todays bird
KIROKAZE
Game of Thrones Daily
Phantogram Three
noise dept.
occasionally subtle
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cherry valley forever
Monterey Bay Aquarium
Not today Justin
TMBGareOK. The Official They Might Be Giants tumblr
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Game Changer & Make Some Noise
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pixel skylines
hello vonnie
YOU ARE THE REASON
roma★
❣ Chile in a Photography ❣
I'd rather be in outer space 🛸
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@steppingstonespoetry
Moving Tumblrs
Hey y’all. I’m moving to a new tumblr, the title of which is ruth-lund. So, I’m in the process of following people over there and unfollowing people on here before I delete this tumblr. I still love you all! I just like to “clean up” and take things back to a blank slate as much as possible before deleting accounts.
I’m going to be reposting my poems from this account and my art from my sideblog alizesart onto the new tumblr. See y’all over there!
Spider-Man: Homecoming’s Gag Reel
If anyone feels shitty rn, please watch this and let the happiness commence 💖
Everyone should see this
My favorite gag reel hands down
Official @sortinghatchats quiz!
The time has come! Who wants to try out our @sortinghatchats style sorting quiz?
Go here and begin your adventure:
https://ejadelomax.itch.io/sortinghatchats
If you run across any bugs or errors, let us know in the sortinghatchats ask box. If the whole thing just jumps to the top of the page and… shakes… that is a known bug and we’re not sure why it’s happening. But it doesn’t happen very often! (I think it’s to do with the hosting site?)
We had a blast making this quiz, coming up with wording and questions, and testing the paths people can take through the quiz content. We even made some new friends along the way!
We hope you have as much fun with it as we did. We think this is one of the culminations of our system, especially in terms of making it more accessible for newcomers. Enjoy.
Burned Hufflepuff/Burned Hufflepuff here. I have clinical depression so the Burned bits were expected and par for the course. I was glad to finally figure out my Primary and Secondary. Thank you so much for creating the quiz!
This quiz really helped me understand the options; more than just reading the descriptions did. I would always get confused because I felt too many things from various houses applied to who I am and how I do things, but for some reason taking the quiz helped me pin down that what matters here is what I value, not necessarily who I am or how I behave. For example, for the Secondary, I might behave like a Ravenclaw sometimes because I love random facts and sharing them and if I get to use them to solve a problem so much the better, but what I actually want to do is be a reliable and steady like a Hufflepuff. That distinction of the most important factor being what I value most as opposed to anything else really cleared things up for me.
Time
I’ve seen you running on, running on, running on As you run on, enemy of mine I grate against your passage here Oh how I wish you’d stop, Oh Time!
There is no dam to stop your flowing No net to cast to catch you in No spear to pin you to the ground No way against you I can win
Yet there are times when you slow down Until you’ve seemed to stop entire I wish I could bottle up that slowness And pour it o’er you when you race like fire
Instead I’m forced to watch you steal My love and memories and dreams My youth and health and yesteryears All dissipate into your streams
My consolation is the hope You’ll bring to me still more And knowledge that all you’ve taken ‘way The Son of God will soon restore.
(c) 2019
Ruth
May the Fourth be with you
I still love this as much as I did last year. Grateful to have it come across my dash again.
Happy 103rd Birthday Beverly Cleary
I was at the LA Times Book Award ceremony the year that Beverly Cleary was awarded the The Robert Kirsch Award, for significant contribution to American letters. It was the first time (and only time, I think) that it has been awarded to a children’s book author and it showed that SOME people appreciate her genius.
When people talk about Cleary, they almost always refer to Ramona. But when I got my turn on stage all I could do was babble about how much I had loved The Mouse and the Motorcycle– how it had opened my eyes to the idea that magic can happen right here in our world, not just in far away places like Narnia.
Beverly Cleary didn’t attend the ceremony, but her son did and he talked to me after the ceremony. He said he’d tell his mother what I said and it was the high point of an already fabulous day.
I was introduced to The Mouse and the Motorcycle via the movie, which I loved! However I have to admit that the book of hers that solicited the biggest emotional response from me as a kid was Ramona the Brave. It’s the first book of Beverly Cleary’s I remember reading, and the part where Ramona’s classmate copies her owl drawing made me so upset on Ramona’s behalf! Actually that might have been the first time I had a strong emotional reaction to a book, ever! I think I really liked Ramona, and it was easy to put myself in her shoes.
Happy Birthday Beverly Cleary! Thank you for capturing the hearts and imagination of kids everywhere!
Show some respect, people.
THANK YOU
The story of Balto is interesting. He led a team of sled dogs across the Alaskan wilderness in the dead of winter with diphtheria antitoxins to stop an outbreak in Nenana Alaska. Diphtheria is a deadly infectious disease that could wipe out a third of a town’s population. It is mostly unknown to the public today because of vaccines. Balto’s body is preserved in the Cleveland Museum of Natural History.
He’s a big hero of mine!
Let’s not forget Togo! Who, at 12 years old during the serum run, lead his team 200 miles through much more dangerous conditions during the first leg of the journey before Balto ran the last 55-mile stretch.
Togo and Balto didn’t bust their asses for dying children for you to turn around and not vaccinate your damn kids
I had never heard of Togo! What a good brave and heroic pupper!
He was real!? I watched the movie as a kid.
Morning Glory
I thought you were beautiful The first time I knew who you were The fact that you grew where you could Even on footing unsure And followed the light and set down your roots Delicate tenacious roots Made me love you and your faith And the sight of your pushing green shoots
We’re striving to live in a world full of measures And change ourselves straight to our cores In life we’re all a little like weeds Trying to produce virtuous worthwhile seeds God tells me I am beautiful And though the world is unsure He gives strength to my roots And the hope to push out more shoots
God knows exactly where is good I trust that this is where I’m reaching for light with all that I have And looking for skies that are fair God is changing us deep in out cores It doesn’t matter what hardships the future brings Through our struggles to grow His love is enough For us beautiful out of place things
© 2013 Unpublished work Ruth
I’m still proud of this one.
I always have to start the New Years with this picture.
Naruto Language Question
Hi! I have a question that I hope you can answer. In Naruto there are some clan symbols that look like this:
(This is the Chinoike clan symbol, and there five other clans with similar looking symbols) I was wondering if you could tell me if the characters within are ancient Mandarin or Cantonese characters as I am afraid if I try to research them on the internet I will misidentify them, since I don’t know much about Chinese languages.
Above is from @steppingstonespoetry
Ooh boy! That’s seal script! It’s an ancient and stylized way of writing kanji! I am horrifically awful at reading seal script!!!
I started to say that characters aren’t Mandarin or Cantonese but actually there are some characters that are used to represent certain Cantonese-only words so that’s not completely true but it’s mostly true.
Anyway. That’s a seal! That’s about the extent of my abilities with reading seals!
Luckily because you told me it was Chinoike I looked up the characters for Chinoike and found out they are 血之池. And when I put them into a seal script generator (via Google, you can do it yourself if you’re keen) I got the three symbols on the right, vertically, from top to bottom.
If you’re looking at 血之池 and looking at the three symbols on the right from top to bottom and thinking to yourself “what the fuck, they don’t look anything alike????” congratulations, you now understand why seal script hurts my brain.
Because seal script would be read right to left, the left hand top to bottom is almost certainly a given name. But what characters are they? I don’t know because seal script scares the fuck out of me.
This is actually very helpful! I had no idea that these characters were seal script or that such a thing existed, so now I can look up and research seal script! ^^
I am interested because I am thinking about the implications of there being kanji in Naruto, which implies that a language like Chinese must exist/have existed in that universe! (I am reading way too much into this, haha) But I know that to say “Chinese” is inaccurate as in reality there are many languages that originated in China such as Mandarin and Cantonese, and I hoped that identifying these symbols would help me narrow down which language the usage of kanji came from (in-universe, that is, as opposed to however they were developed in the real world.) I was thinking if the symbols were from Cantonese I could say ‘ah-ha! Cantonese exists for certain in Naruto.’ and rule out Mandarin. Vice versa if the symbols were ancient Mandarin. This made more sense in my head, as I realize now I would be cutting a lot of linguistic corners to say ‘Ancient Cantonese exists in Naruto, therefore the kanji in Naruto came from that.’
I guess I was thinking “If there is no evidence they exist in Naruto, I should take out (of my headcanon) any real-world elements and only leave in the bits there is evidence for.” But now I am double thinking that because...that is probably insulting in some way to just ignore linguistic history simply because it isn’t explicitly shown.
Back to your answer, though. It being seal script brings up new information! Learning that this is seal script is very exciting to me, because a quick trip to wikipedia has revealed that seal script was used to write Old Chinese. I imagine Kishimoto just used this because it looks cool and old, but the implication of course is that Old Chinese existed in the Narutoverse too! Cool, cool. Very cool.
I know there’s a lot of tension after Tumblr’s new policy annouced for December 17th, but reblog this if you aren’t leaving Tumblr so that other blogs can know they aren’t going to be completely alone!
ned: on a scale from “damn daniel” to “fre sha vaca do” how are you guys feeling ?
peter: in between “it’s an avocado, thanks” and “how did you defeat captain america” but as a solid answer i would say “i don’t need a degree to be a clothing hanger”
mj: probably “road work ahead”
tony: i speak 48 languages and this is none of them
I don’t know any of these references either and my first instinct is to go “No! this is awful!” but honestly it’s also a little fascinating. The way that there is a sort of language within English evolving where currently only those who are aware of the media of origin can communicate in it. It’s likely to stay that way, since popular media changes so rapidly and people add and drop references to their lexicon accordingly. However, I’d like to go on a what if? What if these references just...stuck around, until they became as established as sayings like “two peas in a pod,” where one day parents explained what they meant to their kids and they became a new longstanding part of the English language. Again, not saying it’s likely to happen, but those old sayings that we employ must’ve had some similar origin, if not in source (the internet) then in method (something just...became a thing with a lot of people) and it stuck. Language is cool.
i spent last weekend in pittsburgh...
…because i was asked by the creative writing program at carnegie mellon (my alma mater) to give an address for their fiftieth anniversary celebration.
i don’t think i have anything remotely resembling consolation, solace, wisdom, or sense to make of the the awful events of the last few days, but i would like to share what i had to say…
—
One of my favorite movies is Thomas Alfredson’s adaptation of John Le Carré’s novel “Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy”. I have seen this film twenty-seven times. I have read the novel twice, along with its sequels. I have also seen the 1976 BBC miniseries and the follow-up Smiley’s People, both starring Alec Guinness.
To this day, however, I really can’t tell you what happens in Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy… other than it has something to do with men so profoundly closeted that they just have to destroy the Soviet Union.
That much said, there is one moment that sticks with me in spite of my complete inability to understand the film on the level of plot or character… or really anything not having to do with ugly men’s suits from the 1970s. In the scene, Spy Master George Smiley - played here by Gary Oldman - has a painful reckoning with the lifelong friend and colleague he has uncovered as a Russian mole in the upper echelons of British Intelligence.
When asked why he betrayed Queen and Country, the mole replies - with the quivering upper lip of a man who has never, ever, not once, talked about his feelings - that:
“It was an aesthetic choice as much as a moral one, and the West has become… so very ugly.”
If you think that there is a cheap analogy to be made between that line of dialogue and our current political situation, then let me assure you, you hired the right TV writer for the job.
Like so many sensitive and artistic people who were prone to melancholy even before our democracy went to shit, I feel that the present tyranny is not merely political, but also rhetorical and spiritual. It is a living expression of the belief that the only victories that have value are the ones earned by the fist or the crotch.
Part of where we find ourselves in our politics, discourse, and relationships is the result of a systemic failure of kindness and empathy in our daily practice of living. It is a failure exacerbated by the pernicious yet seductive fantasy that those who act like the rich and cruel will magically gain wealth, and the concomitant entitlement to further, more ambitious cruelty. Too many have bought into the idea that destroying those whose existence annoys us on principle is equal to “winning”.
So. What does this incredible bummer have to do with the anniversary of a creative writing program?
Well, I am a writer and, increasingly, an artist… which is embarrassing, because, when I went into TV in the 90s, the medium was straight-up disreputable and I was honestly trying to sell out. Also, I work for other writers in an industry that not only tolerates, but often lionizes a great deal of madness, rage, and abuse in its upper management. I work in an industry that deliberately keeps its barriers to entry stocked with cauldrons of boiling oil; especially for women and minorities. I work in an industry that forces people to move to Los Angeles.
A few years ago, me and a man named Jose Molina - who is not only a dear old friend but also a very accomplished television writer/producer - were sitting at a bar on Ventura Boulevard getting drunk before our weekly Dungeons & Dragons game… like you do. As we ordered our second round, we began to list all of the sociopathic abusers for whom we had worked over the years. The resulting list, which could charitably be called “a real cavalcade of sigmoid orifices,” was lengthy, and encompassed the majority of both our careers.
As the third round arrived, we fantasized about what it would take to change the character of so many awful bosses to whom we had given our best and most creative work. What kind of Ebenezer Scrooge experience would it take to shift the minds of so many who felt entitled to cruelty, or availed themselves to it through sheer ignorance, to the real work of uplifting their employees instead of torturing them?
Soon however, we came to the depressing realization that, once someone achieves a position of power, it is as if society has given them a validation that their methods do not need to change. A TV network gave you hundreds of millions of dollars to make a show you created. Surely that means you are a genius and beyond correction. So we came up with the idea of making a podcast to, ostensibly, teach newcomers about the TV business. This was an attractive hook, since information about how to break into TV, and how to behave once you’re in, is notoriously hard to come by, and expensive and seldom accurate when it is.
But that really was just a Trojan Horse for the far more insidious message that you do not have to be an asshole to be successful, an abuser to get your collaborators to perform, or need to destroy everyone out of fear that they will someday come back to murder you and take your place… or worse, tell other people what you were like before you were a Genius.
The podcast has the colossally stupid name “Children of Tendu”, it’s free, and the twenty or so episodes we have produced to this day have been downloaded over 400,000 times. Based on that, we approached the Writers Guild and spent a year teaching a series called “Living in the Middle” which was intended as a sort of continuing education for writer/producers but really was a crypto-altruistic mental inception made in the name of decency, integrity, and collaboration.
If you know the entertainment business - or try to enter it - then you probably know that a lot of people with far less experience than I will gladly charge you a lot of money for far less and pretend they are giving you the keys to the kingdom. We took forty combined years of hard-earned knowledge and experience and gave it away for free.
The effect this has had on me as a writer, a manager of creative people, and a human being has been immeasurable. I believe in evolution, and evolution means that if your competition is loud, obnoxious, and seemingly victorious, and you are quiet, introverted, and don’t have a good publicist, you can still prevail by surrounding the bad guys with people who just plain disagree with them. Evolution is a numbers game, and we each have the power to help make more of us than there are of them.
The efforts I have just described are a tiny little spearhead in that evolution. We arm our audience with knowledge, but also tell them unequivocally that much of what is understood as ordinary behavior in our business is wrong, and if they can’t change it, they’d better not feel entitled to further the cycle of abuse with their own actions. If Jose and I wind up helping one person succeed as a television writer while keeping them from falling for the temptation to act like something that was drained out of a colorectal fistula, then we can both enter our homes justified.
Why? Because that person will, in turn, model good behavior to everyone who works for her or him - and those employees will know that it is good to work for an ethical, sensitive, and empowering manager, and they will take that into their own path to success - and the rest is evolution.
There are many of us who look at the current political situation - the endless lies and gaslighting, the normalization of casual hate, prejudice, and misogyny - and wonder only one thing… what to do? Some run for office, some go to demonstrations, call their congressmen, read all the newspapers and blogs…
And some of us have no taste, stomach, or talent for it. I’m not talking about sloth or apathy, I’m talking about the truth that we all have limitations. I have none of the requisite qualities necessary to become a political truncheon; but that doesn’t mean that I don’t live in the same fish tank, breathe the same liquid, and choke on the same poison.
I have one solution. It’s not the only solution - not even close. It’s also not a solution that will force anyone out of the seat of power, bring about an end to the systematic abuse of women in our society, or expedite the punishment of the guilty… but that doesn’t make it not worth exploring.
If you have a skill, teach it to someone for free.
This is especially necessary if you are a writer. Because if you make it, it won’t just be because you are great (though I am sure you are, each and every one of you, the reincarnation of Mavis Gallant) it will be because all of the gatekeepers opened the locks for you.
Anyone lucky - yes, lucky - enough to make a living as a writer has a list of people who recognized their talent, helped them hone their craft, gave them honest but compassionate feedback, introduced them to an agent, explained publishing to them, advised them on how to deal with editors - or network and studio executives - and perhaps taught them how to handle both success and failure with grace.
And if you were to share your knowledge of how those pins and barrels were made to turn for you, imagine how many might be able to walk into the promised land through a path you described. How many stories might see the light that may otherwise have not.
Every time you give knowledge away for free, every time you teach, every time you empower someone who is not, you are creating something that cannot be measured in terms of capital but is nevertheless a profoundly political act:
You are increasing the density of decency in the world.
Every time you are generous with knowledge that is considered privileged, you not just saying that you have faith that the arc of the universe bends toward morality, you are becoming one of the billions of moving pieces whose trajectory defines that arc. Even more importantly, you are modeling kindness as a value.
The more we seed the world with the idea that empathy is not a hindrance to victory, but rather its vehicle - the more we declare through action that there is more to “winning” than profit and dominance - the more likely we are to create a majority for whom what is “cool” and “aspirational” is not for sale. Some of us stand up to bullies by quietly recruiting more and more into the ranks of warriors for that which is soft, and gentle, and far more necessary to the soul than “winning.”
And trust me, I’m not advocating that you put your professors or this university out of business. If you are doing it right, your experience of a place like this will be irreproducible. I’m also not telling you to give your secrets to “the competition.” What you bring to the page is the one thing you can’t teach or give away; the only way to truly understand that is to put everything else on the table.
Some of you may now be saying “but what if I’m too busy changing the world through my amazing writing?” Then I would suggest you study the life of one of the most successful classical composers in history. A man whose voice dominated opera between the eighteenth and nineteenth century. A man who retired one of the wealthiest composers in history. A man who taught composition to Schubert, Liszt, and Beethoven.
His name is Antonio Salieri. His story is a cautionary tale that should be familiar to all you cultural studies double-majors who have been force fed Roland Barthes. Today, this man’s name is known only because - a hundred and fifty years after his death - another artist wrote a grotesquely inaccurate script framing him for the murder of Mozart, holding him up as poster child for the sin of envy, and canonizing him as patron saint of mediocrity.
What happens to your work and your story in the ashes of time is completely beyond your control. The only thing that survives eternity is your place in an unbroken chain of acts that encourage others to surpass you. In the immortal words of Jedi master Yoda: “we are what they grow beyond, that is the true burden of all masters.”
But ultimately, it’s a little weird that you should be listening to me on this topic when, not one square mile from here there lived and worked a true warrior for social justice - a writer, musician, spoken-word performance artist, film-maker, pacifist, and humanist - who said it better, and far more succinctly than I ever could. A man who has been vilified by Fox News and many other standard-bearers of speaking-power-to-truth - and who has frequently accused of everything from mass murder to child molestation - for the crime of putting into the world such heresies as this one:
“As human beings, our job in life is to help people realize how rare and valuable each one of us really is, that each of us has something that no one else has - or ever will have - something inside that is unique to all time. It’s our job to encourage each other to discover that uniqueness and to provide ways of developing its expression.“
His name was, of course, Fred Rogers, and he remains one of my personal idols to this day because he talked the talk, walked the walk, endured the cruelty and ridicule of many with the humane smile of one who knows truth beyond reproach, and embodied day in and day out - without shame, or fear, or guilt - a reality that, sadly, grows more urgent with each passing day…
In this moment, there is nothing more revolutionary, counter-cultural, and just plain badass than simple human decency.
*applauds wildly*
how do u pronounce eugenides
with great skill
……..a skill that i, personally, dont honestly possess sfgsdfg- my best approximation would probably be something like you-gen-ih-daze (or dez), but my brain always wants it to be “you-gen-ih-diedes” but thats because i cant read and like to shoehorn letters in and switch syllables around and otherwise ignore whats actually on the paper in front of me kfjgsdf
100% correct.
The first time I read The Thief, I took a look at “Eugenides” and my brain gave up. I had been pronouncing “Gen” with a hard “G” in my head the whole time, so “Eugenides” somehow became “You-GEN-diss” (with a hard g) as my eyes henceforth skimmed over the name and refused to make sense of the letters I was leaving out. A couple reads later, one day I asked my Dad how to pronounce it, and either he or my brother (who was in the room) speculated that it may be “You-gen-EYE-deez” (soft g, of course) so that’s the pronunciation I prefer now.
Also 100% correct
how do u pronounce eugenides
with great skill
……..a skill that i, personally, dont honestly possess sfgsdfg- my best approximation would probably be something like you-gen-ih-daze (or dez), but my brain always wants it to be “you-gen-ih-diedes” but thats because i cant read and like to shoehorn letters in and switch syllables around and otherwise ignore whats actually on the paper in front of me kfjgsdf
100% correct.
The first time I read The Thief, I took a look at “Eugenides” and my brain gave up. I had been pronouncing “Gen” with a hard “G” in my head the whole time, so “Eugenides” somehow became “You-GEN-diss” (with a hard g) as my eyes henceforth skimmed over the name and refused to make sense of the letters I was leaving out. A couple reads later, one day I asked my Dad how to pronounce it, and either he or my brother (who was in the room) speculated that it may be “You-gen-EYE-deez” (soft g, of course) so that’s the pronunciation I prefer now.
trilogy
Are there no fucking butterflies in japan
This reminds me of memories I have related to butterflies in Korea. One time there was a butterfly or a moth in a building and a Korean girl I was with reacted like it was a spider or a centipede or something. I thought “how can you be afraid of a butterfly?” I’ve known girls in the US that act like this too though, so it was probably just her and not something specific to Korean culture.
Another time I caught a butterfly outside and when I opened my hand it decided to just sit there. (I took a photo, shown below) I walked with it sitting on my hand for about a block and the sidewalk wasn’t busy but there were several people who passed without noticing. However a family walked by and the dad did a double-take (which was funny) and smiled which was nice and made me happy.
Please get a life. Nobody cares what language they spoke. The actor spoke it so they went with it. Easier then forcing 2 actors to learn a language neither knew or make one up!
lol nah
“Nobody cares” - what if it was, say, an African-made film, with parts set in the USA, and there were ‘American’ characters speaking Spanish? ~nobody cares what language they’re speaking~, it’s some European language, it’ll do… right?
Is this talking about the part in Black Panther in Korea? As someone learning Korean even I winced a little. I can’t imagine how Koreans felt at that part. For Okoye’s actress (it was Okoye at that part right? I can’t remember, it’s been a minute) it was understandable, but then the Korean lady opened her mouth and I was so disappointed. I don’t know if her actress was Korean-American or what, but I wish they would’ve gotten someone with better pronunciation.
