I'm Trying My Best

Ama, 26, they/she/he This blog sure does exist

[biggest-gaudiest-poltergeist]

today I found out my mother doesn’t know what dandelions are and now I’m wondering what other strange secrets she’s been quietly harboring

[krystal-prisms]

Where do you live that you don’t have dandelions?

[biggest-gaudiest-poltergeist]

we have dandelions EVERYWHERE, they are basically our State Weed, it is absolutely impossible that my mom has never interacted with a dandelion before, this requires further investigation

[biggest-gaudiest-poltergeist]

So after extensive interrogation I have an update:

my mom is in fact aware that dandelions exist. she temporarily forgot the name and there was some miscommunication.

the truth is actually weirder

she’s aware dandelions look like this

she is familiar with this flower. she knows the name of this flower. she declines to believe, however, that these are also dandelions

she does not believe these are the same plant. I tried to explain, and she thought I was either misinformed or lying. so I asked her what exactly did she think the yellow ones were called?

she answered, with complete confidence: Daffodils.

[biggest-gaudiest-poltergeist]

gosh I enjoy this website

[authoratmidnight]

For comparison, this is a daffodil

[quietlygrousing]

See, folks in the southern US will tell you up and down those are buttercups, actually.

[biggest-gaudiest-poltergeist]

i don’t think so? i’m southern and buttercups are what we call these things (much tinier)

[maejacrezz007]

Wait I thought those bigger cup ones were Easter Lillies???

[fractiousrvt]

This is an Easter Lily. It is an actual lily and therefore deadly to cats.

[blood-trip-god2]

They’re marigolds and I know a bitch when I see one!

[delphinidin4]

This is a marigold:

[biggest-gaudiest-poltergeist]

….we need to start taking the phrase “go touch grass” more literally. go outside and examine a flower i beg u

[jmtorres]

“buttercups” is a name applied to MANY flowers. in my part of the south it was this one:

imo there’s correct identifications of dandelions, daffodils, easter lilies and marigolds in this thread, but buttercups are simply impossible to agree on and the only solution is for everyone to post pictures of their local buttercups

[biggest-gaudiest-poltergeist]

*squints* is that a motherfucking EVENING PRIMROSE?!??

[demon-and-human]

Hello I would like to add to the confusion:

That purple fella is a Morning Glory as told by my mothers (texan)

[biggest-gaudiest-poltergeist]

⬆️ morning glory

[huehueiamabaguette]

wait so if thats morning glory what is this?

[biggest-gaudiest-poltergeist]

[delphinidin4]

*Puts hand over gaud’s mouth* It’s a butterfly pea. Please ignore the Latin name.

[biggest-gaudiest-poltergeist]

*licks ur palm* i won’t be silenced THE PEOPLE HAVE TO KNOW

[eggs-love-loki]

Will be attempting my first cutesy/unnecessary home diy today

[eggs-love-loki]

So we have white outlets and light switches to replace these old painted up ones but I just was too excited to put up my new painted covers! Left the screw unpainted for now since we’ll be taking them off soonish to replace the outlets, but when we do that I plan to paint the screw green

[eggs-love-loki]

Will be attempting my first cutesy/unnecessary home diy today

[eggs-love-loki]

Officially moved into our house today! The only rooms really livable are the bedroom and spare bedroom (which is currently operating as our living room/the cat’s bedroom) but we be here now!

[tpwrtrmnky]

Analyzing the politics of a work that's meant to be apolitical is actually a really interesting exercise because it asks you to critically examine what the creator considers to be "political" in the first place. Which ideas are just How Things Are, and which ones are Political, and how is that influenced by the creator's beliefs?

[takashi0]

Usually this just ends up with you looking like a moron btw

[tpwrtrmnky]

Angrily lashing out at the suggestion that it's possible to do basic media analysis was foundational to the ragebait ecosystem of the 2010s, from which we got basically the entire culture of modern far right politics, btw.

[iteh3xael]

I genuinely believe myself and others are being so sincere and literal when we say TOUCH GRASS

[tpwrtrmnky]

I went outside and got an education, that's where I learned that you can obtain knowledge and insight through analytical methods, then noticed that some people who sit on the internet yelling at strangers get really mad about that constantly.

[pensivegladiola]

Don’t make me point to the Omar Sakar poem

[manuciruja]

[smalllfieldmouse]

my ex used to get pissed off every time i showed them this video they would be like "that's not how a train works" really angrily and storm out of the room

[smalllfieldmouse]

everyones gotta stop reblogging this bro they're gonna find it and get so mad they try to strangle me again

[eggs-love-loki]

It’s been a while since I’ve had to pack to move with a hard deadline and I forgot it sucks ass

[eggs-love-loki]

I remembered date everything exists and returned to continue my hate everything run but I think Teddy might make me fumble my hate streak

[allthingswhumpyandangsty]

[recurring-polynya]

never lose hope. somewhere, a middle-aged, gender ambiguous person with an advanced degree in an esoteric field and a fiber arts hobby could be crashing out and pinning all their remaining mental health on getting obsessed with your otp. any day now, the most elegantly written 100k fanfic you have ever read is going to hit ao3. it could happen. it has happened.

[tenderhooked]

I WANT TO WRITE MY STORIES!!!!!!!!!!!! -> continues doing literally Anything Else besides writing

[eggs-love-loki]

Visited Savannah GA and did a trolley ride in the historic district and like every other street they’re like “so this building is closed cause it’s sinking. Yeah they built it on a burial ground and didn’t remove the bodies or anything so it sinks.” “So this hotel has a really wonderful restaurant- it is in the crematorium of an old funeral home but like it’s really great.” “So this street also used to be a graveyard but well. We needed a street. No we didn’t remove the bodies why would they do that?”

I’m sitting there like no wonder y’all got so many ghosts you treat their resting places like shit!!!!

[blackheart-biohazards]

😈 You are not bound by the Hays code.

😈 You are allowed to have evil characters who are not punished by the narrative by the end of the story.

😈 You are allowed to have evil characters who win.

😈 You are allowed to have evil characters who make evil look fun and cool.

😈 You are allowed to make your fun, cool evil character the protagonist.

😈 You are allowed to glorify, romanticize and eroticize evil characters and villainous acts.

😈 You are not obligated to teach your audience a moral lesson.

[dovesndecay]

[postarcadian]

the thing I love most about how tumblr users use tags is that it’s like what if a social media website had a footnotes system

[annabelle--cane]

I completely get Why this happens but I quite dislike this trend that happens in fan spaces sometimes where fans hold each other to much higher standards of queer representation than they do their source material. a classic example of this is when a writer or actor or other production member gives an offhand comment in an interview about thinking a character is x identity when it's never brought up in the text or is even mildly contradicted by the text a few times, and then fans turn around and deploy that piece of interview to say This Character Is Canonically X This Is #Representation How Dare You Ever Say They're Otherwise. this particularly bugs me as an ace person in regards to ace characters because there are now actually a good handful of textually asexual characters in fandom-popular media who go the whole nine yards, they explicitly say they're asexual or don't feel sexual attraction or voluntarily don't have sex because they don't wanna, if you want a character who is unmistakably asexual you can just find one and put them in your pocket, you don't have to pretend that word of god pseudo-canon asexuality is Good Representation and try (and invariably fail) to force other fans to play along. I just think it's unfair to accuse fanworks of erasure of identities that aren't even in the source text in the first place.

[genderkoolaid]

hey boy don't kill yourself. green's dictionary of slang is available online and allows you to explore 500 years of english vulgarity. you can search by part of speech, source, time period, etymology, and usage. there's a whole category for gay slang. they even have specific citations listed so you can see the exact context for yourself. boy did you know that in 1927 "to kneel at the altar" was slang for "to sodomize"

[genderkoolaid]

some other hits:

Princess: an effeminate and relatively youthful male homosexual or lesbian (1931-4)

Daffodil: effeminate young man (1925)

To throw a fuck into: to have sex with (1919)

Top sergeant: a masculine lesbian (1939) [‘she takes command of the girls’ privates’]

Lily: penis (1919)

Wolf: sexually aggressive man (1847); a homosexual top (1918)

Soul kiss: a deep kiss, involving putting one’s tongue into one’s partner’s mouth (1907)

Tom: a lesbian (1909); [in 'old tom'] prostitute catering to lesbians (1966)

Church mouse: a male homosexual who frequents crowded churches in order to fondle any potential sex partners. (1941)

Discover one's gender: to accept or acknowledge one’s homosexuality (1941) / Lose one's gender: To return to living as a heterosexual

Minty: a masculine lesbian (1941)

Also a lot of early 20th century vulgarity is recorded in Letter from My Father, which is a collection of letters published by a man who's dad was, in short, a major slut and human disaster who wrote about his sex life for his son. It's insane. You can find copies of it online & it's a wild fucking read (literally!) and I think a really interesting look at the life of a person who goes against our stereotypes of what people in the past were "supposed" to be like.

Anyways feel free to add y'all's favs to this post. & if you use this for gay historical fanfic please share with the class

[genderkoolaid]

#OH THIS IS EXTREMELY EXTREMELY HELPFUL#writing#resources#saving for later#maybe i should move my 1920s story from '25 to '27 because..... bro..........

note for writers: these are dated to the first time they were recorded, not necessarily to their first use. I imagine for many of these, they came about naturally through spoken language before they were written down anywhere. This is especially true of more underground slang because it's probably being recorded (in ways we still have) the least. So if you wanna use a term but it's a little off date-wise, give yourself some wiggle room.

also gonna take this moment to highlight two more i found recently:

Best boy: a sweetheart, a boyfriend, a husband. (1893) [w the obvious equivalent term 'best girl']

Honeydripper or honeydrips: a sexual partner (1917)

Like. Honeydripper?????? That's so horny I can't stop thinking about it. We need to bring THAT back

[the-transgenda-agenda]

updates to miscellaneous page - added link to green's dictionary of slang

[lastoneout]

I do actually wonder if part of the reason people start believing ancient aliens type conspiracy bullshit is because they're so divorced from labor they don't understand that a bunch of guys could absolutely quarry a large rock, move it somewhere, and build something with it because that's not actually all that hard or complicated. I've seen people use a simple chisel and hammer to crack boulders the size of houses clean in half, this stuff is a skill that needs to be learned ofc, but the idea that it was impossible for humans to build large, complex, sturdy structures with relatively "primative" tools is so silly I struggle to understand how someone could believe that unless they legit have no idea how labor works.

It's the same beef I have with Fallout. I know they excuse humans being so slow to redevelop society with all "knowledge being lost in the war" but that's just...not how things work. Humans figured out construction and farming very early. There's no way for humans to truly forget how to do this stuff, especially since people survived and could preserve and share what they know. But I just cannot fathom how in 300 years no one's figured out construction or fiber arts or soap making or anything humans have historically figured out super early in the process of being human.

And the only way I can see someone write a world like that is if they either didn't care (fine, it's not real and I get digging the apocalypse vibe) or were so divorced from the process of labor and creation that they actually think those things are way too hard for someone to figure out on their own.

If you think humans couldn't do these things without being taught or helped you have a very warped idea of technological progress and human ingenuity. No one taught humans how to build and create, we figured it out on our own, and it was not just smacking rocks together until something clicked either, ancient humans were just as intelligent as modern ones, they could use logic and reasoning to figure out how to do something new based on what they already know.

Idk it's a theory anyway, but I really do think it's interesting how as a kid I def could believe doing these things is impossible for ancient humans to being an adult who knows things and literally cannot even comprehend believing any of the incredible things ancient humans can do were "impossible" in any way. It wasn't. Humans are incredible, stop underestimating us. And crack open some wiki pages or even youtube tutorials so you get a grasp of how the world works, it's good for you.