Queen of the Imaginary Castle

What's a blog? This is just a mess.

[byjove]

fun wedding game: you make all the wedding guests vote for which member of the couple they’d stay friends with after the divorce

[byjove]

guests don’t have to put their names on it and the voting booth is completely anonymous but they have to explain why

[fruityculture]

Every day i think about those black musicians whose songs were made into covers by white people and now everyone thinks that these are the originals. Youtube comment sections are full of people like "is this what it feels like to find out you're adopted?" instead of celebrating and promoting the original creators of the songs.

[fruityculture]

Gloria Jones - Tainted Love

Little Eva - Loco-Motion

Martha & The Vandellas - Dancing in the Streets

James Ray - I've Got My Mind Set On You

Big Mama Thornton - Hound Dog

Robert Knight - Everlasting Love

Erma Franklin - Piece of My Heart

The Family - Nothing Compares 2 U (written by Prince)

The Supremes - You Can't Hurry Love

The Supremes - Keep Me Hanging On

[fruityculture]

The Top Notes - Twist and Shout

Lord Creator - Kingston Town

The Paragons - Tide is High

Commodores - Easy

And here's an entire playlist with songs by black artists covered by The Rolling Stones:

[beemovieerotica]

if you work in a creative field...or if you do creative hobbies like writing or drawing...you need to make friends with people who don't do those things. you need to befriend normie Steve who has never written a story in his life. and this is because when you are in a creative job or hobby and spend all your time doing that thing, surrounded by very capable people, who you inevitably compare your own progress and skills to, you forget what the baseline human skill at that thing is. and it's usually zero. normie Steve has not written a story since the 3rd grade when his teacher made him do it. he's very good at other things that are not storytelling - but if you tell normie Steve that you wrote a full 300-page book from start to finish, he will think you're some kind of savant. he does not know ANYONE else who has done this. you need this perspective. because when you're constantly on Let's Write Stories dot Com then everyone on Let's Write Stories dot Com will inevitably be like "oh of course everyone on earth has written a book or several at this point!" and you canNOT let yourself think that. that is not even close to the average human experience. you are in a bubble. do not put yourself down. do not give up.

[northernlionsbloodmoney]

[stellaluna33]

Several times on here I've seen the take "I know local theater is bad and cringey, but you have to support it anyway!" And while I understand what they're getting at, I'm always like, why do you assume it's going to be "bad" just because the artists are members of your own community? I just saw a local production of The Importance of Being Earnest and it was HILARIOUS. Everyone was DELIGHTFULLY funny and we thoroughly enjoyed it! There have been so many times I've been greatly moved by "amateur" or student art, and if you can't allow yourself to appreciate anything but "the Best" (and who decides what "the Best" is anyway? This production of "Earnest" was way funnier than the version that Judy Dench and Rupert Everett were in, as deservedly "famous" as they might be) then you are just being a joyless snob. There's beauty and talent all around you. And if that makes me "easy to please," then well... That means I'm pleased more often! And why should I want to apologize for that?

[thecryptkeeper]

they don’t tell you that everyone you ever love(d) in your life will haunt you

[leviathan-supersystem]

there's this video going around from youtuber Adam Something about how "the left pushed men into the arms of Andrew Tate by not having good dating advice for men" and it kicks off with a personal story where he says "when i was a young man and I'd ask 'how do I score a hot gf? 😏' the left responded 'uhm, the word score is actually very problematic!' and I said 'jeez sorry I asked' and then I went to the right, and (etc.)" and it's like...

look man. if you're going around saying "how do I score a hot gf", out loud, with your mouth, where people can hear you, then honestly "hey maybe reconsider how you talk and think about women" is actually really good dating advice that will help you cause saying that shit is gonna repulse women. maybe it's not what you wanted to hear but it's what you needed to hear.

[self-loving-vampire]

Feels like a really common thing for people to mistake someone being nice or polite for someone being spineless or unassertive.

Which is also how you get people who think they need to be "assholes" or lament that they are "too nice for their own good" when what they really need is to actually stand by their values and boundaries, which is a completely different thing.

[sochilll]

What I love about Benoit Blanc is his unwavering faith in people. Even when he has no evidence for it yet. His ability to see something in them that deserves that faith. In Knives Out he sees the blood on Marta's shoes the second he meets her but says nothing because while he doesn't know what happened exactly, he doesn't believe she just murdered Harlan in cold blood. He lets her wander through the crime scene, handle evidence, and hear their theories. He risks her meddling with the investigation because he believes she is not a murderer.

In Glass Onion he believes Helen that one of these rich and powerful people murdered her sister and he believes she found the proof even though he never saw it. He invites himself to a secluded island with a killer on it so he can help her solve this. And in the end he was never even able to see at the napkin but he trusts Helen's anger, her love for her sister, so he removes himself and lets her destroy everything in vengeance for Andi. And I think he also believes that once she does that, the others will turn on Miles.

In Wake Up Dead Man he believes that if he lets Martha walk out those doors, she will come back again of her own free will. He risks letting her "escape." He, as Martha points out, makes a fool of himself saying he can't solve this case, to give her the chance to confess in a way that means something to her in a religion he doesn't follow or agree with. He knows, from Jud, that she has to confess voluntarily or it won't mean anything. He knows she's going to die. It would be easy for her to just go home and die never having told anyone. But Benoit believes that she will confess, and he wants it to be in a way that allows her let go of the guilt.

He believes people are worth trusting. He believes people will prove him right and again and again they do.

[corvidcorgi]

With three movies to compare between, I really appreciate how each Knives Out movie explores justice from a different thematic angle, not based on the murder that was committed but based on the cruelty that led to that murder.

In Knives Out, a compassionate, ethical young woman treats everyone around her with generosity, and the people around her repeatedly try to take advantage of her kindness to force her into losing the fortune that was gifted to her by a dear friend. There, justice means that she keeps the fortune and decides that actually, she doesn't have to be kind and giving to people who've proven themselves assholes.

In Glass Onion, a woman loses her sister to a gang of wealthy, successful people who've sacrificed their principles for the sake of ambition and ego. There, justice means that everyone involved will be made notorious: whatever their other accomplishments, they will forever be known for being complicit in the burning of the most famous painting in history.

In Wake Up Dead Man, the church takes advantage of a young girl's loyalty and faith to place her under a lifelong burden and fill her with guilt, shame, and hatred. Justice means helping her understand what was done to her and the women around her, and giving her compassion so she can find peace.

This is cool because it means the movies contradict each other! The compassionate justice of Wake Up Dead Man would be totally misplaced in Knives Out, and so would the toppling-monuments justice of Glass Onion. And because each movie has something different to say, they all stand on their own and feel fresh.

This is also why Benoit Blanc is the uniting figure but never the protagonist of these movies. He's an agent of legal justice in that he's the detective and it's his job to figure out whodunnit, but the protagonist -- Marta, Helen, and now Jud -- is always the character who delivers thematic justice.

[higharollakockamamie]

MMORPG players in Westworld: people torture the NPCs because they're not real and nothing matters

Real MMORPG players in real games: for a while there was a rock with textures that didn't load in correctly so people made a pilgrimage to Smooth Rock

[mikkeneko]

[mihai-florescu]

[derinthescarletpescatarian]

Except, critically, at bedtime.

[findersfeeders]

Ravings and urges get miscoded over time. Let’s say you’re thirsty, and you live in a strawberry field. Strawberries contain some water and a bunch of sugar so, over time, you may start to crave strawberries when you are thirsty because you get a reward and some relief in shorter time from the need starting than the trek to the stream. This can happen for every need: sleep, food, whatever.

Trevor Noah has a great tip, that when he craves ice cream at night he breaks it down into parts: I want something cold, I want something sweet. He drinks a glass of cold water then waits to see if he still has the ice cream craving. Usually he doesn’t.

So listening to your body isn’t “follow every urge” but “decompose the urge to discover the underlying need.”

If you always feel like getting cozy in bed you may be: cold, dehydrated, and/or malnourished (maybe a need for high calories that are bioaccessible…not processed).

If you do not feel tired at bedtime you may: need to eat dinner earlier because your body is still digesting, need to exercise or go outside more during the day, get the fuck off your screen for an hour so your brain can enter sleep mode.

Hope this helps someone.

P.S. notice i said nothing about neurodivergence. Not that it’s not a likelihood but the over-pathologization of behaviors prevents us from taking simple actions to improve our wellbeing. Also, these tips are pretty accessible and applicable to most brain variations.

[brightlotusmoon]

[honourablejester]

I don’t know why that affected me so strongly, but I’m watching a youtube video on disasters on Lake Huron, and the first one involves a coal freighter that was lost in the White Hurricane of 1913 called the SS Argus. Everyone on the ship was lost. But it’s mentioned that the captain’s body washed up later, and was found without a life jacket. So they thought, based partly on testimony of another ship that thought they saw them go down, that it just happened too fast for him to have time to get his jacket. But then another body was found, that of the second cook, and she was found wearing the life jacket marked ‘captain’. And that’s …

It didn’t work. It didn’t save her. But it’s so very possible that he spent his last moments alive trying to save someone else, one of his crew, and they probably both knew that it wouldn’t work, that there wasn’t a lot of hope in a blizzard on the lakes in November, but he tried … he tried anyway. Even if it did nothing but maybe make her body easier for her family to find.

You know that Mr Rogers thing of ‘look for the helpers’? How many times has someone, facing the end, done something tiny and fragile and maybe hopeless just to try and help someone else? Whether it works or not. How many people went to their graves at least trying?

That has to say something about us. As a people. As monstrous as we sometimes (perhaps often) are, so many times we were also …

Whoever saves one life, saves the whole world.

And sometimes you can’t save one life, sometimes it doesn’t work, sometimes there’s no getting out of this for anyone, but … try anyway. Because it matters anyway.

And maybe no one will ever know. But maybe also some day more than a century down the line, maybe some idiot will be crying into her coffee because of what you died trying.

[hometoursandotherstuff]

[caydencrypted]

the wisdom ive learnt is that becoming part of a friend group 1) takes a long time and 2) involves a lot of feeling awkward and left out at first. there’s nothing terrible about this but if you grew up chronically lonely or have any kind of trauma relating to social isolation this likely feels Really Wrong and activates danger signals. but both fortunately and unfortunately it’s just how becoming close to new people works most of the time

[caydencrypted]

another thing that was not intuitive to me as someone who grew up an autistic loner: basically everyone on the planet is starved for connection all the time and almost everything people do is an attempt to reach out to another. most seemingly illogical interactions and behaviours can be explained by this. you have to take as many of these invitations as you can. even if you're wrong you still attempted to bring more warmth into the world

[iapislazuli]

had a dream the new online buzzword was "qualityslop". people would say things like "you're only enjoying it because it's good"

[neurodivergentaf]

currently at the mental health point where you gotta go "ah fuck, no one else but me is gonna help me climb out of the hole" and you bet your ass im complaining the entire way up