Phantom of the Opera is a reverse "I Can Fix Him" situation. "she can fix me" "no the hell i can not"

this is one of christians’ favorite things to ignore. quite possibly their all-time favorite thing to ignore.

you know what really grinds my gears?

okay, bear with me: so as you may know, harry houdini and arthur conan doyle were friends, at least for a while.

by the early 1920s, both arthur conan doyle and acd's wife jean, aka lady doyle, believed whole-heartedly in spiritualism, talking to ghosts and all of that. (sidenote: this was of course right on the heels of a devastating world war and a devastating pandemic, both of which had created a huge population of grieving people, so spiritualism was having a moment.)

lady doyle sincerely thought she had the ability to go into a trance state and pass along messages in writing from the dead. she offered to do this for houdini. houdini agreed.

lady doyle attempted to channel houdini's late mother. she basically drew a cross at the top of the paper and filled it with generic platitudes addressed to "harry." houdini's mom was jewish and didn't talk like that, so houdini knew the jig was up, even if lady doyle didn't. but not wanting to make the situation awkward, he kind of went along with it to their faces.

then acd decided to publish a glowing account of the seance, and since both he and houdini were super famous, it got a lot of attention, and letters started pouring in for houdini, asking if this was true. ultimately, houdini couldn't life about it. so he essentially said, like, "yeah, i think lady doyle THINKS she can talk to ghosts but she absolutely can't." and it ruined his friendship with acd forever.

and then of course a lot of the people running seances weren't even well-intentioned like lady doyle, they were just simple charlatans taking advantage of traumatized people mourning loved ones. in houdini's youth, he and his wife had traveled the carnival circuit where he did an act pretending to commune with spirits, so he knew all the tricks of the trade AND he had lingering guilt over having done this, AND he was infuriated by this increasingly popular wave of con artists so he decided to assemble a team of anti-grifting grifters and together they went on the road exposing whichever spiritualists were preying on the locals.

houdini's best agent was a young woman named rose mackenberg, who donned disguises to visit the fraud de jour and then importantly sussed out what non-supernatural thing was actually happening, and then houdini would demonstrate the techniques onstage to packed audiences.

(if you want to know more, check out episode 175, "ghost racket crusade" of the podcast Criminal or read Tony Wolf's book The Real-Life Ghostbusting Adventures of Rose Mackenberg.)

but yeah, what really gets my goat is that all this happened and as far as i know, we still don't have like four seasons of a Leverage-style historical procedural about rose mackenberg and the rest of the crew having adventures in the 1920s as they unmask craven hucksters all over the united states. (what we do have, apparently, is one season of a show called "houdini and doyle" which is about the oddball friendship of two contrasting men solving sometimes-actually-supernatural mysteries, and whose premise does i think at the very least a real disservice to houdini's whole quest and also totally erases rose, who is arguably the most interesting part of this story to me.)

i am just steamed about this. steamed.

‘don’t you want your favourite character to be happy???’ no? i want my favourite character to be interesting. i want me to be happy. which sometimes involves my favourite character being in exquisite agony

Great vampire fact from the Castlevania Anniversary Collection

Reblog if you think public libraries are important and should be maintained.

I love themmm ( pt. 1 | pt. 2)

If anyone made this for me. I can’t even describe what I’d be willing to do for them

David putting the "tease" in Doctor Who teaser...

fanfic writers: if you were shown nothing but the title of one of your own fics, do you think you would be able to remember which one it is

I don’t remember where this story was from but it was about how the writers older brother died when he was young and years later had a son who, had never met the brother had the same mannerisms as him. Ok I think I remember the key words were “my son drinks from the water fountain like my brother” or something

FOUND IT

I’m curious, you guys tell me how you distinguish between your two sets of grandparents when speaking (or how you did it as a kid). Was it always Grandma [Lastname] or Grandpa [Firstname], or did one or both sets of grandparents have nicknames? (Like Nana or Papa.)

Tumblr won’t let me add this tiktok to another post about Jack & Jill dances but I’m full of spite and it’s one of the best things I’ve ever seen so have it anyway, the amazing impromptu Mamma Mia dance 💃🏼

getting comments on ao3 makes me go so power hungry like. oh yeah you read the thing?? you read the WHOLE thing and even took time out of your day to give your WRITTEN INPUT on it???? make out with me.

I’m a cis man sure but i also wanna opt out of the gender binary. None of that shit is my fault or my responsibility and i don’t want any part of it

Believing the gender binary is stupid horseshit doesn’t require me to change my gender actually

Yeaheyah you get it. Not trans but i believe in their beliefs. Sometimes i remember people form gender complexes around what alcoholic beverages or colors they like and i just wonder how they’re not fucking exhausted from keeping up this stupid fucking horseshit. Just do whatever you want forever

@nimagine i know u reblogged this from me but ur so correct 🙏 get peer reviewed