level aware of the... the meta of polls. i'm aware that the fourth option out of five or six is most commonly chosen; i know that the final selection of polls with options that are all the same word are most likely to be chosen; i know that people like to be goofy, and will choose the silliest option. no one's voting blindly anymore because the prevalence of these polls is manipulating how we approach them. we're all playing a game together, trying to guess public consensus, trying to contribute. its just another aspect of this website thats defined by collaboration and its fascinating and so so so cool

Aaaaand that’s a wrap folks! Thanks to the 14,422 people who voted for literally anything other than vanilla extract. To the 13,312 people who voted to further exacerbate my suffering- I’ll see you in hell.

The Cake should hopefully be ready by noon tomorrow. Wish me luck!!

And so it begins. Pictured:

-20g eggs

-20g sugar

-60g flour

-12g salt

-12g canola oil

-20g butter

-12g baking powder

-12g milk

-192g vanilla extract

Step one: boil off as much of the alcohol as possible. Bring the vanilla to a boil and then let it simmer for a while. Turn off the heat and whisk in the butter, then set aside to cool.

Once the vanilla and butter mixture is cool enough, whisk in the rest of the ingredients. Grease a cake pan and pour in the batter, then throw it in the oven at 350F.

He’s here!!!!

IT’S TIME

Tumblr inexplicably doesn’t let you add videos to reblogs but the videos are up here and here

Not to get all sappy but this has genuinely been such a fun adventure and I’m so grateful to everyone who participated <3. I won’t say it’s the best birthday present I could’ve asked for, but it’s certainly the most interesting.

Avatar

Tumblr: *rolls out “best stuff first”*

My blog:

Avatar

on the one hand this is a joke post because lol i have never made a good post in my life, but also, if i hadn’t made the connection between this update and my sudden nosedive in activity, i would have been really fucking discouraged about all the shit i’ve been working on lately. i guarantee there are people on tumblr right now who haven’t made that connection, and who are trying to figure out why suddenly no one likes anything they’ve made. and that fucking sucks.

Reminder to go into your settings and turn off ‘Best Stuff First’ because my activity’s tanked a couple days ago for no reason so this stuff IS happening.

You WILL miss content with that setting on.

Avatar

i ain’t joking when i say that my activity looks JUST like this too and i wasn’t sure why

I can only find the option on the app under Settings > Dashboard Preferences.

To support content creators do us a favour and turn off “Best stuff first”. Open the tumblr app (Android or iOs) and go to “Settings > Dashboard Preferences. And please reblog this post, so that everybody will see this. Thank you very much!

Avatar

I assumed I just wasn’t writing very well, but maybe it’s not just me.

Am I supposed to pay to get my writing in front of followers now?

We interrupt your regularly-scheduled sci-fi content because this is important for app users, and it sucks. We all follow blogs because we want to see their content, not to have a crappy algorithm decide what’s best.

This blog is down approximately 80%, which doesn’t affect me other than as an annoyance (as this is a hobby and @okayto is small-ish) but the issue undoubtedly hurts others.

Below are instructions for turning it off. You have to do it individually–it doesn’t matter if a blog you follow turns it off, you’ll still be affected unless you do the same.