Let's Explore the Stars.

20 || Hufflepuff || Case Western Reserve University || Perpetually screaming

[szynkaaa]

In Death’s Warm Embrace

[enigmaticpink]

"Your name is no curse, Little bird. I just like the taste of it."

[xcatsissuesx]

I don't think I'll find love in today's society as a person who loves the arts. I just finished "The Song of Achilles," and Achilles and Patroclus spent every day for around 18 years together. The only exception to this was when Thetis hid Achilles in a distant land to protect him, and Patroclus went on a rampage around the kingdom asking where he was until he got an answer. He then travelled to him and saw Achilles dancing while dressed as a woman, and Patroclus knew it was him, despite the disguise, because he could recognize Achilles by touch alone, by smell, by his breathing, and even in blindness. They followed each other into war; they followed each other into death. Even the gods were scared of their love, for it had the power to change fate. They were each others muse. Half of each others souls. They loved unconditionally. I just don't think a love of this extremity is capable for most people today, and I don't know if I've accepted that.

[silver-ink-iron-words-reblogs]

So I just finished reading The Song of Achilles, and forgive me if I'm stating the obvious but . . .

About two thirds of the way in, Thetis tells the boys that there is a new prophecy, that "the best of Myrmidons will die before two more years have passed." And at first they're afraid that it's Achilles, but then Thetis tells them that he will be alive when it happens

The first time I read this, I didn't understand. It was only when I read that passage again, after knowing what happens, that I realized the prophecy was about Patroclus

The book even acknowledges it later on, when Briseis is saying goodbye to him . . . "'Best of men. Best of Myrmidons.' She places her fingers to my lips, stopping my objection. 'It is truth,' she says. 'Let it stand for once.'"

In the first half of the book, a lot of Patroclus's pov is dedicated to describing how beautiful and amazing Achilles is. And when you see how ordinary and pathetic Patroclus makes himself look in comparison, you almost start to wonder why Achilles loves him in the first place

But Patroclus was the best of all of them, even better than Achilles. No one else had his kindness, his tenderness, his unwavering care for others

And Achilles knew this. Further on, Briseis says that Patroclus was worth ten of him, and Achilles doesn't disagree

[drst]

I just had a small “oh” moment about Tumblr and how the user base has self-selected over time to certain personality types.

I tend to reread/rewatch things I love a lot. I reread the same fic a hundred times. I rewatch tv shows over and over - and not like I revisit them every few years, although I do that sometimes too, but I will finish a show and decide to rewatch it again right away to pick up on things I didn’t notice the first time through.

My family and many of my friends are not like this, or aren’t as extreme about it. They watch something and that’s it. They read a book and they’re done and they don’t really think about it again. I can do that, sometimes, but not as often as I  hyperfixate on something and just go all in for weeks or months, until I absorb every micron of it.

And if I go back to rewatch some time later, I usually skim through to my favorite moments, rather than a complete rewatch or reread.

I have no idea how many other people on this hellsite have hyperfixation tendencies (more than a few I’m sure), but this seems to be the only social media site where content circulates infinitely. I will occasionally see certain memed tweets show up on twitter (dril “I’m not owned” for example), but Tumblr not only recirculates memes we just recirculate cool posts about stuff. No, I did not love the color of the sky clogging up my dashboard but I laugh every time I see it, and I reblog every color theory joke. I love humans are space orc posts coming back around, or “your blood is seawater” etc.

We don’t just endlessly reshare memes, which is what happens on Twitter and somewhat on Facebook, there’s just posts that aren’t really memes but are just popular or interesting that endlessly reappear. And I’d bet a lot of us stop and reread those posts again, even if we know the content (or we’re looking to see if there’s been an addition). We turn cool posts into running jokes, like with color theory and Ea Nasir.

It slots together with my occasional “I want to go rewatch that scene from S1 again for the 1000th time” impulses to revisit things I love.

I don’t know I just saw the “blood is seawater” post and reread the whole thing again and it got me thinking about how seeing old posts cross my dash doesn’t feel annoying (unless every single person I follow is doing it) and it’s more like seeing an old friend.

Also I’d like Tumblr to stop hiding long posts, I can scroll, it’s annoying to have to click back and forth.

[petralemaitre]

For anyone who wants Tumblr to stop hiding long posts: Settings -> Dashboard -> Interface -> Shorten long posts toggle.

[vinnie-cha]

a friendly competition ⭐️

__

Instagram | Twitter | Etsy | BigCartel

[nitewrighter]

“The prince just fell in love with Cinderella because of her looks!”

Wrong. Okay, picture this–

So there’s the prince, okay? He’s like, smack dab in the center of the ballroom, and he is like, horrifically aware that this whole ball thing is a result of his dad falling into a panic about the royal lineage or whatever and he’s stuck listening to highborn girl after highborn girl, all lined up, introducing themselves like, “Oh yeah my family’s been a longtime supporter of the crown, and I think you’re cute, *cough* I’ve been told I have child-bearing hips *cough* Who said that? Anyway–” and Princey boy is just smiling through it, he has been the center of attention for entirely too long, he misses his emotional support horse, and is just internally like “Someone please kill me now.” And then… he sees her–This isn’t a love at first sight thing, this is a ‘what the hell is going on over there’ thing, because this girl has not gotten into the Debutante line for a solid 45 minutes. 

She’s just at the hors d’oeuvres table going HAM on the prosciutto-wrapped asparagus, and like, she’s polite about it, she’s happy to move aside for other people grabbing punch and canapes (and she’s really so sweet with the wait staff, it’s kind of cute because they’re like… definitely not used to being acknowledged) but it’s like, “Damn girl, did you not eat today?” and then the prince is kind of stuck with the uncomfortable thought of ‘how many girls starved themselves to fit into a corset for this.’ And then the Prince realizes he’s missed the past 4 Debutante introductions because he’s watching Mystery girl hork down crab rangoons. So he’s like, “Excuse me” and manages to break free from the never-ending parade of girls who will hop on his dick for status.

 And as he’s approaching Mystery Girl, it’s kind of hitting him that something’s not quite natural about her. Not fake, but not quite real. But at the same time this whole evening’s been just a whole circus of people acting fake as hell, so like, someone seeming a little off doesn’t seem bad, necessarily. And he sidles up to her like, “Hi,” and she’s like, “Oh–hey, have you tried the tapenade?” and she points to one of the plates, and at this point, he could hit her with the “You don’t know who I am, do you?” deal or the “Very funny, I see your play” deal, but at this point it occurs to him that, no, he hasn’t had anything to eat throughout this whole damn ball, partially because of being stuck in the debutante parade, partially because of nerves, and there’s something so disarming about the question that he grabs a crostini and she still seems so food-focused that it doesn’t seem possible that this is a play. So they both grab little plates and ditch the party.

She pretty much clears her plate in under two minutes and then has half of his plate, he’s cool with it, mostly he’s just absolutely fascinated listening to her.

See here’s the thing about Cinderella:

1. She doesn’t know he’s the prince. Like yeah, he’s been at the center of the room, but she’s kind of spent half the party eagerly looking around everywhere she’s allowed to go (”Have you seen rose garden? Have you seen the solarium??” further confirmation that she doesn’t know who she’s talking to) and the other half stuffing her face with food. 

2. She assumes she’s never going to see anyone here tonight again, and no one recognizes her, so she has no filter.

So she’s just talking about whatever with this guy. He seems cool. She talks about her friends, who are rats. She makes little outfits for them. Sometimes they bring her little gifts. She is already the coolest person the prince has ever met because of this. She pretty much offhandedly talks about whatever is fucked up about the kingdom that would take his advisors two hours of hemming and hawing and watering down to address. She just says it like it’s nothing, just funky little things she’s observed, and again, she’s not aware that he’s the prince, but it’s still pretty damn bold to bring up at a literal royal ball.

She… seems to have the majority of graces that lots of girls from Respectable Families™ have, but there’s something strange about it, something simultaneously broken and hardened, like the way you can see where ice has thawed and re-frozen. Also the way she talks about her family, and the way she avoids talking about her family– is raising several red flags, not in the “Oh this is another person trying to take advantage of me” sense, but in the “Oh fuck, something’s gone really wrong and you need help” sense and also lowkey a ‘damn is she even getting fed?’ sense. But he can’t say, ‘Hey, that’s not fucking normal for people to say that to you or treat you that way. We need to get you out of there,’ without sounding crazy himself, so for now, he’s just going to chill, make sure she’s comfortable, and keep enjoying the evening. She’s somehow befriended like 4 of the waitstaff so they’re willing to cover for them while they disappear for a little bit, and they get plenty of time to talk, but eventually it hits her that she hasn’t danced yet and she’s like “Come on! I bet we can make the prince jealous!” and he just bursts out laughing at that like “hell yeah, let’s make the prince jealous. He’s a real asshole.” Like clearly she’s having a good time, so who is he to make it weird? So they head back to the ballroom and they dance. And our girl, Mystery Girl, Cinderella, while they’re dancing, becomes acutely aware that everyone is staring. That doesn’t seem quite right. Like, yeah she’s hot, she knows she’s hot, but at least a good third of the party should still be focused on the prince, right? Where is that guy, anyway?

Oh.

Oh wait.

Oh shit.

And Princey Boy actually picks up on her realization and they whisper argue for like 3 minutes. “Why didn’t you tell me?! Now I feel like a goddamn idiot!” “I dunno it was nice being treated like a normal person” “Well me treating you like a normal person makes me a goddamn felon or something did you consider that?!” “Hey–Hey–it’s cool–you’re cool–I think you’re amazing, and if anyone says shit about you, I can shut it down.” “Well I don’t like that! That’s fucked up!” “I agree. It is fucked up, but I believe in you, and I think you should have a chance, and I’m here to back you up. I know power is fucked up right now. I know. But are you cool with working with me to change that?” And our girl Cindy pauses on that for a couple seconds, because.. she’s just spent hours with this guy and like.. she knows he’s a good guy, she knows he means well, so she’s like, “I don’t know how long I can actually work with you.” and the prince is like “Look, I know your home situation is complicated right now, but I really think we can–”

And then the bell starts ringing.

It’s midnight.

And then she takes off in a panic, and our prince just met the coolest person ever, and like, he’s pretty sure whatever situation they’re headed back to is fucked up, and all he’s got going to find her is a shoe. A shoe. 

[afronerdism]

Saw a post that said “Not every person you dislike is a narcissist and not every unpleasant experience is trauma” and a lot of you needed to hear that.

[homoqueerjewhobbit]

Not all conflict is abuse.

[biggest-gaudiest-poltergeist]

did i ever tell you guys about that time i gave my sister 2000 nickels for her birthday

[biggest-gaudiest-poltergeist]

special ordered them from the bank

[biggest-gaudiest-poltergeist]

nice to know that in a world full of change, tumblr still has no idea how numbers work

[laurajameskinney]

thats…thats $100, right? 

[rabeimwald]

@ you weebs

2,000/10=200

Two hundred dollar power move

[biggest-gaudiest-poltergeist]

#Math is literally the only thing i have going for me  #It’s my bragging right  #Even Gaud can’t take that away

You divided by 10. 10 is for dimes

[lizzykasters]

Y'all. 2,000 nickels is $400. 2,000÷5. It equals $400.

[biggest-gaudiest-poltergeist]

i’m crying. no, no it doesn’t

[biggest-gaudiest-poltergeist]

the answers keep getting worse better

[pawesome-but-pawful]

Guys it’s 50$.

what the hell.

[biggest-gaudiest-poltergeist]

honey no

[fracturedsunbeams]

This post is getting progressively worse and I love it with a passion 

[captainlordauditor]

op why did you get your sister $80 in nickels

[xaimelarks]

Wait hold on

2000 nickels means it’s 2000 x 5 = 10000 cents

Aka 100$?

It’s either 100$ or I’m losing my mind

[captainlordauditor]

it is 100$ being on tumblr just destroys my ability to do math

[yurimom]

this is really just my favorite tiktok

[unclefather]

there’s so many things going on here that we can’t talk about right now

[chaosthedemon]

how dare you hide this in the notes

[renthony]

Terrible Character Ideas:

A monk based on a European Christian archetype. They have sworn a sacred oath to defeat the giant snail plaguing the countryside.

A dragonborn desperately trying to convince the party that they’re really an aarakocra with a skin condition that made their feathers fall out.

Your standard horny bard, but they play a washboard. 

A sentient hat piloting a mannequin.

A dark elf who’s afraid of the dark, and terrified of spiders.

A peasant farmer who joined the adventure because they’re going through a midlife crisis and want to ~find themself.~

A druid who got involved because they’re the party’s weed dealer.

A werewolf who doesn’t believe in the moon.

[catgoblinchelly]

op change the title to “Great”

[pagerunner-j]

OP are you kidding

THESE ARE AMAZING

[dat-soldier]

what if they were all in the same group tho

[averagefairy]

old people really need to learn how to text accurately to the mood they’re trying to represent like my boss texted me wondering when my semester is over so she can start scheduling me more hours and i was like my finals are done the 15th! And she texts back “Yay for you….” how the fuck am i supposed to interpret that besides passive aggressive

[runawaymarbles]

Someone needs to do a linguistic study on people over 50 and how they use the ellipsis. It’s FASCINATING. I never know the mood they’re trying to convey.

[feynites]

I actually thought for a long time that texting just made my mother cranky. But then I watched my sister send her a funny text, and my mother was laughing her ass off. But her actual texted response?

“Ha… right.”

Like, she had actual goddamn tears in her eyes, and that was what she considered an appropriate reply to the joke.I just marvelled for a minute like ‘what the actual hell?’ and eventually asked my mom a few questions. I didn’t want to make her feel defensive or self-conscious or anything, it just kind of blew my mind, and I wanted to know what she was thinking.

Turns out that she’s using the ellipsis the same way I would use a dash, and also to create ‘more space between words’ because it ‘just looks better to her’. Also, that I tend to perceive an ellipsis as an innate ‘downswing’, sort of like the opposite of the upswing you get when you ask a question, but she doesn’t. And that she never uses exclamation marks, because all her teachers basically drilled it into her that exclamation marks were horrible things that made you sound stupid and/or aggressive.

So whereas I might sent a response that looked something like:

“Yay! That sounds great - where are we meeting?”

My mother, whilst meaning the exact same thing, would go:

‘Yay. That sounds great… where are we meeting?”

And when I look at both of those texts, mine reads like ‘happy/approval’ to my eye, whereas my mother’s looks flat. Positive phrasing delivered in a completely flat tone of voice is almost always sarcastic when spoken aloud, so written down, it looks sarcastic or passive-aggressive.

On the reverse, my mother thinks my texts look, in her words, ‘ditzy’ and ‘loud’. She actually expressed confusion, because she knows I write and she thinks that I write well when I’m constructing prose, and she, apparently, could never understand why I ‘wrote like an airhead who never learned proper English’ in all my texts. It led to an interesting discussion on conversational text. Texting and text-based chatting are, relatively, still pretty new, and my mother’s generation by and large didn’t grow up writing things down in real-time conversations. The closest equivalent would be passing notes in class, and that almost never went on for as long as a text conversation might. But letters had been largely supplanted by telephones at that point, so ‘conversational writing’ was not a thing she had to master. 

So whereas people around my age or younger tend to text like we’re scripting our own dialogue and need to convey the right intonations, my mom writes her texts like she’s expecting her Eighth grade English teacher to come and mark them in red pen. She has learned that proper punctuation and mistakes are more acceptable, but when she considers putting effort into how she’s writing, it’s always the lines of making it more formal or technically correct, and not along the lines of ‘how would this sound if you said it out loud?’

[adora-korra]

the linguistics of written languages in quick conversational format will never not be interesting to me like it’s fascinating how we’ve all just silently learned what an ellipsis or exclamation mark implies and it’s totally different in different communities or generations or whatever

[curlicuecal]

We had a running joke about how many times our grad PI’s emails scared us because they were uncharacteristically terse. (You’d get like “We need to talk about your paper.” and then the actual talk would be “It’s great!”)

And he heard us talking one day and started adding smiley emojis to his emails, and honestly it really helped

[veronicasanders]

Can we also have a support group for all of the people who’ve had to do the “Please do not send me a text that says ‘call me.’ unless someone is dead. If no one is dead, you need to delete the period and add a lighthearted emoji” workshop with their boomer parents? Because I know about 10 people who’ve had that exact conversation.

Texts from my mom look like this now:

Call me! 👻

call me 🥑 🥭

Call me. (No one’s dead I just want to talk.)

CALL ME! 🎏🐹🌴💅🏼🎷🌺👒

[tiptoe39]

Book rec if you are interested in this kind of language stuff: Gretchen McCullough’s book BECAUSE INTERNET. It goes into these topics in detail along with a bunch of others and is really fascinating.

[earlgreytea68]

Second this, BECAUSE INTERNET was my second favorite book I read last year, it’s awesome.

[spixi-moved-deactivated20240205]

girl help i managed my time poorly and now im suffering the consequences

[going2hell4everythingbutbeingbi]

"its okay that person does [weird thing] because they have [condition]" no its okay that they do the weird thing because its not hurting anyone and sometimes people just do things you might think are weird and it doesn't have to be explained

[pascalcampion]

Wasting time.

Aka. I just wanted to draw kitty cat.

#pascalcampion

[akira777x]

[rabbitindisguise]

Dude you good??

[magicspotatolover]

Sööp

[ginkgocrown-old-blog]

I used to call in to my local radio station every day in middle school and request that they play the Kingdom Hearts theme and they never did because I didn’t understand how the radio worked back then but one day, one fucking day the radio host was like “for the kid who keeps requesting this song for two years straight, here you go, oh and by the way we’re blocking your number” and they fucking played it and beating the system was worth never being able to request a song ever again