bold of you to assume I know things

novelist. poet. student. cat and dog owner. fears lots, loves more. early 20s. rest in peace to my baby boy Cas (in my pfp). i will love you always.

[goth-queen]

[thirdity]

“You write the beginning and then you go back and rewrite the beginning, and you never got off page one. It’s kind of a syndrome, and I have a rash piece of advice which is — Go on, page two, page three, and never look back. Get something finished, no matter how lousy it is. […] Perfectionists cannot get going unless they kind of do violence to their own instincts, and just blast ahead.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin, The Last Interview and Other Conversations

[queerasfact]

Today, 25 February, in 1971, New York newspaper The Village Voice published an article, titled Asexuals Have Problems Too. The article satirised earlier debates in the paper, which had argued over whether straight or gay people had things harder, positing that being asexual in a sex-obsessed world was the hardest of all. You can read the whole thing here.

Although the article was not intended to be taken seriously, it resonated with readers – some wrote in thanking the author for increasing the visibility of asexuality, others wrote in solidarity, hoping to learn more about how to support the ace community.

If you’d like to hear more about this moment in ace history, check out our podcast!

[karcatgirl-vantas]

the default way for things to taste is good. we know this because "tasty" means something tastes good. conversely, from the words "smelly" and "noisy" we can conclude that the default way for things to smell and sound is bad. interestingly there are no corresponding adjectives for the senses of sight and touch. the inescapable conclusion is that the most ordinary object possible is invisible and intangible, produces a hideous cacophony, smells terrible, but tastes delicious. and yet this description matches no object or phenomenon known to science or human experience. so what the fuck

[skluug]

this is what ancient greek philosophy is like

[ace-disgrace-on-the-case]

False! “Sightly” is a positive word, so the default way for things to work is good as well.

The true most ordinary object is beautiful, horrible sounding, very smelly, intangible, and delicious.

I still don’t think it matches anything in existence but to truly understand a thing one must know its true nature.

[professionalchaoticdumbass]

"touchy" is also a word! however it's mostly used for things that aren't objects, like subjects of conversation. it either means "oversensitive and irritable" or "requires careful handling/wording, delicate"

i think the second one works well for our hypothetical object. so we can use that.

therefore, the Default Object is:

beautiful

makes a horrendous sound

smells absolutely awful

is very fragile

tastes delicious

and i still cannot think of anything that matches this

[and-a-pidgey-in-a-wepear-tree]

behold, the default object!

[ospreyonthemoon]

DEFAULT OBJECT FOUND

[sleepyjump]

its so fucking unfair that i never got to be a little girl

[sleepyjump]

or a teenage girl. who got to go to sleepovers and learn how to do makeup

[sleepyjump]

what do you even do when you keep mourning all the childhood you missed. do you just shrug and go back to work or what

[paper-mario-wiki]

i find myself most often resenting this not even just because "it would have been fun to go to sleepovers and get crushes and play with other little girls", even though that is undoubtedly something i missed and feel sad for, and something that should be mourned-- a lot of the time it's because it feels like i'm lacking vital context to navigate the world as a woman.

makeup and braiding hair and accessorizing. specific types of grooming and hygiene that are just not intuitive. skills i didnt learn, because they are taught in specific gendered contexts.

and one could look at a tutorial or course, but studying a 2D projection by yourself representing what you're supposed to be learning will never teach you an understanding of a 3D skill like being in the same room as other people learning it too.

i miss my childhood i didnt get to have as a little girl, not only because the little girl within me feels lonely and the big girl i grew up into feels isolated, but because the big girl i am now didnt get to learn the things she needed to learn as a little girl.

[argumate]

Cuba’s electrical grid suffered a total collapse on Monday, the country’s power operator said, marking the latest nationwide blackout in recent years, and the first since the US effectively shut off the flow of oil to the island of roughly 10 million people.

can't help seeing the US as the enemy of civilisation on this one

[anonymusbosch]

when I was learning more about the logistics of energy grids, I full-on cried at the idea of black-starting. The complete collapse of the grid and what it means for critical infrastructure - water! sanitation! hospitals! - and the piecemeal, bootstraps recovery in which restoration can take days if not weeks in a careful balance of load and supply, frequency and voltage.

This is Cuba's fifth nationwide blackout in the last two years. Godspeed to all the lineworkers and plant operators in bringing everything back online.

[cheruib]

that comment about how you should not borrow grief from the future has saved me multiple times from spiraling into an inescapable state of anxiety. like every time i find myself thinking about how something in the future could go wrong i remember that comment and i think to myself: well i never know, it might get better. it might not even happen the way i think it will and if it does happen and it is sad and bad ill be sad about it then, when it happens. and it’s somehow soo freeing

[1dietcokeinacan]

[performing-personhood]

Someone in the comments is like "but what about how all my worries are always things that DO go wrong" and homie, fuckin same I see you HOWEVER I will ask you how many times has being worried about the thing successfully prevented the Bad Thing from Happening? Or even made it less-awful for having predicted it? Because in my case, and probably yours I would wager, the amount of times is Zero or damn close to it. And therefore the chart is still true.

[novelistparty]

Baby Globe, Wikipedia’s 25th birthday mascot

[mtndewpitchblack]

[lleyksie]

let’s be primitive horses with mama

[justaboldassumer]

I could never hate you, "with mama" posts

[t-s-n-deactivated20250205]

they were so funny for this

[brumpojumpo]

MARK THE DAMN DATE

[fullest-circlest]

If you're writing 18th century dialogue, this website lets you search words and phrases to double-check whether they were in use & meant what you intend. It doesn't include every period-accurate use of a word/phrase, but it certainly helped me separate genuine 18th century grammar from the vague tangle of 💬old-fashioned fancy-speak💬 I've internalized from TV and video games.

[my-deer-friend]

Other websites that let you do this:

Johnson's Dictionary Online (thanks @yellowbelliedtoad!) – 1755 and 1773

Green's Dictionary of Slang – 1300s to today

A Classical Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue – 1788

Feraud's Dictionaire critique de la langue française – 1778

[zisurru]

A dictionary of the English and Italian languages by Giuseppe Baretti is a bilingual dictionary from 1790!

[innocuous-gnome]

getting ready for aro awareness week...

(yes they all have different fonts. i'm not good at this.)

[dragon-in-a-fez]

perfect new meme template just dropped

[dragon-in-a-fez]

example usage

[dragon-in-a-fez]

wait I'm not done

[pinnakoladda]

hey as a local aroace, i want to specify something.

we're no strangers to love. you know the rules and so do i (do i). a full commitments what im thinking of. you wouldnt get this from any other guy. i just wanna tell you how im feeling. gotta make you understand. never gonna give you up. never gonna let you down. never gonna run around and desert you. never gonna make you cry. never gonna say goodbye. never gonna tell a lie and hurt you

[thegaylibertarian]

[liminalweirdo]

I am once again begging you to get your hands on physical media and/or save your fave stuff OFFLINE.

[ellipsus-writes]

[verrlorenpoet]

WITHOUT APOLOGY