The Tumblr of Sigrid Ellis, out of fucks to give

@sigridstumb

Kpop, feminism, queer rights, nerd shit, trans rights, autistic shit, labor rights, and reblogging.

15.7K posts

stealingpotatoes

@magnetfamily week 2026 day 2: Companion | Enemy

they must have to have this conversation every time they see each other

(commission info // tip jar!)

Hi there, I have been wondering about these lizards for a while. Saw them in Los Angeles in 2022. They seemed bigger than the usual fence lizards i see around here. Thank you much! - 🍓

GREAT GOOGLY MOOGLY!!!

I love ALLIGATOR LIZARDS!!! These are Southern Alligator Lizard (Elgaria multicarinata), family Anguidae.

Southern Alligator Lizard - Elgaria multicarinata

Southern alligator lizard - Wikipedia

* @no-me-it-you-red, can you tell which subspecies this is?

CANNOT take credit for these, my sister in law made them. Behold.

sabertoothwalrus

shoutout to the person in my building that left their halloween skeleton on their balcony and proceeded to dress it up for other holidays

thanksgiving

christmas

not pictured: when I came back from the holidays and there’d been a huge storm while I was gone, so all that was left was a pelvis

but we persist. valentines

st patricks day

and the latest, easter

elodieunderglass

I like that the residents are clearly thinking each month or so, “now! How shall we decorate our Holiday Skeleton? Can you pick up some themed glasses on your way home?”

wizard-council-bureaucrat

the king has abruptly fired 60% of his wizard staff, so he’s about to be abruptly surprised at who floated 100% of his formerly floating sky castle

I heard they're planning to maintain their levitation rites with autonomous constructs from now on, saying wizards are going to be totally obsolete within the season... so, ah, I'd invest in falling island insurance.

Preserving not-prev-but-someone-elses funny tags in this chain as well because I love both these additions actually,

Tim Sale draws clothes like he's referencing ONLY languishing 1800s heartthrobs. He really gave us the sexiest, most dapper Clark Kent fashion. The sleeves. The waist. The silhouette. It's delectable.

theshitpostcalligrapher

last line hit like a mack truck

ink: diamine oxblood

They DID that!!!

It took me about 15 seconds in to realize what was happening in this vid, but the second I did, I legit came. This is… I got chills and got so much validation for my theories about tap and pretty much any genre of music here…

Tap is probably one of the dance styles that gets the least amount of credit four how badass it is

Holy hell-

enigmatic-mystery-777

Sorry I don’t get it?

They’re tap dancing, a kind of dancing typically associated with being old-fashioned and kind of silly. Personally, even tap dancing to old music is awesome in my eyes, but this is on a totally new and exciting level

The thing about tap is that it’s so often seen as a fancy, old-fashioned dainty dance that only posh (and generally white) people do in tuxedos but it didn’t used to be the case.

Way back in the early days, it was where black performers in Vaudeville were legendary for it in Jazz and Jive routines. At about 1:37, this is where the Nicholas brothers go off.

It’s such an expressive and joyful kind of dance and matches so well with hip hop beats and rhythm, which is why the modern reworking of it is so awesome.

Im sure a lot of people also watch the op video and they assume that “clap” sound is part of the music just because a LOT of modern music samples that sound and in some music it is just the sound of hands clapping, but no that is a sound being made by all their shoes at once.

meinenaffenhosen

one of my favorite syncopated ladies routines

Has the world forgotten Gregory Hines?

I am gritting my teeth at the mere suggestion that tap is primarily associated with dainty white people.

Tap is a distinctive American art form that comes from a blending of African dance traditions with Irish dance traditions. It was developed by Black and white dancers and came up alongside and deeply entwined with jazz.

Certainly the tap that ends up in musical theater often seems old-fashioned and white but that’s a musical theater issue, not a tap issue. That is only one small part of tap, which continues to have a strong African-American tradition.

The Nicholas Brothers, above, are in a clip from the film Stormy Weather, which has an almost entirely African-American cast. Some of the other scenes in the film include Bill “Bojangles” Robinson, one of the greatest tap artists of all time. He was very well-known generally and was in quite a few Shirley Temple movies in his day. (Shirley Temple, herself, was a tap dancer – which I’ll be real is probably contributing to people thinking it’s old-fashioned and white, because it’s easy to forget the Black man dancing alongside her, I guess.)

Here’s Bill Robinson with Cab Calloway in Stormy Weather – he’s performing a variation of his famous “stair dance” in parts of this clip:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VY3fbvBRiaM

Here’s probably the most widely famous version of the “stair dance”, from The Little Colonel:

There’ve been a lot of white tap dancers through the years – see, for example, everyone’s favorite clip of two men torturing a speech therapist:

… but a lot of its most famous practitioners have been Black and it’s weird to me that people don’t know that.

Have a scene from Tap (1989).

yomikoreadsbooks

A lot of talent happening here! Plus I always have to stop everything and watch the Nicholas Brothers near defy gravity in the stormy weather routine because it’s just as fantastic every single time! 🌟

macassarebony-deactivated202603

“Never let your enemy tell you how many of you there are. Never let the man that you’re against form your opinions. This is the trick that’s played on everyone who’s oppressed: when you have a revolution in a country, the first thing you take over is the radio. Then, you start telling the people that the war is over, so all of them surrender. They believe that thing right there. And once they take that over, they start telling you where you are and where they are, and you fall right in line — it’s plain thought control. The majority of the American people aren’t segregationists. The majority of the American people aren’t imperialists. But the government is. The structure is; the power faction is. So, how, then, do all the majority go along with it? Because those who sit in power over the television, over the radio, and over the press are constantly telling those who are the masses how free they are, how this they are, and how that they are.”

merrybitchmas91-deactivated2019

Why "doing something relaxing” does not help your anxiety

A lot of the time when people give advice intended to relieve anxiety, they suggest doing “relaxing” things like drawing, painting, knitting, taking a bubble bath, coloring in one of those zen coloring books, or watching glitter settle to the bottom of a jar.

This advice is always well-intentioned, and I’m not here to diss people who either give it or who benefit from it. But it has never, ever done shit for me, and this is because it goes about resolving anxiety in the completely wrong way.

THE WORST THING YOU CAN DO when suffering from anxiety is to do a “relaxing” thing that just enables your mind to dwell and obsess more on the thing that’s bothering you. You need to ESCAPE from the dwelling and the obsession in order to experience relief.

You can drive to a quiet farm, drive to the beach, drive to a park, or anywhere else, but as someone who has tried it all many, many times, trust me–it’s a waste of gas. You will just end up still sad and stressed, only with sand on your butt. You can’t physically escape your sadness. Your sadness is inside of you. To escape, you need to give your brain something to play with for a while until you can approach the issue with a healthier frame of mind.

People who have anxiety do not need more time to contemplate, because we will use it to contemplate how much we suck.

In fact, you could say that’s what anxiety is–hyper-contemplating. When we let our minds run free, they run straight into the thorn bushes. Our minds are already running, and they need to be controlled. They need to be given something to do, or they’ll destroy everything, just like an overactive husky dog ripping up all the furniture.

Therefore, I present to you:

THINGS YOU SHOULD NOT DO WHEN ANXIOUS

–Go on a walk

–Watch a sunset, watch fish in an aquarium, watch glitter, etc.

–Go anywhere where the main activity is sitting and watching

–Draw, color, do anything that occupies the hands and not the mind

–Do yoga, jog, go fishing, or anything that lets you mentally drift

–Do literally ANYTHING that gives you great amounts of mental space to obsess and dwell on things.

THINGS YOU SHOULD DO WHEN ANXIOUS:

–Do a crossword puzzle, Sudoku, or any other mind teaser game. Crosswords are the best.

–Write something. It doesn’t have to be a masterpiece. Write the Top 10 Best Restaurants in My City. Rank celebrities according to Best Smile. Write some dumb Legolas fanfiction and rip it up when you’re done. It’s not for publication, it’s a relief exercise that only you will see.

–Read something, watch TV, or watch a movie–as long as it’s engrossing. Don’t watch anything which you can run as background noise (like, off the top of my head, Say Yes to The Dress.) As weird as it seems, American Horror Story actually helps me a lot, because it sucks me in.

–Masturbate. Yes, I’m serious. Your mind has to concentrate on the mini-movie it’s running. It can’t run Sexy Titillating Things and All The Things That are Bothering Me at the same time. (…I hope. If it can, then…ignore this one.)

–Do math problems—literally, google “algebra problems worksheet” and solve them. If you haven’t done math since 7th grade this will really help you. I don’t mean with math, I mean with the anxiety.

–Play a game or a sport with someone that requires great mental concentration. Working with 5 people to get a ball over a net is a challenge which will require your brain to turn off the Sadness Channel.

–Play a video game, as long as it’s not something like candy crush or Tetris that’s mindless.

THINGS YOU SHOULD DO DURING PANIC ATTACKS ESPECIALLY:

–List the capitals of all the U.S. states

–List the capitals of all the European countries

–List all the shapes you can see. Or all the colors.

–List all the blonde celebrities you can think of.

–Pull up a random block of text and count all the As in it, or Es or whatever.

Now obviously, I am not a doctor. I am just an anxious person who has tried almost everything to help myself. I’ve finally realized that the stuff people recommend never works because this is a disorder that thrives on free time and free mental space. When I do the stuff I listed above, I can breathe again. And I hope it helps someone here too.

(Now this shouldn’t have to be said but if the “do nots” work for you then by all means do them. They’ve just never worked for me.)

This would’ve been great an hour ago

h0lyhandgrenade

This is good advice for anxious peeps and peeps with anxious friends. Seems obvious now but I hadn’t thought about it this way before.

I need to listen to music or run an audiobook any time I walk somewhere because otherwise the distance between my room and the mailbox (let alone between home and work) is too long to be alone with my thoughts.

My “yes, and” just to say that all of these are great, and also some tips for turning non-brain occupying activities into brain occupying activities.

My tip for turning walks into a brain occupying activity (besides listening to an audiobook or calling somebody) is to learn a little bit about (depending where you walk) plant identification, bird identification, architecture, language, etc. if I’m wondering what each of the 20 different plants in the garden I just passed by are, I’m not thinking about other things. If I’m in a neighborhood where many of the signs are not in my native language, trying to read them and figure them out is another way to keep my mind busy. (You can also do games like “look for things that begin with s” for any object, labeled or unlabeled.)

Similar with manual hobbies. I don’t draw much, but I do a lot of fabric stuff. Straightforward stitching might not be great when anxious (unless I’m doing e.g. a language practice audiobook at the same time), but puzzling out a difficult mending/repair project or planning/starting a new patchwork project (colors, shapes, how I want the pieces to go together, and even piecing them together if it’s a complicated one), can be very mentally occupying.

If I find my mind wandering will listening to audiobooks or podcasts, upping the speed usually helps. If my mind still wanders, then it probably means I’m bored with the thing and should listen to something else.

I hope that helps someone!

Still trying to figure out how to make doing yoga more compatible with my brain …

The above comment, about nature identification and manual hobby crafts, reminds me of a great piece of advice I saw from another post I think I reblogged somewhere:

Start a new sicktime hobby when you’re still feeling well.

It’s great to do low-energy activities when you’re ill, or distracting activities when you’re anxious, but trying to find, start, or learn a new hobby when you’re already ill/anxious is really hard! So if e.g. you think you’d like to play a video game next time you’re anxious, install Steam and learn the controls for a game now! Don’t wait til you’re in the middle of a panic attack!

Which leads to my next point…

Playing Tetris is a great distraction!

Yet another reason to love Tetris!

Pride Variant Covers (2023) by Lucas Werneck

This is just to let everybody know that for Pride Month of 2026, the Ebooks Direct Pride Package has been really ridiculously discounted.

...From the product page:

This package contains all our Middle Kingdoms material—some of the first LGBTQ-representing epic fantasy in the 20th-century fantasy field, now continuing into the 21st. It also contains the matter-of-fact exit from the (contextual) closet of two of the best-loved characters in the Young Wizards universe—Advisory wizards Tom Swale and Carl Romeo, on their first canonically-"out" venture as a couple. The main part of the collection spans more than forty years, from the publication of Diane Duane's two-time Astounding Award finalist The Door Into Fire, first published in 1979, through its main-sequence sequels (both also Gaylaxic Spectrum Awards Hall of Fame winners) The Door Into Shadow and The Door Into Sunset, to 2018's and 2019's interstitial Tales of the Five novels, The Levin-Gad and The Landlady. The collection also includes such otherwise hard to find short works as Lior and the Sea and the two current volumes of the "Sirronde's World" group, The Span and Parting Gifts.* And finally, it also includes the Middle Kingdoms novelette Overdue (Tales of the Middle Kingdoms #2), and the short Young Wizards work Owl Be Home For Christmas.

All that for $19.99? Seriously, I need my head felt! So please go validate my mental state by buying the package.

And happy Pride!

(Meanwhile, the project for the course of the month is to put all the major queer, bi, and/or ace characters in my various series into that shot. Just added: Mevraen, Wyn and Eftgan. Now to get Lissa and Matt and Matt's boyfriend in there...) 😏

(And the usual sorrowful reminder: With regret, we must remind any UK viewers of this product that, due to Brexit, we can no longer sell ebooks directly into the UK. Our apologies.)

Máire Brennan died and I am not ok with that. Clannad was formative for me and apart from Altan I can't think of an Irish trad band that was so tightly woven through my life. People may recognise her sister Eithne better, but they almost certainly heard Máire first.

https://youtu.be/I93EN-vYRMo

*going to put on my Clannad CD*

(context: Eithne Brennan is Enya.)

Has anyone else noticed that they do this?

aquatic chapter

shutyourmoustache

After the hell of the past two days, this reminded me of what America could and should be about. It’s a little pocket of hope when our administration is trying to extinguish diversity and community and basic human decency and replace them with fear and hate and division.

"hephaistion made this" in a beautiful trompe-l'oeil piece of paper half unstuck by the wind still some of the rawest stuff ever put in a mosaic (2nd century bc, pergamon)

The Tumblr of Sigrid Ellis, out of fucks to give @sigridstumb - Tumblr Blog | Tumgag