History is a burden,

Stories can make us fly.  

[depsidase]

[pmamtraveller]

Study for the Head of the Gorgon (detail)

— Giulio Aristide Sartorio (1895)

[unheardoracle]

If Your Scene Feels Lifeless, Someone Is Being Too Polite

Stories stall when everyone behaves. Real tension appears when someone:

• asks the wrong question • says something they shouldn’t • notices something uncomfortable • refuses to drop the topic • misunderstands something important • interrupts at the worst moment

Conflict doesn’t always look like shouting.

[ariaste]

Couple more options for tension:

They want something REALLY REALLY REALLY bad, but for some reason they can't ask for it -- or can't have it even if they did ask.

They don't notice something that the audience HAS noticed (like in a horror movie when the monster is sneaking up behind the protagonist, or if someone drinks a glass of unboiled water during a cholera outbreak because they don't know about germ theory)

Takes a risk (or otherwise does something they "shouldn't" do) which the audience has to sit through for a prolongued period of time (e.g. slips away from the party to go into the host's private office and rifle through their papers before the guards catch them)

Loses when they thought they were going to win

[leahgardner-art]

black coffee, empty locket

[tarragonthedragon]

i just got the "see where your blood has gone!" email from giving blood but it glitched and just showed me my current location. which. theyre not wrong. that is where most of my blood is

[sandersstudies]

Me: man I wish I knew more of my neighbors better

My nine-year-old neighbor: *crashes mom’s car into my yard*

Me: Be careful what you wish for I suppose

[sandersstudies]

Honestly my first draft of this post said “my neighbor’s son” and then I was like wait a second that’s functionally the same as saying “my cousin’s sister.” That’s still my cousin and that’s still my neighbor.

[sandersstudies]

Stop saying Calvin and Hobbes it’s important to me that Calvin is six and not nine.

[the-lincyclopedia]

I take it the nine-year-old was literally driving the vehicle?

[sandersstudies]

The nine-year-old was literally driving the vehicle after knocking the gear shift into Drive apparently by accident. Seven- and five-year-olds in the backseat. Nine-year-old knows in movies people stomp down on the thing on the floor and the car stops. He stomps. It is the gas.

[dailysnoopy]

[sapphling]

let's all have a fun time looking up new words when we encounter them to see what they mean before incorporating them into our vocabularies

[wileycap]

[digitaldiscipline]

This is the 85 year old creator of Roger Rabbit:

[makeusfly]

Things That Brought Me Joy This Week

July 18, 2026

[whaile]

late summer / early fall thoughts

[thecrumbez]

Happy Pride Month to those two women dancing together in the foreground of the boat scene in Godzilla (1954).

I’m sorry your romantic foibles were overshadowed by a big ass atomic lizard thing.

[erratic-dragon-fruit]

out of the tags with you

[i-am-bic]

"There's no platonic explanation for this" <-you need to be nicer to your friends. Right now

[esmeralda-anistasia]

#STOP SAYING 'PLATONIC' WHEN YOU MEAN 'CASUAL'#RELATIONSHIPS CAN BE PLATONIC AND ABSOLUTELY DERANGED

[ankle-beez]

surprisingly forward-thinking of jim henson and co. to make a female character in the 70's that's allowed to be loud-mouthed and violent and kind of overwhelmingly romantic and even a huge bitch at times and not have a moment where any character asks her to change

[ankle-beez]

going through all the muppet movies in a row made me realize that like. miss piggy was made in the 70's. and it's so rare even today to have a character like her. she's loud, she's selfish, she's funny, she's extremely vain, she's obsessed with romance, she's violent, she's kind of annoying, and there's not a single moment in any of these films where she's asked to tone down any of these personality traits. i am not joking when i say that miss piggy might be one of the best treated female characters ever written

[amultitudeofyellowrodents]

you might be on to something, I've never heard Miss Piggy being called problematic either

[parkchanwoohoo]

[tiredadventurer]

[heated-blanket]

I think what’s wrong with a lot of people is they’re not eating breakfast. They’re starting the day with at most 16 ounces of milk with espresso and riding on that until lunch time. What they don’t understand is eating breakfast helps absorb all the excess yellow bile that builds up overnight when they sleep and makes them angry. It’s basic humor balancing