I'm fairly certain I've gone insane

[brightlotusmoon]

[legendarymilkshakecupcake]

List of Psychic Damage Short Stories:

Anything written by Edgar Allen Poe, and anything by Ray Bradbury

The Girl With a Green Ribbon by Alvin Schwartz (couldn't find a link sadly)

Lamb to the Slaughter by Roald Dahl

There Will Come Soft Rains by Ray Bradbury

All Summer in a Day by Ray Bradbury

The Pedestrian by Ray Bradbury

A Sound of Thunder by Ray Bradbury

Dark They Were, and Golden Eyed by Ray Bradbury

The Veldt by Ray Bradbury

The Crucible (Play) by Arthur Miller

Graveyard Shift by Stephen King

The Jaunt by Stephen King

Strawberry Spring by Stephen King

Pilgrims by Elizabeth Gilbert

The Grey Man by H.G. Wells

Little Brother by Bruce Holland Rogers

There is No Unmarked Women by Deborah Tannen

The Scarlet Ibis by James Hurst

No Is Yes (audiobook) by Paul Jennings

The Hortlak by Kelly Link (?)

The Interlopers by Saki/ H.H. Munro

The Cold Equations by Tom Godwin

A Rose for Emily by William Faulkner

Bloodchild by Octavia Butler

A Good Man is Hard to Find by Flannery O'Connor

Killing Lizards by William Boyd

Exhalation by Ted Chiang

The Most Dangerous Game aka The Hounds of Zaroff by Richard Connell

Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas by Ursula K. Le Guin

The Lady, Or The Tiger? by Frank R. Stockton

The Sniper by Liam O'Flaherty

To Build A Fire by Jack London

Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been? by Joyce Carol Oates

The Evaluators by N.K. Jemisin (link might not be correct)

The Valedictorian by N.K. Jemisin (came up as rec'd in search engine but I haven't read it/know much about it)

I Have No Mouth And I Must Scream by Harlan Ellison

The Far and The Near by Thomas Wolfe

The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka

The Vanishing Point (unsure who the author is supposed to be; it seems like there are many different versions out there? linked is an audio file that may be what the commenter referred to)

The Delicatessen (I swear I've read this one but I can't find it anywhere; if anyone has a link please reblog and share!)

Hills Like White Elephants by Ernest Hemmingway

Fat Farm by Orson Scott Card

The Yellow Sign by Robert Chambers

By the Waters of Babylon by Stephen Vincent Benet

Bread by Margaret Atwood

The Bees by Dan Chanon (best I could find lol)

The Iron Cross by Heiner Muller (this is all I could find; perhaps someone else can find a digital copy of the story?)

A Very Old Man With Enormous Wings by Gabriel Garcia Maquez

The Story of An Hour by Kate Chopin

A Jury of Her Peers by Susan Glaspell

The Box Social by James Reaney

Just An Ordinary Day (Collection) by Shirley Jackson (specifically linked for the Honeymoon of Mrs. Smith)

Rhinoceros (Play) by Eugene Ionesco

Rain, Rain, Go Away by Isaac Asimov

The Outcasts of Poker Flat by Bret Harte

A Hundred And Twenty Muscles by Rachel Heng (gruesome, beware)

The Mark of Cain by Roxanne Gay

A Tiny Feast by Chris Adrian (this is one of my favorites!! unfortunately, it's behind a paywall in New Yorker. I'm unsure of where to find another copy sadly)

You Are Happy? by Akhil Sharma (another paywalled New Yorker article)

Haunting Olivia by Karen Russell (this one is SO GOOD.)

Paper Menagerie by Ken Liu

A Private Experience by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

Mercedes' Special Talent by Tere DaVila

You, Disappearing by Alexandra Kleeman

The Travel Guide to the Dimension of Lost Things by Effie Seiberg

The Lottery by Shirley Jackson

Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman

Death of a Moth by Virginia Woolf (linked is a collection of her works)

Poems to Fuck You Up:

Porphyria's Lover by Robert Browning

Dulce et Decorum Est by Wilfred Owen (WW1 Mustard Gas Poem)

A Good Day by Kait Rokowski

The Ballad of Reading Gaol by Oscar Wilde

Romantic Comedies by Mark Leidner

Invictus by William Ernest Henley (a personal favorite!)

Rape Joke by Patricia Lockwood

I know why the caged bird sings by Maya Angelou

a few poets to explore: Silvia Plath, Emily Dickinson, bell hooks (especially her!)

Songs (all can be found on Spotify):

Radium Girls (Curie Eleison) by Rachel Sumner

Inertia, Maybe Man by AJR (honestly all of their stuff haha)

It's OK by Nightbirde

Cotton by the Mountain Goats

What Sarah Said by Death Cab for Cutie

rest in peace by BLU EYES (all of her stuff tho for real)

Iris by the Goo Goo Dolls

Church of No Religion by Ed Harcourt

Stars and Stripes by Julie Havery

That Funny Feeling by Bo Burnham

Suggested Novels:

Literary Works of Satyajit Ray (wikipedia link)

Out of the Dust by Karen Hesse (actual novel)

The Watertower by Gary Crew (wikipedia link)

The Giver

And the Ocean Was Our Sky by Patrick Ness (info link)

The Damage is Done by Warren Fellows

I Am the Cheese

Where the Red Fern Grows

1984

Wonder

The Room

Bridge to Terebithia

Jacob Have I Loved

Lord of the Flies

apologies if I forgot any of the repeats! Please add with any of your own reccomendations! :)

[soundlessdragon]

My kids are still quite young (under school age), and I've been careful to try to make sure they only have kind role models. This has resulted in typical mean language being absent from their vocabulary, such as "you're stupid/ugly/I hate you", but they've started inventing their own ways to be mean lol, such as "you're not my brother anymore, you're a stranger to me now", and hearing that out of a toddler's mouth is so cutting lol

[soundlessdragon]

My favorite tags so far

[gator-crusador]

This is a great case-in-point about why designating certain words forbidden is an ineffective strategy. Words don’t dictate thoughts and feelings; they express them. The thoughts and feelings remain, even if the mode of expression is taken away, and a new mode of expression for the thought will be found.

[1964worldfair]

Hollow knight drawing

[falseknees]

Prints available in my store!

[bowelfly]

BANNED from the abbey garden for unsanctioned nibbling

[saprosappho]

always funny that my mom thought my best friend was a bad influence on me growing up as though i wasn’t in my best friend’s ear during sleepovers at hers like an evil royal vizier. “sire now is the time. while your lady mother sleeps. eight more popsicles could be ours if you strike now”

[soundlessdragon]

My kids are still quite young (under school age), and I've been careful to try to make sure they only have kind role models. This has resulted in typical mean language being absent from their vocabulary, such as "you're stupid/ugly/I hate you", but they've started inventing their own ways to be mean lol, such as "you're not my brother anymore, you're a stranger to me now", and hearing that out of a toddler's mouth is so cutting lol

[soundlessdragon]

My favorite tags so far

[gator-crusador]

This is a great case-in-point about why designating certain words forbidden is an ineffective strategy. Words don’t dictate thoughts and feelings; they express them. The thoughts and feelings remain, even if the mode of expression is taken away, and a new mode of expression for the thought will be found.

[crematedequally]

this morning i noticed my cat was freaking out more than usual. he's an anxious kitty (he'd been a stray for 3 years when we got him, then we had two moves with a very rough period in between). usually he has a routine that i do with him that helps him calm down but today it just wasn't working and i couldn't figure out why he was so stressed out. he kept bapping me on the head and waking me up and running around and eventually i realized what the issue was.

on monday i had a skin biopsy that left a pretty sizeable wound. yesterday i spent pretty much all day feeling like shit and laying around, and today i was supposed to clean it and change the dressing. he was panicking because he could smell the wound, saw me laying in bed all day, and he wasn't sure if i was okay. i got up, and as i removed the old bandage he started WAILING. just completely losing it when he saw it. he clearly understood that something like that wasn't good. i made sure he didn't touch it, but i let him smell me and see that i was okay, and he watched me clean and re-bandage it and pretty much the second it was done he immediately calmed down.

ten minutes later and he's purring and snuggly and 'guarding me' from such scary things as Loud Noise Outside and Blanket Moving Weird. this cat is better at taking care of me than i am some days.

[legendarymilkshakecupcake]

57 is just one of Goosworx's inside jokes I've heard

Ahh, thank you! Haven't seen that anywhere

[charl0ttan]

higher math is so fucked because once you get the hang of individual equations they start making you think about all of them at once

[catarium]

A lot of things happening at once, but I cannot get off my head New Grimm calling Hornet “auntie”

[stasqwgos]

Status of abstracted subject?

Disabling C&A intranet will only trigger emergency release system for "lucid" human subject

[mang0mochi]

IVE GOT ANOTHER ONE WHY WAS ABEL the mannequin so linked to hot dogs?

The merch for him and the pendant he was given both had hot dogs after some dialouge kinger mentions scratch, And in the spduy's episode there was an add for the Dobby dog we already know that this dog is Scratch but how and why is this related to Abel.???

ALSO ALSO the fact that the merch of Abel is wearing a spduy's employee hat!

[legendarymilkshakecupcake]

OMG is the 57.57 real?? In Jax's room the blocks also said 57, and the dice on his blanket and the dice were 5's as well! 5-7 has some sort of deeper meaning istg

[vi-chan-things]

I admire people who notice this x2

Is Gangle really there?

Have you noticed anyone else there besides Ribbit and Kaufmo?

[maybequinnidk]

i've seen some people saying this but i don't think caine causes all the abstractions

i think whatever he did to scratch was by accident, and he might have never done so again

i could see a case for kaufmo, but i'm still not fully sold. i really think kaufmo just got so obsessed with finding an exit that he couldn't think of anything else and spiralled into abstraction

another reason (the main reason, actually) why i think caine doesn't cause all abstractions is jax. caine had nothing to do with jax's almost abstractions (i'm counting ep 6 and 7). jax is lonely and borderline, if not entirely, depressed; he just had a pretty bad fight with the one person he was getting friendly with since ribbit and kaufmo abstracted; and the other players prefer it when he's not around (tbf we don't actually know how kinger feels about him, but it's not like they're close so the point stands). he has obvious vulnerability/attachment issues is my point, caine doesn't have anything to do with that directly and i don't think there's anything he could have done to prevent it from happening

this is not to say caine did nothing wrong ever, he's very flawed: he doesn't care that much about the players feelings/struggles – he wasn't programmed to care; only talks to them about adventures; he put them in a right stress situation, making them believe there's a way out only for it to be another adventure – knowing how much they want to leave, i think that classifies as psychological torture; he messed with someone's mind so much it led them to abstraction

i'm just saying he's not intentionally, deliberately evil. he's a computer program that does what he was made to do: games for the people inside the amazing digital circus

[honeythegoat]

*Caine made Jax press the red button* is an in universe retcon by Jax , imo:

Of course, Caine got in his head, he got in all of their heads with this situation. As in a really elaborate and cruel prank would.

But I don't think Caine made Jax press the button with mind control, to me it seems like since Jax was already in a bad place, the circumstances organically led to him pressing the red button.

And I DO believe his suspicions of Caine's mind bending ability is genuine, so is his outburst.

But if you look at it, by this flow of events Jax actually gets to face none of consequences of what he had done:

The fact Caine just interrupted right then actually saves his ass from the consequences for the moment

Then it all turns out to be farce and that weakens the consequences of his choice quite a bit already. It's still bad but at least there weren't real stakes.

BUT then he turns things around.

By the virtue of first mentioning Caine getting into his head before AND then tying it to the actual mind bending stuff Caine has done, he is also retconning the fact that he'd just made the choice to stay in digital circus even if it meant trapping everyone else too.

So the in universe narrative becomes:

"It was never him fucking up in panic or revealing something he didn't mean to, it was Caine's mind bendy stuff all along"

[lezz-agna]

This comment on the latest tadc episode made me laugh