Just a squishy creature @kindlygrub - Tumblr Blog

sometiktoksarevalid

hardrockerhippie

At first i was like: why the hell is this on tumblr?! And then it suddenly made sense...

ekjohnston

This is incredible.

ginsays

IT'S NOVEMBER but I'm not ready to give up the ghost just yet!! Go for it young miss!! 💚

joy-and-whimsy-official

Joy and whimsy I found on another platform! How joyful and whimsical!

temmiechang

little animated doodle

n1-adora-fan

Never change Brennan

corrodedparadox

You telling me…

Prints

bridgekc

yugioh but girls. more characters on the way

ft. a random pinterest outfit i found

the-upper-shelf

Late night Lugia illustration!

beguilingcorpse

i see a lot of criticism towards 17776 along the lines of “ugh if humanity actually stopped aging or dying and people really did just live forever they would not spend their time playing football… that is not what EYE would do with MY time…. this is so unrealistic….. clearly the author just wanted to write about sports 🙄😒” and like. yeah. yes. exactly. jon bois is a sports writer and sports analyst who wanted to examine why people love sports and why sports have cultural staying power and why he especially finds sports compelling and what sports have to say about the human condition and our ability to care. so he made up a fake scenario about humans being immortal and then he made it about sports. and he wrote about sports. the story is titled ‘what sports will look like in the future.’ if that isn’t something that you can vibe with then maybe the story simply is not for you

headspace-hotel

17776 asks you to be fascinated with football for a little while and if you don't take that invitation the story is much less powerful. The first time I read it I kind of skimmed through the parts talking about football because I thought, well, I'm not interested in sports.

The second time I read it I paid more attention to those parts and realized that they were an essential part of the story. This key component of fascination with a human pastime is the axis that the themes revolve around.

Fascination illuminates the world and reveals a lot of meaning in it. Much more can be understood through curious eyes.

aguywholikestanks

The key point is that 17776 and it's sequels are not about immortality, and it is not attempting to predict what would happen in this scenario. It is a study of the impact of sports(amongst other things) on people, using immortality as a narrative device to achieve this.

headspace-hotel

I think I got that in my first read, or at least I understood that the story was about play and the things that are intrinsically motivating to humans: what do we do when there are no stakes and there is no more "progress" to make?

Some of the segments are not really "about" sports, such as the destruction of the lightbulb, where the satellites mourn the "death" of an inanimate object that has meaning because it's been given meaning.

But, if you think you don't care about sports, and therefore don't pay much attention to the parts of the story that are digging deeply into the technicalities of the bizarro football games, you still miss a lot of the story's meaning, because the layers of depth and close examination and exploration show how love for something transforms it, making it endlessly fascinating and new.

I understood the theme of play as a counteracting force to our existential anxiety and feeling of need for "progress" and "meaning," but on my initial read I missed how the story is about love. Not love as an experience between people, but love as an orientation towards existence and your surroundings.

In my re-read it came through so clearly that WOW, this writer really, really loves football. And in the story, football is so inexhaustibly complicated and meaningful, to the point that it's impossible to ever fully appreciate, because people love it and they are always exploring new ways to play it.

It's interesting, because it's important to the story that the writer loves football, but it's equally important to the story that a lot of people don't love football, because these infinite wonders hidden in our existence externally appear so mundane. Football is just another boring, mundane thing that is transfigured by love. Our world is so worthy of being loved that we could never fully love it even if we were to live forever. That's what 17776 is about, to me.

beleester

NANCY: Football's different things to different people. I see this kind of football, the open-world kind, as its end state. The old grid football, the hundred-yard kind, was basically just training wheels. The game was always all about the field, of course. The ground, the Earth. And it was kind of like, "here. Take this little boring flat grassy rectangle and prove you can really know it and understand it." NANCY: And they spent hundreds of years getting to know the Hell out of it. And now, to me, football is a further exercise in getting to know and love this world, this planet. You know? The actual ground. It's so rich with history, it's just embarrassing.

Nancy pretty much says this directly. If football can have such endless complexity grow from a 100-yard rectangle of grass, how much more so is the complexity of the whole world? What would it mean, to truly understand the whole world at that level?