Late Night Philosophy

or something like that

[apolladay]

Which notorious English class short story fucked you up the most?

* I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream

*The King in Yellow

* The Lottery

* The Masque of the Red Death

* The Monkey’s Paw

* The Most Dangerous Game

* The Nameless City

* The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas

* There Will Come Soft Rains

*The Yellow Wallpaper

* The Veldt

* “you think those were fucked up? What about [X]!”

Which notorious English class short story fucked you up the most?

I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream

The King in Yellow

The Lottery

The Masque of the Red Death

The Monkey’s Paw

The Most Dangerous Game

The Nameless City

The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas

There Will Come Soft Rains

The Yellow Wallpaper

The Veldt

“you think those were fucked up? What about [X]!”

Voting ended onApr 30

[it-grrl]

Okay I have things I should be seeing to but I couldn't help myself. In case you, like me, have not read all of these stories and would like to be amongst the lucky 10,000 today:

I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream by Harlan Ellison

The King in Yellow by Robert W Chambers*

The Lottery by Shirley Jackson**

The Masque of the Red Death by Edgar Allan Poe

The Monkey's Paw by W.W. Jacobs

The Most Dangerous Game by Richard O'Connell

The Nameless City by HP Lovecraft

The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas by Ursula K LeGuin

There Will Come Soft Rains by Ray Bradbury

The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman

The Veldt by Ray Bradbury

Honorable Mention from the comments/reblogs:

All Summer in a Day by Ray Bradbury

*note: this is actually a collection of short stories and clocks in at about 72k words

**Originally published in the New Yorker in 1948; interestingly, the New Yorker still has this story archived on their website BEHIND A PAYWALL. CAN YOU IMAGINE.

[wizardarchetypes]

i love truck stops in winter bc i love a little good old fashioned reconnaissance. i’m at a wyoming truck stop eating taco bell with a bunch of random truckers discussing road conditions like we’re in a high fantasy tavern & inn and we’re warning each other about monsters and highway men. everyone talking about where we’re coming from and going to and how bad it’ll be getting there.

THE tallest man i’ve ever seen in real life just stopped me in the hallway by the coin operated laundry apropos of nothing and asked “which direction are you going?” i said east and he said “good” and walked away.

i caught up with him and asked why and he said “west’s no good right now. i just came from there.”

apparently a truck jackknifed and has traffic backed up ten miles but he sounded for all the world like he just found his village raised to the ground by an evil mage’s army

[rosslynpaladin]

...it's super cool in a 'historian with goosebumps' kind of way that this whole experience is essentially timeless.

As long as we've had ROADS or even game trails this

very scene

has played out in brush shelters, shrines, taverns, inns, post stations, and hotel lobbies.

Humans, out upon the Ways, where danger may be, sharing information because we live when we cooperate and share and we all know it out there.

[wizardarchetypes]

being an extremely light sleeper who doesn't go to bed until 3-4 am so no matter where i live my roommates & friends say stuff like, "wake us up if the tornado sirens go off, "wake us up if the tsunami sirens go off," "wake us up if that bear comes back by camp,"

when people say these things i can't help but feel i'm satisfying my evolutionary purpose as night guard. it's just easier now than it would've been for me 10,000 years ago bc i have a flashlight and a weather app.

[wizardarchetypes]

I'm a fisher price Rescue Heroes action figure

[depsidase]

[genderkoolaid]

The little-told story of how the U.S. government poisoned alcohol during Prohibition.

It was Christmas Eve 1926, the streets aglitter with snow and lights, when the man afraid of Santa Claus stumbled into the emergency room a

Frustrated that people continued to consume so much alcohol even after it was banned, federal officials had decided to try a different kind of enforcement. They ordered the poisoning of industrial alcohols manufactured in the United States, products regularly stolen by bootleggers and resold as drinkable spirits. The idea was to scare people into giving up illicit drinking. Instead, by the time Prohibition ended in 1933, the federal poisoning program, by some estimates, had killed at least 10,000 people. [...] By mid-1927, the new denaturing formulas included some notable poisons—kerosene and brucine (a plant alkaloid closely related to strychnine), gasoline, benzene, cadmium, iodine, zinc, mercury salts, nicotine, ether, formaldehyde, chloroform, camphor, carbolic acid, quinine, and acetone. The Treasury Department also demanded more methyl alcohol be added—up to 10 percent of total product. It was the last that proved most deadly. The results were immediate, starting with that horrific holiday body count in the closing days of 1926. Public health officials responded with shock. “The government knows it is not stopping drinking by putting poison in alcohol,” New York City medical examiner Charles Norris said at a hastily organized press conference. “[Y]et it continues its poisoning processes, heedless of the fact that people determined to drink are daily absorbing that poison. Knowing this to be true, the United States government must be charged with the moral responsibility for the deaths that poisoned liquor causes, although it cannot be held legally responsible.” His department issued warnings to citizens, detailing the dangers in whiskey circulating in the city: “[P]ractically all the liquor that is sold in New York today is toxic,” read one 1928 alert. He publicized every death by alcohol poisoning. He assigned his toxicologist, Alexander Gettler, to analyze confiscated whiskey for poisons—that long list of toxic materials I cited came in part from studies done by the New York City medical examiner’s office. Norris also condemned the federal program for its disproportionate effect on the country’s poorest residents. Wealthy people, he pointed out, could afford the best whiskey available. Most of those sickened and dying were those “who cannot afford expensive protection and deal in low grade stuff.” And the numbers were not trivial. In 1926, in New York City, 1,200 were sickened by poisonous alcohol; 400 died. The following year, deaths climbed to 700. These numbers were repeated in cities around the country as public-health officials nationwide joined in the angry clamor. Furious anti-Prohibition legislators pushed for a halt in the use of lethal chemistry. “Only one possessing the instincts of a wild beast would desire to kill or make blind the man who takes a drink of liquor, even if he purchased it from one violating the Prohibition statutes,” proclaimed Sen. James Reed of Missouri.

This isn't particularly relevant to anything specific. I just wanted to remind everyone this is something the US government did.

[whilomm]

oh, i clicked on the article to see if this book was mentioned, and hey its DEBORAH BLUME!! aka the author of the book I was just about to reccomend about this Exact Thing:

if this article is interesting to you, i highly reccomend this book. It doesn't just discuss prohibition of course, but it goes even more in depth on this stuff.

I would also reccomend her newer book...

this one is about the history of food safety in the united states, and I cannot emphasize enough how disgusting some of this is. wanna find out what embalmed milk is? wanna learn about how much random bullshit from sawdust to coconut shells to dust was put into spices? wanna learn about all the ways food was left to rot and be sold before the FDA? wanna learn how HARD food manufacturers fought regulation, for their right to not be inspected and put borax and formaldehyde and unlabeled ingredients in their products? read this book!

this book takes its name from the IRL poison squad, which was a bunch of healthy young men who were purposefully fed common food additives like borax to see if they were as safe as manufacturers claimed.

This, of course, is also not at all relevant to current events or to claims that deregulation is unneeded because companies will self regulate. nope. not at all.

[brionysea]

I like how leverage has a genius character and an autistic character but the autistic character isn't the genius character. the genius is a 22 year old black man with adhd who becomes an expert in anything you give him within 24 hours and the autistic character is a white woman who jumps off buildings for fun and once stabbed a man with a fork because he encroached on her personal space and sense of moral conduct

[theconcealedweapon]

[political-us]

[the-prophesied-disco-gay]

Literally sobbing. A judge, a US judge defended us. A judge brought up intersex people, uaing the term intersex, to *defend* us by not allowing our erasure. I'm having a lot of feelings right now

[graysongoal]

Judge Reyes is literally out here serving so much cunt:

Also, this is her Wikipedia photo:

I love her.

[proleposting]

[stoney-baloney-with-cheese]

Do not let them erase this. Do not let them tell you he meant "my heart goes out for you."

This man is the grandson of a Canadian Nazi sympathizer who moved to South Africa BECAUSE he thought the apartheid was just the coolest.

He has a gaggle of kids specifically because he believes his genes are superior and need to be spread to improve humanity.

He has thrown his support behind the neonazi party in Germany and the far right party in the UK, not to mention how far he's wormed up the ass of the Republican party.

He threw two sieg heil salutes back to back at the inauguration of the president of the United States and is trying to scrub the evidence off the internet.

Elon Reeve Musk is a fucking Nazi.

[petit-papillion]

Charles just randomly trending on Tumblr...

[countingstars-17]

Vegas being THE Lestappen weekend, a necessary thread:

1. Max inviting Charles to join his interview:

2. Max and Charles chatting + them forgetting Carlos' existence:

3. Max saying in the press conference that he already knew in karting days that Charles would make it to F1:

4. Charles talking about karting funny moments:

5. Max grabbing Charles' waist after the race:

6. Charles waiting for Max to get into the car:

7. Max joking about going to nightclubs after the race:

8. Max patting Charles' back on the podium:

9. Max mentioning the incHident in the post race press conference:

10. Charles saying they grew up together and that he knows Max very well:

[countingstars-17]

Vegas being THE Lestappen weekend, a necessary thread:

1. Max inviting Charles to join his interview:

2. Max and Charles chatting + them forgetting Carlos' existence:

3. Max saying in the press conference that he already knew in karting days that Charles would make it to F1:

4. Charles talking about karting funny moments:

5. Max grabbing Charles' waist after the race:

6. Charles waiting for Max to get into the car:

7. Max joking about going to nightclubs after the race:

8. Max patting Charles' back on the podium:

9. Max mentioning the incHident in the post race press conference:

10. Charles saying they grew up together and that he knows Max very well:

[cupidskissx]

Sergio dissociating after being subjected to yet another Lestappen debrief:

📸 James Moy

[cupidskissx]

A Lestappen love story told through their feet, part ♾️:

📸 James Moy

[brakingpoint]

toto telling george to hunt them down like the head of an international crime ring whispering a sleeper cell activation phrase to his number one assassin