Dark Souls & Complaining: A Personal Blog™

-existential crisis-

[transmissionhorologe]

weakness was unknown to me

[hometoursandotherstuff]

[beepboopclick]

Convicted? No, not convicted.

[watchingtheaerial-deactivated20]

Bloodborne - Environmental Concept Art

I can’t figure out what’s so lovely about getting turned around and lost in one of the many soggy backstreets of this dying city. It’s a horrible glory, in all the right ways.

[videos-i-didnt-make]

wash.mp4

[archaicfirehydrants]

[videos-i-didnt-make]

i like your concepts

[inmyshoebox]

What is/was your major?

STEM (science, technology, engineering, mathematics)

Humanities (english, history, philosophy, divinity)

Social Sciences (economics, political science, psychology, sociology)

Arts (dance, graphic design, fine arts, theater)

Business and Economics (finance, human resources, marketing)

Health (nursing, health administration, dietetics)

Education (elementary education, special education, educational psychology)

Other (trade school, military, job certification, etc.)

Voting ended onOct 3, 2025

Feel free to elaborate in the tags.

[strawberry-crocodile]

your scent processing being so close to memory in your brain is insane sometimes you step outside and take a whiff and go "ah, it smells like playing pokemon emerald in my third grade afterschool program in the crisp september of 2006"

[ovenroastedtwerkey]

Context for the 19 year olds reading this, September used to be a bit cold

[slitherpunk]

goes on fangamer and looks at hornet plush reviews and many reviewer's images make her wear shoes

[catsbeaversandducks]

[csinczi]

:(

[hikari-kaitou]

That sign can’t stop him because he can’t read

[guiding-moonlight]

[djkoenig-deactivated20140905]

(◡‿◡✿)

(ʘ‿ʘ✿) “what you say ‘bout me”

(ʘ‿ʘ)ノ✿ “hold my flower”

[chronically-ill-dandy]

✿＼(｡-_-｡) “Kick his ass, baby.  I got yo flower.”

[kahguyaht]

i found it

the original post

i found it

[eviesrealitychangesdaily-deacti]

this should have the opportunity to be on everyone’s blog. 

[allons-ynumberten-deactivated20]

*tour guide voice*

and here on the left ladies and gentlemen, you see one of the posts before everyone went batshit crazy

[official-graveyard-posts]

Official graveyard post

[firewirecompatible]

purity seal that just says "FUCK IT WE BALL" for the entire length of the parchment paper

[garfield-2-on-blueray]

Took about a month but here it is! Maybe I’ll make a longer one at some point, but I think this’ll do for now

[firewirecompatible]

oh my god it's exactly what i saw in my mind

[nekr0droid-deactivated20250611]

Bloodborne

[zarosianzealot]

[strengthins0lidarity]

Sex work is real work and if you disagree, leave.

[292-ludovica]

Y’all really out here getting cucked huh

[noblepeasant]

Dude, he’s fucking the girl you jack off to. That’s the exact opposite of being cucked.

[fordtato]

The comments are full of people going “it’s not like they’re having sex in these examples or anything” so I’ll go ahead and bite the controversy bullet and add:

Even if a sex worker partner is having sex with clients, it’s also literally just work. It isn’t morally wrong. There is nothing wrong with it if both parties in a relationship are aware of the work, and if everyone is being safe.

Sex workers who have sex are no worse or “dirtier” than sex workers who provide other services.

[optimysticals]

Sex work is work and pitting different types of workers against each other only helps keep us all down.

[miniature-stigmata]

this one’s for all the fat girls who’ve cried in dressing rooms 💗

[miniature-stigmata]

when i was about thirteen or so, my mother took me to sears to buy me pants. i went into the youth section and picked out jeans and dickies.

the act of trying to fit my fat, squishy body into something that would not go past my knees was embarrassing. but it’s doubled when i realized i was wearing the biggest size in that section, what was supposed to be my section. the look my mother gave me when i told her that nothing fit is seared into my memory.

so i cried. i cried because this meant i had to shop at the womens section. for some completely asinine reason, in my teens, i decided that if i ever shopped in the fat lady’s section, it meant that i had failed. at what? i still don’t really know. passing by the abundance of ugly, drab, boring clothes that the plus size section provided felt like i was in a funhouse, like this can’t be my reality.

but the pants fit there. i took no pleasure from this, and i cried again.

so that’s why i made this post. because the experiences that fat and chubby kids go through in dressing rooms is unique and so rarely talked about. i’m in a much better place now and have definitely embraced my fat thighs and hanging double belly, but i know a lot of us who grew up to be fat adults still have some pain we have to address and work through.

so again, this is for all the fat kids who have cried in dressing rooms. however your particular story went, i hope you can look back on it and start to heal.

[bigmouthlass]

When I was … fourteen, my father waited impatiently as I tried to find a shirt that fit at the Meijer’s– I outfatted the Plus section when I was in high school. It was an okay shirt, ribbed polyblend ivory with a floral print. I failed to read my father’s burning fuse and said I didn’t think I liked it because it wasn’t my style. Losing patience – I guess he couldn’t believe I needed to be reminded – he told me it didn’t matter that I didn’t like it. It fit– I was getting it.

As I’ve gotten older and fatter, it’s a lesson I’ve had to learn over and over. As I outfatted Lane Bryant, the Romans/Woman Within catalogs, Catherine’s.

Now I’m down to two (hideously expensive) online retailers that sell clothes I can wear.

It doesn’t matter that a lot of them are cheaply made and flimsy, cut weird, or just plain ugly. They fit– I get them. When you’re fat, personal expression ceases to exist, and that fucks with your head way more than you might think.

[officialunitedstates]

I want to be the first person on the moon to shoot a sniper rifle at earth and hit a wasp nest.  my whole life so far is leading up to that moment

[dat-soldier]

[dat-soldier]

You know what other popular tumblr post is about to hit a million?

[thechanelmuse]

I was today years old. That is disgusting.

No Child Left Behind is one of the worst things to ever be incentivized in schools. It was signed into law when I was 14. Reading Rainbow was my show as a kid. LeVar Burton played a big part in why I became an avid reader to date. The joy of it. It's an adventure around the globe and through different time periods without stepping on a plane or time machine.

Children parrot behavior. In grade school, I always wanted to read the same amount of books as my teachers (50 books) and managed to double that each year. Before No Child Left Behind, book fairs and Scholastic catalogs were a serious matter like your grandma's Fingerhut catalogs. Libraries were (and still are) a wonderland.

Reading comprehension and proficiency in schools has been declining for decades. A crisis. The joy of books isn't pushed anymore and I'm always saddened by it. It's one of the reasons why I post my book reviews and recommendations on here, as well as posts from others to encourage reading and (novel) writing. Kids will parrot your behavior while the education system sadly fails to return as that example.

[mysteryteacup]

For those of us who aren't from the states, what - apart from apparently a shitty law - is that?

[kethsposy]

A law passed by Bush that cut funding to public schools whose students didn't improve every year on a set of standardized tests- meaning not that each student was supposed to improve during their time in school, but that this year's first graders had to do better on the tests than last year's first graders, and next year's had to do better still. Obviously this was really difficult over the short term and completely impossible over the long term.

This concentrated schools and other education programs entirely on those tests, especially schools with students who were already struggling, at the cost of art and music programs, home economics and shop type programs, and any in depth exploration of pretty much anything that wasn't on the test, which were pretty narrowly focused. Reading Rainbow was a relaxed encouragement to be imaginative and curious. It didn't teach kids the answers to questions on the test. So it didn't make the cut.

The program also incentivized schools to cut their losses on struggling students, expelling or encouraging them to drop out to bring the test averages up instead of being able to spend the effort to actually help them.

[anyroads]

No Child Left Behind was an absolute disaster for education, poorly hidden behind an insidious name. The real goal of it was not just to defund education (in order to reallocate those funds to appease Republican lobbyists), but to stop teaching critical thinking. Not only did struggling students get left behind, but by prioritizing students who did well on standardized tests, the focus shifted entirely to teaching students memorization without understanding context, and how to guess their best on a test in order to pass. The focus became passing tests, not actual learning. In the process, students were taught that they don't need to understand the material, they just need to know how to follow directions and give the answers deemed correct by the school boards. They were deprived of agency in their own educations.

This widened the gap between public and private school educations significantly, because students in public schools learned mostly how to regurgitate information, while students in private schools learned how to understand it, analyze it, think critically about it, and apply it - in short, if you could afford to go to private school, you still got to have agency over your education. And sure, many public school teachers were dedicated and still taught their students more than the curriculum demanded, but they were under a lot of pressure and scrutiny and their hands were often tied. Many of them couldn't sustain the effort it took (and how little they got paid) and changed careers. Meanwhile basic necessarily skills disappeared when arts and non-academic budgets were slashed into oblivion - you used to be able to learn how to sew, mend, cook, budget, do woodworking, fix a car (hell, build one), paint, draw, do pottery, and so much more in elective classes. What's mostly remained is performing arts programs, which struggle to continue existing, but since you can charge admission to performances they've had a better chance than shop class and home ec.

You have no idea what it's like to have watched all that happen under the Bush administration and now see the second emerging generation of young people who were deprived of the education they deserve and don't understand critical thought or media analysis. Those of us who are old enough to remember the Bush era are frustrated, but not at all surprised to see how reductive and binary fandom discourse is, or that critical media analysis has diminished significantly and turned into fandom discourse instead (ie. that being a child during the "what you feel is more valid than facts" Bush administration has led to the second emerging generation of people who struggle to separate their personal feelings about a piece of media from the idea that fiction is social commentary, who struggle to understand nuance and are more concerned about judging others for their even slightly divergent political views than about what makes for effective activism, or that fandom has become a way for people to judge and condemn others).

You have no idea how terrifying it is to have watched No Child Left Behind unfold in your early 20s and have thought "this is going to lead to generations of kids who will be ripe for manipulation by propaganda" and to now watch how hard it is to get Gen Z and Alpha to understand the ways they're being manipulated by fascists. Believe me when I say the very real purpose of forcing education to focus on tests instead of knowledge was to create generations of people whose brains are trained at an early age to accept information unquestioningly. That's what I see when people reblog screenshots without sources and base their political opinions on tumblr funnymen.

No Child Left Behind was devastating. We knew it then and we see it now.

[razzleberryjam]

Its even worse now that they stopped teaching phonics while prioritizing "sight words"

Theyre literally teaching kids to recognize words they want them to know while preventing them from ever learning how to read, which means you can't learn new words, you can't sound it out and ask someone what it means - the kids can't fucking read. Gen alpha can't fucking read. They can only read "approved sight words"

[dgcatanisiri]

The best description I've ever seen of No Child Left Behind is that it is "a masterpiece of Orwellian language that says that no child shall advance faster than the slowest."

[breelandwalker]

No Child Left Behind is also the reason we see students being so susceptible to using Gen AI and chatbots to do their work for them. They've never been taught that it's important to UNDERSTAND what they're learning, or why information analysis and literacy and critical thinking are important for basic operation in the adult world.

They've only been taught that they need to Get The Grade And Pass The Class. Actually LEARNING is not a part of the equation.

[math-is-magic]

One slight correction - the move away from phonics happened before and mostly separate from NCLB.

[aaaaaarchive]

[nemi-n1ghtshade]

she's got places to be

[itsjustminormending]

She took a midnight train going anywhere