PUT YOUR BEARD IN MY MOUTH
sheepfilms
occasionally subtle
Claire Keane
cherry valley forever
@theartofmadeline
Fai_Ryy
Show & Tell
almost home
ojovivo
YOU ARE THE REASON
2025 on Tumblr: Trends That Defined the Year
wallacepolsom
Mike Driver
todays bird
oozey mess
we're not kids anymore.
Jules of Nature
Keni
Cosimo Galluzzi
seen from Türkiye
seen from United States
seen from Brazil
seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from Malaysia
seen from United Kingdom
seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from Colombia
seen from Bangladesh
seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from Jamaica
seen from United States
seen from Jamaica
seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from United States
@freakycircle2
hello! due to issues with my old blog @freakycircle not being able to send messages and ghost noting I've had to create a new one.
I'm still setting this one up but I'm trying to follow everyone I did before. so if you know me and see this hi!
i will eventually change this name to freakycircle and the old one to freakycircle2 but for now here I am
ultimately the truth about frankenstein is that we are all grotesque amalgamations of the best and worst parts of everyone who came before us. and sometimes the people who are supposed to love us because of and in spite of this will not. and we can kill them with hammers for that. and i think that’s beautiful
The most obsession inducing trait a character can have for me is knowing somewhere in their heart That They Are A Bad Kid
This isn't necessarily literal. It can apply to characters who aren't children too. But there's something about characters who are either certain of the fact, or terrified of the possibility, that they are just fundamentally wrong and bad at their core
It is also important to me that it is not true. No one is fundamentally broken and evil.
Olivia Tapiero, from her book titled "Nothing At All," originally published in January 2026
"I love you but you're doing wrong in a way I cannot condone" and "I hate you but you're being wronged in a way I cannot stomach" are top tier and I need more of them.
hey guysss so unfortunately the rumors are true and im leaving the narrative. Buttt the good news is my absence will create such a gaping hole in your lives that it will become a sort of presence itself, and so in a way it will kind of be like i never left! But i am. Leaving just to be clear.
reading a historical romance novel and reflecting on the way these stories often present woke nobility for the contemporary reader. a big thing is servants. you can’t not have servants in those times but many modern readers think “but I would never have servants. it would be so weird to have servants” and in order to make the protagonists of the story more relatable they are actually friends with the servants. but flip your perspective and think of it from the side of the servants. wouldn’t it be so awful if your boss was always trying to be friends with you. a really common thing you’ll see is the woke baronet having tea in the kitchen with the servants bc he’s not like other baronets. but what if your boss wanted to hang out and talk during your lunch break every day. not so charming when you think about it that way
#okay but now what is the optimal way to be a good boss in this situation i genuinely wanna know#its easy to guess what makes a bad boss or a mid boss. but what is a good boss#specifically in such a highly structured hierarchal situation (via @rainbowroach)
HELLO you are asking questions that literature and poetry THROUGHOUT the middle ages has asked, and it is from this questioning that we derive things like the Codes of Chivalry (which is not "how to treat a noble lady really nice" but is actually "how to be an ethical person when you're rich and you own a horse" and includes such things as "don't run people over with your horse")
In fact I daresay you already know instinctively just from cultural osmosis what a good boss -- a good liege lord -- is and does based on the tropes that have survived to the current day and the kinds of things that get Hugely Praised in things like legends of King Arthur.
A good boss (liege lord) is:
Merciful. He is not having his peasants killed for things like poaching rabbits during a famine. In fact, he is working to mitigate famine. During times of individual hardship, he might negotiate with a peasant for a payment plan on their annual rent.
Patient. He is not impulsive, he does not lose his temper.
Prudent. He makes choices that are thoughtful, considered, conservative (in the sense of not needlessly risky--he's not investing his entire fortune in having everyone plant an unproven crop). He is making sure local infrastructure like roads and public buildings are maintained and kept in good nick.
Gentle. He doesn't haul off and slap a servant or a tenant for breaking a dish or making a mistake. He doesn't abuse animals, his wife or children, or his employees. He doesn't rape the servants.
Generous (both in money and in spirit). He is not extorting the peasants for an amount of rent that is beyond their means, he is not raising taxes every year to cover his own lavish lifestyle. He is paying his servants a living wage (or, if wages are low, he's giving them room/board/clothing to make up the difference). If someone in a tenant's family dies, the lord is sending a gift of condolence, or helping to pay for the funeral, or possibly even ATTENDING the funeral and speaking a few kind words about the deceased, ESPECIALLY if they were a really upstanding and important member of the community. If one of his tenants is gravely sick, the lord is sending a basket of food or paying for a doctor. He is giving charitably (generally this will be, like, a bequest to the church so that they can run a hospital or an orphanage or a school for the local village children).
Pious. This classically means "goes to church, submits with humility to God" but to me this quality is subtextually standing in for "maintaining an ongoing sense of Perspective that HE'S not god, that there are higher powers he is Accountable to, that he too can be Judged, etc, so that he doesn't end up going on a weird fucked up power trip"
Humble. One of the most admiring things you hear about a lord doing in literature and epic poetry is, "He ate off of wooden plates while his followers ate off of gold and silver." Humility isn't about being meek, it's just about not thinking so much of yourself that you turn your nose up and sneer at what "lesser" people do. In other words: Don't be a fucking diva. If your carriage gets stuck in the mud, climb out and help everybody else push, you're not gonna die from getting mud on your shoes.
Condescending. This word has changed wildly in meaning/tone over the last couple centuries -- it's now a rude thing to do (because we've done away with legal social hierarchies, so someone acting like they're lowering themselves to your level IS insulting), but in older times, a high-ranking person "condescending" to a servant was worthy of praise and admiration: it means they were setting aside rank and privilege to speak to them with the easygoing, friendly respect and compassion they'd give a peer. This is things like... Treats those beneath him with courtesy and respect (ie: listens soberly and attentively when one of his servants or tenants comes to complain about a problem). Having a sense of humor and kindness about it when the lord and a servant both come around a corner at the same time and run into each other and the servant gets knocked to the ground and starts babbling apologies--the condescending (positive) lord helps them to their feet with his own hands and cracks a joke to show them that it's ok (as opposed to just walking off without a word or insulting/scolding them). This is also things like trusting a farmer, woodcutter, or artisan to speak with expertise about their own livelihood and taking their advice into consideration if they tell the lord that one of his ideas won't work.
Good boundaries. The ethical liege lord knows that it's normal for the staff to probably be softly bitching about him in private (even with a really good boss, we all grumble from time to time). He's not eavesdropping on them, he's not going into the staff areas where they should reasonably expect to have a degree of privacy, etc.
Righteous and protective of "the weak". The "weak" here doesn't necessarily mean physically weak, this is often used in the sense of someone politically or socially weak, aka The Marginalized -- the poor, the disabled, women, children, the elderly, etc. If a lord sees someone like this being mistreated or abused, he's supposed to step in and put a stop to that.
Committed to reciprocity. In a highly hierarchical system like feudalism, every person (from the lowest peasant all the way up to the crown prince) legally OWES their liege lord certain things (taxes, labor, service, loyalty, etc). A good liege remembers and takes very seriously the idea that this should be a balanced and reciprocal relationship -- in other words, he owes something BACK. Feudalism is modeled very strongly on the family system: If children owe their parents obedience and service, then parents owe their children care and protection. This still applies when the "child" is a farmer and the "parent" is a local baron. Or when the "child" is a duke and the "parent" is the king.
Basically, we get so caught up in the aesthetics of nobility that we forget that it literally is a managerial position that comes with responsibilities that were... very similar back in the day to the same ones we have now. Humans have not changed all that much. At the end of the day, a really good boss in the 1400s versus in one from the 2020s displays most of the same qualities of personality, even if the details of execution are different.
The next question is, of course, "well, but this theoretical liege lord is HIGHLY idealized -- how often did that actually HAPPEN? Wasn't it more likely that everyone was exploited all the time?" and to that I say: Well, maybe. But again, I don't think humans have changed all that much. Just like the bosses of today, there's a SPECTRUM: A really really good boss is rare and precious and one that you tell stories about for years after you've left that job, but a truly, genuinely, homicidally nightmarish boss is also pretty rare. Most bosses are sort of meh -- they have their good moments, they have their shitty moments, but they're tolerable and you can get along with them well enough to do your job, and then you roll your eyes at them behind their back. Generally, humans don't take outright exploitation lying down. Being a bad boss in the historical period is how you get peasant uprisings and revolts, and you know that to be true because your parents raised you with that knowledge, so unless you are very stupid or inbred or an egomaniac, there is literal personal incentive to at minimum be a Tolerable liege lord. And that means hitting at least SOME of the above bullet points.
TL;DR: In the words of Honore de Balzac, "Everything I have just told you can be summarized by an old word: noblesse oblige!"
(for more discussions of the ethics of fealty and what it means to be a good boss when you are an exquisitely beautiful twink of a prince with a hot beefy bodyguard.... [fingerguns] read A Taste of Gold and Iron)
Ohhh, I get it: the art of drawing and painting is the art of skillfully reducing your perceptions of a three-dimensional form to a cluster of shapes, lines, and colors that—in the representative tradition—build up as convincing an illusion as possible that the viewer of the artwork is seeing the object portrayed, or a “good likeness” of it. But the marks themselves are arbitrary, and the process of learning to make convincing ones is in part learning how not to see whatever is in front of you as a face, an apple, a cat, but instead to see funny-shaped areas of light and dark that, when committed to a flat surface, recreate the contours of the thing. It’s like literary translation in a way.
sometimes you need dialogue tags and don't want to use the same four
ten years ago as part of my creative writing degree we had a class on professional development where we learned how the publishing process works for different mediums and how to choose an agent and what the role of a publishing house is and back then, the advice was "self-publishing has its advantages but a traditional publisher will provide editorial support and market your book and if your book sells well enough they want to invest in your future" and now basically none of that is true anymore. books make it to shelves with noticeable errors and structural issues that could be addressed with one or two more rounds of developmental editing, authors are expected to do more and more of the marketing themselves to the point that they are expected to be social media influencers in their own right, and publishers appear to be prioritising flashy debut novels with huge advances they don't outsell, which means the author is less likely to get a follow-up deal.
Obviously a publisher is a business and a business needs to make money, but the idea used to be that you'd have a couple of very successful authors who bring in so much cash that they subsidise the new kid who is building a back catalogue of books that sell okay until they get name recognition and pay for themselves. I was told back then that a couple thousand pounds was very reasonable for a debut novel because you want to get royalties for the sales exceeding your advance and that way the publisher sees you as a profitable investment. The last couple of years I keep hearing about six figure book deals for debut (!) literary fiction (!) novels, what on earth?
I'm not saying that the publishing industry is uniquely awful or that it's worse than it's ever been or whatever, but especially in a time when reading and talking about books is trendy and there is so much money in books, it feels very, I don't know, symbolic? Prioritising flashy one-time projects over sustained and sustainable growth. Investing only enough resources to make your product fit for sale but not enough to make it good because people will buy it anyway. It's frustrating to me as a reader and as an aspiring writer and as a person existing in a capitalist system.
One of the tags referred to people thanking their editorial teams in acknowledgments, and I want to point out the growing prevalence of people thanking beta-readers and writing groups, both of which usually rely on a pre-existing community or relationship and, just as importantly, are unpaid.
My day job is as a freelance editor for nonfiction books, and I can safely say that if the publishing industry were operating as intended, I would either not have a job at all or be working for a specific press. Authors pay me directly to do the work that a press editor used to do as part of publication contracts. This is because so many presses have started outsourcing all their editorial work to either third-party contractors or, even worse, to genAI.
In short, venture capital has broken the publication industry the same way it's broken the retail, restaurant, and travel industries.
I didn't go into this side of it in my original post but YES! Fuck! I know this is a huge issue for translators too because they're being asked to do more work in less time for less money and I've heard rumblings about human translators being brought in only to essentially proofread work done by AI, which is so disrespectful to the sheer skill and artistic abilities of (literary) translation...
Anyway, I love editing. I think I love editing almost more than writing, and I'm pretty sure that I'm better at it. Last year I edited an academic article from 11k to 9k words for my supervisor and I felt like a god when I finished it, but when my supervisor asked if I'd thought about doing this professionally, I had to tell her that there's just not a viable career in editing anymore. Publishers used to employ! editors! Several different kinds of editors for different stages of the process! That used to be my dream job!
Editing is so essential to making a text good. It doesn't matter how talented or dedicated you are as a writer, you cannot achieve the level of quality by yourself that you could achieve by working with a skilled editor. That's normal! The lone genius who comes out of the cave with the perfect novel does not exist! The manuscript that gets sold to a publisher is supposed to be handed off to an editor who tells you to tighten up that plotline and reminds you that every day can't be Tuesday and sharpens your prose so your voice really shines. Skimping out on that part of the publication process takes money out of the hands of skilled professionals, leads to consumers (ew) receiving subpar products (ew!), and is such an injustice to the writers whose work can't reach its full potential (and the writers who won't get published because they can't afford to pay an editor out of pocket!).
It drives me up the wall. I hate reading a mediocre book and knowing that a skilled editor could have easily raised it from 3 stars to 4. We should all be way angrier about it, frankly.
The poet exists in fragments, so does the poetry.
sources: unknown // unknown // maplepecanpastry on tumblr // ashmanathletics on tiktok // i saw the tv glow (2024) // pray for me by kendrick lamar // unknown // what are you waiting for? by derald cannon jr. // unknown // unknown // drunk drivers/killer whales by car seat headrest // polekingrasputin on instagram
on waiting / on saving yourself
[error]- person not found
I wonder if you wish for a different daughter instead of me. - user jay says on medium/twenty - silas melvin/@/eternaldroplets on twitter/if my body could speak - blythe baird/mother - maia baia/home is not a country; "mama" - safia elhillo/acts of desperation - megan nolan
