Yes, I made an account. I am also surprised

[lumsel]

There's an open pit in the middle of our office plan that drops down into a bunch of very sharp spikes that kill you instantly. This is bad. People keep falling in there and dying. Someone put a sign up, the other day, all bright yellow so you can't miss it, that says "Beware!!! Spikes!!!"

The office immediately split into two factions over it. One says that if anyone falls in the spike pit it's their own fault for being so stupid and not watching where they're walking, so we should remove the sign. The other says that the sign is an insult, there shouldn't be a spike pit in our office at all, and having the sign up like that is just normalising the existence of the spike pit, so we should remove the sign.

We ended up removing the sign. Probably for the better. Still... for a while there it looked like it might have worked...

[unusual-pybro]

[m1dori-eyes]

Nobody has ever been capable of writing a scathingly harsh and well formulated satire about the perils of modern capitalism, that doesn't just get immediately one-upped by some random food service worker talking about their actual week.

[faggotfungus]

[fervent-bookwomb]

i think that soy sauce fish and honey bear must be the very very best of friends

[fervent-bookwomb]

look at them. look at them!!! i bet they have tea parties together when the spice cabinet is closed.

[emtearzz]

buddies!!

[pastel-prouvaire-deactivated201]

PSA: tumblr user littlefuckinmonster is stealing human bones from cemeteries in Louisiana. Please don’t let them get away with this and spread the word/signal boost!

[wdapteo]

this post is officially a decade old now

[mutantrenegade]

For anyone who wasnt around when this happened, this was real. Littlefuckinmonster was actually stealing bones from cemeteries. She is the bone stealing witch. She was specifically stealing bones from poor people. She was arrested for it.

[ms-demeanor]

This is not a Goncharov, this literally happened, here’s the Wikipedia article about it.

[jauntylittlefrillyboy]

I think the solution to kids on the Internet is to have specific, kid friendly spaces on the Internet. Kids wouldn't come across "adult content" on YouTube if barbie dot com still had flash games and this is a hill I will die on.

[aetherograph]

Oh! Then I know the EXACT person you should be mad at! Michael O'Rielly! He's the one that gutted the Children's Programming Rules, which covered internet as well as television.

[jauntylittlefrillyboy]

HELLO?

[aetherograph]

#so the death of the Saturday morning cartoon is THIS motherfuckers fault?????

Indeed it is! The FCC controls how much of broadcasting has to cater to children and that includes how educational that programming has to be, and exactly how much and in what way you are allowed to advertise to kids. That's why for the entire 90s and up to the early 00s, kids shows had shorter commercial breaks, and ads that talked about a website had to say "ask your parents before going online", and those websites had to be non-commercial--i.e. they could not be shops, and could not have any way you could spend money or were encouraged to spend money. That's why Barbie.com was flash games, and O'Rielly LIFTING that ban is why Barbie.com now takes you directly to a storefront instead.

If you're mad about Saturday Morning Cartoons, dark patterns in ads targeted at children, online protections for kids, or wondering why educational children's shows aren't as much of a thing as they used to be, get mad at the FCC and the person in charge of it who is gutting the Children's Brodcasting Rules (sometimes called the Kid Vid Rules), because those rules control all of that!

While O'Rielly is responsible for gutting the rules in 2019, he was replaced in 2020 by Nathan Simington as head of the FCC, and Simington resigned in June of this year. The post remains vacant as of the time of this writing (August 31, 2025).

And a side note: Things like KOSA and SCREEN and all those other censorship bills that use "think of the children" are not going to protect children at all; if you want to protect kids online, there is already a way to do that it's called the Kid Vid Rules and the FCC is the one that can update and change them to keep up with the times! It doesn't need a congress vote, it already got voted on in 1990!

[byjove]

My grandma’s on and off again boyfriend that she cheated on grandpa with died today.

[byjove]

RIP to Nana’s side piece. Though they never married, Grandpa died in September and she brought his long term competition to Thanksgiving that year.

[byjove]

Grandma and Grandpa had a shotgun wedding when Grandma was 19. Grandpa went off to Vietnam which left her, a severely mentally young mother, alone. Never heard a complaint about her side piece Jeff. He seemed to make her happy and for that I salute him.

[byjove]

I’m an only child so I have to discuss sensitive family drama with my 38,000 followers instead.

[femmmie]

My grandmother broke up w my grandfather through a letter and he just pretended to have never read it. They got married and had three kids.

[lucisthings6]

My grandmother confessed on her death bed that:

Her and Grandpa were in a relationship with their best friends

The four of them have been in a relationship since they were teenagers

They flipped a bottle cap to see which girl the boys would marry

Their children could have either man as their biological father but their biological mother is the mum that raised them

The past two weeks has been chaos since her confession 😂

[polyamorousmood]

[zootycoon-archive]

i got these knockoff boots online and instead of the brand name on the tag they have the name of an apparently nonexistent martin scorsese movie??? what the fuck

[loseremo]

[syzygy-yzygy]

THE ORIGINAL? ON MY DASH

[this-too-too-sullied-flesh]

this post led to a series of events that had martin scorsese himself reacting to his alleged movie goncharov and it has less than 400k notes almost 3 years later?

[nattousan]

i'm in agony, SOMEbody please help me remember what the childhood book series was that centered around critters that looked like this:

IM IN HELL WHAT WAS IT

[hrrkikshoard]

Little Critter?

[nattousan]

THATS THE BITCH

[nattousan]

alright smart-aleks, what about THIS one huh?? the dude had a really cool shading technique where he just swirled (colored pencil?) around??

[cosmignon]

Parts :)

[nattousan]

YOU GUYS ARE TOO GOOD AT THIS WHAT THE HELL

[nattousan]

ok my partner wanted in on this, I have no idea what this is

[thecrabscycle]

I GOT YOU

[nattousan]

i'm never leaving this fucking site i stg i love you all.

OK

final one

for all the marbles,

this one doesn't have an illustration bc i think it was just a kids novel but i haven't been able to find ANYTHING about it on my occasional internet queries:

kids is staying with his (grandmother?) in the woods and she warns him not to look a fox in the eyes bc they're tricksy and will swap places with you. obviously that's the first thing the little boy does and gets body snatched by a fox who uhhhh proceeds to pig out with his new little boy human hands and the boy has to trick the fox into looking him in the eyes again to switch back...

thats all i got, it's an older book i wanna say from the 60's?? 70's?? kinda the same jist of "Little Rascal"

[dyketennant]

perhaps this?

[nattousan]

A DECADE OF SEARCHING THANK YOU @dyketennant IM ORDERING THIS IMMEDIATELY

[nattousan]

ok i lied i'm back bc this is fun and i get to share some of my most deeply cherished childhood books with you all

i cannot express how much these are from memory, that's how internalized these artists and writers have become, they're a part of me now

[cryptid-of-ohio]

The first one looks like The Spider and the Fly, though the poses are a bit different.

The second one is likely Stellaluna.

I’m not sure about the third one, I will keep searching.

[cryptid-of-ohio]

I think I found the third one, though I’m the least confident about this one. Is it Creature Tech?

Unfortunately it doesn’t have a praying mantis on the cover :(

[nattousan]

[butch-king-frankenstein]

I think those fancomics where Calvin from Calvin and Hobbes is transgender are cute and fun but I also think it's a deep misunderstanding of Calvin's character to think he would transition into a heterosexual normie who goes to her high school reunion. That girl would have neopronouns and fang implants

[butch-king-frankenstein]

Adult Calvin is a tattoo artist named Panthera who is the bassist in a terrible metal band called Captain Napalm and Hobbes helps do faer E injections

[butch-king-frankenstein]

I know it's like 2 weeks too late to change it but I'm so mad I didn't realize that the band would obviously be called "Get Rid Of Slimy GirlS". I walk the road of shame

[parawyrm]

[parawyrm]

@madnessbrainworms pointing at you

[batmanisagatewaydrug]

my notifications are once again devolving into a spirited debate about the ethics of actions that could potentially make someone uncomfortable, and at risk of sounding like someone about to get a lot of irate anons I think we're frankly giving way too to much moral weight to hypothetical discomfort

[batmanisagatewaydrug]

the thing about discomfort is that it's an extremely nebulous category that can be triggered by virtually anything and that's far too broad a category to have any inherent moral quality to it. like. my mom was mad uncomfortable when I stopped shaving. that didn't mean I was doing violence against my mom it just meant she needed to get over herself. many such cases it must be said.

[batmanisagatewaydrug]

there's not a single example I could give that's better than this

[cloverchameleon]

[whereserpentswalk]

A cannon event for me is hearing a rich Upper East Side lady talk about how she had "a right to feel safe" when she was arguing for the removal of homeless people from her neighborhood.

[batmanisagatewaydrug]

the number of people who think that they have some kind of right to not have to see unhoused people while doing absolutely nothing to help get those people housed (and frequently voting against any kind of measure to do exactly that) is astonishing, yeah.

[fandomsandfeminism]

So, lately I've been finding myself feeling... annoyed with very modern reimaginings of Greek myths being presented as like the "secretly TRUE versions of the myths before they were warped by the patriarchy."

Like, I don't really have an issue with #GirlBoss Persephone retellings (even if I find them a bit tired because they so often have to rely on villifying Demeter to do so.) But to act like that very modern interpretation of the character and story has any basis in the classical sources is just untrue, and it is frustrating because it refuses to engage with the difficult or uncomfortable aspects of stories that are 3000 years old. It refuses to engage with the cultural differences and history of these stories that still find ways to speak to us today. Instead it just seeks to sanitize and erase the bits that don't fit into our modern sensibilities.

But the one that *really* gets me is Medusa. Because as modern audiences, the idea that Medusa being turned into a monster was *punishment* by Athena for being *raped* by Poseidon is really upsetting. And I've seen people legitimately try to say that *actually* Athena would never do that. Athena was actually *protecting* Medusa by making her a monster so that she wouldn't be assaulted again. #feminism

But HERES THE THING- the entire idea that Medusa was transformed by Athena after being raped? COMES FROM FUCKING OVID.

(Ovid is a Roman writer who HEAVILY REIMAGINED the Greek myths in Metamorphoses because he was working with a Roman world view and political agenda.)

All EARLIER classical (and actually Greek) sources have Medusa being *born a Gorgon.* (whether the Gordons as a rule are beautiful or monsterous varies, and Hesoid does mention in the Theogny that Poseidon and Medusa had a thing, but he doesn't describe it as rape. But that they "lay in a meadow of soft flowers", and theres no description of her being transformed because of this.)

So like.

No.

no.

Obviously, the idea that there is some "true" Canon Orthodox version of these myths just...isn't true. That's just not how that worked.

But no. There is no classical support for any of that.

Thanks.

[fandomsandfeminism]

Side note- speaking of myths that have Athena just wildly lashing out at people- Ovid also may have just... invented the myth of Arachne.

We have 1 reference to Arachne that predates Ovid, from Virgil (Also Roman), and he doesn't name her. "The spider, hateful to Minerva, hangs in the doorway her loose-woven nets."

There is no surviving earlier Greek references or even Greek art depicting Arachne at all, at least that I can find reference to. 🤷‍♀️

Which, again, there is no "Greek Mythology Orthodoxy" or anything. Buuuuuuut.

[fandomsandfeminism]

So I just want to let yall know how deep of a rabbit hole I have fallen down.

So here is the question- did Ovid, or at least Romans around Ovids time if not Ovid directly, invent the myth of Arachne? Does it have any basis in Greek oral tradition at all?

And the answer seems to be...we have no idea. The lack of art seems particularly weird to me, right?

But like, ok, I found 1 website (a museum IN GREECE) that claims to have 1 vase from 500BCE which depicts the myth of Arachne.

But this is the vase.

Here is a scan of that image

... why has this been identified as Arachne and Athena? One of the women is larger (the one they have identified as Athena) but she doesn't have any of Athenas traditional iconography- the helmet the shield, even an owl. Anything. And why is that Arachne? There's no spiders, and the tapestry isn't detailed enough for illustrations to be seen. Unless I'm missing something, this is just a scene of 2 women weaving. Maybe with some funky proportions. Why not say it is Penelope and one of her slave girls? Or anyone else? Weaving was pretty popular.

But this isn't a well known or well studied piece. And I'm not an archeologist. What do I know?

But having proof of the Arachne myth from a Greek source in 500BCE would be super interesting, yeah?

So. What do you do when you're hyper-fixating at 11:30pm on an unknowable historical question?

I emailed the museum and asked.

I'll let you know if I find anything interesting.

[fandomsandfeminism]

So it's been a few months, and...to the best of my knowledge, this is just where we stand on this.

The museum never got back to me. I posed this question to a classics professor on TikTok who said basically the same thing - the references from Virgil and this specific vase seem to imply that there was *some* version of the myth that existed before Ovid.

But even he was like "...yeah, they are identifying this vase as Arachne but... it seems a bit speculative."

He also added that Arachne having a Greek name, not a Latin one, makes it more likely that Ovid was adapting something rather than just making it up himself (since he otherwise might have just used a Latin name?)

So. Unless someone digs up another villa or temple at some point and finds new evidence.... this is just... the state of things.

Which is kind of frustrating, but still very cool. If anything, it kinda hammers home HOW we, as modern audiences, know about these myths, how much of that tradition has been lost to time, and how we always need to be thoughtful about our sources and what assumptions we make based on them.

[honorthegods]

I find the assumption this weaving scene represents the competition of Athena and Arachne odd, to say the least, so I did some research.

Here is the description of Object CP 2038 by Gladys Davidson Weinberg and Saul S. Weinberg (1956):

See also: Williams, Charles Kaufman, J. Lawrence Angel, Peter Burns, and Joan E. Fisher. “Corinth, 1972: The Forum Area.” Hesperia: The Journal of the American School of Classical Studies at Athens 42, no. 1 (1973): p. 13. https://doi.org/10.2307/147469.

Here's the description of the same vase from ASCSA: (https://ascsa.net/id/corinth/object/cp%202038)

woman to rt., weaving at vertical loom; long hair to below waist, wearing chiton and necklace; holds 2 rods. At rt. 2nd woman facing lt., standing on stool (?) with shorter hair, unbelted garment, holding 2 forked tools against loom. Loom: 2 uprights and horizontal cross-bar, loomweights holding warp threads, length of woven cloth at top with incised cross-hatching. Surface damaged to rt. of her: 3rd woman facing lt., possibly holding loomweights; 4th woman, very tall facing rt.; small 5th woman facing 4th; behind, 2nd loom like 1st.

As OP notes, there's nothing in this scene to relate it to the contest between Arachne and Athena. There are two looms and five women weaving, one of whom is apparently a child who has to stand on a stool to reach the weft.

Also, an aryballos is a container for perfume. It's hard to understand why such an object would be decorated with a cautionary tale, but makes better sense if the decoration is a domestic scene of women of various ages performing the normal household task of weaving.

I think that the Weinberg's interpretation of this scene is inaccurate.

I checked a few websites (the perseus.tufts.edu Art & Archaeology Artifact Browser, The Beazley Archive Pottery Database, the British Museum, and Wikimedia Commons - okay, not exhaustive, but still) and the only ancient depiction of the contest I could find is a frieze of Arachne and Minerva from the Forum of Nerva (built 85 - 97 C.E):

"Rome, Forum of Nerva, so-called "Colonnacce", detail of the frieze, scene with Arachne's punishment." Image source: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:RomaForoNervaColonnacceFregio2cAracne.jpg Image license: Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International

Interesting commentary on this section of the frieze and Ovid's myth here: https://penelope.uchicago.edu/~grout/encyclopaedia_romana/imperialfora/nerva/colonnacce.html

Good investigative work, OP!

If it's any consolation, I emailed a museum to ask about a particular object several years ago (it had been repatriated from the Getty and I was hoping they a photo) and never heard back from them, either.

[fandomsandfeminism]

Thank you! That's both validating and weirdly frustrating that this is the only Pre-Ovid depiction of the myth, and that it's so inconclusive at that.

I'm so interested in what the pre-Ovid version of this myth might have been like. His adaptations have a very specific thematic slant to them- the cruelty and foolishness of the powerful. As thinly veiled critiques of the political elite, he wasn't shy about radically changing the myths to suit that purpose.

So what would an Arachne story *without* that political goal be?

[fandomsandfeminism]

Thinking about this again.

I wish I could sit down with someone who identified that vase as an Arachne/Athena depiction and just....ask them.

Why was this identified as Arachne and Athena instead of, say Penelope and her slave girls? Which would seem to make more sense with some of the details?

[plaguedocboi]

So every year, my aquarium does a captive lobster hatchery project (hence all the loblings). The reason we’re doing it is because in the wild, loblings only have a 1 in 25,000 chance of surviving their larval phase. They’re plankton as babies and everything eats them. Additionally, as the Gulf of Maine warms, they are having even lower survival rates because the blooms of copepods they feed on as babies are happening earlier in the year, and they’re missing it.

Obviously, the goal of this experiment is to grow the lobsters until they’re big enough to settle to the seabed and then release them, because they have a much higher likelihood of surviving to adulthood when they’re able to hide. Ideally, captive lobster hatcheries can boost the wild population and keep things stable, so we don’t have a major crash in a decade or two.

The first year we tried this was pretty bad. We had a lot of eggs, but very few babies. It turned out that the CO2 levels in the building spiked as more guests visited throughout the summer, and that settled into the water and threw off the pH and caused a chemical reaction that prevented a lot of the eggs from hatching. I think we ended up releasing three baby lobsters (which is still better than their wild survival rate but not great).

The second year was a little better. We added a de-gasser to the aquarium and got a ton of larval lobsters, but right as they were settling to the bottom we had a disease outbreak that killed most of them. We ended up releasing four babies at the end of the season.

But this year? Oh boy. We have so many lobsters that we had to release the first round early (usually we wait till September or October so guests can see them). We just released a total of FIVE HUNDRED AND TWENTY FIVE baby lobsters, and we still have over a hundred who haven’t settled to the bottom yet. I genuinely don’t even have words to explain how cool this is. OVER FIVE HUNDRED. We just added hundreds of lobsters to the wild population that wouldn’t have been there otherwise.

Conservation is so fucken sick

[prettyponyprincess-prancespiety]

This deserves not to rot on a Reddit comment section

[trickstertime]

Eels are hilarious. Did you know we only recently found where they spawned? For literally thousands of years we've wondered. Like, ancient greeks wondered about it. Also a bunch of eels we thought were diffent species are just the same eels at different life stages but they look and act very different, lol

[trickstertime]

Ffs I didnt even say. Ok, so they live waaaay longer than anyone expected and they noodle around the Mediterranean and around England and France at various times.

On top of this they don't have sexual organs. This is the one that really fucked everyone up. The ancient Greeks said mad shit, one old timey English(?) guy spent years dissecting thousands and thousands of eels and never found their sexual organs.

Anyway, what happens is, when they're done fucking around in europe they say "right. Time for fuck!" and then fuck off out into the ocean and spend months swimming across the god damn Atlantic to over near the Americas. Then their digestive systems fully dissolve and THEN they develop sexual organs.

Why? You ask? Why do these sentient noodles swim half way accross the god damn world to fuck? Well the answer is easy really.

Pangaea.

Yea. Turns out when they first started off, all the contenants were right beside each other so it wasn't that far a trip. Over millions of years as the contenants spread out they just kinda went 'wow, it feels like this trip gets a little bit longer every time'. They weren't wrong and they sure as shit didn't stop.

So, yea, turns out that not only are the slippy guys in the Themes the same as the slippy guys the Mediterranean, but they're also statistically older than you and at the end of their life they fuck off over the ocean for about 5000 miles so they can loose their guts to grow dicks and pussys.

Eels!!

[what-even-is-thiss]

I like the idea in fantasy that humans are better at maintaining things long term because they set up societies or professions to do it whereas dwarves and elves and stuff are like “just get bob to do it he’s got a good few hundred years left” and then bob doesn’t teach anyone else how to do it

[what-even-is-thiss]

Elf: How have you kept this castle maintained for a thousand years if your lives are so short?

Human: We just train new people how to do it?

Elf: *gears visibly turning in their head*

Human: Are you alright?

Elf: I just realized that we didn’t have to let that whole city fall to ruin just because my grandfather died.

Human: What?

[what-even-is-thiss]

Human: Wait that’s why there’s ruins of elven cities even though you live for so long? You just keep not asking people how to do things? How do you learn anything?

Elf: There’s a lot of “you’ve got time to figure it out on your own” attitudes floating around in our society that I’m starting to question somewhat.

[unassimilatedsoul]

Elf: That sword, where did you get it?

Human: My cousin made it.

Elf: Impossible! Those metalworking techniques were lost a hundred years ago!

Human: What do you mean lost? My great-grandmother learned to make these swords from an elven smith, then taught it to her kids.

Elf: That's ridiculous. No elf would give such secrets to a human.

Human: They didn't. Meemaw delivered the metal to the forge, and no one kicked her out when she stayed and watched. She always said they barely acknowledged her even when doing business with her, like she wasn't worth noticing.

Elf: Come to think of it, my great-uncle always was rather single-minded when he started working.

Human: So he wasn't ignoring her, he just forgot she was there?

Elf: Oh, he was definitely ignoring her, too. He was super racist.

[mistflarden-deactivated20200816]

“In Europe they–”

WHERE in Europe??!? WHERE??? You mean Iceland?? Azerbaijan? The Netherlands? Liechtenstein???? THERE ARE 50 COUNTRIES IN EUROPE. ALL WITH DIFFERENT CULTURES. SO PRAY TELL ME, WHERE IN FUCKING EUROPE.

[eldriitchmurmurs]

in europe they got antisemitism

[number-one-malloc-appreciator]

[sunshinemoonrx]

HUH?

Most cop thing I've ever read. what the fuck are you talking about. The posts you're looking for might be on this website but we won't show them to you???

[sunshinemoonrx]

I'm sure all my settings are set to "yes show me mature content no don't filter anything" what are you TALKING ABOUT

[sunshinemoonrx]

the posts are ON THE WEBSITE. I can't search dirty words?? am I five??? is this club penguin??? when I get you

[noticesghosts]

What the hell

[noticesghosts]

What is going on

[error-404-fuck-not-found]

just so you know, if you completely ignore the search feature on the website and just type "tumblr.com/search/term" into the address bar, it bypasses all of this. broken-ass website