Paper Hearts @aquoda - Tumblr Blog

I will trade you one terrible memory for a memory I have of a young pine tree covered in butterflies.

A hundred monarchs resting on their long flight have lit here, on these green needles. You reach out. The tired creatures crawl onto your arms, wings slowly parting and closing, parting and closing, as they breathe. They rest, covering you in magic. You spin in the sunlight, laughing. You are very small, and they glow like candles behind colored glass.

I will trade you one awful, inescapable thing for this one golden moment in time, this moment of honeycomb light and a warm autumn day tapering to endless evening.

Look, you have made the trade. You can take your memory back anytime, but you do not need to bear it always. Now I will hold it for you so that for a while it can be smaller and further away.

Look at the butterflies.

(If you like this post and the replies it has inspired, please visit @thememoryexchange, a place to take and leave beautiful memories.)

robotslenderman

The recent hot VS cold polls have made me realise that a lot of people have no idea how to cool down.

As someone from a hot country that's regularly on fire, here's some tips:

WATER IS YOUR FRIEND! WATER! IS! YOUR! FRIEND! You can transfer SO much heat into this bad boy! You cannot cool down without water!

Wrists under the cold tap. Splash your face and the back of your neck. Fan yourself.

In some countries you can buy a little handeld fan with a water sprayer.

Damp tea towel around the neck. Stick an ice pack in there on hotter days.

Half fill a water bottle with water, stick in freezer. If you use a bottle with a straw, make sure it's lying on its side with the straw side up and out of the water. When frozen top up the rest of the way with tap water and off you go.

Desperate to cool off? Wet T-shirt. Sit in front of a fan. This will nuke it, just don't get hypothermia and don't fall asleep like this.

Cold showers are also your friend in summer. Some people get psyched up by these. Personally, I sleep like a baby, so I'm good to have them before bed. Just keep in mind that it takes a bit of time for the cool to circulate, so your body will tell you that you're colder than you actually are. I find that when I have cold showers I need to step out of the spray when I think I'm cold... I'll just wait, and thirty seconds later the temperature has evened out and I actually need to step under again. Rinse and repeat until you maintain coolness even after stepping out for a bit.

If you can't do cold showers, turn the cold shower on anyway and just stick your arms under. When they're cold, lift your arms up above your head. The sensation of cool blood draining into your body is fucking weird and kinda unpleasant but less unpleasant than being hot.

Feet in a tub of water with ice. Blood naturally flows to your extremities when hot, so take advantage of this. If you don't have a tub of ice water, sticking a wet rag on your feet in front of the fan works too, it's the less powerful version of the wet T-shirt.

Drinks lots of water but make sure that water has electrolytes as well. Stay in the shade.

Keep air circulating. Fans don't actually cool rooms down, they just help transfer heat from your body to the moisture on your skin or the air via evaporative cooling.

Block north facing windows early in the morning so the sun doesn't get in. If you're in the northern hemisphere, this is opposite for you. Keep in mind that if your home is brick, the bricks will still heat up and slowly release heat into your home even after the sun goes down so this will only do so much.

If it's hotter inside than outside, close all your windows but two, making sure they're on opposite sides of the house/unit you're in. Point a fan out of one window, making sure that the doors between the rooms with the open windows are all open. This will help create a mini pressure system in your home, pulling cooler air in and pushing the hotter air out via the fan. Bonus points if you can get that fan high up where the hot air rises; even within a single room the top is much hotter than the air by the floor. Adjust the amount of open windows based on how many fans you have, but generally you want more windows with fans open than windows without fans to keep the pressure correct.

Obviously, use your common sense for these. Not everything WILL work for you, just use the stuff that does and adjust what needs to be adjusted. Some of these will be impossible to use in the workplace but others you can still use. Others are best used at home. If humidity impacts your ability to use any of these, get a dehumidifier if that's an option, or use more ice instead of evaporation.

Also keep in mind that the skinnier you are, the faster these will work. More fat means more insulation, means more heat, so you may need to be more patient with some of these or use them in combination.

robotslenderman

Bringing this back for my dying mutuals

sepdet

Get long hair off your neck.

ice tucked in a hair bun = great cooling.

Or soak a baseball cap or other cloth hat that won’t be damaged by water.

Water needs energy to evaporate. As it dries, it consumes a little heat in its immediate vicinity.

Therefore any significant amount of water — buckets, wet towels, damp laundry— in a small room can cool it a degree or two, although this doesn’t work as well if the air is already humid.

This principle has been used since ancient times, from wet blankets hung over doors in ancient Egypt to the “swamp coolers” of the southern U.S. before modern AC, to modern “evaporative coolers.” And, of course, it’s the function of sweat.

quasi-normalcy

I've reached the point where cynicism is a major turn-off for me. You're not smarter than idealists, and you're not helping.

quasi-normalcy

Funny that the stereotypical cynic is an idealist who aged out of it. In my experience, the reverse is true. I was an extreme cynic as a teenager and then I noticed how profoundly limiting it was, and also that "cynics are cool and smart" was a message that was being constantly reinforced by corporate media for some reason.

quasi-normalcy

#yes! cynicism reads as very juvenile to me#and yes prev often stemming from teen pain

Yeah, like I see black-pilled people on here and my default reaction isn't "oh, these must be world-weary old warriors who've lost their faith in humanity", it's "these people are in their 20s and need a hobby"

quasi-normalcy

I also think that the present era has proven that authoritarian leaders don't actually want a population of wide-eyed idealists, they want a population of jaded assholes who are convinced that everyone is lying, any resistance is either a scam or doomed to failure, and nothing can ever get better.

depsidase

allthingswhumpyandangsty

“apologize for being weird about the character” no the point of passion and hyperfixation is that you’re shamelessly and unapologetically weird about the thing that brings you joy

adhdwannabewriter

Writers, I dare you to post/reblog the first sentence of the last chapter you wrote.

Here's mine:

A steady, constant pain pulsated in Arden's thigh.

aquoda

Oh hell yeah, here you go:

I dreamt of the man's face again.

thememoryexchange

I offer a memory of starlight in the late Summer sky.

It’s late, too late for the early day that is to come. You rest in a cabin with a few others on a camping trip outside city limits. It’s been several days, but you haven’t seen what you came here for.

You stumble past the cots resting on the floor, the artifacts of a recent s'mores session still hanging in the air. Across a hallway you tip-toe ever so slowly to avoid the old floor’s whines and creaks. You should be asleep, but a rush of adrenaline pulses through you. At the end of the hall you push a flimsy screen door out of the way and climb a small set of concrete stairs to the front porch of the rented cabin. Taking great care to avoid the thistle leaves, you walk out into crab grass and dry soil to stare up at the night sky.

It is still cloudy, as it was on previous nights, but you see a patch of darkness around the back of the house. You weave your way back to the front porch and creep into the cabin itself. It’s small and simple, only housing a basic kitchen and dining area, a little laundry room, and a single tiny bathroom. The music of a game long forgotten echoes in silence. Past all this is the door to the back porch, and it isn’t long until you reach it.

From this door stretches a decent clearing, and beyond that an impressive pine forest. Not a thing stirs in the dark encampment, with only the faintest breeze brushing your skin. It tastes a bit like oncoming rain. But while the nature around you is beautiful, you instead look up at the sky. Up and away is the stars of the Milky Way Galaxy stretching across your vision. A hundred million twinkling little stars fill your view, shimmering and shining down on you without the burden of a moon.

Then, all at once, you see one. Two, three. Five meteors, streaking across the sky. The Perseids shoot off into the distance, each one leaving a twinkling trail. Dozens more follow those first few trailblazers, giving you a night full of stars. You only wish your friends could see them with you.

This memory is yours to hold for as long as you need it. Your memory will be safe and sound with me, sparkling in the sky above the mountains. You can take it back at any time, but don’t feel rushed. There’s always another night.

m--ood-deactivated20181217

kocalls

snow-nose

video description: an orange tabby cat sits in front of a row of tall grass, surrounded by small, fluttering yellow butterflies. it is calmly looking at the butterflies. end video description

luna-azzurra

How many times can I describe someone’s eyes before the reader burns my book?

allthingswhumpyandangsty

zmpl

has anyone noticed that after the porn ban of 2018 tumblr was essentially killed from the mainstream and everyone flocked to other social media sites like twitter and meta. then those sites got enshittified to where twitter became Nazi Central and meta sites had an entire meme around getting “zucced” aka mark zuckerberg himself would ban you for saying a no-no word like fuck. and then the mainstream shifted to tiktok where infamous toddlerspeak sentences like “he got unalived by a pew pew” were born because if you once again say a no-no word like kill or gun or any other word that isn’t corporate i mean kid friendly then the algorithm will bury your post into the ground. and somehow we’ve come full circle and tumblr is now the most bearable social media site because although we can’t have female presenting nipples we can at least talk to each other like adults. has anyone noticed that at all or is it just me and the flaming skull

luna-azzurra

Ways to worldbuild (Stars)!!<3

beanswithbones

Girls don't want more big name studio super hero movies. Girls want indie movies on a 3mil budget where a YouTuber puts himself in a big box that shakes him around and gets a double eye infection from a record breaking amount of fake blood.