*tucks in legs and rolls awkwardly away*

I adore plastic eyeballs, and am constantly looking to expand my collection. Other than that, I am an average blogger, given to sloth, caprice, and loquaciousness.

[sheoftheeyeballs]

… if you’re sufficiently brave and sufficiently nuts then it serves to delude people about your levels of talent

— Polly Barton, What Am I, A Deer?

[rabid-transcendentalist]

[blumineck]

Happy Ides of March, folks!

Please support me on Patreon if you like these videos

[sioltach]

watching a video on brewing Mesopotamian beer and look at this orange man (his ass cannot guard the barley)

[loth-catgirl]

[alex51324]

slander! Did any potentates steal the barley on his watch????

They did not.

[homunculus-argument]

Between the nothingburger and the everything bagel, there is the somewhat sandwich.

[sheoftheeyeballs]

Tumblr pls do not tell me these things— what do you mean it’s been 13 years?

[stcrlghts]

i think what’s on a person’s nightstand is very telling so reblog this and put in the tags the things you have on your nightstand

[handbellanon]

Clock radio that I never plugged in when I moved here (I use my phone as an alarm now bc I need at least 3 to wake up thx chronic fatigue)

phone when I’m asleep

glasses when I’m asleep

sleep mask for when I have migraines

second clock radio with 8pin iPod dock that I also haven’t plugged in

switch lite + case

some old spare power cords/adapters I haven’t put away since I moved here

an embarrassing & unmentionable amount of dust

[sheoftheeyeballs]

I replaced my bedside table with an ikea kallax so I could separate my sleeping & living areas and have more book storage, but one pair of cubbies are def the “bedside table” cubbies. Those have:

A lamp

Charging cables/dock for my phone

A tiny Bluetooth speaker

A trinket dish where I put jewelry I’ve taken off at the end of the day (mostly earrings)

A second trinket dish for my myriad hair clips/sticks

A Swiss Army knife

Earbuds & their cases

A few smaller containers of lotion & lip balm

Acetone (for nail polish removal)

Various small Knick-knacks (Lego things, statue of Anubis, squishy Fresno nightcrawler, etc.)

A tape measure (that really should be in my sewing kit instead)

Clear nail polish (topcoat), that needs to go back in the drawer where it belongs

[oysters-aint-for-me]

do me a favor and plz reblog with your five most recently used non-face, non-hand, non-heart emojis

[this-neon-burns]

When does Christmas music become acceptable?

Nov. 1st

Mid-November

Dec. 1st

Mid-December

Christmas week ONLY

Voting ended onNov 11, 2025

[ladydei]

Preferably not before my (very early December) birthday. Thems the rules.

[sheoftheeyeballs]

In the end, all we need in life is someone who loves us, a bed with nice big pillows, a few cans of cold beer, and tomatoes that still taste like something

~Beatriz Serrano (trans. Mara Faye Lethem), Discontent

[sheoftheeyeballs]

I find Instagram the most vacuous of all the social networks. It’s like a boutique window for beautiful things and ugly babies.

~Beatriz Serrano (trans. Mara Faye Lethem), Discontent

[scutesketch]

YOUR ART ON TUMBLR IS BEING USED TO TRAIN AI!

The setting that prevents your work being used to train AI models is turned off by default! I had no idea about this until now! Artists, go to your settings, click “visibility”, and turn on this setting! Protect your work!

[portlandalites]

《Made a visual guide of how to get there, because it's under a weird tab.

Go to your blog (you have to do this for each individual blog) and the visibility tab

It's this last option here

Hate this shit, but turn it off babey》

[godlessondheimite]

[fluffmugger]

#so did they miss the part where gatsby ends up floating dead in a pool and all the miserable deaths in wuthering heights#or did they miss that because there weren’t any chapters titled In Which The Sinners Are Punished For Their Errors#like. even if you require explicit moral instruction from literature it’s pretty hard to miss the comeuppance in those.

[pennie-dreadful]

“What I assume my teachers were trying to teach me”

[doctorbluesmanreturns]

Huck Finn is about a white Southern boy who was raised to believe that freeing slaves is a sin that would send you directly to hell who forges a familial bond with a runaway slave and chooses to free him and thereby in his mind lose his salvation because he refuses to believe that his best friend and surrogate father is less of a man just because he’s black. Yes it features what we now consider racial slurs but this is a book written only 20 years after people were literally fighting to be allowed to keep other human beings as property, we cannot expect people from the 1880s to exactly conform with the social mores of 2020, and more to the point if we ourselves had been raised during that time period there’s very little doubt that we would also hold most if not all of the prevalent views of the time because actual history isn’t like period novels written now where the heroes are perfect 21st century social justice crusaders and the villains are all as racist and sexist as humanly possible. Change happens slowly and ignoring the radical statement that we’re all human beings that Twain wrote at a time when segregation and racial tensions were still hugely prevalent just because he wrote using the language of his time period is short-sighted and foolhardy to the highest degree.

[mikkeneko]

I’m really kind of alarmed at the rise in the past few years of the “and we do condemn! wholeheartedly!” discourse around historical figures. it seems like people have somehow boomeranged between “morals were different in the past, therefore nobody in the past can ever be held accountable for ANY wrongs” to “morals are universal and timeless, and anything done wrong by today’s standards in the past is ABSOLUTELY unforgiveable” so completely, because social media 2.0 is profoundly allergic to nuance

please try this on for size:

there have always been, in past times as today, a range of people in every society, some of whom were even then fighting for a more just and compassionate accord with their fellow man and some of whom let their greeds and hatreds rule them to the worst allowable excesses. the goal of classics and history education is to teach you enough context to discern between the two, not only in the past but in the present

[three--rings]

My mind just boggles at the “There’s Racism In That Book” argument.  Yes, there is racism in that book, because that book is ABOUT RACISM.  The message is that it is BAD. 

My high school English teacher, who was a viciously brilliant woman, used to say that when people banned Huck Finn they said it was about the language, but it was really the message they were trying to ban, the subversive deconstruction of (religious) authority and white supremacy.

[lyricwritesprose]

Huckleberry Finn can actually be seen as a powerful case study in trying to do social justice when you have absolutely no tools for it, right down to vocabulary.  And in that respect, it’s a heroic tale, because Huck—with absolutely no good examples besides Jim, who he has been taught to see as subhuman, with no guidance, with everyone telling him that doing the right thing will literally damn him, with a vocabulary that’s full of hate speech—he turns around and says, “I’m not going to do it.  I’m not going to participate in this system.  If that means I go to Hell, so be it.  Going to Hell now.”

(I used to read a blogger who insisted that “All right, I’ll go to Hell,” from Huckleberry Finn is the most pure and perfect prayer in the canon of American literature.  Meaning, as I understand it, that the decision to do the right thing in the face of eternal damnation is the most holy decision one can make, and if God Himself is not proud of the poor mixed-up kid, then God Himself is not worth much more than a “Get thee behind me,” and the rest of us should be lining up to go to Hell too.  Worth noting that this person identified as an evangelical Christian, not because he was in line with what current American evangelicals believe, but because “they can change their name, I’m not changing mine.”  Interesting guy.  Sorry for the long parenthetical.)

Anyway, the point of Huck Finn, as far as I can tell, is that you can still choose to do good in utter darkness, with no guidance and no help and none of the right words.

And when you put it like that, it’s no wonder that a lot of people on Tumblr—people who prioritize words over every other form of social justice—find it threatening and hard to comprehend.

[sheoftheeyeballs]

I knew one day I'd have to watch powerful men burn the world down

I just didn't expect them to be such losers

~Paris Poloma's "Good Boy"

[molombo]

Where's the African mythology?

The Kickstarter is live now!

[boycarofchilladelphia]

I know I have close to zero Tumblr fame, which I normally appreciate, but I would love it if this made it into the world and got fully backed. You can even pledge to get the digital content and send a real copy to a school in Africa or to a HBCU or community library of your choosing!

[uncharismatic-fauna]

Uncharismatic Fact of the Day

To the flamboyant cuttlefish, the whole ocean floor is a runway! They are named both for their striking coloration and the way they will often 'strut' across the bottom of the ocean. Both of these traits are meant to ward off predators, as they are the only venomous cuttlefish and their flesh is highly poisonous.

(Image: A flamboyant cuttlefish (Ascarosepion pfefferi) by Lakshmi Sawitri)

[somafalls]