dreaming bloom

welcome to the cryptid diaries, sara (she/her), 18+ || lovely profile pic by @jwfkeon and banner by @springdaynwa

[tacofriend]

Something that I think should be an important part of solarpunk aesthetics is screws.

Look at your smartphone. No screws. You've got to have specialized tools to get inside your phone to repair something. There are certain pieces of tech that are glued in place and glue can't be undone without permanently breaking the bond.

But screws!

You can take apart a broken old radio, repair what's broken, and, if you were careful in taking it apart, you can put it back together and have a fully functioning radio and all you need is a common screwdriver!

It's hard to build screws and other mechanical fasteners because it requires more planning than clamps and glues, but isn't that what solarpunk is all about‽ It's about care and sustainability and and a radio or a computer built carefully with repair in mind is a sustainable computer that stays out of landfills and in use.

[foone]

Screws are proof that God loves us and wants us to fix shit

[eagle-writes]

Screws are proof that god loves us and wants us to fix shit

[foone]

Awesome!

[fluentisonus]

conversations around whether fanfiction is better when written in the 1st or 2nd or 3rd person — & particularly the common conclusion that it's universally better & more natural sounding to write in the 3rd person — are always so annoying to me because they almost always entirely neglect to address what person the original work is written in & how that effects the "naturalness" of how fanfiction might sound to the reader. which I feel like is a really crucial element! like 3rd person is more usual & so often sounds more natural just because most stories tend to be written in it, and as such it also tends to be the default for fanfiction of things that aren't narrated in writing (e.g. a tv show) — but the thing is like. no one I think would actually find it particularly unnatural sounding to read a fanfiction of the original sherlock holmes stories (for example) written in the first person from watson's pov, because that's the register the original stories are written in. in fact after having read your way through all of conan doyle's stuff first you might actually find it weird to read about these characters the 3rd person. and likewise despite how near-universally reviled the 2nd person seems to be for fanfic I think it would actually be pretty natural to read in, say, a disco elysium fanfic, because that's a story you've already been hearing in the 2nd person all this time. [that one post voice] I think it depends!

[buffyseasonsix]

Dubcon but it's me bringing you back from the dead

[glittering-git]

the untamed bringing me back to tumblr seven years late is honestly not surprising

[mxtxdiaspora-may]

MXTX Diaspora May is back for 2026, and sign-ups are open!

Sign-up form

MXTX Diaspora May is an event in which Chinese diaspora creators come together to share the diverse aspects of Chinese culture, as well as connect with each other over lived experiences.

Through the promotion and creation of these fanworks, we hope to encourage thoughtful self-reflection throughout the broader fandom, especially with regard to embracing cultural humility and dismantling structures and behaviors that allow racism to flourish, both in fandom and in real life.

Support of MXTX Diaspora May will go a long way towards creating a more inclusive and open climate in our shared online spaces, especially for creators who rarely get their voices heard in the English-speaking side of fandom. We aim to uplift the unique voices and stories of our participants, and we encourage anyone who enjoys works from this event to share in the celebration of Chinese culture from creators of Chinese heritage.

Event Rules & FAQs

Any creator with Chinese heritage may participate in MXTX Diaspora May. Event rules and work requirements may be found at the link below.

Note: We will not accept AI-generated works (works created by generative artificial intelligence models) as part of this event.

Prompts

Our prompts this year are the Four Natures in Traditional Chinese Medicine. Sub-prompts for the event will be posted separately.

After you sign up, you will receive a discord link to the event server after you complete the form. Please make sure to join the discord server to connect with fellow event participants and receive event announcements and updates. Sign-ups will run from March 7, 2026 to April 30, 2026.

Signal Boost!

Reblogs and signal boosts for this event are welcome from both participants and non-participants. Please feel free to boost on bluesky as well.

Feel free to check out our collections from previous years. Comments and kudos are always appreciated by creators!

2021 (MDZS only)

2022

2023

2024

2025

We look forward to sharing and celebrating everyone's works from the 2026 event!

[homunculus-argument]

Tsundere this, yandere that. I'm a wandere. You took your eyes off me for two seconds and I've already fucked off. Saw something cool glint on the other side of the continent and I'm on my way to check it out.

[feralplantwife]

Wei Wuxian-ass post

[torchwood-99]

"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.

[shmolgtheweed]

Lan Wangji to Wei Wuxian on both counts

[mysticalcoffeequeen]

When you thought it would be easy peasy lemon squeezy but it turns out to be difficult difficult lemon difficult.

[switchnx]

Wait that’s actually really good, gonna pop this out of the tags

[itsreallystupid]

[teaboot]

[spookynest]

⚔️🩸🐴✨

[leslekieuart]

Under My Skin

[browniefox]

We don’t talk enough about how fanfiction writers love to give character large amounts of non-specific paperwork they hate doing

[streamofsalmon]

say more pls

[browniefox]

Yeah sure why not.

So most stories take place when Events are Happening, and this means that no matter what kind of job the characters have, they’re probably not too focused on them. Fanfics, on the other hand, often show the down time. Which means that the writer has to figure out what the hell these characters do in their jobs. Unless the characters have a job the author understands or knows well, the author is often at a loss for what to have the character doing.

So they sit them at a desk and give them paperwork. What is the paperwork for? Rarely specified. It is Paper Work for the characters Important Adult Job they have and they need to read or sign it or something. And there’s always a line about how Character Hates Paperwork. Doesn’t matter if Character is a Mafia Boss or a General or a Diplomat, here they are in an office trying to get out of Doing Paperwork.

There’s also a sense of, like, humor and mundanity that comes with it. Like the examples above, it always particularly stands out to me when a dangerous individual is griping about some paper they need to sign or something. The less you can picture Character doing paperwork, all the better to force it upon them. If Character is saddled with Paperwork, they’re usually now concerned about the physical damages their motley crew causes, because damage = More Paperwork.

Anyway I just think it’s fun or funny, Sephiroth doing paper work and Sawada Tsunayoshi doing paper work and this just in, Tony Stark is doing paperwork. Sorry, Phoenix Wright can’t play right now. Yeah, it’s paperwork.

[elumish]

A very non-exhaustive list of actual paperwork they could be completing/reviewing/approving, in no particular order:

Timesheets

Expense reports

Requisition requests

Budget justifications

Payroll

Performance evaluations

Incident reports

After action reviews / post-mortem analyses

Incident Action Plans

Contracts

Contract proposals / grant applications

Reports / briefings

[redwingedwhump]

Your Royalty or Nobles in your feudal society should be doing this constantly unless you want to show how they're losing the kingdom and about to be usurped or overthrown.

petitions, speech-writing, complaints, requests, assignations, disputes, judiciary forms, declarations that need signing off on, matters requiring the Royal seal, matters requiring a royal endorsement, pardons, judgments, invitations, rebuttals, census data, crop yields projected or actual, livestock records, water rights, Sumptuary laws, taxes taxes taxes...

[val-ritz]

solid point there!

even when the royalty look like they're just fucking off to have fun, they're doing Socially Mandated Fuck-Off and Have Fun Time

Tournaments? Gotta show you're manly and virile through sport, or the nobles will supplant you. Feasts? Gotta show you're wealthy through conspicuous consumption, or the nobles will supplant you. Patronizing the arts? Gotta show you're cultured and erudite, or the nobles will laugh at you behind your back and probably supplant you.

[delicatefury]

Lawyer here. Here’s some more mundane/modern ones for you:

Invoices.

Intake sheets (information about new clients. The one for my firm is 13 pages and requires an hour long meeting. Then you have to do something with the info gathered)

Data entry for invoices and intake sheets.

Billing. (More involved than timesheets because you’re justifying to clients why you’re getting paid so much).

Form letters.

Taxes. Including 1099s for any contracted work.

Bank statements/accounting spreadsheets. Gotta track how expenses are trending.

Insurance documents.

General messages. Lots of office still use a paper system for missed calls and “important” stuff because it just works better than emails and chats for some people.

Memos. Big enough office to have at least one attorney on payroll? You’re getting memos about every legal question and concern and contract. It’s how we’re trained to communicate in formal settings.

[letslipthehounds]

And if you want to get into modern military, the forms are numbered, and people will refer to them by either their actual name, or the number. (Have you filled out the 4187 for this? Yes, I filled out the personnel action form.)

The military has so many forms.

[leebrontide]

If you want to add a rage level, there’s the Regular Paperwork and then the special hell of Fuckup Paperwork.

Cause there’s the invoice, and the follow up invoice and the we are about to have a problem follow-up invoice.

There’s the incident report and then the I swear I yelled at that worker about this don’t be mad at me if they do it again second warning documentation

The requisition form and the it has been six months now get me the fucking thing or you’re gonna hear from Cindy escalations form.

Paperwork has layers and protocols and backups.

[dancing-thru-clouds]

For law firms, there's also the 'I am asking nicely for you to send me this legally mandated document' and then the follow-up 'My please was a social nicety, I am no longer asking, I am telling you to send me this document or explain to a court why you refuse to do so' which, depending on the type of law, can fill a significant amount of the day

[mblematic]

the answer to AI slop is rec lists... every fandom needs to bring back rec lists in a major way

[thornhands]

copying @cabezadeperro's tags:

#also the thing about rec lists is that they make you actually thing about why you like something.#it's less passive consumption and more engaging with the work#in ways that make you enjoy it more and also are good for you

[rageprufrock]

Yes!!! I love rec lists!! Please I need them so much I'm dying!!

In case y'all don't know, I treat my bookmarks on AO3 as a rolling rec list. It is also, as my friends use it, a good way to gauge the depth and complexity of my current mental illness.

[villainwithacrush]

[mortalityplays]

This is a dangerous sentiment for me to express, as an editor who spends most of my working life telling writers to knock it off with the 45-word sentences and the adverbs and tortured metaphors, but I do think we're living through a period of weird pragmatic puritanism in mainstream literary taste.

e.g. I keep seeing people talk about 'purple prose' when they actually mean 'the writer uses vivid and/or metaphorical descriptive language'. I've seen people who present themselves as educators offer some of the best genre writing in western canon as examples of 'purple prose' because it engages strategically in prose-poetry to evoke mood and I guess that's sheer decadence when you could instead say "it was dark and scary outside". But that's not what purple prose means. Purple means the construction of the prose itself gets in the way of conveying meaning. mid-00s horse RPers know what I'm talking about. Cerulean orbs flash'd fire as they turn'd 'pon rollforth land, yonder horizonways. <= if I had to read this when I was 12, you don't get to call Ray Bradbury's prose 'purple'.

I griped on here recently about the prepossession with fictional characters in fictional narratives behaving 'rationally' and 'realistically' as if the sole purpose of a made-up story is to convince you it could have happened. No wonder the epistolary form is having a tumblr renaissance. One million billion arguments and thought experiments about The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas that almost all evade the point of the story: that you can't wriggle out of it. The narrator is telling you how it was, is and will be, and you must confront the dissonances it evokes and digest your discomfort. 'Realistic' begins on the author's terms, that's what gives them the power to reach into your brain and fiddle about until sparks happen. You kind of have to trust the process a little bit.

This ultra-orthodox attitude to writing shares a lot of common ground with the tight, tight commodification of art in online spaces. And I mean commodification in the truest sense - the reconstruction of the thing to maximise its capacity to interface with markets. Form and function are overwhelmingly privileged over cloudy ideas like meaning, intent and possibility, because you can apply a sliding value scale to the material aspects of a work. But you can't charge extra for 'more challenging conceptual response to the milieu' in a commission drive. So that shit becomes vestigial. It isn't valued, it isn't taught, so eventually it isn't sought out. At best it's mystified as part of a given writer/artist's 'talent', but either way it grows incumbent on the individual to care enough about that kind of skill to cultivate it.

And it's risky, because unmeasurables come with the possibility of rejection or failure. Drop in too many allegorical descriptions of the rose garden and someone will decide your prose is 'purple' and unserious. A lot of online audiences seem to be terrified of being considered pretentious in their tastes. That creates a real unwillingness to step out into discursive spaces where you 🫵 are expected to develop and explore a personal relationship with each element of a work. No guard rails, no right answers. Word of god is shit to us out here. But fear of getting that kind of analysis wrong makes people hove to work that slavishly explains itself on every page. And I'm left wondering, what's the point of art that leads every single participant to the same conclusion? See Spot run. Run, Spot, run. Down the rollforth land, yonder horizonways. I just want to read more weird stuff.

[teaandcrowns]

Preserving previous' tags because firelxdykatara also makes excellent additions in them

[quietcannibal]

i'm going to kill you and eat your remains. (flirting)

[glittering-git]

scrolling tumblr at midnight just like the good lord intended

[frodo-of-the-nine-fingers]

immortality as theft (you have to steal life from something else) immortality as parasitism (there is something else inside You that is keeping you alive and you become less of yourself more and more the longer it stays in you) immortality as violence (everything is trying to kill you because everything is supposed to die and the universe will always try to find a way to right the wrong that is You) you understand

[ninewheels]

#at least once a month I think about that one post about laminating a paper towel#and how that makes it immortal but also forever prevents it from fulfilling its true purpose#yes you will live. but at the cost of everything that makes you You

(courtesy of noknowshame)