she herself

30s. love and culture and childhood and blackness and nature and writing and-

[homoquartz]

i’ve warmed up significantly towards the concept of small talk ever since i learned that its sole purpose is to make friendly noises.

as long as you smile and nod, people are satisfied. it’s just to show that you are nice and there with good intentions. we’re small in a big world and have to rely on other people to be decent to us. so we do our little human dance to each other to say, “i’m not here to hurt you. here’s something we have in common, like the weather or sports or itchy sweaters, so we both know we’re on the same team. we both agree on a basic fact, like that it is rainy or that being itchy is uncomfortable, and this proves we can get along. i’m being light-hearted and non-threatening right now.”

small talk isn’t to get to know a person. it’s just a greeting to affirm you’re buddies in the universe.

i am motivated by wanting the other person to know i am friendly, so i have gotten pretty decent at small talk when i used to hate it.

[piratedgender]

[maureen2musings]

Silence in green

michaelkagerer

[mortalityplays]

btw you will miss this in 5 or 10 years. memory will smooth these circumstances down like a river stone, and you will find yourself longing for a shade of light or a moment of this particular innocence. you don't know about what happens next, and one day that will be the most alluring thing of all. don't leave it all for nostalgia. have a nice night now, whatever night it happens to be.

[thesophistiicate]

if you want to experience life more deeply you have to find more beauty. stop training yourself to dismiss, to mock, to assume the worst all the time — when you do this you build walls between yourself and the world. and after a while you stop feeling the warmth of it entirely.

beauty requires openness. it asks you to let things reach you, to soften enough to be moved. it’s not naive to see beauty everywhere—it’s a skill, a form of intelligence, a kind of quiet bravery. because it is so much easier to critique than to create, to detach than to engage, to dismiss than to love.

let yourself be affected. let yourself find things beautiful and let that be enough. life is not asking you to be cool, sitting on the sidelines and nitpicking everything. it’s asking you to see life and experience it fully.

[petaltexturedskies]

Katherine Mansfield, in a diary entry dated 14 October 1922, from Letters and Journals of Katherine Mansfield

[nature-hiking]

Heather flowers along the mountain stream - Isle of Skye, Scotland, August 2025

photo by: nature-hiking

Instagram: nature__hiking

[floursh-blog]

[ashstfu]

inside flora soames’ peaceful woodland cottage

[shisasan]

F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Beautiful and Damned (1934)

[slfcare]

Lately I’ve been really into being honest to people about my positive feelings towards them. I told my classmate that I’ve admired her creativity from the start and named a project of hers that I loved, and her face lit up! I took the train with a project partner the other day and told her that I always have so much fun with her, and it prompted an entire conversation about the difficulties of graduating from ‘classmates’ to ‘friends’ and both of our insecurities in this regard (and how we’re definitely getting coffee later). I express my gratitude honestly. I say what I feel if I’d be happy hearing it, myself. I remember details so that I can refer to them later. Once you realize how great you can make someone feel, all of those mundane moments become so special. It will maybe even create some lasting connections, something I think we could all use more of.

[ravendognerd]

This is a great idea. Not just for building friends but for lifting up the people around you! What a wonderful way to interact with the world.

[random-brushstrokes]

Robert Lee MacCameron - New Orleans Man (ca. 1910)

[wokefrogvirus]

let’s have a blast with mama

[oblivioustoast]

photographer credit from the notes!

[35mmelody]

Joyful Resistance, Harlem (2020) Sade Fasanya

[roychewtoy]

my watery friend... are you too brushed with the pattern of the dappled light...?

[rebu72]

[andhumanslovedstories]

I started using Head and Shoulders ten years ago for itchy scalp and dandruff, and then for ten years I have not had itchy scalp and dandruff, so I thought “why do I still buy shampoo to combat itchy scalp and dandruff when I do not have itchy scalp and dandruff,” so I stopped buying the shampoo for itchy scalp and dandruff and can you guess I have now? Can you predict what currently afflicts me? It’s alright if you can’t because apparently I fuckin couldn’t either

[andhumanslovedstories]

Cutting something out of your life because you think you don’t need it any more only to realize that it was in fact working as intended and preventing a problem that will return should you stop doing this is a good experiment to run periodically with something small like dandruff shampoo, lest you start to think it would be a good idea to do this with like let’s say public health and the social safety net and vaccines

[thomrainierskies]

I had a liver transplant when I was 14 and like six months later I was chatting with my surgeon and he said “there’s gonna come a time, probably when you’re a teenager, where you’re gonna think, ‘I feel great, why am I still taking all this medication? I haven’t needed it in years.’ and you’re gonna want to stop taking all this medication. Guess what’s gonna happen then? You’re gonna go into rejection and your liver is gonna start failing, and you’re gonna be dying again, and we’re gonna have to find you another liver. So don’t do that.” And I said “why the fuck would anyone do that?” and he said “people are stupid.”

every once in a while when I get annoyed by a pharmacy or don’t wanna get out of bed to do my drugs I think “ugh, this is dumb, why do I do this?” and that conversation slams into me like a truck and I remember that I am, in fact, stupid

[zenosanalytic]

#you are not immune to the recency bias(via@arrows-for-pens)

[morethanonebraincell]

Every person on earth needs to read this post. It will make people’s lives a lot better and lessen the crises everyone faces in day-to-day lives.

[queeranarchism]

It's a real shame that online reply guys have made 'thought experiments' into a constant ordeal of 'would you let me say the n-word to save 5 black children?' bullshit, when actually, real thought experiments are important training tools to unlearn acting on bigotry, biased instincts and propaganda.

In life you're going to encounter ethical questions that you've never considered before or you'll find reasons to question ethical questions that you always thought that you knew the answer to. And when that happens, you have to be comfortable thinking the whole things thru from all angles, even though your gut instinct tells you to settle for the easy answer that makes you comfortable.

You have to be able to ask questions like 'but is anyone harmed by the thing that disgusts me?', 'is this about improving the world or just about punishment'?, 'what if my assumptions about why people do this thing are wrong'?

You have to be comfortable not being sure yet what your conclusion will be. You have to be comfortable exploring opinions that differ from what your friends think. Thought experiments teach you this.

If you don't get comfortable doing that, propagandists will trick you into accepting a comfortable answer based on your preconceived biases and whatever new biases they want to slip in there.

[queeranarchism]

I regret to announce that I need to actually explain to insufferable people in the notes why 'would you let me say the n-word to save 5 black children?' isn't a clever little thought experiment. Let's start with a little story:

I work the door at a feminist club sometimes. We've got a big sign at the door in bold letters reading "No touch of any kind without consent, you will be kicked out". When new guests show up, we point out the rule and ask them to confirm that they'll follow this rule.

Every night, there will be a few guys whose response to this is to immediately put a finger somewhere on my body, like my shoulder or my arm, and ask "not even this?". If those guys are allowed to enter the club, they ALWAYS end up groping people. Their response to a boundary that was put in place to prevent harm, is to immediately push it, test it, see if they can do a little bit of harm, see how much harm we will tolerate. That's what that finger and "not even this?" shows.

In this club, little innocent touches without prior consent definitely happen. It's loud and it can get crowded on the dance floor and around the bar. Shoulders touch, people tap each other on their arm to signal that they want to get through the crowd. No harm is done. But "No touch of any kind without consent" stays up at the door because its an effective filter to keep out the predatory guys.

Social conventions around the n-word are a lot like that. While it is technically true that the sound of the n-word does no harm on its own and it's the intent that makes a slur into a slur, to point that out is to misunderstand why the "don't say the n-word ever" social rule is there. It's a test, like our "No touch of any kind without consent" rule. People who see that rule and respond by pushing its boundaries are telling on themselves. They're showing that they want to explore how much harm we will tolerate.

So you're not particularly clever if you invent a thought experiment that shows that the n-word isn't a magic sound that does harm on it's own. We all knew that already and you're not cleverly exposing purity culture or dogmatic liberal behavior. You're just telling on yourself. The "don't say the n-word ever" social rule is a filter that exists to get people like you to tell on yourself.

[queeranarchism]

This also branched into a bigger thing about thought experiments: Thought experiments are NOT neutral lenses which reveal inevitable truths. They're artificial realities controlled by their creators, and as such they're extremely subjective.

Clever, insightful thought experiments have no clear answer and challenge us to examine all sides of an issue, to dig deeper until we get to a more complex nuanced understanding of moral issues.

Thought experiments whose only purpose is to create a scenario in which we must inevitably say the n-word, or we must torture someone to defuse a bomb, etc. are not insightful, they just reveal that their creator would really like to be alloed to say the n word / torture. They're blunt manipulations and we have every right to refuse to play that game.