blake kathryn
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š©µ avery cochrane š©µ
YOU ARE THE REASON
Origami Around
Noah Kahan
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let's talk about Bridgerton tea, my ask is open
if i look back, i am lost
RMH
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Kaledo Art
"I'm Dorothy Gale from Kansas"
wallacepolsom
Sweet Seals For You, Always
DEAR READER
almost home
tumblr dot com
titsay
Stranger Things
seen from Argentina
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seen from United States
seen from Malaysia
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@canadianwheatpirates
Well damn. I was going to be spending less time online anyway, but it would have been nice for them not to ruin online. Feel free to send me an ask or DM for alternate contact details if you know me (mutuals and people I've talked to before included!).
Iāve seen multiple āBest Death Personificationā brackets on this website, and every time the Discworld fandom turns up en masse to vote for Discworld Death, and itās always deserved, and itās always funny. A horde of book nerds rising up in defence of their collective grandfather.
Discworld Heritage Post
We're not leaving this gem to languish in the comments:
it is kind of frustrating that discussion of fictional portrayals of police and how the goofy nice policeman and the brutal-but-noble cowboy cop are both propaganda used to excuse or gloss over the violence of real police has kinda been watered down into people taking stupid potshots at each other for liking a fictional cop
i don't think a guy who wants to fuck chief wiggum really needs to be yelled at about it and the more often you do things like that the more convinced i am that you care less about actual police brutality and more about how your taste in characters is "objectively" better and more moral than other people
A sick wizard castle with a nondescript van painted on the side. A gothy pin-up girl with the portrait of a random trucker tattooed on her thigh. A bathroom-themed beach vacation. A beautiful brightly coloured cupcake that tastes like soap.
Jesus with a portrait of my grandma on his wall. A scimitar-wielding fantasy protagonist reading about the adventures of sixth-grader Kelsey. A National Park with a framed print of somebodyās living room.
Tfw you find a new mutual with a fetishism you"ve never encountered before
When you try to talk about enshittification, it sounds like conspiracy theories. (I'm not crazy)
Amazon made their service worse, to force people to pay for Prime.
Nowadays, if you order from Amazon, there is a week long delay before your package is shipped. (on purpose)
I remember when orders would ship out the same day. (I remember - it was real)
YouTube didn't used to have ads. Now, ads play in the middle of videos. (it's worse than TV ever was)
The best can opener I have owned is over 40 years old. Modern ones just don't hold up as well. (The ones I bought new broke ages ago)
The bread machine my mom got for her wedding lasted 30 years. It's been replaced twice in the last 5 years. (How can you fuck this up?)
The cardboard tubes in the middle of toilet paper rolls have gotten larger. (This too?) Companies increasing the price of the product while selling you less. (REALLY?)
It sounds crazy. (it's the truth) When you talk about it, YOU sound crazy. (it's true)
Even when people believe you (do they really), all they can say is "it sucks". (it's too big) Because the problem is so big, so pervasive, what can we even DO about it???
To get the necessary laws written and passed, we need politicians, to get the politicians elected we need information campaigns, to fund campaigns we need money, and all the money is being hoarded by the people profiting from enshittification. (it sounds so fake)
So I talk about enshittification (it sounds crazy), so people don't forget that things have been made worse on purpose (it's true), even though I sound crazy. (maybe I am)
It's called planned obsolescence and it was invented when lightbulbs could still run for 1000 years. Enshittification is the web-specific (and more specifically social media) version of that.
Planned obsolescence is also a specific thing, but a lot of what's going on right now (in addition to planned obsolescence and enshittification) falls under what some people call "skimpflation." That's what the enlarged toilet paper rolls are. That's what it is when my hummus brand costs the same but now suddenly has guar gum instead of the actual amount of chickpeas needed to make hummus thick, or my yogurt and hot sauce brands reducing their fruit, herbs, and spices and replacing them with "natural flavor."
This stuff was at its peak in 2023 when my last business of ferrets got old and Tux was dying of kidney failure and Kit was dying of IBD. Nothing radicalizes you more than buying the exact same brand of paper towels (Bounty, which I've ragequit), using the exact same amount, and suddenly having diarrhea soak onto your fingers every time because the paper towels are now only 60% as thick as they were last week. And this stuff has just continued since then.
It's sometimes shocking to me how many people don't notice the degradation of quality. (I have a food allergy so I have to check food labels every time; I know a lot of people don't.)
What makes it so unacceptable is the dishonesty of it. It should be considered a deceptive business practice. Rising prices do sometimes go back down, but these companies never go back to increasing their quality.
There is a really frustrating thing where some kinds of speculative story are hard to write because they will be assumed to be bad (clumsy, harmful, regressive) metaphors for real-world events or people, rather than exploring completely speculative ideas. Like:
"What if a small group of religious extremists, persecuted in their own country, moved to an inhospitable uninhabited island and had to rebuild society there?" - But the Americas and Australia weren't inhospitable and were full of Native nations, why are you perpetuating the idea of Terra Nullius and manifest destiny? - Yes, that's because this isn't a metaphor for the British invading other countries, it's a metaphor for finding out how much of a person's religious practise is rooted in worldly concerns, vs how much they will really stymie themselves for the sake of God.
"What if 1/100 children born was a werewolf?" - But queer people are no danger to straight people, and disabled people don't have predictable patterns to their illnesses, and most people who have uncontrollable rages really CAN control them and are just lying, and no minority group has superpowers... - Yes, but that's all immaterial, because I wanted to talk about a load of other metaphors about the passage of time and responsibility and the relationship between humans and wildlife.
It almost feels like death of the author, like "Death of the most obvious metaphor" - If you couldn't reach for the (tormented) parallel between being an alien species and being stateless, what stories could someone tell? If your changeling-baby was neither disabled nor adopted, what would the story be about? Etc.
Sometimes there's no metaphor.
The Wicker Man comes to mind. It's not a metaphor for anything. It's about the confrontation between Christianity and The Old Ways. There's metaphors in the story that are explained, but the film itself isn't a metaphor for anything. Christopher Lee's character says things elder Pagans taught me to say to Christians. The filmmakers did as much research as they could and cared about portraying the religious practises accurately according to information they had available to them at the time. The way the Christian character behaves, and what he says, is 100% things I have had said and seen done or had done to me and mine. There's no metaphor for anything, it's all right there in the open.
Sometimes there's no fucking metaphor.
Lately I've stopped writing because I feel so trapped by the audience assumption that everything I write will be seen to be, not just a metaphor, but specifically a bad metaphor, for some real-world thing when I am writing about literally what I'm writing about. A changeling is not inherently a Bad Metaphor for being autistic or disabled, writing about a religion is not inherently about Christianity. Vampires are not inherently a metaphor for sex or disability or what-the-hell-ever.
Not everything is a fucking metaphor, and tbh someone thinking everything must a metaphor for something else is a deeply Christian behaviour.
To assume that everything must be a metaphor is a very Christian way of viewing the world, I'm just gonna come out and say it plain. It's an established Christian belief that goes back at least as far as the medieval period, to think that everything in the world was created by their one-god as a metaphor or a parable for them to learn some kind of Christian idea, and that the whole world is meant to serve this purpose at all times.
Y'all need to stop fucking imposing that on everything. If you want that, stick to bible parables. Don't come out here reading stories by non-Christians expecting that's why or how we write stories, and certainly don't come out here combining it with bad faith readings and accusing people of things.
"well but I'm not christian anymore--" a person is what they PRACTISE, not what they say. People can SAY anything! So if you don't like being called christian, stop fucking behaving like one. Actions speak louder than words!
"but death of the author" that means YOU bring projection to the art, and YOU need to take responsibility for your response and interpretation. It isn't MY fault you are bringing a shitty, poisonous, lack of critical thinking to my story, and it isn't my job to soothe you either! death of the author means DEATH. It means grow up and take responsibility for your fucking projected meaning over the fucking text, not "my interpretation is what the author intended and even if it wasn't it's the author's responsibility to respond to me about it". No it isn't. You experience what YOU bring to the art.
Any piece of art will react to you if you react to it. You get from it what you bring to it. It will meet you half-way, but no further. It is alive if you are. It represents something--and so do you. YOU ARE A SPACE, TOO.
nasty amount of tumblr class discourse boils down to "how can my superior access, resources and quality of life be a privilege when I pay for them fair and square"
which in itself is symptom of how american this site is. class and wealth invariably have heavy overlap but the two being basically interchangeable is a feature of a very specific social structure which really does directly feed into the "disparity is only worth talking about if someone didn't earn it" mindset
this might shock you: a lot of ruling class Americans, people you've heard of even, are in staggering amounts of debt. it just doesn't matter. on account of their class.
i think americans should have to put a banner above their post that says U.S. CENTRIC ADVICE/INFORMATION. i think political posts should clarify that they are giving protest/societal/class information relevant only to the USA i think i would like to stop getting halfway through a post with really good information and then realising it is not widespread advice and is only applicable in the united states of america
for the love of GOD can we PLEASE stop treating us-centric advice as applicable to the whole entire world. Please. beyond anything else, i do not think you guys understand how difficult it makes it for young people to interact with and learn information relevant to them.
at a certain point, treating us-american advice as universally applicable borders on misinformation. i am not saying that it is done maliciously, but it is dangerous at worst. i do not want younger people going around assuming that certain laws do/do not apply to them and getting in trouble because of it. i worry about what 'fundamental/constitutional/labour rights' are only legally defensible in the USA. i worry about kids who do not know yet to wonder where the advice is for, and take it as fact because a post that reads "EVERYONE SHOULD KNOW THIS" begins with "EVERYONE".
some examples i can think of (perspective of a kiwi):
the concept of jaywalking. just crossing the road, americas weird for trying to ban it.
literally anything about guns in america almost certainly doesn't apply to most other countries. in aotearoa and many other nations we do not have the right to own firearms, nor do people even really want to. we don't have a reason to have them and people usually treat them like a bomb that has to be locked up at all times. they are all registered here and some types are entirely illegal.
the idea of cops having guns is so ridiculous and unhinged its the subject of mockery to a lot of people. batons and tasers are more common but still not all cops just run around with them.
the word "republican" means something different in different countries. in america its a political party, overseas its typically referring to the idea of separating from or abolishing monarchy.
places outside america have different political systems. the 2 party system is not universal. even if labour and national usually win the prime minister role, kiwis still actively vote for parties like the greens and te pati mÄori, which get seats in parliament as a result while another party is in the main role.
race dynamics are different in different countries, even within the limitation of just western countries. people keep failing to understand this in concept and practice so ill just say this: according to the new zealand census infomation publicly available one of the largest racial minorities is mÄori. the census has usually listed a joined option for latinos, black africans (a lot of africans here are white), and people from the middle east (which is incredibly vague). if i remember correctly last census these 3 groups were collectively 1% of the population.
a city having a population of 7 million or something is absolutely nuts, theres countries smaller than that.
there are thousands of languages and asia has a lot of them.
because of american homogeneity everyone has to learn english anyway to read half the fucking internet.
because of american homogeneity other english dialects are losing our slang and our accents. these things are part of our culture, and in certain dialects like nz english local indigenous languages are closely intertwined in the vocabulary.
that one particularly saddens me personally. commonwealth english has a fascinating history with dialects so diverse there are variations between towns in some areas. southern hemisphere english has loanwords from local languages and collectively shared features that northern hemisphere english doesn't have (the monotone accent especially). there is a particular dialect group encompassing aotearoa, australia, many pacific islands, and more recently antarctica.
cultural things are lost when american english takes over. it doesn't have words for certain things we have (is there an american word for bogan? or in the uk? redneck is not quite the same). going bush is a whole thing people regularly do and ive never heard a word for it in any northern hemisphere dialect.
i just.... idk what to say. the team americaness of it all ignores the concept of our collective societies and now we cant even keep our accents
oh he would have loved having a blog
And here I thought "the Like" was invented in Silicon Valley with the blogging sites of the 90s. Typical westerner, unaware that "Likes" had been invented in China two hundred years earlier.
found out lindsay graham died tonight through this fucking meme how's everyone else's night going?
One of my ancient posts has gone through the AI Recyclers that turn them into New Posts for Facebook screenshots so I keep getting jumpscared by words that are very almost mine attributed to other people's faces. I feel like I have a doppleganger in a horror movie who keeps showing up in places I go in order to freak me out.
This post is not mine, but this is the kind of shit I'm talking about. "Elaborate on your gender identity to him thoroughly". They just make it a little bit... off. You stare into the mirror and realise that your reflection's eye colour is not your eye colour. This isn't how it was. Something is wrong here, and Rowanchen895 is NOT your friend.
Disney is doing crazy things in the japanese mobile game sphere rn
you may be familiar with disney twisted wonderland, the gacha game in which various disney villains are used as direct inspiration for handsome anime boys. well that game was so successful that disney is trying to do it again but this time they're just animeboyifying whatever
here's mickey, goofy, donald, and chip & dale. yeah they turned mickey & friends into anime boys. they're an idol unit or something. they're technically not anime boy versions of the source characters, they have different names. mickey's guy is "Neo Michel". not michael, michel, like he's french. chip & dale are "Ruska Moncrief" and "Ranka Monk", they have different last names, they're not brothers anymore so that they can be yaoibait instead, anyways this post isn't actually about these guys I'm just setting the stage for the actual humanizations I wanted to show you
They also did monsters inc. And. Well it's obvious from the designs who mike and sully are. but you will also notice. the blonde one on the left. with glasses. monsters inc is kind of famously about just the two guys so they didn't really have a lot of other non-villain characters to take anime boys inspiration from, I guess, so, well,
Yeah it's her. they made an anime boy version of the mean receptionist slug. her name is roz btw, as all of boygachagame twitter has become extremely aware of in the past 3 days as we speculated prior to the release of the full image who tf the third guy was. the anime boy's name is "noah slugger". at this point no parody of the types of things gacha games will make gijinkas of will ever be able to live up to what disney is officially spending their own real money on designing
I... DONT... LIKE... CHANGE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! [MY TELEKINESIS THROWS EVERYTHING ACROSS THE ROOM] [I SEE MY ITEMS STREWN ABOUT THE ROOM AND GET EVEN MORE UPSET]
there's this weird thing people fall into online a lot, where people assume that if the [perceived-to-be-inferior] version of [activity] is discouraged then people will, naturally, do [perceived-to-be-superior] version of [activity] instead. When really it's just as (or more) likely that if [perceived-to-be-inferior] version of [activity] is discouraged people just won't do it at all.
audiobook listeners are not necessarily people who would otherwise do a lot of traditional reading if audiobooks did not exist, many are people who simply would experience zero books. Booktok romance readers would not necessarily be reading the classics if booktok did not exist, many of them would simply not read. Fanfiction writers would not necessarily be novelists if fanfic wasn't an option, many would just be people who didn't write. You know?
