the things we cherish are small indeed

So much larger the need. arrows / a4p / kate, 30s, she/her. This is a personal & fandom blog, I'm a writer and I like cats.

[probuccalfat]

do you have any advice?

eat a protein heavy breakfast. don’t shop on shein. it’s never too late to get more educated. tell people you love them. listen to birds. go to an old growth forest. get really good at something, just to see if you can.

[dalniente]

it is honestly amazing how much of writing and editing is just. logistics. like... do i use a name here or a pronoun? if i move this dialogue tag to the middle of this line and break it in half, does the end of the line hit harder that way? what if i move the tag to the front? what if i remove it entirely? ...wait, whose point of view am i in; can i reasonably say this character is appalled, or must i say they look or seem or sound appalled? is this a deliberate action or a step-removed one; is her hand closing on his shoulder, or is she closing her hand on his shoulder? environment environment environment, we need to break all this dialogue up with some narration, the scene is coming untethered. what! are! they doing! with! the rest of their bodies that are not hands! fuck fuck fuck FUCK i forgot we covered this two chapters ago and now i either need to cut this whole chunk or find a reason to reprise the conversation from earlier. name or pronoun? name or pronoun? name or pronoun? move this clause around in this sentence? oh i'll add this phrase-- nope, never mind, past!me added the same phrase two lines down. okay, if i add too much environmental narration it's going to take away from this bit, but not enough and it won't feel grounded. what if i move this to its own line? where the FUCK are their hands?

[angelumcaedis]

couldn’t not preserve this tag @spottedenchants

[blackpyrefly]

makes your puppy dusty

[himborc]

ahh fuck!!!!! my puppy!!!!!

[flipchild]

Yeah its baically Dusty puppy thursday

[queerliblib]

We’re halfway there baby!

Thank you for showing up for community, queer books, and the beautiful coexistence of educational text and absolutely filthy queer niche erotica.

Thanks for getting us this far! Please keep sharing, donating, and building those teams so we can go all the way.

https://givebutter.com/qqlls-pride-campaign-2026-rg3yn3

[dduane]

The Onion says it won’t wait for the courts, will launch Infowars to pay Sandy Hook families

The Onion’s staff is tired of waiting for the courts to settle its pending takeover of Alex Jones’ brand, so the new Infowars will launch ne

Now The Onion says it isn’t waiting on the courts anymore.  “Alex is holding Infowars.com hostage,” Collins said in a phone interview. “He’s trying to intentionally degrade the assets so these families can never sell them, and the courts have largely obliged. We’re tired of waiting around.” “We are allowed, and even more, these families are entitled to this stuff,” Collins added. “Somebody’s got to do this, or else he’ll get away with it.”

[vampire-loving-vampire]

hey white people . if u dont know how to pronounce an ethnic persons name *google it* or if its someone ur talking directly to *ask them*. dont fucking do that "erm i dont know how to pronounce but __" or "im gonna butcher this haha" or "im not even gonna bother trying" . ur not funny. do u know what poc think when they hear u saying that ? u sound like a loser asshole and we dont want to spend time with u . im so fucking tired of watching youtube videos about media from my country and hearing those phrases. im tired of people saying that to my face . i respect someone who clearly looked it up and is tryong but says my name wrong over someone who just goes with whatever bad first guess they had without trying. u have too many resources at ur disposal to keep doing this. for the love of god just Fucking Try. if ur confused Just Try.

[despair-tea]

I highly recommend Forvo.com, the website where native speakers of a language contribute their time and voices to read words and names in their own language. It is a fantastic way to expand your world, open up your ears, and it's way more likely to nab a hit than just googling.

[vampire-loving-vampire]

wow , I didn't know this existed, thanks so much for sharing the resource !! I will absolutely be using it now too 🖤

[catsindoors]

[Image Source]

A Deadly Fungus That Can Infect Cats and People is Spreading

Shared from Science News.

Microbiologists are used to looking at gross pictures and hearing scary statistics. So when a moderator of a session on emerging fungal infections at the ASM Microbe meeting uttered the words “somewhat terrifying,” it caught my attention. He was referring to a sexually transmitted skin infection that is becoming increasingly drug resistant. But what came next was even more horrifying to me.

Medical mycologist Shawn Lockhart stepped to the podium and began describing a fungal disease that attacks cats, causing oozing skin ulcers and worse, and spreads to humans. It isn’t yet in the United States … that officials know of. But the disease, caused by Sporothrix brasiliensis, has sickened and killed thousands of cats and infected more than 11,000 people and at least 200 dogs in South America since its emergence in Brazil in the 1990s.

“What we have right now is this ginormous ongoing outbreak of Sporothrix brasiliensis in Brazil,” Lockhart, a senior adviser at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said June 7. The fungus has spread beyond Brazil to cats, dogs and people in Paraguay, Chile, Argentina and most recently Uruguay.

“It’s just a matter of time” until the fungus reaches the United States, Lockhart told me after the session. “We’re waiting.”

Here’s why he’s so concerned.

He worries about the fungus spreading in big cities such as Istanbul and Bangkok where “cats are just everywhere,” and in rural areas in the United States where large populations of farm cats roam freely. “All it takes is one traveler [from South America] bringing their cat with them, and it can emerge anywhere,” Lockhart said during the presentation. “This is something we are very, very worried about.”

Infected cats develop skin ulcers and nodules and swollen lymph glands. If the infection isn’t treated with antifungal drugs, it can become a respiratory disease and spread throughout the body. “Without treatment, it’s 100 percent fatal, and even with treatment, it has a pretty high fatality rate,” Lockhart said. In people, it causes painful skin ulcers. If untreated, the disease can also be severe and may kill those who have weakened immune systems.

Risk of contagion is complicated because symptoms don’t always show up right away. Two members of a family who moved from Brazil to the United Kingdom developed the disease three years after the move, health authorities reported in 2022. One of the family’s two cats turns out to have been infected with Sporothrix brasiliensis. A vet who treated the cat was also infected.

The fungi’s unusual properties may help it conquer new territory.

The cat-infecting fungus is a relative of Sporothrix schenckii fungi that cause skin infections, called sporotrichosis or rose growers’ disease. Like many other soil-dwelling fungi, Sporothrix fungi are dimorphic, meaning they have two forms. “It is a mold in the cold and a yeast in the beast,” Lockhart said. That means it grows as long, stringy filaments known as hyphae in soil but then changes to single-celled yeast when its spores infect people or animals.

Most fungal infections happen when people inhale spores or, in the case of rose growers’ disease, when spores enter skin through scratches and puncture wounds from rose thorns. But S. brasiliensis can spread in its yeast form, Lockhart said. “That doesn’t happen with any of the other dimorphic fungi.”

Cat behavior may be why felines seem more susceptible to catching S. brasiliensis, Lockhart said. “Those of you who have cats, you know they do two things: They’re loving all over each other, grooming each other, licking, or they’re fighting, biting and scratching. Those are their two most frequent activities, both of which allow the transfer of Sporothrix brasiliensis from one to another.”

Cat scratches and bites may inject the yeast directly into other cats, people, dogs and other animals. “I’m convinced that half of the human cases that come from cats are people who are trying to stuff pills down their cat’s throats to treat the sporotrichosis,” getting scratched and bitten in the process. Grooming may also spread the fungus around the cat’s body or to other cats, he said.

The fungus has another unusual means of spread: Cats can sneeze out infectious yeast, researchers reported in Medical Mycology in 2022. “When the cat’s sneezing, it’s going on the surface, it’s going on the lab coats, it’s going into the air, it’s going everywhere,” Lockhart says.

The firehose of fungus-laden snot from a cat’s nose might also pose a danger to humans and felines after the infected cat has left the room. That’s because the fungi may live a long time on surfaces, Lockhart said. Up to 10 weeks, according to one lab experiment testing how long the fungi could grow on stainless steel discs that mimic the examination tables in veterinary offices. By contrast, Candida albicans, fungi that people naturally carry and that sometimes cause yeast infections, lasted 48 hours. Candida auris, a fungus that can cause infections in those with weakened immune systems, died after about a month, he said.

S. brasiliensis’ persistence means that if veterinarians miss a spot while cleaning, the lingering fungus could infect other patients. The good news is that the fungi is easily killed with bleach and ethanol, Lockhart said.

There’s no commercially available test for S. brasiliensis and cats coming into the United States just need a certificate from a vet saying that they appear healthy. That makes the disease easy to miss.

Because veterinarians may be the first to notice when the fungus arrives in a new country, Lockhart urged pet health professionals to notify local public health labs or the CDC if they start seeing cases of sporotrichosis. “There is an opportunity for it to spread quite easily,” he said. “We need veterinarians working with infection prevention and public health to make sure that this doesn’t get here and happen in the U.S.”

[magicalrocketships]

Here is a reminder, in case you needed it (as I did yesterday) that you can BREAK YOUR STREAKS

you can just stop

there is no moral value or judgement in having a streak or not

companies are banking on your streak count keeping you coming to their app and being a committed user - this benefits them and their advertisers and not you

instead you can make active choices today or any day you want to do things that bring you joy or are helpful

a habit is still a habit if you manage it even like 75% of the time (or 50% of the time or whatever it is, maybe your habit doesn't actually need to be one that requires you to do it every day)

This brought to you by me trying to reduce my phone screen time to stuff I actually want to be doing and not just cycling through the same apps every day, and the surprising revelation that keeping up a streak might not be good for me, actually.

[scalproie]

I hope I'm not just a blog to you guys but also a gateway to acquire secondhand knowledge of medias you'll never get into

[adibkhorram]

Back in 2024, I was maybe a third of the way through giving a talk about my first novel, Darius the Great Is Not Okay, to an auditorium full of high schoolers, most of whom had read all or part of the book, when it happened. Someone (later, I found out it was a 9th grade boy who wasn't actually supposed to be in the auditorium in the first place, as his class wasn't one of those who'd studied Darius) interrupted me, shouting, at the top of their lungs, "Faggot!"

(I don't use that word in my daily life, and typing it out still feels weird. But stick with me. It’s important to grapple with both the ugliness of that word, and how some of the queer community has begun to reclaim it. I’m still deciding where I land.)

I didn’t let it disrupt my presentation; I pretended I heard the word “bacon,” talked about my love of breakfast food, and carried on, while the student was bodied out of the auditorium by a group of teachers. I moved on.

But the students in that auditorium didn’t. So many of them came up after to apologize to me, as if it was their responsibility, what someone else had said. Others admired how I handled it, asked for advice on how to do the same, because they were queer too and knew they’d need that skill in their lives too.

Teachers and administrators later told me about the discipline planned for the student shouted. But none of it really stuck with me.

I was visiting. I got to go home. I’m a grown man. The ignorant words of a fourteen-year-old, even a hateful one like the slur he used, didn’t hold much weight.

Instead I found myself thinking of his peers, who have to walk the halls with him, sit in class with him, who will remember this moment for the rest of their school days and maybe the rest of their lives. Who’s apologizing to them? Who’s making sure they feel safe and respected? How are they healing from this?

And I found myself thinking, too, of the boy who shouted the slur. Why did he do it? Was he a homophobe? Was he parroting what he heard at home? In the hallways of the school? Was he put up to it by a classmate? Does he have impulse control issues? Had he eaten breakfast that day? I’ll never know.

The older I get, the less I care about punishment, and the more I care about justice. How can an individual or a community make amends; and how can an individual or a community heal and move on? What does it mean to forgive? What does it mean to remember?

Will that boy ever be given a chance to reflect on his mistakes, learn and grow, apologize for the hurt he’s caused and allowed to heal it? Will his classmates ever get to feel safe and welcome in their school again?

I wrote about this experience after it happened, and my wise agent emailed me: You know...there’s a story in here, if you want to explore it.

And I responded: Hmmm, maybe so! Maybe even two stories, or two stories in one...

So here we are. Two stories—two stories in one—about mistakes, and about fear, and about apologies, and about justice, and about healing.

I don’t know if any of the students who inspired this story will ever read it. But I hope they found their own healing, whatever that may be.

And if you would like to read that story, now you can.

One Word, Six Letters

Check out One Word, Six Letters - <p><b>Two teen boys grapple with identity and accountability and set off a ripple effect within their comm

[sexy-people-contests-2026]

Tumblr Sexyman Contest 2026 Round 3 Part 7

Spock (Star Trek)

James (Pokémon)

Remaining time: 3 days 9 hours

[nic-the-rat]

LOCK THE FUCK IN MUTUALS AND FOLLOWERS SPOCK CANNOT BE LOSING HERE

[titleknown]

Trump Moves to Deeply Censor the Entire Internet

The Trump administration is cynically exploiting calls for stricter AI regulation to pass broad censorship measures at the federal level.

So, in terrible news, Trump's trying to pull some strings to pass this massive internet censorship bill, featuring all the kinds of internet censorship we're terrified of, including mandatory ID for accessing basically any website, specifically to crush state regulation of AI, because apparently this man will always see the moral bottom of the barrel and start digging.

So, if you live in the US and hate censorship and AI you know what to do, contact your congresspeople and tell them do not fucking dare let this through or so help us god...

[kosher-salt]

More direct source of concern

URGENT: We’re one bad D.C. deal away from the era of online government censorship.

Congress and the White House are negotiating your online speech rights away. Tell lawmakers: reject KOSA, NO FAKES, and age-verification man

[rfpreiwaphase]

5calls has NOT updated to reflect this

6/14/2026

Bad Internet Bills

All of the bad internet bills. One website.

Call now. Call often. Get your Americans on the horn. 📞 Every time you call, 🐨 will hug you

[downtroddendeity]

Me, pointing at a whiteboard full of ancient Grandmaster of Demonic Cultivation English-language fandom fanfiction drama: "-so I do entirely empathize with the 'someone is wrong on the internet' reaction to the infamous Jewish Lan Sect fic, but the scale of the backlash was straightforwardly antisemitic and often deeply hypocritical in its framing. Which brings me to my proposition. The vibes of a hardcore Buddhist sect in a culturally-Buddhist milieu are not those of an enclave of a minority with fundamentally different underlying religious and cultural beliefs from those around them, but I believe we can make Jewish Lans work. It simply requires that everyone else be Jewish as well. So in this scenario, extremely Orthodox Lan Qiren keeps catching Wei Wuxian microwaving a plate of cheesy bacon bites at midnight on a Friday, about which WWX is always able to produce a weirdly well-cited argument that this is kosher actually, while gobbling down the Cheesy Bacon Bites, and then as soon as he finishes them he will always claim to have seen the error of his ways even though both of them know he will definitely do it again next week."

The random person I have tied to a chair in my basement: "Mmf mmf mmf!"

Me: "Look, we'll get to my thoughts on the Drake/Kendrick beef when we get there."

[creekfiend]

gender essentialism is soooo funny bc it's like "this is what women are like" and you're like "I've met women and many of them, if not the majority, have not been like that" and it's like "well women SHOULD be like that" and you're like "why should women be like that" and its like "because that's what women are like"

[h3rta-space-stat1on]

Okay but like real talk this is why I'm struggling with gender kinda cus its like "am I genderqueer? or does my autism disconnect me from the typical gender experience allistic cis girls have?"

[batmanisagatewaydrug]

okay I'm going to let you in on something. there is no universal allistic cis girl experience either.

[free-my-girl-tourney]

Eva Stratt propaganda incoming! (mostly book-related because I think the things she gets the most criticism for are things from the book.) It drives me absolutely bonkers when Stratt is pared down into someone who is straighforwardly evil because Her Whole Freaking Thing, particularly in the book, is that she *knows* from day one that she is going to be thrown under the bus for everything she has to do to save Earth. She is very aware that if you take her actions out of the context they are living in, she would be The Bad Guy. But the thing is that you cannot remove the context from Eva Stratt's actions.

Like, yeah, of course, bombing Antarctica is a bad thing to do. It is objectively a very bad idea... EXCEPT for when you have thirty years at most before over half of the Earth's population will be obliterated as they slowly freeze and starve to death, and releasing the methane trapped under the ice is the only actionable solution that you have for slowing that timeline even a little bit.

This holds true for pretty much all of her more "questionable" actions in the book, up to and including paving over the Sahara to breed astrophage (aka the ONLY fuel source that would make this mission even remotely possible) and sending Grace on his one-way trip into space.

And remember that "half the population will be dead in thirty years" statistic is the *optimistic* number. Stratt, Grace, and other characters repeatedly point out that it only holds true if the *entire planet* works together. Every government, every person, sharing increasingly scarce resources as the world gets darker and colder and hope gets smaller. In the book, Stratt's academic background is in History; she talks at length about how that background is what motivates her. In her estimation, almost every war in history was fought over food and resources. This conversation is the only time she is described as vulnerable, btw. She is SCARED and about to send her only friend to his death against his will and she is DOING HER BEST.

Direct quote from the book: "If I have to be the world's whipping boy to secure our salvation, then that's my sacrifice to make... when the alternative is death to your entire species, things are very easy."

There's so much more I could say but my lunch break is over so like.

TLDR: It's not that Eva Stratt did nothing wrong. It's that there was No Right Answer in the first place, and holding her actions to some unreachable moral standard is erasing the reason she takes them at all.

eva stratt propaganda!

[arrows-for-pens]

Eva Stratt walked off the glass cliff with her eyes wide open.

[voyaging-too]

That Carrie post reminded me of my biggest and oldest pet peeve: adaptations taking a character who's supposed to be ugly, or at least not beautiful, and casting someone perfect-looking. A lot of the time this is simple misogyny, but the inability to allow ugly people to exist also extends to men and boys, and I remember how pissed I was when I started understanding this at around the age of eight.

Bastian of the Neverending Story is fat and weird-looking, in the movie he's a perfectly photogenic all-American kid.

Hermione is buck-toothed and unpretty, in the movies she's a perfect little girl who grows into a very attractive woman.

Carrie is fat and unpretty, in the movies she's a supermodel in slightly unflattering clothes.

Don't even talk to me about Ugly Betty.

The latest Frankenstein adaptation continues a long trend of trying to convey the message of "this monster is not inherently evil" by making the monster look good. Because obviously if the monster did look bad, it would be evil and people would be justified in shunning it.

Even supposedly more serious media does it. Imre Kertész's Holocaust novel Fateless has a minor character, a wimpy weird-looking member of the group of boys who got deported together. The other boys don't really like him, and disdainfully agree when he's deemed not fit for work - of course they don't yet know that it's a death sentence. In the atrocious movie he's not weaker just younger, a photogenic little boy, and him being sent to his death is played as a sentimental tearjerker for the audience instead of forcing us to grapple with the complexity of the original, where mundane teen boy cruelty continues to exist in boys who are currently victims of a genocide.

A written text says: this person is ugly, this affects how people treat them, this affects how they feel about themselves, how they behave, how they live in the world. This might just be an incidental part of their story, or it might be its entire point of the whole fucking book. And then the movie sweeps in and says: oh, but they aren't ugly! They have always been beautiful! They are being bullied and shunned for no reason! So unfair!

And the unintentional but very obvious implication arises that if they *were* ugly, of course they would deserve the bullying, the audience would agree that they deserve the bullying, the audience would want to join in, kick spit point laugh. The idea of empathizing with an actually ugly person doesn't compute. (Maybe it's clear by now that this has done low-grade but long-lasting damage to me as a person: weird ugly people are simply not allowed to exist, not even in stories about being weird and ugly.)

Btw this is why "everyone is beautiful" type body-positivity does nothing for me, and why I'm hyper-sensitive to how people discuss ugliness in reality and in fiction. For example, I love the Just King Things and the Shelved by Genre podcasts, but I think they struggle to see the value of written descriptions of ugliness. They interpret Steven King's descriptions of Carrie as cruel, they interpret Tiptree's description of P. Burke in The Girl who was Plugged In as cruel and fatphobic. Sure, I don't want to give King kudos for all his depictions of women, but he did get it right that time, and Tiptree absolutely did. Describing a character, especially a woman as ugly, genuinely ugly, no not secretly beautiful, actually ugly, and then telling her story, a story about existing in the world as an ugly woman, is really really fucking important. And people keep shying away from it, oh, it's cruel to call anyone ugly, let's pretend that ugly people don't exist instead.

[northshorewave]

Freddie DeBoer attempts to purchase and install several Smart (tm) Google (tm) fire alarms and is driven to madness.

It would be cliche of me at this point to say that a lot of "irrational, reactionary" anti-tech and anti-AI sentiment is not in fact irrational, but the direct result of "AI for everything" making ordinary peoples' lives objectively worse, in measurable ways, ways that did not and could not exist 20 years ago, so that some soulless parasite's stock portfolio can ride the bubble a little longer. But if you or someone you know doesn't understand why sentiment has turned so sharply against Big Tech, why everything they say is assumed to be a scam or a waste of time by so many people, this article is a good start.