Dragons are Lurking

what am i doing - Ace - they/them and ne/nem- this blog is a mess

[redstonedust]

if vampires existed in real life i think there would be shady companies advertising "organic blood" sourced from "willing donors" who are coincidentally all poor people being paid like $5 per blood donation. and like haughty vegan vampires who only drink a synthetic blood drink thats brewed in a way thats actively worse for the enviroment. and radical traditionalist vampires who go on tiktok and claim that true alpha chads have to drain and kill people and anyone who leaves their victims alive is a liberal cuck. enter the world of hypothetical insufferable vampire politics with me.

[annabelle--cane]

gothic horror is when there's a location. cosmic horror is when there's an unauthorized fucking Thing. folk horror is when you're outside.

[aralintheobsessive]

if you want butterflies, you need to live with caterpillars.

i am not being metaphorical, i work in a garden center, stop buying plants 'to bring in the bees and butterflies' and then immediately poisoning every caterpillar that dares to consume a single leaf

you will not get butterflies if you kill all the things that turn into butterflies! what are you doing!

[annabelle--cane]

I understand the argument that while transformative and derivative works have always existed, "fanfiction" as a medium is inherently connected to the concept of IP law and thus is a specifically contemporary art/craft movement, I get it I really do, but also twenty years after the canterbury tales were finished an english monk wrote his own additional chapter and added himself as a character, and I'm sorry but that man should have been on wattpad

[earlgraytay]

The thing is that I feel like there's two things people are conflating under the label of 'fanfiction':

A specific literary movement (or series thereof?), akin to Surrealism or Modernism, that started in the 1960s with the Star Trek/Man from UNCLE fandoms and has continued in some form, with its own language and culture, to the present day. It is as inaccurate to call Dante Alighieri a fanfic writer as it is to call him a post-modernist- he might be one avant la lettre, but he didn't exist in a context where 'fanfic' was even a concept on his radar, and could not have been part of this movement.

The fine and noble human traditions of self-insertion, wish fulfillment, and Original Character Donut Steel, which have been going on as long as humans have loved stories, and will continue to go on as long as humans are human.

[solarishashernoseinabook]

I think the author of my immortal should drop a new chapter out of the blue. it would make this site completely unusable but more importantly it would be really funny

[fromthemouthofkings]

better yet, someone should fake it and then we can have another round of arguing over who the real author is too

[depsidase]

[countyourteeth]

Oh em gee an email from my good friend Jonathan Harker! He’s going on ANOTHER business trip to Transylvania? Man, I sure hope everything goes better for him this year.

[wherestoriescomefrom]

why did you people come up with russian names for what is supposed to be a movie set in italy. what was the thought process here. why does she sound like she walked out of a tolstoy novel

[wherestoriescomefrom]

an insane response, but i can't fight this. carry on

[wherestoriescomefrom]

im being hunted for sport in the notes

[edit: the user in the last screenshot is a TERF. I can't control how this post is circulating, but I figured I'd add an edit.]

[toolusingmammalgirl]

The Four Sacred Artistic Motives:

-what if this bad thing was good instead

-how about Make-Believe Land can have whatever I want

-would that be fucked up or what

-I think that shit's hot

[cooking-with-hailstones]

Listen if the study of ancient humans doesn’t make you at least a little bit emotional idk what to say.

I started crying today at the museum because they had reconstructed the shoes of Otzi the iceman.

Either he or someone he knew who cared about him made these shoes out of grass and bear skin and twine and he was wearing them when he died over five thousand years ago.

And a Czech researcher and his students did reconstructions of these shoes and wore them to the same place where he died to test them out and they were like yep! These shoes are really cozy and comfy and didn’t give us blisters while hiking!

Is that not just the coolest shit ever????

[malkaleh]

@taibhsearachd

[x0401x]

So I just saw a post by a random personal blog that said “don’t follow me if we never even had a conversation before” and?????? Not to be rude but literally what the fuck??????????

I’ve had people (non-pornbots) try to strike conversation out of nowhere in my DMs recently, and now I’m wondering if they were doing that because they wanted to follow me and thought they needed to interact first. I feel compelled to say, just in case, that it’s totally okay to follow this blog (or my side blog, for that matter) even if we’ve never talked before.

Also, I’m legit confused. Is this how follow culture works right now? It was worded like it’s common sense but is that really a thing?

[x0401x]

Saw a sharp increase in my follower count after posting this. The legitimacy of it is driving me nuts so I also feel the need to say that you can follow anyone on here regardless of whether you’ve interacted with them or not. People like the above mentioned blog are exceptions. Perhaps they themselves think they aren’t and therefore will act like they aren’t, but they are, trust me.

Just follow anyone you wanna follow. The worst thing that can happen is maybe getting soft-blocked by the other person, but if they do soft-block you, then they were never that worth following in the first place.

[starfieldcanvas]

wow. really hope this isn't actually a norm taking hold with new users! this isn't facebook, you don't need to know people before following them

[westiec]

this is the '10 year mutuals you've never spoken to once' site

[victusinveritas]

[silly-jellyghoty]

Fascinating!

[pyrrhiccomedy]

So I've been learning French for a while and 'faire' is actually an incredible word. Like what a fucking breakthrough in economy of language.

Faire is a verb that is usually translated into English as "to do/to make," but it covers way more actions than that, which is very confusing for new speakers. because (I have realized) that's not really what faire means.

Faire is actually a word that just gestures vaguely in the direction of the object of the sentence and goes "you know." "Je fais du velo." "Je fais du courses." "Je fais mes valises." I'm biking. I go grocery shopping. I'm packing my bags. You're just sort of pointing at a bike and going "you know, the obvious thing you'd do with it."

English: "You mean RIDE it??"

French: "Sure whatever."

Like idk I just really enjoy the concept of a catch-all verb that you can just slap onto almost anything because who fucking gives a shit, you get the idea. There's a bike. what do you think I'm going to do with it.

[teaboot]

I feel like the closest English equivalent might be "Get"? Or maybe "Got"?

"I get a present. I need to get going. I get to drive. I get what you mean. I need to get over there. I'll get it done."

"I've got this. I got you a present. I've got to go. I just got here. "

Or maybe that's too close to "Avoir?"

OH WAIT

NO

IS IT "FUCK"?

"I fucked your mom. I fucked up. This shit is fucked. Stop fucking around. Something's fucky. You're fucked up. My car is fucked. Fuck shit up. Fuck yeah."

SOMEONE MORE FLUENT THAN ME PLEASE ADVISE

[rumplefuckingstiltzkin]

I believe you got (apprehended) the idea right away, Teaboot.

'Get' most commonly makes sense when substituting 'comprehend' or 'manipulate'. It works in the sphere of receivership. Heidegger's Dasein philosophy applies here. This is closer to 'faire' than the english language use of 'fuck', because the breadth of 'fuck's use is greater, and covers pronouns, (Grab that fucker, will ya'?) verbs, (I fuck cars, monster fucking, it'll all be fucked by 2030,) and prepositions, interjections, and abstract nouns besides, and this is not a premeditated exhaustive list.

[teaboot]

Oooooooooh ty

[luulapants]

This actually has to do with what linguists call "open class" vs. "closed class" words! Certain parts of speech in different languages may be more "open" or "closed" than others. Open class parts of speech readily accept new words. Closed classes do not. Generally, open classes are more content-oriented and closed classes are more grammatically oriented.

Take conjunctions for example (and, but, or, etc.) and try to think about inventing and introducing a brand new conjunction to the English language. Doesn't sound likely, right? But we add new nouns all the time, like "deepfake" or "rizz."

English also adds verbs easily, which is how we easily get verbs like "googling" or "doomscrolling," but verbs are a less open class languages like French or Spanish. This makes sense when you consider the grammatical complexity of verb conjugation in those languages compared to a language like English. Turning "bike" into a verb is pretty simple in English and only generates four verb forms of the word: bike, bikes, biking and biked. In Spanish, for example, verbing 'bicicleta' would generate dozens of new forms of the word through 16 tense and mood variations multiplied by five or six different forms (first, second, third person + plurality), depending on dialect.

That's where words like "faire" (French) and "hacer" (Spanish) come in. Instead of generating a new verb and all of the conjugations that come with it, those languages are more likely to use the preexisting verbs faire and hacer as verbifying auxiliaries. As a result, you can stick them in front of any non-verb to make a verb version.

So actually the best English equivalent to "Je fais mes valises," would be "I'm suitcasing."

[beggars-opera]

The old school lack of transparency on tumblr is amazing because you assume the people you follow must all be equivalent to you and then you see someone write “I brought my youngest to college today” and someone else write “my mom wouldn’t let me listen to Ariana Grande when I was a kid” and then your head explodes

[formerlyanon]

and we need that! keeps us humble. 

[dabouse]

Then I'm just like WHAT DO YOU MEAN YOU’RE AN ADULT

[tomboy014]

It goes the other way, too, because WHAT DO YOU MEAN YOU'RE A CHILD?!!

[dabouse]

I'm 16, that's like, barely a child

[tomboy014]

I'm in my 30s. You are baby

[digitaldiscipline]

I'm older than both of you in a trenchcoat.

[kabretoss]

honestly one of the best things we can do for ourselves is realize that people of different ages than us can still be the same kind of person as us. it's humbling and it gives everyone involved a sense of continuity, and it busts those stupid generational stereotypes media is so fond of.

[beggars-opera]

#this post must be doing the rounds again bc I saw it this morning#then saw it on youtube shorts pasted over minecraft parcor(?)#and now here again#what are the odds

I'm sorry WHAT

[catnipper]

[prokopetz]

Sometimes I wonder what portion of authors who write transhuman-themed sci-fi started doing the "random chapter from a wildly incongruous viewpoint" thing because it's become customary in the genre, versus what portion of authors who write transhuman-themed sci-fi got into the genre in the first place because they love to head-hop and wanted to expand their options.

Like, sure, let's have a chapter from the viewpoint of the coffee machine. Why not. Apparently sapient coffee machines are a thing in this setting – it's not even metaphorical, it's straight up diegetic that the coffee machine has political opinions. The coffee machine is not a significant character, it never interacts with the main cast, and its viewpoint will never be revisited, but getting its perspective is essential to the narrative.

[lyrarts]

I finally managed to catch an eclipse on camera!

Dug out the DSLR for this and had to use a handheld filter so these were the images that didn't come out shaky.

Unfortunately that also meant I couldn't take my time to meter and catch the really cool red coronal ejections I could see during totality. But this was still very cool.