Beware The Ides Of March

The name is March, adult, do what thou wilt with the pronouns, and the blog is for me :]

[calcichel]

Just a little animation of Princess Donut

[calware]

the truly evil part about lolcowing is that the targets are almost always people who have done something/things that are unsavory at best or objectively harmful at worst and that is used as justification to treat them however you want with no recourse whatsoever. like you suddenly have permission to dehumanize someone for what, fucking entertainment. and if anyone tells you to cool it for a minute, suddenly they're supportive of that behavior, making you effectively immune to anyone who disagrees. like apparently nobody's ever heard of disproportionate punishment

[pangur-and-grim]

[pangur-and-grim]

they take turns

[jesush8r]

Variations of Isle of the Dead

by Arnold Bocklin, Swiss Symbolist

1880

1880

1883

1884

1886

1901

[7thgenbotulist]

Kabru trying his usual approach to undermining people against Laios is so funny. It’s like he’s a grandmaster at chess, poker, and everything else that requires mind-games coming up to a guy, fully expecting to beat him at any game under any circumstances, only to realize he didn’t prepare for the one thing he’d actually be faced with, which is a hotdog eating contest against a guy whose friends call him “the vacuum cleaner”.

[galileosballs]

The 'ingredients you can pronounce means it's healthy' line implies a world in which the kind of nutrition a person requires scales with their biology education and grasp of phonics. Which isn't true, of course, but sure would imply some interesting worldbuilding if it were

[bumblebeebats]

"Potassium cyanide. Arsenic trioxide. Polonium 210. Tetrachlorodibenzodioxin," I say, smugly and with full confidence, before downing the glass of wine my political rival insisted on pouring for me. Seconds later, she watches with a smirk as I collapse writhing to the ground, in the knowledge that I never could hit that "R" in "pinot noir" quite right

[our-queer-experience]

shoutout to aromantics

[our-queer-experience]

a lot of the time i get hit with a lot of loneliness and despair because ive been out of relationships for a while. i feel undesirable and alone and i really panic at the idea that it might be like this forever. aside from calming down and realizing that’s not true + also the mental illness talking, i genuinely think its been harder for those episodes to last as long as they used to because im surrounded by people who are constantly rejecting and reinventing what love and intimacy means. im completely alloromantic and allosexual but i mean it so genuinely when i say considering things from an aromantic perspective makes my life so much freer

[skarchomp]

my problem is im fine talking about the problems with marvel movies when that's the actual conversation but i hate talking about the problems with marvel movies when we were just talking about how good some other unrelated movie is

[skarchomp]

there is a spectre haunting cinema discussion. sorry i mean there is a ghost rider haunting cinema discussion.

[leafeana]

my two favorite fiction podcasts that build the reason for your access to them into the story itself

[targetedknowledge]

[hmslusitania]

In other news Washington continues to be Washington

ALT

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[pauvrecamille]

[swaps55]

@shadesofmauve​

[wellthatschaotic]

human doctors are like "yes i specialize in specifically the right ankle. you're gonna have to go to a different doctor for the left ankle" and veterinarians are like "yeah i'm treating a cat's broken leg then doing dental surgery on a dog and also a cow is scheduled to give birth today so i'm gonna help with that"

[fat-fuck-hairy-belly]

From semi-personal experience, a vet can also remove a human appendix.

[wellthatschaotic]

hi. what do you mean by semi-personal experience.

[dubiousculturalartifact]

i think the most egregious example of the manic pixie dream girl trope was this play i but I just remembered seeing it, several years ago… 

it was about this sad-sack guy driving across the country to try and reunite his old band for one last show

he’s accompanied by this girl who he was in the band with, back in the day… and he was in love with her then, and she’s cool & smart & funny & talks only to him for the entire play, even when the rest of the band joins him on the drive

& at the end of the play it turns out that she was a ghost the whole time, nobody else in the play could see or hear her, & the ‘last show’ he kept referring to is actually going to be her funeral wake bcs she died..

That her ghost had accompanied them on this trip bcs he was grieving & she wanted to help him let go of her…

which, you know, was a surprise & it was really emotional & legit the play was pretty good

But I just started thinking about it randomly…

And I keep being struck by the fact that the play only works if the entire audience is so used to the idea that a female character would literally only speak to the main male character for the entire length of a narrative.

Would only converse with him, interact with him, even when there were other people around.

That even as he talked about what he was doing next, she never discussed their future goals. She never touched any props or anyone other than him. 

That nothing she did or said would genuinely have anything to do with herself as a person, except in the context of how he felt about her. 

The entire play hinges on the audience not expecting anything hinky about a female character who acts like that,

& most of the audience bought it, hook, line, and sinker.

even I did. there was genuine feeling of surprise in the room

and I just…

A woman can literally be an incorporeal ghost & as long as she is emotionally supportive of a man we see her as a fully realistically person

if that isn’t a sad indictment of how female characters get treated idk what is, honestly

[parkayquarts]

little girl in the checkout line was freaking the FUCK out reaching for a shelf and screaming "GIMMEEEE GIMMEEEEE" at the top of her lungs and the mom kept saying "no 🫩" and I look at the shelf expecting there to be candy or something and it was full of batteries

[luna-azzurra]

Something neuroscience-y that helps with prose: attention is selective. A character will not notice everything in a room. They will notice what matters to their goal, fear, desire, training, wound, or obsession. A jealous character notices hands. a hungry character notices food. A soldier notices exits. A lonely character notices pairs. Description becomes character when attention has a bias.

[wizardarchetypes]

like logically ofc i know my sleep disorder is indeed a disorder but it's still crazy to me that i have been taking my sleep meds every single night without fail for 3 months now, and as a result i have been sleeping by midnight and THROUGH the night every single night without fail for three months. but tonight i forgot to take it on time and now it's almost 3 am and i'm awake. it doesn't matter how long i stick to a rhythm, i will no magically become a healthy sleeper. these meds are genuinely life saving.

absolutely bonkers and actually MADDENING thinking about spending nearly three DECCAAAAADESSSS of my life believing i could just "fix" my schedule and get my sleep "on track." LMAO. i was up at 4 am when i was 6 years old sneaking downstairs to watch TV in misery bc i couldn't sleep and then i was still 32 YEARSSSS old like "no everyone listen THIS week i'm gonna avoid naps and go to bed on time and then i'll sleep normal from now on. for real this time." AJVBJAS SHUT UP!!!! NO YOU WEREN'T BABY!!!!!!!!! YOU WERE NEVER GONNA BE ABLE TO DO THAT!!!!!!

[wizardarchetypes]

i went to my doctor in march and i was like "man you gotta help me. i haven't slept in 75 hours. and i know sometimes people say that but they really mean they've only slept 2 or 3 hours a night for several nights, which is awful of course, but i mean quite literally i haven't slept in 75 hours. and i keep waiting to finally 'crash' but i don't."

and he was like, "has this ever happened to you before?"

and i said, "oh yeah loads of times, since i was a toddler."

and he said, "why are you just now getting help?"

and i said, "well recently when i hit the 60 hour mark i've started hallucinating birds. and that's new."

and he said, "what do you mean, birds?"

and i said, "i don't know, i think they're house sparrows"

and he said, "i didn't mean what kind of birds"

(true that's not what he said but it was hard to parse the nuances of the conversation because there were a bunch of house sparrows in the room)

[codex-entry]

stories which clearly have very lofty thematic and intellectual goals but come up short have a unique ability to inspire madness.

like, any time I see a narrative that tries and fails to articulate something profound and nuanced, yet still comes close enough that I can see the silhouette of the thing they were maybe probably possibly trying point at, some apophenic part of my brain always gets set off cause it reflexively wants so so very badly to make it make sense.

but there's nothing there to make sense of, because the reality is it's just a poorly written story that failed to coherently say what it was trying to say. yet I can still hear the muffled words through the walls so some part of me remains convinced that if I just look at the text hard enough, I'll find the missing piece I've been looking for and everything will fall into place, and next thing I know I'm trapped in my own personal copy of The King in Yellow with no means of escape.

[codex-entry]

this post brought to you by the fact that i thought about Bioshock Infinite again