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(The best of this post and its reblogs, but with links that work)
Here is a website where you can scroll down to all the different levels of the ocean
Here is a website where you can see the future of the universe
Here is a website where you can press a ‘make everything okay’ button, over and over, until things really are okay
Here is a website that you can read if you feel like a burden
Here is a website where you can look at strobe illusions (TW strobe/flashing)
Here is a website where you can cut stuff up (TW blood/sh)
Here and here are websites where you can play with sand
Here is a website where you can draw with macaroni and other fun foods
Here is a website where you can paint someone’s nails
Here is a website where you can grow a garden with emojis
Here is a website with hundreds of videos of people hugging you (rightfully dubbed ‘the nicest place on the internet’ because it really is, y’all, it made me cry)
Here is a website that will take you to other useless websites
Here is a website where you can make a tiny cat play bongo drums (and other instruments!)
Here is a website to help give you gentle reminders <3
Here is a website where you can grow a tiny farm
Here is a website where you can take a bunch of scientific personality tests
Includes: modern!Baelor x f!reader / modern!Maekar x f!reader
Warning(s): ModernAU, kind of a crack!fic really (i wish my dad kept bees)
GIF by @sakuraspoke
The thing about Valarr, sweet, naïve Valarr, was that he had absolutely no survival instincts.
"He's just reading," he said, from beside you on the kitchen counter, stealing grapes from the bowl between you with the casual ease of someone who had decided you were close enough friends that your food was his food. "It's not that interesting."
"He's got two pairs of glasses on," you said.
"He does that." Valarr ate another grape. "He loses one pair, so he puts on another and then he finds the first pair and instead of swapping them he just—" he gestured vaguely, "stacks them."
You looked back through the kitchen window into the living room where his father was arranged in the armchair by the lamp with the particular quality of a man who had achieved a level of comfort he intended to defend unto death. Dark hair, threads of white catching the warm lamplight. Two pairs of glasses. A book that appeared to be roughly the size of a brick, held with the careful reverence of someone deeply personally invested in its continued structural integrity.
He had a cup of tea on the side table that he had not touched in forty minutes because he kept forgetting it existed.
"What is he reading," you said.
"Something about Byzantine military strategy."
You stared.
"For fun," Valarr added. "He does it for fun."
Baelor turned a page. The lamplight shifted across the lines of his face — the strong bearded jaw, the particular set of his brow when he was concentrating, the slight movement of his lips because he occasionally read difficult passages quietly to himself without realising he was doing it, a habit Valarr had told you about once with the fond exasperation of someone who had grown up watching it and could no longer imagine its absence.
He reached for his tea without looking. Missed it by four inches. Patted the table twice, frowning faintly at his book, and then looked down with an expression of mild surprise at the existence of the cup, like he had genuinely forgotten he had made it.
"Oh no," you said quietly.
"Yeah," said Valarr.
Baelor took a sip of the tea, realised it was cold, made a face of profound personal betrayal directed at no one, set it back down, and returned to his book.
You were experiencing something you didn't have a clean word for. It sat somewhere in the vicinity of I would like to bring this man a fresh cup of tea every day for the rest of my natural life and considerably south of that as well, if you were being honest with yourself, which you were trying not to be.
He turned another page. Murmured something to himself. The lamplight caught the line of his jaw and the silver in his hair and the careful way his hands held the book, and you were, genuinely, a little embarrassed about yourself at realizing that you were, in fact, biting your lower lip.
"Valarr," you said.
"Mm."
"Your dad is—" You stopped. Tried to start again. Stopped again.
"Is…" Valarr prompted, with the patience of someone who had been watching this unfold for the better part of an hour and had popcorn, metaphorically speaking.
You watched Baelor reach for his tea again. Miss it again. The same four inches. The same faint frown. The same expression of mild existential surprise upon locating the cup.
Something in you gave way entirely.
"Valarr," you said. "I want to fuck your dad."
The grape Valarr had been eating went somewhere it was not supposed to go. He coughed. You waited. He held up a finger, collected himself, and turned to look at you with an expression that cycled through several distinct phases — shock, offence, processing, reluctant resignation — in the space of approximately four seconds.
"That's my father," he said.
"I know."
"You just said that about my father."
"I'm aware of what I said."
"He's reading about Byzantine military strategy."
"I know! But him being a nerd isn’t helping," you yelled-whispered to your friend.
You looked back through the window. Baelor had found his tea again, remembered it was cold, and was now looking at it with an expression of genuine philosophical sadness, as if looking at it would eventually warm its content again.
Valarr stared at you for a long moment. Then he looked at his father through the window. Then back at you. The reluctant resignation had settled into something that looked almost like the beginning of a plan.
"He needs a fresh cup of tea," he said slowly.
"He really does."
"Someone should bring it to him." A pause. "He likes it with a splash of milk. No sugar. He'll look up when you come in and forget what he was reading for a moment because he's polite like that, and when he takes his glasses off to look at you properly he'll probably—" Valarr stopped himself. Pinched the bridge of his nose. "I cannot believe I'm doing this."
"Valarr—"
"The kettle's right there," he said, getting off the counter and leaving the kitchen with the dignity of a man washing his hands of a situation while absolutely enabling it. "I'm going to be upstairs. Not hearing anything. For a very long time."
You were already filling the kettle.
GIF by @prettysharwood
You had come over to study.
That had been the plan. That was still, technically, the plan, in the same way that standing in Daeron's kitchen doorway staring into the back garden while your notes sat untouched on the kitchen table was still, technically, adjacent to studying.
"What are you looking at," said Daeron, from somewhere behind you, in the tone of someone who already knew and was choosing to witness it anyway.
"Nothing," you said.
"You've been looking at nothing for six minutes straight."
Through the kitchen window and the glass of the back door, Maekar was in the garden.
He was doing something to a raised bed that appeared to involve a great deal of focused activity — kneeling in the dirt in old jeans and a worn grey t-shirt that had not survived contact with the garden soil in any meaningful way, hands dark to the wrist, white hair shoved back from his face with what appeared to have been a forearm and was now sticking up at an angle that should have looked ridiculous and did not. He was frowning at the soil the way, Daeron had once told you, he frowned at everything that failed to immediately cooperate with his intentions.
He said what seemed like a profanity by the look on his face under his breath. Adjusted whatever he was doing. The frown deepened fractionally.
The t-shirt was doing a lot.
"He's been out there since eight," Daeron said, now beside you with a mug of coffee and the expression of a young man who had made his peace with his life. "Something about the drainage not being right."
"Does he garden a lot?"
"He acts like it's a tactical problem he's been assigned to solve." Daeron drank his coffee. "Last month he made an Excel spreadsheet."
"A spreadsheet."
"For the tomatoes." A pause. "It had conditional formatting."
Outside, Maekar sat back on his heels and looked at the raised bed with his arms resting on his knees and dirt on his beard and the particular expression of a man reassessing a situation and preparing a revised approach. The late afternoon light was doing something entirely unreasonable to the line of his shoulders. His forearms were right there. Existentially. Just present in the world, doing that to your composure.
You needed to get a grip.
"He looks like that when he's cooking too," Daeron said conversationally. You wondered if he wore an apron. "And when he's parallel parking. And when he's doing the crossword. Basically, whenever he's concentrating on anything he gets that—" a vague gesture toward the window— "face."
"The face," you repeated.
"You know the face."
You knew the face. The face was a problem. The face combined with the forearms combined with the dirt on his bearded jaw combined with the knowledge that he had made a colour-coded spreadsheet for his tomatoes was creating a situation inside your chest that you were not equipped to manage.
You did not get a grip.
"Daeron," you said.
"Mm."
The words were out before you made a decision about them. "I want to fuck your dad."
The silence that followed had genuine texture.
Daeron lowered his coffee mug with the slow care of a man buying himself time. He looked at you. You looked at the garden. Outside, Maekar was frowning at the soil again, entirely unaware that his drainage problem was the least of what was currently happening in his kitchen.
"That's—" Daeron started.
"I know."
"He's my dad."
"I know."
"You came over here to study."
"I am studying."
A long pause during which Daeron appeared to conduct an internal debate of some complexity. You watched Maekar stand, brush the dirt from his jeans, push his hair back from his face with one forearm, and survey his raised bed with his hands on his hips. The t-shirt. The forearms. The hair. The frown.
"He's going to be insufferable about the drainage for the rest of the evening," Daeron said finally. "He needs something to redirect his attention."
You said nothing. You let that sit.
"He doesn't know you're here," Daeron continued, in the tone of a man constructing a case for something he will deny constructing. "I could go tell him. He does this thing when he's surprised — not bad surprised, just caught off guard — where he kind of—" another vague gesture— "resets. Stops frowning. It's a good moment."
"Daeron."
"I'm just providing information."
"You're facilitating."
"I'm going to go tell my dad you're here," he said, setting his mug down and heading for the back door with the air of someone who has made peace with their choices. "And then I'm going to remember that I have somewhere else to be. Urgently." He paused with his hand on the door. "He likes it when people are direct, by the way. He has no patience for anything else."
"I know," you said.
Daeron looked at you with suspicious eyes, like how long has this woman been observing my father without me noticing kind of eyes. He preferred not to walk down that line of thought and went to open the back door instead.
"Dad," he called, "look who came to visit!"
Maekar looked up from his raised bed. Found you through the glass. The frown shifted into something else — not quite a smile, but the suggestion of one, that fractional movement at the corner of his mouth that you had learned was as much as you usually got and had discovered was entirely sufficient.
Daeron brushed past you back into the kitchen, collected his jacket from the chair, and pointed at you on his way to the hall.
"I want absolutely no details," he said. "Like ever. Under any circumstances."
"Obviously," you said.
"Not even a look. Not a grin. Nothing."
"Daeron."
"I mean it,” he directed one final look to you from the front door. He turned on his heels and, with that wicked smile he usually saved for when he wanted to get under your skin, said: "Go on, pup, go get your toy."
Your eyes widened at the audacity of the man. But, when the front door closed behind him and you looked back through the glass at Maekar, who was still watching you with that fractional almost-smile and the dirt on his jaw and the forearms, you smiled and decided, for maybe the first time in your friendship, to not argue with Daeron.
So, you opened the back door.
I am completely normal about these men. Yeah. Completely normal.
we gotta get back to torrent distribution, i just watched someone eat eight grand in bandwidth charges because they ran a direct-download piracy site with local file hosting through cloudflare. torrents were invented literally for this exact reason
i have a file or folder on my pc that i want to share with other people. let's call it gayshit.mp3
unfortunately gayshit.mp3 is 750mb and im not paying for discord nitro so i need another way to send it
i put it into qbittorrent and it makes a torrent file. this is essentially a very small file that points to gayshit.mp3 so other computers can find it. kinda like a treasure map
i send this tiny file to my friend, who loads it into qbittorrent. their computer takes a moment to find mine over the vast expanse of cyberspace and then (as long as my pc is running and the file is still where it should be), it gets copied from my hard drive to theirs
this is the cool part: if somebody else loads that tiny file, they can download it from both of us. if i'm offline but my friend is on, the third person can still get it. this also means that if two people have separate halves of the file, they can download the other half from each other. as long as some combination of people have the pieces between them, they can all have the whole thing.
crucially this does not require a server!!! you can just upload the file to a few people and as long as they keep it, it's still accessible. as long as somebody, somewhere is still connected, it's available forever. the only way it goes away is if everybody disconnects from it.
Tumblr’s fucking insanely poor programming on the mobile app ads is doing absolute power numbers on my desire to use my phone less in spaces where I need to wait for something.
Tumblr has joined the war against advertising on the side against advertising.
The solution is simple as meatballs on a frozen lake.
Tumblr is a Saas — software as a service, this term is important to link what is going on. Twelve seconds of research will show you how cheap it is to add a user to a Saas. It isn’t $0.00 but it’s a fraction of a cent. The big cost is the initial load.
It’s $7 a month to pay for Tumblr Premium.
That’s fucking insane.
It should be $1-2.
You will obviously need a significantly higher volume to make the same amount of cash. I have an idea. Stop introducing shit people don’t want.
I am here on this site because of the perverts and artists and people with interestingly unhinged takes on media and/or life events.
There is no feature I crave on Tumblr beyond maintenance and a “reply via email” because I hate having inboxes outside of my email.
This is a business. I get it. I do not want this site to go under. I want the crew that runs it to be compensated well.
And.
There is no content Tumblr as a business is producing that I give a shit about. I am here still because it is the most convenient meeting ground to be weird and to enjoy weird and discover weird.
Premium experiences are so goddamn overrated and over bloated.
You have lost the plot and gotten way too big for your britches.
Charge fairly, provide the core service intended, and get out of the way for the mechanism that makes your product worth it — in this case, the evolving nonsense essays, comments, hilariously specific and targeted hate mail that feels at least half loving, and comics.
This place is wires and a collection of bad decisions in a group project for a teacher that is themselves about to get fired. It’s special because of the people. Not the fucking software.
Look into my beautiful eyes, tumblr staff.
Ban the nazis.
Stop banning trans people for being trans.
Keep the lights on and the floors swept.
Understand that every feature to compete with another network misses the point that this is place is a dive bar.
You bought a dive bar. You can’t make it into a gastropub. Your attempts to bring in headlining entertainment is going to fall on deaf ears, we are here to see the local folks live their theater kid nightmare orgasm comedy fest.
This brought to you by counting how many ads I had to scroll past on my phone while stuck in traffic where the ad purposefully slowed down the scrolling mechanism.
You are not going to annoy me into supporting this business.
Any money I have / will in the future spend here is because it serves the purpose of putting my weirdos in my life and me in theirs. My tolerance to the bullshit terrible programming extends only as far as the path takes to replace this with newsletters and mailed zines.
Because I love data (being a big ol' nerd), let's do some math.
CURRENT PRICE FOR TUMBLR PREMIUM: $7.00
ESTIMATED NET RETURN (($7 x 0.971) - $0.30): about $6.50
This accounts for basic credit card processing fees of 2.9% + $0.30. Something at Tumblr's size should be able to negotiate better, but we are being malicious in our calculations, and saying "you get the basic rate" to prove a point.
SUGGESTED PRICE FOR TUMBLR PREMIUM: $2.00
ESTIMATED NET RETURN (($2 x 0.971) - $0.30): about $1.64
So
I ungenerously estimate the current Tumblr premium gets them $6.50/revenue versus my suggested $1.64/revenue.
Seems bad?!
Let's do a bit more math.
How many users at $2/base ($1.64 profit) would it take to cover the income of 1 user at $7/base ($6.50 income)?
6.50 / 1.64... 3.96341463415
I will
uh
go ahead and
round up
to 4 users
So.
1 user = $6.50 (6.50 x 1) profit.
4 users = $6.56 ($1.64 x 4) profit.
we'll just let the ol' tumblr keep them there six cents and call it even an even swap
Now.
To be fair.
To make this work.
You have to attract 3 more users (1 versus 4) to pay.
This feels like a lot!
Until it doesn't!
Because personally.
I would pay $2.00/month to keep this site running. Feels like a rounding error in my books.
I flinch at $7.00/month. Feels weird to pay this much for a site that so regularly has "hm, this disasterous new feature is pissing me off."
:)
But
as always
what do i know.
To satisfy my various spoken and unspoken life/art studio ambitions
I offer this as a free consultancy lesson to anyone making a patreon or paid newsletter or whatever thing --
where you have a digital product that does not require shipping, handling, etc.
You can make it expensive and aim to have a small audience.
You can make it cheap and aim to have a large audience.
I personally am really fond of cheap digital services because it feels like support when I realize I have not had time to keep up. When I do have time to keep up -- "Oh this is a great value"
And when I do not, I see the bill -- "Ah, I am glad THING exists. Happy to throw them a few coins."
In respect to my soul, please use this lesson exclusively for such things as
art
music
thinly-veiled self-insert fan fiction
non-tax evasion accounting practices
joyous pornography or other erotic silliness
history (all years available)
claymation
cartooning
books (novels or things longer or shorter)
poetry (erotic or non)
coffee
fiction
non-fiction
non-non fiction
non-fiction fiction
and, of course, real reviews of faux products that should exist, but do not, due to limitations of time, space, money, reality, magic, technology, theology, methodology, organic chemistry, biology (marine, terra), cosmology, topology and/or cartography
People against piracy fail to realize that no, I can’t just ‘buy it.’ They stopped making DVDs and Blu-Rays. They’re barely offering digital copies for download. I am not spending money I could use for food or bills to pay for a subscription service just so I can always have access to a beloved piece of media. Especially not when the service will remove media on a whim without concern for how the loss of access to that piece will make its artistic conservation nigh impossible.
For example, I recently learned that Disney+ had an original film called Crater. It’s scifi, family friendly, and seems cool - I would love to buy it as a holiday gift for my little brother! But: it’s exclusive to D+ and THEY REMOVED IT LITERALLY MONTHS AFTER ITS RELEASE.
The ONLY way I can directly access this film is through piracy. The ONLY available ‘copies’ of this film are hosted on piracy websites. Disney will NEVER release it in theaters, or as something to buy, and it may NEVER return to the streaming service. It will be LOST because we aren’t allowed to purchase it for personal viewing. If I can’t pay to own it, I won’t pay for the privilege of losing it when corporate decides to put it in a vault.
Every time I feel any semblance of happiness, I'm reminded of the fact that Samira and Victoria never got to bond over the complicated relationships they have with their respective mothers, and the pressures they felt from their expectations (ESPECIALLY as the only daughters in a brown family).
i'm thinking about charlotte brontë spending her last years editing and publishing her sisters' writings and about christopher tolkien dedicating his life to the protection and meticulous reconstruction his father's life's work and about johanna van gogh publishing the letters between vincent and theo that would propel vincent van gogh into fame because she knew how much her husband had loved his brother, and about how so often art isn't just a reflection of the artist's mind and skills but a testament to the fact that they were loved
My sister just quoted this post at me over dinner bc it was discussed in her philosophy class & I can't even smugly inform her of its authorship. Due to the mindhunter yaoi state of my most recent blog history.
