❤😭😭😭❤
2025 on Tumblr: Trends That Defined the Year

No title available
Stranger Things
Sweet Seals For You, Always
Game of Thrones Daily
trying on a metaphor
todays bird
"I'm Dorothy Gale from Kansas"
Monterey Bay Aquarium

@theartofmadeline
No title available
let's talk about Bridgerton tea, my ask is open
Not today Justin
Xuebing Du
d e v o n
Keni

Andulka

No title available
One Nice Bug Per Day

Product Placement

seen from United States

seen from United Kingdom
seen from United States

seen from Czechia
seen from United States
seen from Brazil

seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from United States

seen from United States

seen from United States
seen from United States

seen from United States
seen from United States

seen from United States
seen from United States

seen from Poland

seen from United Kingdom
seen from T1
seen from United States
@headdeskingisntenough
❤😭😭😭❤
This popped up again on reddit today, and I realized I’d never posted it here. Possibly Sir Terry’s best interview response, ever.
[image text: O: You’re quite a writer. You’ve a gift for language, you’re a deft hand at plotting, and your books seem to have an enormous amount of attention to detail put into them. You’re so good you could write anything. Why write fantasy?
Pratchett: I had a decent lunch, and I’m feeling quite amiable. That’s why you’re still alive. I think you’d have to explain to me why you’ve asked that question.
O: It’s a rather ghettoized genre.
P: This is true. I cannot speak for the US, where I merely sort of sell kay. But in the UK think every book— I think I’ve done twenty in the series since the fourth book, every one has been one the top ten national bestsellers, either as hardcover or paperback, and quite often as both. Twelve or thirteen have been number one. I’ve done six juveniles, all of those have nevertheless crossed over to the adult bestseller list. On one occasion I had the adult best seller, the paperback best-seller in a different title, and a third book on the juvenile bestseller list. Now tell me again that this is a ghettoized genre.
O: It’s certainly regarded as less than serious fiction.
P: (Sighs) Without a shadow of a doubt, the first fiction ever recounted was fantasy. Guys sitting around the campfire— Was it you who wrote the review? thought I recognized it— Guys sitting around the campfire telling each other stories about the gods who made lightning, and stuff like that. They did not tell one another literary stories. They did not complain about difficulties of male menopause while being a junior lecturer on some midwestern college campus. Fantasy is without a shadow of a doubt the ur-literature, the spring from which all other literature has flown. Up to a few hundred years ago no one would have disagreed with this, because most stories were, in some sense, fantasy. Back in the middle ages, people wouldn’t have thought twice about bringing in Death as a character who would have a role to play in the story. Echoes of this can be seen in Pilgrim’s Progress, for example, which hark back to a much earlier type of storytelling. The epi of Gilgamesh is one of the earliest works of literature, and by the standard we would apply now— a big muscular guys with swords and certain godlike connections—That’s fantasy. The national literature of Finland, the Kalevala, Beowulf in England. I cannot pronounce Bahaghwad-Gita but the Indian one, you know what I mean. The national literature, the one that underpins everything else, is by the standards that we apply now, a work of fantasy. Now I don’t know what you’d consider the national literature of America, but if the words Moby Dick are inching their way towards this conversation, whatever else it was, it was also a work of fantasy. Fantasy is kind of a plasma in which other things can be carried. I don’t think this is a ghetto. This is, fantasy is, almost a sea in which other genres swim. Now it may be that there has developed in the last couple of hundred years a subset of fantasy which merely uses a different icongraphy, and that is, if you like the serious literature, the Booker Prize contender. Fantasy can be serious literature. Fantasy has often been serious literature. You have to fairly dense to think that Gulliver’s Travels is only a story about a guy having a real fun time among big people and little people and horses and stuff like that, What the book was about was something else. Fantasy can carry quite a serious burden, and so can humor. So what you’re saying is, strip away the trolls and the dwarves and things and put everyone into modern dress, get them to agonize a bit, mention Virginia Woolf few times, and there! Hey! I’ve got a serious novel. But you don’t actually have to do that.
(Pauses) That was a bloody good answer, though I say it myself.]
Was kind of expecting this to be irrelevant by now but
list of mundane things that feel like ancient human rituals
cleaning or wipe your bare feet
breaking off a piece of bread and handing it to someone
putting the weight of a basket on your hip or head
eating nuts or berries while hunched over close to the ground
seeing something startling just out of your line of sight and very quickly stepping or leaping on to a larger object to get a better view
cupping your hands into running water to wash your face
the unanimous protection of a baby or child in a public space where women are present
when an elderly woman laughs and grips your forearm tightly
People who dog-ear and make marks in their books are 10383738x sexier smarter and cooler than people who act like marking books is a federal crime
I collect rare and antique books. I love them, they are my babies. Most people aren’t even allowed to touch them.
I also own paperbound, and mass produced hardbacks, and I underline and dog ear and leave symbols all over them. And get into arguments with the authors sometimes by writing in the margins.
When my mother died, she left me her library. Walls of mass produced books in pristine condition. There’s nothing sentimental about them, I don’t even know which ones she liked. I could buy another copy of the exact same edition for 10 cents in Amazon’s used book section, and you wouldn’t be able to tell the difference.
Write in your books. You being the owner is what gives them meaning.
You are. Epilogue 03
Just keeping that story going!
#pascalcampion
This is amazing.
For what it’s worth: if you find success, don’t spend forever second guessing it. Don’t give in to self doubt. Don’t wonder if you deserve it. Don’t cut yourself down because you made it and other people didn’t.
Find a new goal. Find a new dream.
And a perfectly valid new dream is helping the less fortunate reach the same place you are.
I feel like this most of the time. For once I sort of understand why now. It’s hard to accept things you’ve always thought don’t belong to you or you don’t deserve and it’s always one of the reasons that giving up is the easier option.
Reading this makes me think that maybe accepting it isn’t so bad.
I was sitting here struggling to think up ways to relate this to physical disabilities like cerebral palsy and neurological disabilities like ADHD.
And then I realized that my 2000(!) followers would understand that anyway.
(To be fair, it was the last thing I expected.)
That is the cutest shark I have ever seen ♡♡♡
This one?
Reminder to self:
Your writing seems boring and predictable because
You wrote it
You’ve read it like eight million times.
A person who has never read it before does not have this problem.
Great encouragement for writers
Pass it on
Thanks, self. I needed to hear this today.
A priest, a Baptist minister, and a rabbit walk into the Red Cross to donate blood
The nurse asks, what’s your blood type?
The rabbit says, “I’m probably a Type O”
in the sixth months after graduating from college, with my very expensive degree from a good college, i ate nothing but bread. i worked at a bakery / cafe / restaurant and got half off one meal per shift but it was still too expensive even then. but at the end of every night we would throw out all the bread loaves that hadn’t sold, which was most of them, every night. we would fill up ten boxes to give away to a shelter and then we could take anything we could carry, and i couldn’t afford a half off deconstructed sandwich, but i could fill the cabinets of my apartment with bread. everyone who worked there was just like me, subsisting on discarded, overpriced bread.
(when the managers’ backs were turned i was taught to leave the trashbags of bread behind the dumpster rather than inside it, because it was locked after everyone left to prevent people from stealing from it. we would say we were going out to stack chairs and instead stack prepackaged salads prepared that morning in the narrow space between wall and dumpster, but that’s not what this is about.)
we were working valentine’s day, a little bit miserable about it, because customers are somehow worse on a holiday about love, and even if we were single we didn’t want to be here, and most of us had people we’d rather be spending the day with, and the snappish, hardass manager was working that day, and everyone could not wait for the day to be over.
we had a boxes of those bakery tissue sheets around and i was twisting it in my hands and i thought about how the first night my uncle spent with my aunt he had to get up early for work but didn’t want to wake her and the whole thing hadn’t been planned, exactly, so he (a roofer by trade and a golden glove boxer by sport) went into the kitchen and took some paper towels and twisted them between his big, scarred hands until it formed a sweeter shape and when my aunt work up it was to a paper towel rose on her pillow.
so i used a couple sheets of bakery tissue to make a rose and walked up to my coworker who stared at me with a rictus smile and i gave it to her, trying not overthink if it was a weird thing to do. her smile slipped and she asked “you made this?” holding it carefully, like it wasn’t something her two year old son could have made with his pudgy hands, and i shrugged and got more milk from the back.
then another coworker held the steamer too long when frothing milk, not on accident but because he was irritated, so i rolled another rose and tucked it in his apron pocket as i walked by. then it was just one more of us up front and it was nothing, thirty seconds of twisting paper to take the stack of cookies out of her hands and hand her a tissue paper rose, her lined face lifting into a grin as she proudly tucked it into the chest pocket of her shirt and i may as well have been standing in front of the ovens for how hot my face felt.
it was such a silly thing to do, i felt ridiculous, giving away hastily constructed tissue paper roses on valentine’s day, clumsy artful garbage. then one of the servers walked by and noticed and so i made her one too, and then other servers came by, leaning over the glass, and complimenting the flowers with big eyes, and i laughed and made more, still not sure if it was sincere, but even if it wasn’t, i figured making them one and handing it over was better than saying no.
then i went to the back again and the dishwasher yelled out “where’s mine? what about us?” and he was too sweet to ever be anything less than sincere, so someone kept an eye on the door to the manager’s office as i stood in the sweltering kitchen and rolled clumsy tissue paper roses, enough for everyone
and by the time the day ended, everyone had one, everyone wore one, tucked in their shirt or their apron or stuck in their hair or taped to the top of their pen. everyone was a little less miserable, smiling like we were all on in on the joke, although i don’t think any of us knew the punchline
this story doesn’t have a punchline either. i just sometimes think of how much better some crumpled tissue paper made things and think that it can be that easy, sometimes, if we’re sincere and don’t overthink it too much
So, IDK if this is true everywhere, but I have a cousin who works in the Colorado Department of Transportation and at least here, they have competitions to come up with the road signs. So there is not just one nerdy sign maker involved, there are a bunch of nerds all backing one another up to get their nerdery projected to everyone on the roads. And that delights me.
This is from a comic about being creative. Read the rest on my website: 8 things I’ve learned about creativity.
A whole big-ass mood right now… Number 6 in particular is calling me out hard!
I swear I managed to reblog this before without noticing the link to the rest of the comic, which. Whoops.
I’d like to stop living in interesting times now.
this is simply the greatest video i have ever seen
I'm going to reblog this a million times so be it
#i love how they give up on the dumb gimmick and just make her do increasingly inane trick shots
Reminded of that time the xkcd guy was trying to research what sports equipment would be most effective for destroying enemy drones in flight and he looked up a bunch of stats about pro tennis player accuracy against stationary targets like 40 feet away, and figured that a really high level tennis pro might be able to hit the drone in 5-7 shots if they had the time and even then probably wouldn’t do enough damage to disrupt it more than momentarily.
And then Serena volunteered to test this theory and just, killed it instantly.
New superhero class that’s basically The Archer but they play tennis instead.