a pop culture addled mind

Whatever floats my boat. Or your boat. A metaphorical boat. The Love Boat? You know what? Let's get away from this analogy. There is no boat. I promise. (There may be boats.)

[hannahhillam]

I threw a dog on the ground today 😭😭😭

[coffeeandstring]

I am embarrassed by how hard this made me laugh.

[fatsexybitch]

…..does this mean cat people hurl cats at the ground?

[hollowedskin]

you just kind of… open ur arms and they sort themselves out. if you try and place them down they get mad and wiggle and make everything worse

[everydayconman]

[shotfromguns]

some friends of mine have the most un-cat-ish cat i have ever met

my quintessential example of this:

i was holding him in my arms petting him while we were picking out what games to play that night. when we’d decided on a few, i needed to put the cat down in order to, you know, carry boxes. so i started letting him down, expecting that he’d eventually do the cat hop thing… but he never did.

i ended up lowering him all the way to the floor. and even then he never got his feet under him. i just sort of… plopped him down on his side as he stared up at me like a betrayed sack of flour.

[thecheshirecass-deactivated2018]

I saw this so clearly in my mind and I’m never going to stop laughing at betrayed sack of flour.

[daftzilla]

Miette’s long lost brother, the betrayed sack of flour

[theanishimori]

[bob-belcher]

Anatomie d'une chute (2023), dir. Justine Triet

[kwistowee]

ugh… this sceeeeeeene 😂 TWISTERS (2024)

[tomundsen-deactivated20250731]

Galavant 2x01

[zeglyth]

WEST SIDE STORY dir. steven spielberg

[agrippinaes]

LITTLE WOMEN (1994) dir. gillian armstrong i find it poor logic to say that because women are good, women should vote. men do not vote because they are good - they vote because they are male, and women should vote, not because we are angels and men are animals, but because we are human beings and citizens of this country. you should have been a lawyer, miss march. i should have been a great many things, mr. mayer.

[demilypyro]

what does "i compare you to a kiss from a rose on the grey" even mean i mean i love that song but that's just nonsense

[demilypyro]

lmao "elaborate on that" "no"

[tsukinoinaba]

[saltedume]

her doing a jazz album would fix me i would have nothing more in life to ask for

[evilroachindustrial]

Good News!

Lady Gaga did two albums with Tony Bennett that are just the pair covering jazz standards.

[caitrose]

Lady Gaga is so over-the-top that some people forget she’s a classically trained singer and could absolutely wipe the floor with any piece she so pleased

Anyway check out my favorite song from the aforementioned jazz duet album

[treecitysessions]

This is so silly and cute I love it

[treecitysessions]

The most realistic part is the heels already hurting their feet too much before they even made it into the club

[lucy8675309]

OK Tumblr Geriatric Ward, let’s talk about your posture-

there are things you should be doing now to prevent yourself from starting to look like 🥀

Why does it matter? Future you would like to avoid the pain, limited motion, and fall risk that goes along with worsening posture.

What’s the focus?

1. Keep the flexibility in your spine

2. Stretch the muscles in the front

3. Strengthen the muscle in the back

Here are some simple things you can do daily while sitting and when you get up to go into the bathroom or the kitchen

Keep the flexibility by doing these repeated movements: 10 repetitions several times a day

The goal is to give yourself a double or triple chin. Keep your nose pointing forward, don’t let it tip up or down

Thoracic extension- use a chair with a seat back that comes up to the level of your shoulder blades. Try to bend back over the top of the chair without arching away from the seat back and without extending your neck. If the pressure from the top of the chair is uncomfortable you can place a towel there

Stretch the muscles in the front by using a door frame. This one will feel good afterwards

If this isn’t enough of a stretch you can do one side at a time. If you have the right arm up step forward with the right foot and turn slightly to the left. Then do it on the other side.

Strengthen the muscles in the back by squeezing your shoulder blades together for a count of 10 and then repeating 10 times. You can do this several times a day Hint: Don’t lift your shoulder blades up

There are lots more exercises for strengthening your back muscles but this is a good starting point and easy to do. I like doing it while driving

Tips:

Do the best you can

If it hurts stop

Envision future you saying thank you each time you do one of the exercises

[brightlotusmoon]

NOTE: I can do most of these with the cerebral palsy. In fact, a lot of these little exercises are automatically part of my physical therapy. My problem is I already have hyperlordosis, spine arthritis, and cervicogenic headache. These have helped me at least try to have a posture.

[becausegoodheroesdeservekidneys]

I CANNOT STRESS ENOUGH HOW GOOD THIS ADVICE IS

[davidlowery]

Little Women (1994) dir. Gillian Armstrong

[tiktoksthataregood-ish]

[thatdisasterauthor]

Whatever you're expecting, you're wrong.

[heartwasglass]

BRIGHT STAR (2009) dir. Jane Campion

[kaijuno]

[byteofsoup]

Imagine you're so small and cold and scared but there's smaller ones that are smaller and colder and more scared. I'm going to cry

[parkchanwoohoo]

a little kid came up to the desk (it came up to his like, collarbone) and very seriously asked me about baby name books, because he wanted to help name his new sibling. i guided him to the shelf (there were only two book of names) and pointed out the differences between them, and after some serious contemplation he went, “I think I should take both, just in case.” So I gave him both and he thanked me and went on his way.

And I went back to my desk and screamed into my arm for like 45 years because HE WAS SO FUCKING ADORABLE AAAAA

[parkchanwoohoo]

i love when little kids come to the reference desk alone because they want to be perceived as an adult and so they come up to you and very seriously inquire “Where are your books about dolphins? ò__ó”

and of course you have to very seriously show them your collection of dolphin books while they nod carefully at your explanations and it’s SO CUTE!!! THEY’RE SO CUTE AAAH

[andletforsakendidodie]

a kid came up to me to enquire about books on queen victoria, so I promptly guided him to the children’s history section, and we had a lovely chat flicking through horrible histories books, when I asked him what does he like about history. he grinned, and with a smooth, brilliant smile he said “My favourite thing about old times is torture.”

[wakingfromthewater]

One time I had a dad come in with his ~10 year old kid and go “Hi, we’re looking for, um…” at which point he trailed off and looked expectantly at the kid the way parents usually do when they can’t remember which Percy Jackson book comes next, but instead the kid looked up at me and very brightly and firmly announced, “The Federalist Papers!”

[platypusisnotonfire]

I had a kid come in all the time by herself after school, and she was hands down my favorite patron of all time. 5 years after I met her, she graduated 8th grade, so she was….8 or 9 when she first came in? Young enough that I was like “where is parent? I guess I am your mom now. you are safe in the library, child.”

The very first book she asked for was a book on Morse code. I was instantaneously enthralled with this child. Over the years, she took out books on first nations religions, the war of 1812, Ulysses by james joyce, books about tracking animals and identifying pawprints, basket weaving, loom weaving, the battle of Agincourt, honestly way too many things to remember. 

100% of the topics she was into were not typically “age-appropriate” (although I am a staunch believer in there being no age-appropriate subjects, just age-appropriate ways of explaining them) and about half of them required interlibrary loan requests because the topic was so esoteric the only books on it existed in some university library on the other side of the country. 

Some evenings she would come in after school and it would be a big snow day so there was hardly anyone there, and we’d just talk until the library closed, looking things up on google when she had a sudden inspiration to know something. Topics ranged from the physics behind a woodpecker’s tongue wrapping around its brain (she taught me about that one) to “Horrible bear bear” and the “bear circle” and the “anti-bear circle” (latin and greek roots of bear names and the Arctic.) She was just like, the coolest person. 

I really hope to meet up with her again someday because I really think these kinds of things have a circular effect- I’m thinking back to when I first moved to that town at 13 and went into that same library, marching up to the front desk and asking for books on astrophysics (probably looking even younger, I’m 26 now and people peg me for 14-16 consistently), and how the librarian- who later became my boss- must have felt about tiny me when she was putting in interlibrary loan requests for specific textbooks from MIT to go along with the OpenCourseWare courses I was taking online (which I gained much greater respect for when I became the interlibrary loan technician- holy Hannah that’s a lot of steps.) 

Anyway that was literally my favorite part about working at the library.

[certifiedlibraryposts]

Certified Library Post

[forthegothicheroine]

I’m not a classicist, but I suspect one of the reasons so many of the Greek gods are portrayed so unflatteringly was less because they were seen as villains than because they represented their domains.  Of course Zeus sometimes misuses his power, that’s what a king does.  Of course Artemis’s wrath is wild and painful, that’s what nature can be.  Of course Hades snatched away a young girl from her mother’s arms, that’s what death does.  This is one of the reasons callout posts for some gods comparing them negatively to ‘nicer’ gods are kind of missing the point.

[selavy]

as someone who is partially a classicist, this is a better analysis of Greek mythology as a whole than 99.95% of the takes I’ve seen on here (and a substantial number of the takes I’ve seen in ~academia~)

[nedlittle]

it drives me bonkers the way people don’t know how to read classic books in context anymore. i just read a review of the picture of dorian gray that said “it pains me that the homosexual subtext is just that, a subtext, rather than a fully explored part of the narrative.” and now i fully want to put my head through a table. first of all, we are so lucky in the 21st century to have an entire category of books that are able to loudly and lovingly declare their queerness that we’ve become blind to the idea that queerness can exist in a different language than our contemporary mode of communication. second it IS a fully explored part of the narrative! dorian gray IS a textually queer story, even removed from the context of its writing. it’s the story of toxic queer relationships and attraction and dangerous scandals and the intertwining of late 19th century “uranianism” and misogyny. second of all, i’m sorry that oscar wilde didn’t include 15k words of graphic gay sex with ao3-style tags in his 1890 novel that was literally used to convict him of indecent behaviour. get well soon, i guess…

[dancinggrimm]

I saw a review of The Tenant of Wildfell Hall that said ‘I can’t believe people think this was a feminist book’.

Like, do you know how swooningly, outrage-causingly shocking it was that the main character slammed her bedroom door in her abusive husband’s face? Do you have any idea how unthinkable it was that she denied him access to her space and her person? She was supposed to submissively look away while he turned their son into an alcoholic for his own amusement and seduced innocent young women! It was revolutionary in 1848; when Bronte (Anne) wrote it, she had to do so under a male psuedonym because publishers wouldn’t accept works by women unless they were harmless pap, which was all that was thought suitable for women to read lest their mild and gentle minds be corrupted.

The reason these groundbreaking books of history seem to tame and understated now is because they worked. They raised the bar, pushed the agenda forwards, cleared the path for the next writer. They did exactly what they were supposed to. Time is linear. History moves forward. We make progress.

When you are old, if things happen as they ought, a future generation of teenagers will read The Hate U Give and Simon and the Homo Sapiens’ Agenda and Speak and think to themselves ‘why did anybody ever think this was contraversial? Why did they ban them? These are just things we talk about, these are things we deal with like normal people. What was the past like, and how do we stop from backsliding into a place where these things are considered shocking again?“

I really hope that’s how it goes.

[svengooliecat]

First rule of literary analysis: the analyst cannot judge a past work by modern standards or ethics. Doing so leads to faulty comprehension, straw man fallacies, and lazy logic and analysis. We must always consider the work within the broader frameworks of the history, culture, and events that shaped it.

[ktempestbradford]

I had a roommate in college that hated Jane Austen because the protagonists always ended up marrying men and it was such a wrong signal to send to young women that marriage is the only goal. I stared at her for a full minute before screaming WHAT IN THE BUTTERFLY BISCUIT F—?

What’s hilarious is that the entire year I knew her she would vehemently deny that she was a feminist. Because feminists were man-hating harpies! She just believed in equality. So…. there’s that.

Still, it surprised me to hear her say that about Austen’s books given the era they were written in. I even tried to explain this to the roommate but she wouldn’t have it. Apparently Jane should have written about them all getting jobs to live independently.

Historical context is important, children.