From the Bear Pit

In fandom in various forms since 1996-ish. Jessikast everywhere, including AO3.

[oscarjamesleigh]

Tumblr is a fate driven website. You can't find posts through the search function, you see them when you're meant to.

[fandomsandfeminism]

Xena is a great show, as someone who is more knowledgeable than average about classic Greco-Roman history. Not because Xena is historically accurate, but because it doesn't give a shit about historical accuracy.

One episode, Xena is hanging out with her...ex? Hercules. And the next Gabrielle is going to Bard school with *Homer*. And then Xena is talking about cesarean sections (for a half centaur-half amazon baby) and medical ethics with Hippocratus AND Galen. And then she's encouraging Brutus to murder Caesar. Next week, she's gotta beat up Ares and return the Arc of the Covenant to its rightful people.

When is this show set? The time of legends, shut up.

[jessikast]

Ancient New Greeceland

[cuunos]

hey can everyone do me a favor and put in the tags why they chose their name? even if you don't go by a chosen name irl, you can put why you chose your online name.

[a-most-beloved-fool]

i do think that bashir and garak could play a sherlock holmes hologame together but ONLY if they're playing as holmes and moriarty respectively. there is no watson.

[knivesandteeth]

I think theres a watson exactly once. It is miles and he had to put up with so much flirt arguing that he will never agree to anything like it again

[thenotoriousscuttlecliff]

What I find funny about this is that Xena having many skills and being awesome at all of them is 100% accurate and yet her character is deeply flawed. She's a former murderer trying to make amends, but still has a thirst for violence and bloodshed she struggles to resist. This is why you don't confuse skills with characterization, what someone can do isn't always who they are, or make assumptions on a work you haven't actually seen or fully understand the context. A character being really good at doing things doesn't mean they are a perfect character. Character also don't have to be "defective" to be interesting. That's just the nauseating edgelord nonsense people who think they understood Watchmen but didn't keep try to push because they think all heroes need to have a dark side to be interesting. Listening to that lot is how we ended up with the evil Superman era, which were only just now starting to claw our way out of.

[jessikast]

There’s also the interest in seeing how she takes skills which she has acquired in bloody and violent contexts, and using them for good instead.

[beholdingslut]

in absolute tears about the pride module at my work

[dikdikpronouncedxylophone]

[bigfoots-biggest-fan]

HOLY SHIT GUYS, I WAS INSPIRED BY THIS POST TO TRY MAKE THE SONG AND YOU WOULD NOT BELIEVE THE SCREAM I SCRUMPT WHEN I DRAGGED THE TRAINING AUDIO OVER THE BACKING TRACK AND IT LINED UP PERFECTLY

Visit Original Link

Tempted to actually put this on spotify so I can secretly stream it at work...

Tagging @batshit-auspol because as an Australian you're the only big account I know who might share (sorry).

[punkrorschach]

happy first day of pride everyone

[jessikast]

Stuart walked so this song could dance.

[theprincessandthepie]

maybe one day. (yt)

[just-another-cat-blog]

pride month!!!

[lemonsharks]

Is that a miette?

[jeanjauthor]

Pride for you!  Pride for a thousand years!!

[lost-and-cursed]

you COME OUT to miette? you come out to her as queer? oh! oh! pride for mother! pride for mother for One Thousand Years!!!!

[jessikast]

I’ve been listening over and over to the songs The Vampire Lestat has been releasing, and I have to say I think the show is going to nail making me believe that this guy could conceivably be a global superstar. These songs are banging.

[vamplvs]

“now, uh, mistuh du lac, if i am not to be mistakuhn, your lovuh here had the very same paramouah as yourself, a man bah the name of lestat de lioncourt. it is a, uh, teluhnoveluh, if you will”

this fanfic shit easy as hell

[thememedaddy]

[diana-andraste]

St. Catherine of Siena Besieged by Demons, c. 1500, artist unknown

tempera and gold on panel

[transformativeworks]

Updates to "No Fandom" Additional Tags, May 2026

AO3 tag wranglers have canonized some new "No Fandom" additional tags and revised subtag and metatag relationships of existing "No Fandom" canonical tags. Check out the latest news post for details: https://otw-news.org/y8pvnu7j

[jessikast]

I’m sorry but these are the absolute funniest items to have sequentially on the list:

[a-silly-poll-side-blog-yay]

would you still be alive without modern medicine? looking back at your life, would you survive without any to the moment where you are now?

yes

no

barely

yes but it would affect me for the rest of my life

results

Voting ended onJun 2

I'd have my knee fucked up forever 🫪 alive but yeahhhhh

[stele3]

I need people to understand that the “No” should be much, much higher. 50% of children used to die before the age of 15, and we just went thru an airborne global pandemic. Everybody say “thank you” to vaccines and antibiotics, without which probably 75% of us would be dead.

[voidandradiance]

the most disorienting thing thats ever happened to me was when a linguistics major stopped in the middle of our conversation, looked me in the eye, and said, "you have a very interesting vernacular. were you on tumblr in 2014?" and i had to just stand there and process that one for a good ten seconds

[booksandchainmail]

#i was in a car with a linguist i had never met before the car trip and like half an hour in he looked at me#after i finished describing a geology thing that was happening out the window and asked if i'd ever spent much time on tumblr#the fuckor of it all#and then we spent six more hours driving#it sure does leave linguistic markers! i'm not sure i'm good with it (tags via @thoughtsformtheuniverse)

[issela-santina]

it is one thing to be a linguist and another to be a linguist who knows enough of 2010s Tumblr to spot one of its enjoyers

[lierdumoa]

Oh! @meret118 see above comment! The use of the word "enjoyers" instead of "users" or "bloggers" -> You left a comment a while back asking, "Does this just mean vocabulary words? Other than blorbo and sweet cinnamon roll etc, I can't think of what a Tumblr accent would be." I almost never see anyone use the word "enjoyer" anywhere outside of tumblr, but I see it on tumblr fairly frequently.

Another one is the verb "perceive" i.e. "don't perceive me" "I am perceiving" "I am being percieved." That's something that feels very specific to tumblr parlance.

There's the thing where people on tumblr have an emotional reaction to something and instead of, or in addition to telling you how they feel about it using emotion words, they will narrate a fictional action in the present progressive tense. "I am gnawing at the bars of my enclosure "I am kissing you on the mouth" "you are going into the soup" "you are getting all of the awards"

I once saw someone use that response format in ... I think it was a restaurant review, or a doordash review, or something like that. It was very unexpected seeing it outside of a tumblr post.

There are a lot of other tumblr linguistic quirks I can't currently remember off the top of my head, but I'll instantly recognize them if I see/hear them outside of tumblr. It's always a bit startling to see them out of context.

[pacificnorthwhore]

[i-wear-the-cheese]

when I was in university one of my modules was about internet slang and for our grades project we had to compile and analyse a small database of 100 words used by a specific community of our choice. I chose tumblr and that's how I stumbled across Gretchen McCulloch's research and discovered that yes not only did tumblr have its own vernacular and syntax (as @lierdumoa demonstrates), it was at the time a crucible of slang and memes probably unrivalled by any other part of the internet. and it's stayed that way! even the very title is McCulloch's book because internet is an example of this specific phraseology.

sadly my project is lost due to the website being wiped from the university database after graduation and my then laptop having a major hardware failure. backup your backups people! but the crux of the entire module was that the internet is full of communities using language not only as jargon for specific purpose but also to signal membership in said community. I even wrote a bit about non capitalisation and punctuation useage as a visual cue on tumblr and how including information in the reblog body or the tags indicated different levels of importance or intimacy of thought

I am holding the side of your face and looking deep in your eyes and telling you that love is stored in the syntax, and that we are rotating words together all at once as we all nod at their new and baffling meanings. if the devils sacrament be tumblr then the devils gospel is our collective voice. thanks for coming to my tedtalk

[weirdchristmas]

I am being perceived.

[wouldyoueatthisfood]

Would you eat this?

I would eat this

I would not eat this

I have eaten this (positive)

I have eaten this (negative)

Remaining time: 1 hour 40 minutes

Food: Australian party pies

Ingredients: olive oil, chuck steak, onion, garlic, tomato paste, beef stock, red wine, bay leaves, salt, black pepper, cornstarch, water, egg yolk, shortcrust pastry, puff pastry

[catchymemes]