[solarsyrup]

the unimaginable power of saying "huh, guess that's not for me" and moving on with your life

[captainsamuelmorrigan]

"Twilight vampires are stupid! Twilight vampires are for little girls!"

NO! LISTEN!!

Twilight vampires are a direct result of Purity Culture of the 90s and early 2000s, the AIDS crisis, and the War on Drugs.

Many vampires are prolonged feeders. Hell, the original literary babes like Carmilla and Dracula, feed many times from people, and those folks never went through any change besides anemia, potentially becoming obsessed with or enslaved to the vampire, or DEATH.

Not to say that some vampires in between don't have a one-and-done in biting and turning (My Best Friend is a Vampire [1988], Blacula [1972], My Babysitter’s a Vampire [2010]), but Twilight vampires truly do it with every aspect of these guys. Bella meets Edward ONE TIME and is obsessed with him, drawn to him. He seems to be her first love, and they end up getting married. They have sex THE NIGHT AFTER THEY WED, and BOOM, PREGNANT! True Love Waits, the organization that formed in 1993 with the aim of reducing premarital sex (some members even thought actually dating before marriage was toeing the line), had its first Purity Ball only seven years before the novel came out. Stephanie Meyer herself is Mormon, so the purity culture runs DEEP. This is an important context to be looking at this media from!

This one bite thing is not a popular thing in vampire media in years since Twilight, many people seem to prefer the method of vampires swapping blood with their sires (True Blood [2009-14], Interview With the Vampire [2022-present], What We Do In The Shadows [2019-2024]). One of the inspirations for Twilight, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, even has this method in place. But Twilight is in the age of D.A.R.E. where we gotta say, "Not even once!!"

These guys also really dig in on moral superiority of being "vegetarian." They are able to control their want to feed on humans, their LUST for blood, by feeding on animals. This is another product of purity culture! Vampires feeding has long been a metaphor for sex. They partake in a 'cleaner,' 'more moral' type of feeding, much like "soaking" or dating without engaging physically at all. Edward has been a good boy, basically his entire vampiric life, feeding on wild animals, and he constantly mentions that Bella even being close to him is a threat to her safety (and her mortal soul). This is straight-up purity culture nonsense!! Painting women as the gatekeepers of sex and pleasure, and men as wild monsters that seek to corrupt these delicate flowers.

Yeah, Twilight mainly appeals to teenage girls in terms of sincerely thinking that Edward or Jacob are good people worthy of being attracted to, but I think that the vampires in the franchise are incredibly fascinating in the wake of all of these important changes to how we as a culture view sex and sexuality! I've even seen cases made where these vampires are much closer to Mormon angels than vampires due to their diverse range of abilities and sparkly skin. These are bonkers versions of the vampire myth, but they are still important! All vampires ever are products of their time, and these sparkly, horny, guilt-ridden monsters are practically engineered for girls and women of the aughts, playing out the sexual and courting behaviors they have had shoved down their throats their entire sexual development.

Be nicer to the folks that like Twilight! And analyze your media!

[cyberpunkpavlichenko]

People legitimately think there was no criticism of the Harry Potter series before her TERF/soft holocaust denier era and I'm sorry to tell you but people were criticizing the Cho Chang banking goblins werewolf-AIDS metaphor elf emancipation is silly series years before Joanne's public turn to transmisogynistic chauvinism.

There were things to criticize of the series.

[thevampirecrow]

fellatio sounds like a supporting shakespeare character rather than oral sex on a penis to be honest

[anaconda-creates]

in love with this medieval art where this lady has been shot by an arrow and just looks so unimpressed

oh noo...

[chimpanzeedotcom]

Being a bi guy quite possibly the funniest sexuality like dammmnnnn I know who John Waters is and jerk it to twinks in panties but I got a coffee date with Hetero Jessica from work at 3 thats her name heteroooo jessica thats her name folks thats what we call her hertero jessica

[parawyrm]

More from that one post

[parawyrm]

[parawyrm]

[heatherwitch]

Ray Bradbury’s short story “There Will Come Soft Rains” that was written in 1950 is set on the day of August 4th, 2026 (tomorrow)!! Now’s your chance to read it around the time it’s based in!

Audio: A recording of Leonard Nimoy reading it on Internet Archive.

Text: A PDF version.

Graphic Novel: On Internet Archive.

[unamccormack]

I used to set this one for second year undergraduate creative writing seminars on writing science fiction on a double bill with Octavia E. Butler's "Bloodchild" and no-one here gets out alive.

[regionalpancake]

!!!! Today is the only chance we’ll ever have to listen to this absolute banger of apocalyptic fiction on the very day the story is set 😲✨

Nemoy’s voice is PERFECT in this!

(A content warning if you do listen - the dog dies, though it’s not super graphic)

[regionalpancake]

I paused the robot vacuum so I could listen to this 1950’s story predicting the robot vacuum.

[sith-shenanigans]

*looks at polyamorous triad* so which of you is the soldier and which is the poet and which is the king

[sith-shenanigans]

this is the perfect reblog post cancelled

[dahlia-molinas]

if christopher nolan was really the visionary and ground-breaking director everyone claims he is he would have cast ben affleck as penelope

[charoitenigma]

no, white baby, racism isn’t a valid trauma response.

[utopians]

the avatar movies are crazy bc "what if colonizers literally inhabited and puppeteered the bodies of indigenous peoples in order to exploit their homeland" sounds like the premise of some sort of anticolonial horror film, like specifically the kind of thing that would be commenting on self-indigenization among white settlers, but because it's James Cameron his whole takeaway from that premise is "it would be preddy cool"

[utopians]

actually sorry. the takeaway is also "the white settler possessing an indigenous body would actually be extremely good, perhaps even The Best, at being indigenous, and he would become their Leader"

[libraford]

Googled something about quick hydration and it suggested big jug of water, couple tbsp pickle juice, dash of lime juice.

Its surprisingly tasty????

[libraford]

Pleased to report that after a day of this i am not longer craving caper brine and my mouth is not dry as usual. There's some good suggestions in the notes too that I want to try.

-ancient roman posca: water, red or white wine vinegar, honey, salt, herbs (coriander, mint, thyme)

-switchel: water, ginger, vinegar, sweetener, lemon, salt

-ayran: yogurt, water, salt, mint

-Agua pepino: water, cucumbers, lime, sugar, optional mint.

[libraford]

I have been reminded of:

-shrub: vinegar, sida water, elderberry (or other berry), sugar.

[libraford]

I have now been informed of

-sekanjabin: honey, vinegar, mint, water.

[libraford]

"Wow, I wonder why this post was popular this week."

-sees the reports of the heatwave in Europe-

"... ah."

[probablyasocialecologist]

Study finds nearly every pre-2010 video game is unavailable

Games from older consoles are being made less and less available to the point so much of the industry's history could easily vanish without

[gay-jesus-probably]

Vimm's Lair: Preserving the Classics

Preserving classic videogames from consoles past.

I'm just gonna slide this on in here for anyone that is interested in preserving old games. They take it very seriously too, they want an archive of every single game. Like, they have lists of every game ever released for a system, and once that system gets old enough, they add it to their archive and start collecting. Their latest addition was the Xbox 360, they opened that vault up in September 2022, and proudly announced they'd finished their collection of games for it back in April.

Also, while their game archives are almost entirely complete, they've got another project of archiving the manuals that came with those games, and that is... considerably less well filled out. Their collection of Xbox 360 manuals is especially rough, they've only gotten manuals for three games. So if you've got some Xbox 360 games kicking around, and the manual's still with them, please consider scanning them and submitting them to the site!

Game preservation is important, but people rarely consider preserving the manuals as well; I really respect Vimm's Lair for being so thorough in their archival work.

[anachronic-cobra]

I've been using Vimm's Lair for years, I have yet to see a single bad link or virus on the entire site. It's arguably the safest and most comprehensive archive of video games in existence. Preserved history

[kyra45]

Another yearly reminder that badjokesbyjeff and writing-prompt-s harassed actual Palestinians and started the idea that all gfm accounts are ran by a ‘scam ring’. Neither ever apologized and have pretended this never happened as they still post regularly.

(Writing-prompt-s made an ‘apology’ stating any posts about the incident was due to moderators as they hadn’t been running the blog for some time. This post was deleted eventually.)

[kyra45]

You know this is always the post that drags out these trolls. They can’t just keep to themselves and move on. No one even mocked them. I was very late even seeing them! Imagine this is how you spend your days on here. Commenting on posts that tell you about people who hate Palestinians.

[carosbee]

Remember everyone: donate to legitimate charities who can do more good for more people with your money instead of blindly trusting some random blog coming into your DMs on Tumblr.

Remember gazavetters consistently has to update blogs marking them as scams and spammers so them being listed does not necessarily mean they have been properly vetted. Many of these blogs are scams.

Stay safe out there.

[kyra45]

There is no “many of these blogs are scams” by the way.

[iguanodonwildman]

Also worth noting: most blogs that are “marked as scams/spam” by Gazavetters are NOT scams. They are removed from the list for spamming because they violated the rules of Gazavetters by going onto other people’s posts to promote themselves. Which… idk man. I understand why the rule was put into place, because this sort of behavior is the reason people like the one above are so determined to prove these are not people in need (so they can write them all off as spam and won’t have to feel bad about ignoring them) but I’d also be willing to annoy everyone on the planet for a year straight if it meant I had a chance to get my mom out of a war zone, and I think you would to if they were dropping bombs on someone you loved.

[nostalgiaville]

"EverythingGirl.com Archive" is a personal project of mine that attempts to reconstruct the whole website, and fix/replace any broken/missing assets. I'm excited to finally show this to the public! But keep in mind the website's still a work in progress, so a lot of clickable links lead to nothing:

https://everything-girl.neocities.org/

[cowsites]

NEED you guys to see this

[ampervadasz]

[unashamedly-enthusiastic]