Living alone leads to habits that you don’t realize are weird until you stay with someone else and have to suppress them.

I’m staying with family right now and I can’t just go “AUGH” like a peanuts character in the middle of the night just because I feel like it. I also can’t lick cooking utensils anymore because other people are gonna be eating that. And I can’t rant to my Swedish horse because I left that at home and also ranting to an inanimate object in the middle of the house would make me look insane.

I was talking to my aunt about this because she also lives alone and we agree that when you start living alone you need to start making more noises when you do things like grunting when you get up and yelling at annoying inanimate objects because you need to fill the space somehow. But when suddenly other people are around you’re now in the habit of whistling whenever you open a cabinet and people who have never lived alone don’t understand what you’re doing.

If you ever stay with somebody who lives alone for a few days and they start randomly doing squats in the middle of the kitchen and clicking their teeth or making noises at birds outside, just let them. Believe it or not those are methods of preserving sanity. Shaking the fridge and demanding it give you answers is a shield against the impeding darkness.

I maintain that Hey There Delilah by Plain White Tees is a 450% better song if it’s about a guy who’s lost custody of his daughter

Literally every lyric has so much more Energies if it’s sung to a child I’m gonna die on this hill. “Hey there, Delilah /Don’t you worry about the distance /I’m right there if you get lonely /Give this song another listen” and “Hey there, Delilah/ I know times are gettin’ hard /But just believe me, girl / Someday I’ll pay the bills with this guitar / We’ll have it good /We’ll have the life we knew we would / My word is good” like? He’s trying to get his daughter back? Idk if she’s with the other parent or in foster care or what but it’s So Much I have a lot of feelings about this. The repeated promises, “I’d walk to you if I had no other way” and “I’m right there when you get lonely” when, like, obviously, he’s not, and he’s just sort of desperately hoping that she still understands that he loves her, and that she doesn’t feel abandoned. And then, “Delilah, I can promise you /That by the time that we get through / The world will never ever be the same /And you’re to blame” that’s so fucking sweet? That’s such a sweet thing to say to your daughter. Romance is over. Noncustodial parental love songs are where it’s at. 

This is what “death of the author” means. We know that’s not what the song was written about, but what if it was? What if we explored the lyrics as though the speaker was a heartbroken father missing his daughter? It changes EVERYTHING. And it’s so good.

Anyway, OP you are wonderful and I love you.

The band Adjacent to Nothing covered Dolly Parton’s song Jolene and changed it to be about a guy losing his son in a divorce. It really works, even though they had to change a few words.

I've been rolling something around in my head.

If everyone receives Minimum Basic Income, what happens to all the relationships where one of the individuals no longer has to depend on the other(s) to survive?

Just let that marinate for a moment.

Not just the economic landscape but the social landscape could be transformed.

Not for nothing, but this is literally part of the entire point of Universal Basic Income.

When abused people can just literally walk away, knowing they can still have enough money to live, the world will be a lot less sheltering of abusers and that is a massive fucking benefit.

It gets better than that, if we go with my ideal UBI scenario, in which we peg UBI to "enough to live in any major metropolitan city in the country" and do NOT adjust it for cost of living.

Suddenly, the poverty and scrabbling for survival of rural areas? Gone. That UBI will go a whole long fucking way out there. Suddenly, people who had to move to the cities to get jobs that paid enough? Can afford to move back. Heck, they can afford to get decent fucking broadband out there and continue working, just, not in the city. Suddenly, people who live in rural areas but want to move to the cities with like-minded people? That's affordable, too. Suddenly, people who want to have a bigger house, but are stuck in a tiny apartment in a city? They can afford to move out to where there are bigger houses.

Universal Basic Income would realign our whole damn society, and I think it would long-term be for the better.

even if you care deeply about some specific kind of suffering you do not have to fill your life with as many upsetting stories of that type of suffering as possible. that is just signing up to have a bad time.

does you absorbing this information help you benefit a cause? and even if you are benefitting a cause, are you doing something productive with more of these stories or are they just making you feel bad? are you taking more effective action or just getting overwhelmed with sadness? is surrounding yourself with stuff that upsets you helping you more than it hurts you?

Get your fucking bread out of the fridge. Refrigeration makes it stale faster. If you’re not eating your bread before it goes bad you should keep it in the FREEZER, never the fridge. Stop eating subpar bread

I will say I get the vibe that a lot of peoples interest and support for strikers is a bit too much for a vicarious ‘burn it down’ thrill, rather than for the actual goals of a strike.

Like UPS has agreed to come back to the table and it is very possible they will concede to Union demands and avert a strike. And if that happens (so long as the union does not make concessions on its key demands) it’s a good thing. It’s a victory for the laborers. It is the same ultimate conclusion that a strike would intend to produce except without the workers having to go on (not so great) strike pay for a week or two.

This really hit home, and there are many types of families in the world. It would be great if more people could realize that. 

"Do you really need that disability aid?" is such an unhelpful, useless question.

Ask better questions.

"Would you benefit from using that aid?"

"Would using that aid improve your quality of life?"

"Would that aid reduce the pain you're in?"

"Would it allow you to do more than you currently can unaided?"

Ask better questions, get better answers.

I'm not the first person to say this, but sometimes I like writing things where The Twist(TM) can be figured out before its actual reveal.

And sure I also like Twists aren't meant to be figured out until the end. But it's like. That's not a requirement. There's room for both. They serve different purposes. Not every Twist needs to be some fight for the writer to prove how smart they are by keeping the audience in the dark until the very end.

Sometimes I wanna write a Twist that's a teamsport actually. I'm gonna reward the reader for paying attention. I want them to be able to go "hey wait I think I know where this is going" halfway through when I've sprinkled out enough breadcrumbs. I want them to get excited. I want them to be able to go "I called it." Like fuck yeah you did. You got my clues. You were paying attention. You did great. I'm shaking your hand.

I VASTLY prefer this.

One reader did this not too long ago in a BIG way. They were like “Is this…?” And I just

And then it happened in the book. And that’s the best feeling.

The whole "common era" (BCE-CE) has to be the stupidest thing ever and I say that as a Christian who thinks we should indeed have a secular calendar.

"Oh no we can't use "Before Christ" and "After Christ", that's so Eurocentric. We'll change it to something else, like "common era", that's more neutral."

"Oh okay, and what's gonna be year 0 then?"

"Oh, the year of the birth of Christ of course"

As far as I'm concerned we live in the year 62 A.G. of the Space Age (After Gagarin), like in a proper sci-fi novel.

HUMANITY DID NOT BEGIN 10.000 YEARS AGO NEITHER DID THE FIRST HUMAN STRUCTURES, THAT'S AN ARBITRARY VAGUE YEAR PULLED OUT OF NOWHERE, AND IT STILL FRAMES IT AROUND THE BIRTH OF CHRIST, THAT CALENDAR IS A STUPID MEME FROM KUZERGARST OR WHATEVER THAT YOUTUBE CHANNEL IS SPELLED I'M TIRED OF SEEING IT IN THE NOTES IT'S SO FHAHAHAHAAHAHA BATMAN I'M GOING TO DESTROY GOTHAM CITY

having to change all your dates fucking sucks and is almost completely infeasible at this point, and BCE/CE is as good an attempt at secularization as you're gonna get. idk what the issue is here

i mean i think this is one of the cases where 'as good an attempt as you're gonna get' is significantly worse than nothing. a thin coat of neutrality over something that is fundamentally not neutral is imo much worse than a plain admission that we're stuck with this date system & of the history behind it. like e.g. 'english as lingua franca' is also something that the world is going to be stuck with for the forseeable future because of inertia but saying "we're going to be calling it The International Language instead of english from now on" would make things much worse rather than better

someone tell the tumblerinas that you can raise an issue without deliberately guilt-tripping everyone about it

okay, I take it back. I don’t think everyone is doing this deliberately. some of it is so deeply entrenched in tumblr culture that you probably don’t always notice you’re doing it

“nobody’s talking about this” -> you can just delete this phrase

“if you can’t reblog this, unfollow me” -> you can also delete this one

“x group can, and should, reblog this” -> remove the “should”. or you know. delete the entire sentence

your post will still spread all the important information without the guilt-tripping parts, I promise

if an otherwise valid post tries to guilt trip me it’s a pass on the rb, sry.

honestly the boundaries between friendship and romance don’t really matter that much like at all if everyone involved is ok with it

like most of what is and isn’t romance is cultural/constructed anyways... you can take and leave what you want with it as long as you maintain boundaries. does that make sense

Some of my latest black void star cat artwork series! Wallpaper size can be found on my Gumroad shop - https://munchimo97.gumroad.com/ or on Patreon!

also im growing to hate the phrase ''hold accountable'' in discourse because its always so.... empty? like you see people saying ''sure this person apologized, but we need to hold them accountable!'' like cool. what does that mean. how can you get any more accountable than a public apology. do you want them to apologize... again? more? get a tattoo explaining their crimes so everyone they meet is informed? do you want accountability or are you repeating buzzwords because you cant find a nice way to say you just want them to disappear.

Cats with knives.

cat riding sheep

an under-discussed feature of chronic illness + pain is how fucking boring it is. Like I know that I will get better and stop hurting if I lie down with my eyes closed in a quiet dark room but holy fucking shit if I do that for five more minutes today I’m going to totally lose my marbles.

Disgust has absolutely no ethical weight. If you are basing your ethical positions on the emotion of disgust you should stop, it is entirely unjustified and leads to a huge amount of harm.

Word for today: wisdom of repugnance

The logical fallacy that because something disgusts you it must be bad

this is probably the funniest example of a tumblr user simply not reading the post theyre reblogging at all

re: the secret to comedy is timing

[video description, mostly courtesy of @creachur-captions :

A TikTok video by user @mrkurtwise, who plays all characters. As Backstreet Boys’ “Everybody” plays, both the Players (embodied as one person) and the DM lipsync to the lyrics that are (or aren’t) playing as the actual questions are asked via the captions. The perspective switches back and forth between the DM and the Players:

Players: So we defeated all the enemies? [“Am I original?”]

DM: “Yeaaa-ah” (in time with the song)

Players: And were the only ones here? [“Am I the only one?”]

DM: “Yeaaa-ah” (in time with the song)

Players: So were out of combat right? [“Am I sexual?”]

DM: [smiles without saying anything, head bopping. No lyrics play.]

Players: [stares, brow furrowed, looks around frantically] “So were out of combat. right?” [“Am I sexual?” replays]

DM: [smiles widely while rolling dice, still not saying anything. No lyrics play.]

Players: [stares, distressed and hesitant] “We’re out of-” [“Am I se-?” The lyric starts to replay but is cut off.]

DM: [zoom on DM, bopping hard] What’s your AC? [“Everybody-!”]

Players: [wailing, clenching their character sheet, throwing their hands up in distress] [“Yeaaa-ah”]

/end description]