[highways-are-liminal-spaces]

[bitcoitus]

Please remember that almost everyone around you is traumatized. I didn’t understand this when I was younger. I wondered why people acted so strangely and irrationally. Maybe all children wonder this. The author Robert Anton Wilson said (paraphrasing), “We have never seen a completely sane adult human.” No one makes it out of this life alive. It’s not their fault. Mercy, kindness, forgiving — these are what makes one human. They are other names for love. People break in the strangest of ways.

[bitcoitus]

“Under the present brutal and primitive conditions on this planet, every person you meet should be regarded as one of the walking wounded. we have never seen a man or woman not slightly deranged by either anxiety or grief. we have never seen a totally sane human being." — Robert Anton Wilson

[headspace-hotel]

Seems legit

[headspace-hotel]

we all hear about kudzu being introduced as "erosion control" in the South but I don't think contemporary people understand on a gut level what that means

these are images from a 1930s pamphlet that endorsed kudzu, entitled "stop gullies: save your farm"

It was Bad.

[headspace-hotel]

Invasive plants need to be understood as part of a much larger cycle of incredible violence against the land.

[peat-moss-and-starlight]

For context: erosion on that scale occurred as a result of our clear-cutting entire states. The land east of the Mississippi used to be covered in old-growth forest to an extent that we literally can’t imagine anymore, because most of us have never seen a forest over 100 years old. It turns out if you remove all vegetation from a landscape, you end up with a bunch of loose soil ready to move downstream. A fast-growing plant that covers everything in dense vegetation sounds like salvation when you’re surrounded by 40-foot deep gullies that get wider with every rainstorm.

[epicyurian]

A lot of the south too was covered in Canebreaks, basically bamboo forests like a lot of South Asia, I don't know the specifics of the ecology, but bamboo being a grass I assume is rhizomatic like other grasses and forms a big net of roots that prevent erosion. *I assume* (pleez ecologists weigh in)

[headspace-hotel]

Yes, the destruction of Canebrakes was a direct cause of this erosion we see here. Canebrakes were destroyed, using slave labor, to make room for cotton plantations. You can read about it here.

Canebrakes built up incredibly rich, fertile soil and are amazing at preventing erosion. They form incredibly strong mats of rhizomes. And their roots are known to go 10 feet deep into the soil.

The erosion we see in these pictures was a result, very much directly, of the Canebrakes being destroyed.

[headspace-hotel]

This is a case study in how violence against ecosystems goes so closely hand in hand with violence against people. The violence against the indigenous caretakers of the land, and the violence against the enslaved captives that were forced to clear the Rivercane and work the cotton fields that would degrade the soil into nothing.

[angel-oneiros]

Alexandre Hogue, Crucified Land, 1939

[headspace-hotel]

This painting was added in another reblog chain, it's good to have it on this thread

[yipyipallyall]

[nightclubsinger]

i’m strange but friendly so people tell me things

[steampowerednarwhal]

The (Un)official Tumblr Census 2026

This census was not written by and is not endorsed or sponsored by or affiliated with @staff in any way whatsoever. Your personal data will not be gathered by this census beyond your responses to the polls. Participating in the census is voluntary, but strongly encouraged.

[steampowerednarwhal]

1. Please select your age

< 18

19-30

31-40

41-50

51-60

60>

Voting ended onAug 5

[steampowerednarwhal]

2. Where do you live?

North/Central America (Outside the United States)

The United States

South America

Western Europe

Eastern Europe

Middle East/North Africa

Sub-Saharan Africa

North/Central Asia

Indian Subcontinent

East/Southeast Asia

Oceania/Polynesia

Voting ended onAug 3

[steampowerednarwhal]

3. Describe your living situation

Live with parent(s)/guardian(s)

Live with other relative(s)

Live with partner(s)

Live with friend(s)/roommate(s)

Live alone

Homeless/unhoused

Other

Voting ended onAug 5

[steampowerednarwhal]

4. Describe your employment status

Unemployed

In part/full time education

Working part/full time

Both working and in education

Self-employed/Freelance

Other

Voting ended onAug 5

[steampowerednarwhal]

5. Which religion do you follow?

Agnostic

Atheist/irreligious

Buddhism

Christianity

Hinduism

Islam

Judaism

No specific religious beliefs

Other religion(s)

Prefer not to answer/Results

Voting ended onAug 5

[steampowerednarwhal]

6. Describe your gender identity

Cis man

Cis woman

Trans man

Trans woman

Nonbinary

Other gender (s)

Prefer not to answer/Results

Voting ended onAug 5

[steampowerednarwhal]

7. Describe your sexual identity

Straight

Gay man

Lesbian

Asexual

Bisexual

Pansexual

Queer

Attracted to multiple/all genders

Other

Prefer not to answer/Results

Voting ended onAug 5

[steampowerednarwhal]

8. Where would you place yourself on the traditional left-right political spectrum?

Far Left

Left Wing

Centrist

Right Wing

Far Right

Voting ended onAug 5

[steampowerednarwhal]

9. When did you join Tumblr?

Pre 2010

2011-2015

2016-2020

2021-2025

2026

Voting ended onAug 5

[steampowerednarwhal]

10. How would you rate the (Un)official Tumblr Census?

5 stars

4 stars

3 stars

2 stars

1 star

0 stars

Voting ended onAug 5

[cookiethebirddoll]

bus is my friend. shes no train but shes trying her hardest in a world that hates her

[gardengnosticator]

““Let us free Ireland,” says the patriot who won’t touch Socialism. Let us all join together and crush the brutal Saxon. Let us all join together, says he, all classes and creeds. And, says the town worker, after we have crushed the Saxon and freed Ireland, what will we do? Oh, then you can go back to your slums, same as before. Whoop it up for liberty! And, says the agricultural workers, after we have freed Ireland, what then? Oh, then you can go scraping around for the landlord’s rent or the money-lenders’ interest same as before. Whoop it up for liberty! After Ireland is free, says the patriot who won’t touch socialism, we will protect all classes, and if you won’t pay your rent you will be evicted same as now. But the evicting party, under command of the sheriff, will wear green uniforms and the Harp without the Crown, and the warrant turning you out on the roadside will be stamped with the arms of the Irish Republic. Now, isn’t that worth fighting for? And when you cannot find employment, and, giving up the struggle of life in despair, enter the poorhouse, the band of the nearest regiment of the Irish army will escort you to the poorhouse door to the tune of St. Patrick’s Day. Oh! It will be nice to live in those days! “With the Green Flag floating o’er us” and an ever-increasing army of unemployed workers walking about under the Green Flag, wishing they had something to eat. Same as now! Whoop it up for liberty!”

— James Connolly, Let Us Free Ireland! (1899)

[drumlincountry]

[lostverdania-moving]

“If you remove the English army to-morrow and hoist the green flag over Dublin Castle, unless you set about the organisation of the Socialist Republic your efforts would be in vain. England would still rule you. She would rule you through her capitalists, through her landlords, through her financiers, through the whole array of commercial and individualist institutions she has planted in this country and watered with the tears of our mothers and the blood of our martyrs.”

— James Connolly, Socialism and Nationalism (1897)

[nonaferatu]

This would have had me crucified on tumblr 10 years ago but maybe we are ready for this conversation now:

If you are a socially anxious person, you have to socialize. Your panic/anxiety attacks will only get worse and trigger more frequently if you constantly avoid contact with The Public. Not saying that you need to be a social butterfly- but there is a genuine problem with not being able to order your own meal at a restaurant. And it cannot be solved by always having someone else do it for you.

This is a PSA to about 3/4s of the Portland Youth populace

[nonaferatu]

everyone who reblogs this and is like "I ordered my own tea this week" or "I only barfed once when I had to give a presentation'- you are doing amazing sweetie. Have patience with yourself, you are relearning a skill so difficult that people get 4 year degrees to do it professionally.

[kosmogrl]

[aurpiment]

“It’s easy to assume”: someone’s misconception is about to be amiably corrected

“It’s tempting to assume”: someone’s assumption is about to be criticized

“It’s comforting to assume”: someone’s assumption is going to be read for filth

[an-ruraiocht]

maybe it's silly when my dialect of english isn't minoritised or endangered but it makes me sad when i realise that the way i speak has become americanised and i've lost a lot of the phrases i grew up with in favour of ones i've picked up online. the other day i found myself saying I would "throw [something] out". it would always have been "throw away" in my family. when did i start saying out instead? "i need to throw that out" = I need to throw it away, in the way i learned to speak. talking about laundry and groceries instead of doing the washing, doing the food shop. "i need to do laundry" where my mum would say "i've got to put a wash on". these are the everyday things, but there are a thousand more tiny details, language flattened and homogenised by media and international conversations

and it's not that the international conversations aren't valuable. and my dialect is not anything special or anything endangered. but language variety and dialect variety matters even when it's boring and everyday, i think. i am trying to remember how to speak with my own tongue again

[an-ruraiocht]

it's "hahah yeah nobody can ever tell where i from" as a joke until you realise you don't know what it would sound like to come from there

it's "give your characters a distinct way of speaking that says something about them" until you realise they all sort of sound the same, american-flattened british english, everything too distinctive smoothed away to be understood online and everything quirky or unusual disappeared in favour of a more common option

sigh

like. i have one of the least minoritised dialects of british english that could possibly exist. i'm from london and the south east. sure you'll rarely see MLE in formal written text but i only have smatterings of that anyway. but i already don't sound like i did ten years ago and struggle to remember the ways i learned to phrase things. (and you won't see MLE in formal written text so i won't learn them that way.) and some of that is a reflection of the places i've lived and the people I've been but some of it isn't and it makes me sad

[an-ruraiocht]

weirdly, it's learning Irish that makes me very conscious of this. paying attention to dialectal variation there makes me a lot more awake to it in english, and caring about 'saibhreas' and idiom and complexity of language makes me think about language homogeneity and simplification in general. i think about it in the context of AI, too, which flattens language to an average output. and i think about the collapse of spoken language into written language because of extensive online communication and how this has benefits, but also losses: the erosion of a formal written register with the richness and complexity that goes with that, in favour of a naturalistic spoken style, and the chipping away of dialect and local styles in speech to better match how people would talk-type online to be understood. when speech and writing become the same thing they lose their particularities and you end up with... less language

and i say this as somebody who relies very heavily on writing as speech and who is often better at it than speaking aloud

[divingreflex]

This has been happening within America as well. Strong New York and Boston accents are largely disappearing among young people, and a lot of regional dialects in the South have been homogenized into a general ‘southern’ dialect.

Even among milder dialects, for example I don’t have any of my mom’s Northern Cities Vowel Shift (pronouncing egg like ‘ayg’ and milk like ‘malk’ or ‘melk’). Like you said, learning Irish has also made me realize how genericized my own language really is.

[boringkate]

Boots Riley making a porno: So it's gonna seem like it's a scene about a girl getting gangbanged by mechanics at an auto repair shop, but when you skip forward to the anal you find out the mechanics are aliens and most of the work they do is on space ships that were intentionally designed to be unrepairable to keep aliens buying new models of ships and so they're getting hurt trying to work on those things. By the time we get to the blowbang at the end she'll have gotten the workers to unionize and go on strike. There's also gonna be some stuff in there about food deserts. Because the guys aren't eating well and their cum could taste better. Also minotaurs.

[identifying-planes-in-posts]

What airport is most based, what airport is most epic, and what airport is most cringe?

Everyone take a vote

Based/Epic/Cringe Airports

For consistency, use three letter IATA codes for all responses

[orteil42]

there should be more phoneme shifts happening… more rebracketings… there's still time for the english language to evolve… i hope to see the advent of "I wrote a nardicle" in my lifetime

[grox]

no one wants to fuck you because you’re mean and strange

So?

[grox]

Wait hold up this is awesome. So not because I'm ugly?

[an-ruraiocht]

there's a lot of talk about reading comprehension and one thing i think is the biggest barrier to people on this site getting better at it is simply... rushing. rushing to share something you haven't understood, rushing to have an opinion without taking the time to think about it, rushing to declare that you don't understand something

take these tags, on somebody else's post (condolences pip)

the thing is. this is what i would call an inside thought. nobody would have known you didn't get it if you didn't tell them that. if you recognised that it was important but didn't have the headspace to process it, you can reblog without commentary for others, or to come back to later. or you can save it somewhere and wait until you DO have the capacity to read it over a few more times, ponder it, consider what it might mean, figure out how to understand it, and THEN reblog it

but no. rushing to reblog while it is still opaque. rushing to admit to ignorance rather than spend the time to achieve understanding. perhaps hoping that somebody will break it down for you more simply, though to my mind it was quite simply phrased in the first place. never stopping to take the time first

comprehension is not always instant! sometimes it takes a bit of time for something to percolate after you read it; sometimes you need to read it a few times; sometimes you realise you don't have the context for it and either go and get the context or accept that it's not for you right now

please just simply slow down. you don't always have to respond to everything within a second or two. it is okay if it is not an instantaneous understanding. we all need to get more comfortable with thinking more slowly and more deeply and more carefully, and not letting our instant split second responses drive us all the time, because they are a barrier to genuine reflection