procrastinating

she/her, early 20s ~ this is an incoherent mishmash.

[parkchanwoohoo]

Realizing that I am not employing enough of my free will to become a nuisance at work

[raine-of-auroria]

Me watching this:

[femmedummy]

the tragedy of distance is simple I want to sit on the couch with you and do nothing sometimes

[todayintokyo]

Volleyball player Yuji Nishida accidentally hit a line judge. This is how he apologized.

[rakkzi]

[json-derulo]

I wonder if being raised in a more communal family/society makes you more likely to be emotionally balanced

[json-derulo]

Like, if your primary source of human contact during your formative years is 1-2 people, you’re naturally going to pick up at least some of their neuroses, because that’s your model for what a person is. You unconsciously notice what they value, what they punish you for, and that forms the basis of your worldview. If a father yells at his toddler for knocking over her cereal bowl because food was scarce when he was a child, she may feel profound guilt about throwing out expired food when she grows up. And even if a parent is emotionally healthy and present and doing their best, they’re still bound to screw you up somehow if they’re the main influence—praise a kid too often for their independence, and they grow up to be so self-sufficient that they think needing help from others will make them a disappointment.

So if you just increase the number of distinct close influences on the child, increase the variety of experiences and worldviews they’re exposed to, does that produce a more emotionally well-rounded adult? If your dad over-praises your independence, but the disabled neighbor whose lawn you mow every week teaches you that relying on others is how humans connect with one another, do you grow up into someone who understands that it’s okay to ask for help when you need it? If your mom criticizes your eating habits or weight, but your friend’s grandmother tells you to have seconds or thirds if you want because nourishing your body is good and important, do you become an adult with a mostly-okay relationship to food? Or does the parental influence still cut just as deep?

[json-derulo]

I don’t actually know the answer to these questions, btw (and given that we can’t even agree on a standard international definition of what constitutes a “death from heart disease” when reporting death statistics, I suspect that “emotional well-roundedness” is a really complicated concept to measure that would differ significantly from culture to culture, meaning a solid apples-to-apples comparison may not even be possible). But I do wonder if the US shift toward nuclear family living arrangements/suburban isolation/mistrust of each other/etc over the last 75 years or so maaaaaaybe has a lot to do with why we’re all so messed up now

[gerardwayspostcocaineweightgain]

it’s actually wild how terrified of the general public most usamericans are. like you don’t realize it if you’re someone who mostly walks and takes transit and spends a lot of time in populous public spaces but then you talk to one of the thousands of people that seemingly never set foot in any public space besides a parking garage or a starbucks and you suddenly understand why it’s so easy for fascist rhetoric about the dangerous alien to take root. this country’s median voter pretty much never interacts with strangers who aren’t their coworkers or people they met on dating apps

[gerardwayspostcocaineweightgain]

saw a post on instagram that was literally someone citing statistics saying public transit is one of the safest travel options out there and the comments were literally just “ummmmm op this is so ableist and misogynistic of you :) don’t you know the average public transit user is a dangerous violent criminal who wants to set you on fire :)))”

[gerardwayspostcocaineweightgain]

it must be so terrifying and sad to go through life convinced if you set foot outside your car in public or interact with people outside your nuclear family you’ll instantly be raped and robbed by the Evil Poors no wonder so many of these people are reactionary tar pits

[junglejim4322]

This person wrote a manifesto I ain’t reading all that but this is literally the type of behavior im talking about the idea hobbies all cost money is so removed from reality if you have the time to pick up your phone and write 7 paragraphs on how im victimizing you with my offhanded post you have the time to watch a movie on YouTube with your very same phone instead come on now. How is you freaking out on the internet helping any of these issues

[turbozarky]

things that dont cost money: hiking, walking, birdwatching, identifying plants, drawing (you have a pen, reading (library), collecting rocks, dancing, singing.... etc wtc etc

if you cant find a hobby you can afford, thats a you problem. and if youre posting online, you have a device to do that, get some free games, trawl wikipedia, study something. stop picking fights online and do something else.

[theonceandfutureharpy]

[judblanc]

jud put up with a ton of shit before stirring a very stirrable pot but we have to admit he stirred that pot with impeccable talent. one plea for honesty 4 dead entire church injured

[homunculus-argument]

Hey people who have several pets, with obvious differences in intelligence levels: How did you figure out that one of them is smarter than the other? What do they do?

[mikkeneko]

There are a lot of things that lead me to think my elder cat is unusually intelligent compared to other felis domesticus I have known (understands pointing, can open every door and cabinet in the house except the ones with round knobs or that I added child locks to, understands enough English to know from a phone conversation that a stranger is coming to the house) but in terms of specifically comparing one to the other, there was The Case Of The Mousey Puzzle Box.

When we got our younger cat Skadi, her favorite toy was (still is, but she's calmed down with age) the rattley mouse. She would bring the mouse to be thrown for fetch so many times that not even two human adults in the house could keep up with her. So my partner started making puzzle boxes to put the rattley mouse in that would occupy her for longer.

So, we have a setup: mouse is in the puzzle box, puzzle box is on the floor, younger cat is trying to resolve the puzzle box, elder cat is sitting on the cat tree observing all this. Skadi spends about fifteen minutes trying and failing to get the mouse out of the box. She sticks her paw into the holes. She sticks her nose into the holes. She pushes the box to and fro on the carpet. She meows beseechingly for a human to come solve the problem. Sticks her paws into the holes again.

Finally, she gives up on the puzzle box and wanders over to see if there's any food to be had. As soon as she walks away the elder cat gets up from the cat tree, big stretch, jumps down, walks over to the puzzle box, hooks a paw under the edge and flips the whole thing over, spilling the mouse onto the floor.

Gives the younger cat a look of utter disgust as if to say "That's all you had to do!" and then walks away, utterly uninterested in actually playing with the toy.

[bisexualbaker]

Older cat just subjected to fifteen minutes worth of those horrible mobile game ads where the player is failing really badly to make you want to play.

[handweavers]

i find some people really do not understand grief (end post) but specifically grief for really old people who die of natural causes there is this idea that it doesn't make sense to mourn them because they lived a long life and they passed peacefully and their time was simply over and all of those things are true, but a good and quiet death after a long and happy life is not something that removes or lessens grief. it is the ideal grief, yes, it makes it less complicated, but even the most uncomplicated grief is still death and still has the potential to be a life-changing loss. every death of a loved one sits in me like a ring in a tree trunk. this notion incorrectly identifies grief as 'this person died when they should not have' when you can know in your bones that someone died at the right time, that they were ready and wanted to go, and still grieve intensely for them. grief is the knowledge that they are not coming back, that everything you shared exists only now in your memories. even if a person died well - when you have lost people to 'bad' deaths you really appreciate a 'good' death - they are still never coming back, and that is still something you must carry with you for the rest of your life. there is no manner of dying or age of the person who died when that becomes less painful. people want to believe there is a way to lose someone forever that won't break your heart and that is just not true.

[going2hell4everythingbutbeingbi]

getting lost in boston is fun because I turned around on a street corner three times and some guy yelled "hey stupid! the bus is that way!" very helpful interaction and accurate insult, 10/10 no notes

[going2hell4everythingbutbeingbi]

one time I walked around a building a couple times looking for a bathroom and this guy went "this bitch thinks she's on a merrygoround, where the fuck are you tryna go? bathroom? one floor down to the right behind the door that says bathroom."

[mentohol-blog]

My very first time in Boston. I was absolutely miserable, trying to drag my giant suitcase up a lengthy set of stairs in the pouring rain. This guy who had already reached the top looked back at me with the most pure expression of disgust I’ve ever seen in anyone’s eyes, marched back down the stairs, grabbed my suitcase, carried it to the top, left it there for me, and walked away without ever saying a word. I think about him often.

[just7frogsinapeoplesuit]

For the people in the notes going "why is Boston like this": a) the insults are a way to show you have no ulterior motives when helping someone (and don't need to be thanked or repaid), and b) Boston was settled by the Irish

[tockthewatchdog-deactivated2020]

i cant stop laughing

[eulers-babe]

for no reason whatsoever here’s a reminder that if you consider yourself a leftist/punk/abolitionist/anarchist/radical in any sort of way and get called into jury duty, you are to become the most square person on earth during the jury questionnaire!!!

don’t be that guy who says fuck the police in the jury questionnaire! that just gets you sent home! if you want to generate change, interact with the case and use your jury vote for good! ESPECIALLY if it’s a high profile case!

[libraryogre]

Remember, when you're on the jury, a good "that cop's story didn't add up" will sway a lot more Chads and Karens than "fuck the police."

[damnfool-of-a-took]

Had jury duty, can confirm!

An innocent man is home with his family instead of spending his kids' whole childhoods in jail for "resisting arrest" when none of the cops could agree on why he was being arrested in the first place. (But it definitely had nothing to do with him being a Black man in a nice car, honest! 🙄)

And it still took like two hours of delibration after we'd heard all the evidence because one lady was so gung ho about believing everything the cops said, even when not a single goddamn one could agree with their own testimony, let alone their colleagues'.

Pointing out all the inconsistencies and admitted misconduct and letting people slowly come to their own conclusions as the trial played out was fucking hard, I won't lie. I can be patient, but it doesn't come naturally to me.

But. Yelling about how this was obviously a bs case would have shut everyone down and made them stop listening. Asking questions and letting people discuss how the cops tried to make xyz sound suspicious but it was totally normal, or about how if things played out the way the cops said then logically events should have proceeded in a totally different direction, and positing different theories that actually lined up with the evidence presented?

That got people thinking, and everyone realized that for a variety of reasons we all had reasonable doubts that the defendent had committed any of the crimes of which he was accused.

Being able to raise reasonable doubt among a jury of one's peers saves lives. If you get the chance, take it.

[genderkoolaid]

"Jury Room / The Holdout" (1959) by Norman Rockwell. One of my favorites of his. Particularly the gendered dynamic he depicts here.

[shiisiln]

people aren’t wrong when they describe how weird, unhinged, and shitposty The Locked Tomb is- but I don’t see enough mention of how that goes hand-in-hand with how it’s genuinely, earnestly, and effortlessly utterly heartbreaking

like, (massive spoilers) the entire series from Gideon to Nona is about how everything you ever loved is dead and dying, but that doesn’t matter because you can’t take loved away

and it delivers that phrase, which will make me cry for years and has gotten me through personal tragedy in real life, at the end of a bit about a “Free mustache rides” T-shirt

[shiisiln]

#I think what ppl don’t consider is that it’s obnoxiously silly and memey because it’s supposed to be undeniably human#there’s no aliens in this space opera#even the worst characters are unbearably human.#the earth herself is arguably the most human of them all#and what’s more human than giggling at something stupid while your heart breaks apart?#what’s more human than stopping to feel gleeful about a really fucking dumb joke?

You. You GET it.

[oh-jod-dammit]

The juxtaposition is honestly so, so important and so masterfully executed. It controls and balances the tone. It's far more memorable than most works trying to be entirely serious and Professional. It's frequently used to direct the audience's attention, like in GtN where Harrow quoting Teacher just lays out huge swaths of the plot pretty directly, but on a first read we don't have quite enough context to understand what we're looking at and then immediately get distracted by Gideon's "Surprise, my tenebrous overlord! Ghosts and you might die is my middle name!" Sometimes the humor is used to disguise lines that should garner more suspicion, too, like she's not quite the only one who says it but it's weird they still have a concept of middle names tbh? And of course the infamous None House with Left Grief, which really SHOULD be just as glaring as quoting Annabel Lee, especially with both present rather than just one or the other. So many just don't give the same consideration to "lower" references like memes or modern things that they do to "higher" "classic" art—which is textually acknowledged and played with in the way Blood of Eden names equally preserve both.

And yeah, it's so deeply also how authentic and human it makes everything. It's the way you can feel through every page how much passion Tamsyn Muir has for this story. It's not an unfiltered experience, but it still manages to feel like it in ways that really matter, and that takes so much skill to do with such intention.

It's vital to just how special these books are, and while of course I wished more people who turned up their nose could see that, I'm so grateful for how many people started out with mixed to negative feelings about it only to fall in love and understand by the end. Everyone who found Gideon's jokes jarring and intrusive in early GtN but by this passage was emotional about and grateful for Cheap Mustache Rides. I hope the impact it makes spreads and gives us more works that feel like this in the future, because it really is so wonderful.

[mcbitchtits]

this is fucking incredible

An Archive of Our Own, a project of the Organization for Transformative Works

[annabelle--cane]

harrow the ninth asks the question "what is the first impulse of a genius necromancer when trying to retain any shred of coherency in a river bubble?" and gives the unambiguous answer "write fanfiction"

[annabelle--cane]

to be clear I am talking both about palamedes "the necromancer's marriage season... 2!!!!" sextus and harrowhark "role swap au" "ballroom au" "coffee shop au" nonagesimus. tamsyn muir said that in 100% of case studies the last frantic attempt of a prodigy to avoid entering a final psychological death spiral is writing tropey fanfic.

[annabelle--cane]

ortus I'm so sorry I forgot about you and your matthias nonius rpf. you may not be a necromancer but you were still fucking it up in a river bubble. unequivocally harrow the ninth boldly states that fanfiction saves lives.

[carbomcoco]

"these researchers published a paper on something that literally any of us could have told you 🙄" ok well my supervisors wont let me write something in my thesis unless I can back it up with a citation so maybe it's a good thing that they're amplifying your voice to the scientific community in a way that prevents people from writing off your experiences as annecdotal evidence

[carbomcoco]

they did the research in the first place because they believed you and wanted to tell people about it. they are not our enemies.

[yesthattoo]

Sometimes "they" are us who got an entire graduate degree for the explicit purpose of saying this stuff where academics might take it seriously.

[capricorn-0mnikorn]

I probably reblogged this before, but I'm doing it again for that last comment.

[landminepeople]

i bet on losing dogs