It Got Weird

"How rarely do we stop to examine that path, to see the reasons why all things happen, to consider whether the path we take in life is our own making, or simply one into which we drift with eyes closed." Scully

[thematicparallel]

this blog is not a well-curated museum. it's my bedroom & i'm putting things on my shelf & taping things on the wall

[handern]

what I really like about Pratchett's work among all the other things, is that he basically opens all his books with exposure and "here is an immuable, very eternal law upon which the world is built" and then he spends the rest of the book trampling on that law

"it is impossible for a woman to be a wizard, so we're going to follow this wizard girl's journey"

"dragons are gone forever and dormant, here be no dragons. say hi to this one lady dragon tho"

"nobody can resist elves. that's why Magrat is going to deck their queen in the face"

"everyone knows women can't fight"

"everyone knows golems don't have souls. they all have names and personalities and-"

"all dwarves are men. then they were introduced to gender"

"Death is eternal and unchanging. Let's see what happens when he goes through all major human development stages in reverse starting with his retirement"

All in all "here's this thing everyone knows is true, here's why it's bullshit, here's how untrue it is, and here's how nobody is going to learn a lesson from being shown that this law of nature is bullshit. We all know people never learn right. or do they"

[va-draws]

A moment of light during the siege

[guerrillatech]

[vixxey]

(Cis/trans)women aren’t the only ones that can get breast cancer, either.

[guerrillatech]

Please boost this version 👆

[gentil-minou]

Sorry I gotta call out of work I have to go mourn the bestest little robot there ever was

[andillwriteyouatragedy]

[professionalchaoticdumbass]

I CANT DO THIS AGAIN ITS TOO MUCH

[cannibalcaprine-deactivated2024]

YOU CAN'T DO THIS TO ME, NOT AFTER OPPY'S WHOLE "MY BATTERY'S LOW AND IT'S GETTING DARK" THING!

[sheabutterbitch]

The talk I gave tonight was primarily about how babies, as well as young children, experience hyperconsciousness, something that is often considered one of the main reasons why children at these stages are ‘difficult’ to handle.

Kids man, they encompass some of the most phenomenal thought processes and it is all driven by the fact that this whole world is completely new to them. If you want to see abstract ideas constructed in a matter of seconds, talk to a child. Their grasp is unbelievable.

Even if you feel that children whine, cry, and scream too much… in considering how they’re in a world they had no prior concept of, and are subject to an uncontrollable amount of stimuli every waking moment…. I still believe they’re handling it all fairly well.

This conference made me realize how much of a passion I have for destigmatizing childhood behaviors. There’s a sort of ‘Ahh..’ moment that people come to when they see that children actually have reasons for everything they do, that they shouldn’t be viewed as underdeveloped ‘functioning’ adults but should instead be recognized as humans in a separate yet equally important stage of life.

I’ve also been doing some work in researching and writing about children as an oppressed class, I’m finding ways to incorporate my previous sentiments into that.

[shounenchild]

OP really singles out that stubborn refusal to recognize babies and kids as Human People dealing with extreme new stimuli All The Time, Forever and hits the nail on the head, huh. And yet they’re so right, bc kids are handling that situation with a lot more grace than you might expect!!! Kids would be justified in freaking out way more than they do, in all honesty.

and not to lighten things up too much with a joke but i really feel like anyone who still hasn’t grown out of the propensity to bitch about kids doing xyz “annoying” thing in public without any sense of sympathy for what that kid’s going through should have this tweet tattooed into their eyelids:

[syellowtails]

[image ID: a tweet by user @/codeinefridge that reads: “bein a baby must be terrifying imagine goin to sleep in ur house and u wake up at walmart

Tweet dated 13 June 2022.

End ID]

[theseerasures]

I would like to hear the story of how you slept under the christmas tree

so i immigrated to the US at age 9, right, and one of the first things my family did was join the local Chinese church. as far as the whole “figuring out how to do things so we no longer have to live in the back shed of Uncle Joe’s* Magic Emporium” thing goes, it’s a pretty sound strategy! now we had people to teach my dad how to drive and give us old furniture and say “hey, Seattle is pretty rainy maybe you should rent an apartment-like space before either a) the shed roof caves in b) your daughter with the famously delicate constitution falls dramatically ill from a strain of black mold or possibly herpes”

*is not my uncle, that’s what his store was called. he sold magic gadgets and my dad knew him because???? possibly in a past life they ran a meth empire in Albuquerque, who knows

ANYWAY. thanks to the church i did not fall dramatically ill from black mold or possibly herpes, but there was an unforeseen factor in joining a Christian church, which was that they? were pretty hardcore? about Jesus?**

**in a nice “we build houses for the homeless” way, not in…the other way

given that we’d just immigrated and that China’s religious policy is worshiping Mao’s preserved corpse ehhhhh…let’s call it “freedom of atheism,” my family was decidedly not hardcore about Jesus. my parents mostly took the bemused “i guess Jesus is okay since he indirectly led to us living in a place suited for human habitation” route, but i

was

DISGUSTED.

i was the first kid in my class to get her red scarf, okay, and when we sang the national anthem and saluted the flag every morning i fucking meant what i was singing. we almost didn’t come to America; my dad had more lucrative job offers in Germany and Belgium, but i put my foot down because everyone knows Europe is full of gross imperialists Dad, GOSH, and the Americans helped us fight off the Japanese.

so seeing all these fellow Chinese believing in THE CAPITALIST GOD was basically the worst thing to ever happen to my delicate psyche. my parents’ tacit approval was even worse: DID PATRIOTISM AND COMMUNISM MEAN NOTHING TO THEM? DIDN’T THEY KNOW THAT DOING NOTHING AGAINST OPPRESSION MADE THEM OPPRESSORS THEMSELVES??

clearly something needed to be done.

so because the church was pretty hardcore about Jesus, it was understandably also hardcore about Christmas. big party, massive intricately decorated REAL TREE, sleepover for the kids with presents in the morning—you name it. everyone was going to be there.

WHAT A GREAT OPPORTUNITY TO PROVE TO EVERYONE HOW WRONG THEY ARE ABOUT JESUS.

my plan:

sleep UNDER the giant real Christmas tree: y’know, the one with real pointy needles reaching all the way down to the base? that sheds? with lots of pokey tinsel?

catch Jesus in the act of depositing presents***: look. i’d seen like, ALL of Scooby Doo by this point. i knew Jesus was probably a real person, just not the Son of God.

subdue Jesus so he’s still around when everyone else wakes up: CLEARLY VERY FEASIBLE, given that Jesus was a heavyset white dude who used superhuman agility and strength to deliver presents around the world overnight and possibly had reindeer minions and i weighed 70 pounds at most while sopping wet.

(who is Santa Claus?? who cares)

????

EVERYONE MAGICALLY BECOMES AN ATHEIST AGAIN, AMERICA BECOMES A COMMUNIST STATE

***even if i didn’t believe in him, why was i slavishly devoted stopping a highly altruistic man who gave? people? presents? did i hate joy????

sure enough, at around 3 in the morning i heard soft boots approaching the tree. i reached out and snatched one of the Ankles of Jesus

—whereupon Youth Pastor Liao screamed “OH MY LORD” and kicked me in the face.

and THAT, dear friends, is how i spent my first Christmas in America with a concussion.

[waffleguppies]

I think this is the greatest Christmas story ever told

[pilgrimkitty]

This is the most beautiful story I’ve ever read.

[mulderscully]

THE X-FILES | 4.09

[stream]

Addams Family Values (1993) dir. Barry Sonnenfeld

[ragsy]

Having a totally normal one at work today

[ragsy]

Looks like the jury's in on this one

[neil-gaiman]

How was your day today? What did you do?

Took an incredible amount of delight in my seven year old son's decision to create a "television" out of two cardboard boxes, one of which he would sit in, the other of which went over his head and had a "screen" cut out, in which he would sit and tell us the news or weather or sing. "This is what people did before they had televisions," he explained, confidently.

Later in the day I took him, with his boxes, to his mother's Dresden Dolls soundcheck, and afterwards he got onto the stage in his boxes and performed his television for the first couple of dozen people to be allowed in. I got him off the stage by telling him it was time for him to take a bow. He took his bow. People applauded. Someone gave him a dollar which he considers the first money he has ever earned, and means he informed me after he swaggered off the stage still high on the applause that he was now "rich and famous, Dadda".

When he discovered, half an hour later, that his mother and Brian Viglione were performing without him on the stage in his box he took it very badly and pointed out that I had tricked him offstage and that he could be up there being famous and getting more dollars because people would like his television much more than they would like his mother's singing and Brian's drumming. So we walked home together and watched Minions.

[neil-gaiman]

Photo by Amanda's manager Jordan. I don't usually post photos of Ash, because of privacy and general discomfort with putting his face out to the world. But this photo is sort of perfect, and you can't tell what he looks like really...

[memewhore]

[becausegoodheroesdeservekidneys]

This man took so much longer to crack than I would have what a PROFESSIONAL

[peripetyy]

Plotting, scheming, etc.

[oneheadtoanother]

[catchymemes]

[disgruntled-foreign-patriarch]

it’s almost as if Tolkien knew what he was talking about

[thepieking]

It’s almost as if Tolkien personally witnessed one of the bloodiest wars in human history and then used that to fuel his writing.

[catchymemes]

[plumslices]

Can’t believe im adult now. Sometimes I feel like a teletubbie with a credit card.

[chancemedley116]

On my way to buy groceries

[powerbottombrucespringsteen]

The problem with putting s’mores as a technical challenge is that baking your own s’more from scratch defeats the purpose of s’mores which is of course to spend ten minutes trying to get a crappy store bought marshmallow the perfect golden brown color before going “fuck it” and letting it catch fire then frantically putting it on a graham cracker with hershey’s chocolate before it falls off of the stick you found on the ground

[roach-works]

the main ingredient of s’mores is chaos. the secondary ingredient is open flame. only after that do you break out the cheapest possible ingredients and go to town.