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The Bowery Presents
PR's Tumblrdome
Lint Roller? I Barely Know Her
Sade Olutola
ojovivo
The Stonewall Inn
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cherry valley forever
official daine visual archive
Monterey Bay Aquarium
🪼
roma★
@theartofmadeline
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Claire Keane
EXPECTATIONS
The Bright Sessions
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Product Placement
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@iusedtoweavecrowns
Does anyone have any weird favorite smells that aren't just like gasoline or sharpie? I do like those but I want to dig deeper. I love the smell of frozen cardboard and brand new hardware
So far the replies on this seem to be either "old books and libraries.... Moss..... Rain..... I'm so weird I know" or "actual rotting garbage"
If you were a natural disaster, what would you be?
Hurricane
Famine
Volcanic Eruption
Landslide
Tsunami
Earthquake
Tornado
Wildfire
Flood
Drought
Epidemic
Other
This is a shocking aversion to the Tumblr trend of weird polls having a clear winner.
Why is our identification with natural disasters so diverse...
“One of the poets, whose name I cannot recall, has a passage, which I am unable at the moment to remember, in one of his works, which for the time being has slipped my mind, which hits off admirably this age-old situation.”
— P.G. Wodehouse
the silmarillion is wild because you read it and you're like huh okay, and then you read lotr and it turns out everyone's just going around doing their own thing while the surviving elves are living through the final chapters of a post-apocalyptic horror story
rivendell's a pretty chill place, right? everyone gets along splendidly. dream retirement home et cetera. solid chance the guy you're having afternoon tea with has either survived or personally committed war crimes. also the reason it's so chill is elrond has this magic ring that makes it so the whole place exists slightly outside normal time
galadriel's been around since the beginning, like, for pretty much all of middle-earth's history you understand, she has Seen it all and despite what you may have been led to believe is at all times this close to snapping. also the reason lothlorien is so chill is she has this magic ring that makes it so the whole place exists slightly outside normal time
i can't emphasize enough how much of a post-apocalyptic horror story thranduil lives in. homeland destroyed and half his people massacred. has fucken sauron in his backyard and the spawn of the primordial beast that eats light puttering about on his lawn. a dragon lives next door. does NOT have a magic ring and is therefore obliged to rule over his murderforest in normal time
just so we're all on the same page here, legolas' day job before joining the fellowship was to hunt the spawn of the primordial beast that eats light and it's not like, a big deal or anything. he just has to do it. he's used to it.
'elves are leaving middle-earth and it's so sad :(' they have ptsd samwise.
What would you do if you met an exact clone of yourself, memories and all?
deep heart to heart
make-out/seduction/sex/etc
fight (physical or verbal)
some combo of the other 3
some secret option (do tell)
Button that shows results and sends you to the Twilight Zone
your special interest is your job now! how is it going?
good
bad
great
awful
results
Corridor - Arjan van Helmond, 2024.
Dutch, b. 1971 -
Gouache and acrylic on canvas
Detail of New Year's Eve Foxfires at the Changing Tree, Ōji (ca. 1857) by Utagawa Hiroshige
"imagine showing insert blank to a medieval peasant they'd die lol" personally i think if i saw the medieval peasant's night sky i'd start crying and never stop
Would you have recognized this person if you had seen them in public when they were alive?
Yes, I know who this is and I feel confident that I would have recognized them
I know who this is but I’m not sure I would have recognized them in person
They look familiar but I’m not sure who they are
I have no idea who this is
Nuanced answer
Had a real "hello fellow kids" moment today - had to do a talk at my former high school as a young writer and i tried so hard to bring up things relatable to the youth tm but got no reaction whatsoever to anything, not even computer games (a tactic that has worked so far in my limited experience) and now i'm like was it me being cringe or were they just the most prim and proper high schoolers ever? were they about to mob whichever person dared say a word? only one person had some light in his eyes though it was an optional creative writing class!
I was probably cringe but tbh i don't care about that, i just have this thing where i talk a mile a minute (it's the adhd) and then it downloads a few hours later into a best-of compilation of things you should have said different (that's probably also the adhd)
Have you read The Empress of Salt and Fortune by Nghi Vo (2020)?
yes
no
I didn't finish it
I've never heard of it
People call me a grinch for not liking Christmas music. I get so mad. I can’t even describe the incandescence of my fury. The first notes of any Christmas song make me want to hurl my tiny frail flesh prison against the offending speakers over and over until they cannot produce sound anymore.
There are, generously, about ten Christmas songs. Every fucking year. Every. Fucking. Year. I have to hear those same ten songs in a variety of fresh new tones, over and over and over and over and over. I go to sleep with them blasting across my consciousness, driven deep into my psyche with the relentless repetition.
When I worked retail I would spend 40 hours a week at my job. There’s four weeks in December but honestly most of my workplaces began the music in November and didn’t end it until the new year. So let’s call that six weeks a year. Forty hours a week. For over ten years.
That’s two thousand four hundred hours of fucking Christmas music.
That’s one hundred forty four thousand minutes of the same ten songs.
That’s eight million six hundred and forty thousand seconds of pure. Fucking. Hell.
And I will never be done. I don’t work retail anymore. But every fucking year if I leave my home in December I will have to listen to the same fucking songs I’ve been hearing my whole life. For millions of captive seconds. My suffering will never end.
Tag game reblog this and put Baby’s First Blorbo in the tags like who was the first Character to move into your head and live there back when you were still figuring out how to tie your shoes
a writing competition i was going to participate in again this year has announced that they now allow AI generated content to be submitted
their reasoning being that "we couldn't ban it even if we wanted to, every writer already uses it anyway"
"Every writer"?
come on
Reblog if you're a writer who doesn't use AI.
Though I don’t have a fear of dogs, I find it really sad and disgusting the way the phobia is treated at large. Cynophobia is one of the most common and debilitating phobias and it often forms in childhood, especially after a traumatic event. I grew up in the middle of nowhere with a lot of unleashed, untrained and/or stray dogs and I was bitten and knocked down by several dogs as a kid. Your dog might be your best friend, your dog might be a very good dog but that person may look at your dog and only remember being a helpless 6 year old child with a dog’s jaw around their neck. The fear seems irrational and hilarious to you, someone who has had mostly positive interactions with dogs but remember not everyone has lived the life you have.
So many dog owners are practically allergic to doing anything to alleviate human anxiety around their dog, even things that would greatly benefit the dog like keeping it leashed and not bringing it into high stress environments* without cause. If a friend told me they were afraid of cats, I’d tell them it is best we meet outside of my home because that is a completely reasonable accommodation. There are so many horror stories about someone being told another person is afraid of dogs and repeatedly putting them in situations where they have to be in close proximity to a dog without that person’s consent because they think it’s funny or because ‘My dog is such a good dog. It’ll definitely change their mind about dogs. This is like impromptu exposure therapy.’ and it makes everything worse.
Someone being frightened and on the verge of a panic attack at your little Shih Tzu mix may seem like an amusing overreaction to you but those bitches (pun absolutely intended) do bite and the safest thing to do for that person and your dog is to keep them separated. You don’t know what life they’ve lead.
*This post is not about service dog and handler teams. If your dog is a disability aid, it is the responsibility of others to Buck Up and Deal regardless of their opinions on dogs. This is about the epidemic of terrible dog owners taking their poorly trained dogs places and being completely inconsiderate towards others AND their own dog.
I have so many thoughts about this! I used to be scared of dogs. Like really scared. I tend to explain it with the dog attack my mum and I experienced when I was 2 years old - the 90ies were the wild west here in Eastern Europe and there was a big free running aggressive dog in the neighbourhood we lived at (a wolfdog would be the translation from Estonian, i don't know about English) who attacked us out of nowhere. I don't know if I actually remember it or just remember the story I've been told about how my mum lifted me up above her head to keep me safe as the dog ripped into her coat. We were both unharmed but I remember her showing the coat to my grandma and it had big holes in it from where the dog jumped on her back. I was terrified of dogs as a child, possibly as a result of this.
Fast forward a couple of years and we were sledding in the park with my mum, a few of her friends, and me. I was not yet in school so maybe 5-6 years old. I sled down the hill and a small fluffy sort of dog jumped on my chest, barking. Probably it wasn't trying to scare me but wanted to play. At least that's what the owner who stood nearby seemed to think, laughing. It was a tiny dog - you know the sort, small and yapping loudly - and probably not very threatening to adults. The owner probably wasn't trying to be mean, she was just laughing about her little dog trying to play with this child and pushing it over in the snow. I was terrified out of my wits though, crying, maybe screaming. I don't remember what I did except that suddenly there was a dog on top of me, barking, and I was just in shock with fear. My mum who didn't have a sled slid down the hill on her back to rescue me, injured her spine, and had trouble walking for weeks afterwards, having to mostly stay in bed. And I remember the owner just laughing, doing nothing to stop the dog. Because it's harmless, a tiny funny thing! It's not going to bite! At least that's what I imagine she might have been thinking. (Did she think the child was screaming and crying with snot running down her face out of joy?) A harmless tiny little thing who pushed a random child over and scared her witless.
Anyway I'm mostly over it by now. I have learnt to walk by barking dogs not going to the other side of the road, to say hi to dogs and let them smell me and make up their mind about whether we're going to be friendly and mostly have no issues. I'm not scared of dogs I know well unless they're being deliberately threatening. I might like to pet your dog if it seems friendly and soft. I am cautious around dogs though and most of them can tell and are cautious in turn. I think they think I'm being a bit sus and I'm fine with that. I'll never be a dog person, but I love them as I do all animals, and if someone in my family had a dog I'm sure we'd figure it out. I much prefer small to medium size dogs though, where I feel like if I had to defend myself (or them) I could reasonably pick them up and take them someplace else. Big dogs who could jump on me and push me over or run away and pull me along make me feel unsafe though in my experience the small yappy ones can be much more likely to bite - I think they're insecure :P Anyway I'm cool with dogs for the most part, I just don't especially want one near me unless we know each other for a while or they're really chill.
People who are big dog people seem to find all of that very suspicious of me though. Like on a character level. You do not really want a dog or want to interact with dogs? What's wrong with you? How can you be a good person and not like dogs? They understand my reasoning from "childhood trauma" but what if I didn't have a good excuse like that? And as much as I try to tell that I'm not a monster, it's not like I hate dogs, nor even truly dislike them - I just wish they kept their distance until we can come to an understanding on how much contact we both are comfortable with - they still treat this as some unimaginable character flaw.
And then these very same people tend to be absolutely hateful about cats. They're the "cats are mean assholes" club when my theory is just that they have much more experience with dogs and the issue is they excpect cats to act like dogs. And then get upset when they don't. Or they have traumatised their cat (or adopted an already traumatised cat) and are now treating the cat's response whether it's aggresion or fear as "cats just being cats you know how it is". I have seen some very stressed cats whose people don't seem to realise at all that their cat is constantly in survival mode from never getting a moment's peace. And some very bored cats whose people do the opposite - thinking cats like to lay in sunbeams and sleep a lot means they don't need any attention at all.
Anyway I think this goes for animal and human interaction as well as human-human interaction: consent!
If I don't give my consent to be jumped on and licked I should not be jumped on and licked. You as an owner need to make sure that doesn't happen. If a dog doesn't consent to being patted by strangers we the strangers should honor that just as we don't start hugging random people on the street. If we can't pick up the cues from the dog we must respect their person's input. And we shouldn't touch cats either when they don't want it. Now cats tend to make it pretty clear when they're upset but are smaller than humans and can be easily overpowered. As tempting as it is and as much as I did that as a child (accidentally resulting in some cats never trusting me however much I wanted them to) that is not a great way to win a cat's heart. Would you like someone to pick you up mid-nap? Probably not. Especially not as a first meeting. Much harder to stop a cat from touching people when it wants to but it might be possible to keep the cat in another room for example, if someone is around who doesn't want to interact with them (yes such people exist). Consent! Both for the humans and the animals* We all want to be able to choose who sits in our laps or pets our hair or gives us wet kisses :D
*with exceptions if it's some sort of life or death situation or something. but you know you can find a loophole in anything - I'm not talking about "what if a dog is about to be hit by a car"
