kill your darlings

i'm that clown that operates on a sideblog, please go forth to @kangaracha and read my fics (just kidding i'll tell you here it's apocalyvse on ao3 check ur fluff at the door no shoes on the carpet thankyou)

[devinellekurtz]

When we first met

[callme-mag]

Altaïr's full face (canon!)

After years of seeing only part of his face...

[frontmansdefender]

RIP to the legend

[silvermoon424]

This goose fucking rocks and had a crazy life!

I really just have to summarize Thomas's entire life:

He was in a committed relationship with a male swan named Henry for 18-24 years before a female swan named Henrietta showed up and mated with Henry.

Thomas was initially jealous of the pair and attacked them, breaking 2 of the 5 eggs Henrietta had laid. However, once the remaining eggs hatched, Thomas warmed up to them and helped raise them.

Henry couldn't fly because of an injured wing, so Thomas taught the cygnets how to fly.

When they needed to reduce the goose population in the pond where Thomas and the swans lived, they dyed Thomas's feathers red so he wouldn't be separated from Henry.

Henry, Henrietta, and Thomas remained in their happy throuple for years and raised 68 cygnets before Henry died in 2009. After Henry's death, Henrietta found another swan and flew away, leaving Thomas alone.

Thomas finally met and mated with a female goose in 2011 and had his own babies. However, another goose named George stole them and raised them himself.

As Thomas grew elderly and blind, he was relocated to a wildlife center where he raised orphaned cygnets.

His caretaker at the center described him as "pretty high maintenance."

Thomas died in 2018 at the age of around 40. He had a funeral that included a small coffin and a procession that was led by a bagpiper. He was buried under the stone where Henry was buried, the two finally reunited in death.

Before and after his death, Thomas has been celebrated as an icon of the LGBTQ+ community for obvious reasons.

[nadhie]

my dad just exploded into laughter out of nowhere and told me ‘imagine the lion king but with sea lions’ he has been chuckling about it for 5 straight minutes now

[nadhie]

apparently it doesn’t matter that i’ve told him 10 times it’s the monkey who raises the newborn and not the lion himself, this is the scene he has been imagining

“he can’t raise his kid over his head”

[wakingfromthewater]

I want it

[crockpotcauldron]

okay but have you considered

[imaginarylock]

quality content

[thorinobsessed]

Extreme quality

[janetbrown711]

@squorkal can it be my job to find you seal posts? Because I want that job

[squorkal]

[darkcomedies]

reading a “there was only one bed fic” and the characters have decided to share the bed as long as they stay on their sides. i’m really glad they figured that whole mess out and am excited to read about them staying on their sides of the bed until morning^-^

[darkcomedies]

oh dear

[pollsforadults]

You get transported into the universe of the last media you consumed. How are you doing?

This is better than my real life

I'm doing well

I'm doing fine

I'm not having a good time

I'm absolutely cooked

There is nothing different about this universe and my own

Voting ended onMay 29

[questcequecestqueca]

She played bass on 10,000 songs, including the most-played track of the twentieth century. She was paid $55 per session. Her name never appeared on the albums.

Gold Star Studios, Los Angeles, 1964. A woman in a cardigan walks past the receptionist, a Fender Precision bass in her hand like a briefcase. She doesn’t sign autographs. She signs a timesheet.

Her name is Carol Kaye. In three hours, she will record what will become the most-played track of the twentieth century. She’ll pocket fifty-five dollars and head to another studio, on the other side of town, for the next session.

The record label will never put her name on the album.

Between 1957 and 1973, Carol Kaye took part in roughly 10,000 recording sessions. Not as the featured artist, not as a guest, but as a hired hand. She was part of an anonymous collective nicknamed The Wrecking Crew—elite studio musicians who actually played the instruments on your favorite records while the famous bands posed for promotional photos.

The work was relentless. Three albums before the day was over. Stale coffee in paper cups. No rehearsal. The charts arrived minutes before the tape rolled. If you couldn’t read a chart and nail the take in two tries, you didn’t get called for the next session.

Carol could do it on the first try.

She started playing guitar in grimy bars at fourteen because her family couldn’t pay the electric bill. Music wasn’t a romantic dream for her. It was survival. It was a job—factory work with better acoustics and lower pay.

But she was faster and sharper than almost everyone else. She corrected charts in pencil while the producer was still explaining what he wanted. In one session in 1968, she told a famous producer his arrangement sounded like a dying dog. She chose her own line. They kept her version.

That descending bass line that drives the Beach Boys’ “Wouldn’t It Be Nice”? Carol Kaye. The propulsive groove of “These Boots Are Made for Walkin’”? Carol Kaye. The acoustic-guitar intro to “La Bamba”? Carol Kaye. The iconic theme from Mission: Impossible? Carol Kaye.

She invented techniques on the spot, out of sheer necessity. When the bass sound was too muddy for AM radio, she stuck felt under the strings and used a hard pick instead of her fingers. The tone cut through the static like a blade. It became the sonic signature that defined 1960s pop.

Bassists spent years—decades—trying to crack the secret of the Beach Boys’ gear to get that sound. They were studying the wrong people. They should have been studying Carol.

She received no royalties. No residuals. No gold-record ceremony. No credit on the album sleeves. When “You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feelin’” hit number one, Carol was already back in a studio cutting a soap jingle.

The biggest bands mimed her bass lines on TV variety shows. New York marketing departments decided a mom in classic clothes didn’t fit the rebellious-youth image they were selling. So they simply left her name off the album credits.

For thirty years, almost no one cared. The truth only began to surface in the late 1990s, when music researchers found the same union contract numbers on thousands of hit records. The very documents meant to preserve studio musicians’ anonymity betrayed them.

Think about it. Every time you heard “Good Vibrations,” “River Deep – Mountain High,” the Righteous Brothers, Nancy Sinatra, or Sonny and Cher, you were hearing Carol Kaye. She composed the soundtrack of an entire generation’s youth.

And yet the records still say nothing. She’s now over eighty. She wrote instructional books. She trained countless bassists. She is finally starting to be recognized by music historians who uncovered the truth about The Wrecking Crew.

But she never got what she deserved: her name on those albums. Credit for the music that defined an era. Recognition that those bass lines everyone associates with the “Beach Boys” were, in fact, Carol Kaye’s.

Fifty-five dollars a session. Ten thousand sessions. The most-played track of the twentieth century.

And the world didn’t know her name.

[clevermanka]

She was admitted to the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 2025 but refused, fuck yeah, Carol. Her official website is incredible.

[redlipstickresurrected]

Joyce Lee (South Korean, b. Seoul, South Korea)Female Artists - Keep Calm and Eat his Flesh, Paintings: Watercolor, Acrylic, Colored Pencil on Paper

[louisegluckpdf]

they won't tell you this in therapy but sometimes the best way to stop catastrophizing/anxiety is to interrupt your spiraling with "girl what the hell are you talking about"

[ytpreviews]

It's not a cure but you have no idea how many times this image has helped me with my OCD

[notgreatthanks]

This tag has been more effective than any meds I’ve ever taken

[aisatsaa]

we'll meet again don't know where, don't know when

[identitty-dickruption]

I went to an exhibition on the history of migration and colonial rhetoric in Australia and it really helped me to pinpoint my exact issue with the way non-Australians (and. tbh. some aussies) talk about this country

this map is a piece of propaganda from 1921. honestly what shocked me about it was how little of Australia is marked out as “uninhabited”. I have seen maps shared around on this website that basically mark out the entirety of non-coastal Australia as “empty”. fucking colonialists from 1921 were more generous than some of you

the history of colonial Australia is a history of “taming the untameable land”. this has been reinforced through narratives that this country is:

inherently dangerous

uninhabitable

empty

this rhetoric survives in both the way Australia is imagined by non-Australians and in the self-image of Australia. the (white) aussie battler conquers the unconquerable. the outback is imagined as a post-apocalyptic hellscape. our fauna is categorised as uniquely hellish and unwieldy. so when non-Australians make joke after joke about how scared they are of this place. well you can imagine why it fills me with the kind of rage that can only be generated by the understanding that You Are Reinforcing Colonialism

[boogerwookiesugarcookie]

For those who haven't seen a map of Indigenous Nations in Australia:

A link to the interactive version, since as you can see there are more cultures than can legibly fit in a single image.

[dreemmachine]

just my humble attempt at raging against the machine

[kangaracharacha]

I switched to Tidal and I would rate the experience as equal to Spotify - and it actually shuffles my playlists every time I ask instead of like, once a week, which was the main reason I switched. And it only cost me $5 on TuneMyMusic to move 2000 songs and playlists, out of that I think like 7 obscure tracks didn't migrate.

[foxlaren]

my top 5 oscar piastri expressions

5 - Boyfriend Smile

4 - did not hear what the fuck you just said

3 - 'ehrmmm'

2 - looking up at other men

1 - SMUG

[schistcity]

currently maybe possibly single-handedly crashing whatever servers eton hosts its archived student newspapers on because me and a friend are getting obsessed with a single outspoken prefect from 1883

[schistcity]

@queenlua Happily! This is going to be long, so here's some set dressing first:

Eton College, for anyone unfamiliar, is a prestigious boys' school in England that has famously educated MANY MANY politicians, royals, nobility, and other assorted famous people. All you really need to know about it is that's it's incredibly posh and expensive and exclusive

The Eton Society (called “Pop” internally) is a self-selecting body of senior students at Eton that have historically held a decent amount of power at the school. If you’ve ever attended a school with a prefect system/house system etc you probably know a little bit about how obnoxious this kind of group can get. Now imagine they're all called Lord Godfrey Pickerington or something. Are you getting it? Is the set being dressed? Good.

Now that the scene is set, here’s our tale!!

I stumbled into Eton’s archives while doing research for a fanfiction and we’ll just leave that admission where it is!! It was in reading old issues of their student-run paper, The Chronicle, from 1883 that myself and @carebewear started becoming fixated on one guy in particular.

Cecil B. Gedge (from this point on known as Gedge) was a member of the Eton Society in 1883/84. He won a few Science awards during his time there (Biology!!) and seemed to like rowing during school sports events. He went on to become a barrister, which will make sense once you know more about him.

The best part of Gedge, though, is his appearances in the minutes for the Eton Society meetings. At least at Gedge’s time, the Eton Society seemed really fond of staging debates (more like loosely organised discussions) on a wide variety of topics.

Here are some of the riveting questions they discussed!

And my personal favourite: "Are Ghosts Real?"

(They were very divided)

Gedge first came to our attention in debate about the annexation of New Guinea, in which he apparently started an "abusive attack on the British army and missionaries":

Wow! Based Gedge!? He continues to spit period-typical truths about things like how we shouldn't tax bicycles actually because it would disproportionately affect poor people. YIMBY Gedge?? He would've loved light rail.

The final nail in our Gedge obsession was a debate on women's suffrage, in which Gedge vehemently advocates for women's right to vote and then gets no supporters at the end of the meeting. But I appreciate that he said it anyway and kept saying it. He is more persecuted that Christ, to me.

Here are some more, from anti-conscription sentiment to indirectly calling his classmates stupid to weirding everyone out by saying he wants to donate his body to science (his friend dissecting him for fun):

We started getting the feeling people might not have liked Gedge that much, mainly since one of the Society members wrote a poem about all his friends and Gedge isn't in it.

In 1884, there was some extended drama in the Chronicle where someone whom I groundlessly suspect was Gedge under a pseudonym ("A Socialist"), wrote to the editor complaining that the "debates" published by the Eton Society were "bad" (genuine quote) and that they should make a REAL debate society at the school that ALL boys, not just the self-selected seniors, could participate in:

To make a long story short most of the vocal members of the Eton Society threw up their hands at this and refused to do anything, basically boiling down to "Just because we're the prefects of the school doesn't mean we should have to actually DO anything!! Unfair!!" and also this quote which reads exactly like at least a thousand real tweets I've seen in my life

Liberal. Gedge, of course, was there giving practical suggestions, but the discussion was ultimately cut short because their principal died and they had to push a memorial issue of the paper. We have a working theory that the staff might've used that interruption as an opportunity to get the boys to cut it the fuck out.

Anyway it's a little unclear what happens to Gedge after that. He isn't credited as being in the 1884 Eton Society in the larger school register but it's unclear if that's because he wasn't re-elected or if he just graduated. Either way, he went on to become a barrister in London, which makes a lot of sense. Sadly though, he passed away in WW1, which we were really normal about

Thank you Lt. Gedge, for truly embodying the eternal spirit of an outspoken debate-kid, a friend to the lefties, a proto-yimby, a terminal back-talker, and the kid in a biology class that's a little too excited for the dissections. I hope your life, however short, was a rich and bright one. Thanks for the incredibly entertaining afternoon, brother 🫡

[helpimsotired]

Justin McElroy talking about accessibility in live theatre (June 9, 2019)

[formichi]

[quasi-normalcy]

“Art is happening everywhere all of the time” but an awful lot of it seems to only ever happen in New York and London, doesn’t it?

[derinthescarletpescatarian]

Unless your enjoyment of theatre is based in the idea that you get to do it and The Poors don’t and that’s why it’s fun for you, how does other people getting to experience recordings of it make it worse? Like why would anybody be against that. “Oh it’s better in person” yeah and concerts are often more fun than listening to CDs, so what? There’s absolutely no reason why people in other places and circumstances shouldn’t get to experience art.

[xiranjayzhao]

Can you imagine how stressed Katara would've been by the time she had two kids with Aang and neither of them were airbenders

Like I know he wouldn't be MAD about it but just imagining being in her situation has me so stressed out

Also Aang was lowkey kind of weird for not bothering to immerse Bumi and Kya in airbender culture even though Air Acolytes were a thing and showed that having airbending wasn't a requirement for being part of the culture

[ironinkpen]

best thing about uncle iroh is that if you pay attention he is actually just as much of an idiot as zuko but has just mastered the art of coming across as a wise old man. the even better thing is that zuko is the only one on the planet who somewhat realizes this and no one would ever believe him because he's zuko

[ironinkpen]

like uncle iroh 100% does dumb shit on purpose sometimes to get people to underestimate him and keep zuko from capturing the avatar, but other times he just, and i cannot emphasize this enough, does impulsive dumb shit for no reason other than the fact that terminal stupid presumably runs in the royal family's blood

[ironinkpen]

uncle: "you never think things through, prince zuko!"

also uncle:

once got captured by the earth kingdom army buck ass naked bc he really wanted to go to a hot spring in enemy territory

betrayed zhao at the Northern Water Tribe with no escape plan and then spent 3 weeks starving on a boat

immediately went to a spa resort upon publicly committing treason

ate a poisonous plant and, in the spirit of Two Fish Hook Sokka, was going to solve the problem by eating another potentially poisonous plant

decided the safest place in the world they could go was the city he once FAMOUSLY laid siege to for 600 days

instead of lying low or giving a modicum of a shit about people recognizing him, overachieved himself into becoming one of the most well-known restaurant owners in said city

in fact overachieved so hard that he got an invite to meet the earth king (whose city he, again, once FAMOUSLY LAID SIEGE TO) which he fucking? accepted????

[prettybirdy979]

#no wonder zuko was constantly frothing at the mouth! he's the only one who knows the truth!#god just imagine the number of times people have seen zuko yelling at iroh#and assumed zuko was just being mean#when zuko was actually yelling at his uncle for wasting all their money bartering with pirates AGAIN#everyone assumes iroh is babysitting zuko but really they're pingponging responsibility back and forth#and zuko at least has the excuse of being 16#anyway I love Uncle Hypocrite so much; funniest motherfucker on the planet (via OP)