having a child has taught me that every toddler is completely justified in their frustrations and tantrums because learning how to do something you have literally never encountered or heard of before is insane. and being expected to be completely calm in the face of this constant barrage of overwhelming information is doubly insane.

i got charlie a sticker activity book and it occurred to me i have to TEACH someone how to unpeel stickers. it's SKILL that requires DEXTERITY and FINE MOTOR ABILITY. i thought it was obvious that you have to curl the page a little bit to create a break in the cut so the sticker comes up.

obviously a fucking BABY wouldn't know that because they have no background experience to inform their thought process. OBVIOUSLY. and OBVIOUSLY the LITERAL BABY wouldn't get it right the first few times. it would OBVIOUSLY take practice. lots of it.

i hate this feeling. it's so obvious. why are children treated so badly when they're learning everything for the first fucking time. why do people treat children so horribly and expect so much. they're brand new. why didn't i get the same grace i give to my child? why did no one have patience for me? why, when it's this easy?

it's so easy. it's so fucking easy.

TIL a family in Georgia claimed to have passed down a song in an unknown language from the time of their enslavement; scientists identified the song as a genuine West African funeral song in the Mende language that had survived multiple transmissions from mother to daughter over multiple centuries (x)

ok i actually think the carl wheezer bit was funny too

there’s something endlessly hilarious to me about the phrase “hotly debated” in an academic context. like i just picture a bunch of nerds at podiums & one’s like “of course there was a paleolithic bear cult in Northern Eurasia” and another one just looks him in the eye and says “i’l kill you in real life, kevin”

I heard a story once about two microbiologists at a conference who took it out into the parking lot to have a literal fistfight over taxonomy. 

have i told this story yet? idk but it’s good. The Orangutan Story:

my american lit professor went to this poe conference. like to be clear this is a man who has a doctorate in being a book nerd. he reads moby dick to his four-year-old son. and poe is one of the cornerstones of american literature, right, so this should be right up his alley?

wrong. apparently poe scholars are like, advanced. there is a branch of edgar allen poe scholarship that specifically looks for coded messages based on the number of words per line and letters per word poe uses. my professor, who has a phd in american literature, realizes he is totally out of his depth. but he already committed his day to this so he thinks fuck it! and goes to a panel on racism in poe’s works, because that’s relevant to his interests.

background info: edgar allen poe was a broke white alcoholic from virginia who wrote horror in the first half of the 19th century. rule 1 of Horror Academia is that horror reflects the cultural anxieties of its time (see: my other professor’s sermon abt how zombie stories are popular when people are scared of immigrants, or that purge movie that was literally abt the election). since poe’s shit is a product of 1800s white southern culture, you can safely assume it’s at least a little about race. but the racial subtext is very open to interpretation, and scholars believe all kinds of different things about what poe says about race (if he says anything), and the poe stans get extremely tense about it.

so my professor sits down to watch this panel and within like five minutes a bunch of crusty academics get super heated about poe’s theoretical racism. because it’s academia, though, this is limited to poorly concealed passive aggression and forceful tones of inside voice. one professor is like “this isn’t even about race!” and another professor is like “this proves he’s a racist!” people are interrupting each other. tensions are rising. a panelist starts saying that poe is like writing a critique of how racist society was, and the racist stuff is there to prove that racism is stupid, and that on a metaphorical level the racist philosophy always loses—

then my professor, perhaps in a bid to prove that he too is a smart literature person, loudly calls: “BUT WHAT ABOUT THE ORANGUTAN?”

some more background: in poe’s well-known short story “the murder in the rue morgue,” two single ladies—a lovely old woman and her lovely daughter who takes care of her, aka super vulnerable and respectable people—are violently killed. the murderer turns out to be not a person, but an orangutan brought back by a sailor who went to like burma or something. and it’s pretty goddamn racially coded, like they reeeeally focus on all this stuff about coarse hairs and big hands and superhuman strength and chattering that sounds like people talking but isn’t actually. if that’s intentional, then he’s literally written an analogy about how black people are a threat to vulnerable white women, which is classic white supremacist shit. BUT if he really only meant for it to be an orangutan, then it’s a whole other metaphor about how colonialism pillages other countries and brings their wealth back to europe and that’s REALLY gonna bite them in the ass one day. klansman or komrade? it all hangs on this.

much later, when my professor told this story to a poe nerd friend, the guy said the orangutan thing was a one of the biggest landmines in their field. he said it was a reliable discussion ruiner that had started so many shouting matches that some conferences had an actual ban on bringing it up.

so the place goes dead fucking silent as every giant ass poe stan in the room is immediately thrust into a series of war flashbacks: the orangutan argument, violently carried out over seminar tables, in literary journals, at graduate student house parties, the spittle flying, the wine and coffee spilled, the friendships torn—the red faces and bulging veins—curses thrown and teaching posts abandoned—panels just like this one fallen into chaos—distant sirens, skies falling, the dog-eared norton critical editions slicing through the air like sabres—the textual support! o, the quotes! they gaze at this madman in numb disbelief, but he could not have known. nay, he was a literary theorist, a 17th-century man, only a visitor to their haunted land. he had never heard the whistle of the mortars overhead. he had never felt the cold earth under his cheek as he prayed for god’s deliverance. and yet he would have broken their fragile peace and brought them all back into the trenches.

my professor sits there for a second, still totally clueless. the panel moderator suddenly stands up in his tweed jacket and yells, with the raw panic of a once-broken man:

WE! DO NOT! TALK ABOUT! THE ORANGUTAN!

miles is taller than 42-miles because of his spider bite. This is like when your younger brother have a grow spurt and now are slightly taller than you.

“They’re the same height”-“It’s just his hair”- “he’s slouching”- no, you guys are not thinking silly enough. There’s obviously better explanation.

get back to me in approximately 10 - 15000000 business days when i have emotionally recovered from this movie holy shit

so there's a lot of speculation whether or not they're gonna have mike be michael or not in the fnaf movie. and so far even i thought it was pretty unlikely considering the little things we've been shown. but now that the full trailers been revealed there's something that caught my eye. and maybe i'm puling a matpat here and over analyzing one little frame but. just hear me out alright. so in the little snippet we see of a phone call between mike and william, it's pretty normal and well, there's nothing to show that they know each other. clearly mike doesn't know who he's talking to, he just wants a job.

and honestly for me i was losing hope that they were gonna have mike be revealed to be michael. since initially i thought this was just them confirming that he's not since, surely if he was michael then he'd recognize his fathers voice? but. that might not be the case.

my theory/speculation for the route they're going (again, emphasis on the theory i'm not saying this is 100% canon) is that it's heavily implied there's going to be SOME kind of flashback with mike as a young teenager, since a boy was cast and listed as "young mike" too. and this information about his character given back when casting for the roles were announced.

"riddled with guilt over a tragedy in his past" which only further strengthens the possibility of a flashback to the bite of 83 where michael pranked his brother and inadvertently caused his death. it's the aftermath of this event with determines how this theory could work. either, william and his wife divorced shortly after, and his wife got custody of mike - they married into another family, the schmidt's. this could lead to abby either being his step-sister or his half-sister.

OR. mike was taken away from william either because of the bite or because the police were heavily suspicious that william was responsible for the missing children. he was put into the system and adopted by - again - the schmidt's. and the reason he doesn't remember anything is because the trauma and the guilt from the bite of 83 and the death of his little brother caused him to heavily repress those memories and in turn, a lot of others (william) without realizing.

so mike doesn't recognize william's voice here. but william?

this is the frame that caught me here. his expression, the subtle smile on his face. the gears are turning in his head, something clicked.

what if william was keeping tabs on mike this whole time? and he carefully plotted to ensure he got the job at freddy's. for reasons unknown. maybe he just wanted to mess with him, make him remember everything he repressed from his childhood - he's trying to get him to remember by bringing him back to the place where it all started. he remembers his son, but mike doesn't remember his father.

BUT that's just me i'm a little insane. anyway i needed to make this post and write down my thoughts or i'd explode.

i like how vanessa and mike have the dynamic of a hardcore fnaf fan who knows all the lore and a guy who thought it was just a game about evil robots

Ok one more, Miguel O’Hare

impeachy the conservative clown

YOU ARE COPYING MY IDEAS THE CLOWN

clown-names the MEAN RUDE ASS clown

now you’ve fucking done it

the clown

on their way to get a happy meal.

hey netizens! i'm not sure how many people are aware, but youtube's been slowly rolling out a new anti-adblock policy that can't be bypassed with the usual software like uBlock Origin and Pi-Hole out of the gate

BUT, if you're a uBlock Origin user (or use an adblocker with a similar cosmetics modifier), you can add these commands in the uBlock dashboard (under My Filters) to get rid of it!

reblog to help keep the internet less annoying and to tell corporations that try shit like this to go fuck themselves <3

TPoH au, where everythings the same, but RGB has heelies

and just slides everywhere

this is how they got together

For Hearth and Home by @sword-and-stars has been giving me brainrot for the better part of a month

My take on the moment when Aang & Appa reunite after the lost days

It's a good thing Suki taught Sokka feminism in season one bc if she didn't it would've been up to Toph and I don't think Sokka could've survived that lol

Master of all four elements