the quiet chaos driving me mad

archivist. jewish. i exist. sleepily. one time, someone told me i laugh too much.

[ezekiel13]

Whenever I text someone happy birthday I always have to double check and then I panic and worry that I’ve somehow gotten their birthday wrong this year and I read the date wrong on the messages from last year and my calendar is wrong. #Normal

[urgetocreate]

Elena Wuest (Kazakhstani/German b.1977) , Dissolving into Pink, 2026, Oil on canvas

[reasonsforhope]

"The trouble is we have a bad habit, encouraged by pedants and sophisticates, of considering happiness as something rather stupid. Only pain is intellectual, only evil interesting. This is the treason of the artist; a refusal to admit the banality of evil and the terrible boredom of pain."

—Ursula K. Le Guin

[twoblogger-deactivated20260714]

Shout out to this tiny yet crucial error on an otherwise actually very informative post about myths about tax returns and the IRS

[daughter-of-sapph0]

oh boy! something in my mailbox from the IRA? I wonder what it could be!

[jenniebellie]

[bookpatrol]

😇

[takeintoaccount]

<- prev your tags. i'm dying. 😂

[loveridden1999]

if i was a soccer player i'd simply kick that ball in the goal instead of wasting everyone's time

[oilpalette]

Monsieur Noir and the Red Teapot, 2026 by Elena Polishchuk (Russian, b. 1978); Oil on canvas, 60x60cm

[codeblueberry]

When you’re sleep-deprived, running on 3% and ask the demon in the corner for emotional validation

[petitworld]

Glasgow Botanics Gardens, Scotland by Simon Hird

[sinni-ok-sessi]

I do think the ability to emoji-react is a net win for human communication. not only does it give you an outlet for 'I see and acknowledge this but don't have a verbal response' but it also adds a pleasing alethiometer element to things

my coworker announces that he's off to the dentist. someone reacts with a tooth emoji. is this a statement of dentist solidarity? a wish for my coworker to return with more (or fewer?) teeth than he set out with? simple word association? who can say

[vulpes-aestatis]

Baby sphinx trying to be like mama and waylaying travelers, but all its riddles are completely non-sensical like the ones a 1st grader would tell

[thecactifindahome]

[hiddurmitzvah]

The Joy of Hating Jews - Tablet Magazine

Why antisemites always have a blast—and how Jews enhance the experience

[mouse-fischer-deactivated202608]

Today’s digital culture has monetized these pleasures. Online platforms are engineered to maximize engagement by maximizing emotional reward. Antisemitism is extraordinarily well suited to such systems. Platforms amplify the thrill of forbidden knowledge, insider language, memes, and collective outrage while making them instantly accessible and endlessly repeatable. The digital dogpile—coordinated mass attack on a single Jewish target—is the mob made digital. Like the analogue mobs that preceded them, these too are often gleeful and public. But unlike earlier forms, participation no longer requires gathering in the street or much physical effort at all. The mob no longer needs to gather, it simply needs to log on.

Flooding Jewish journalists’ social media feeds with Holocaust jokes and “oven” memes; defacing synagogues, menorahs, or Jewish community centers with swastikas—often timed to holidays; filming antisemitic taunts of visibly Jewish people and posting them online for laughs; turning classic antisemitic tropes into viral “ironic” content or remix videos—none of these are coherent responses to a supposedly sophisticated international cabal controlling the world’s economy, politics, media, migration, and satellites. They are rituals of humiliation. The point is not resistance. The point is pleasure.

[sprinkledsalt]

"The third pleasure is moral. Antisemitism allows its adherents to experience hate as virtue. The antisemite does not feel like a bully. His experience is one of courage. He is exposing hidden power. Defending society. Cruelty becomes public service. This framing—hating Jews as just and right—has proved infinitely adaptable. Medieval violence against Jews was 'defense of Christendom.' In the medieval Islamic world, Jewish subjugation under dhimmi law was framed as righteous social order and mercy. Soviet purges were coded as 'anti-cosmopolitan virtue.' Nazi propaganda framed persecution as national hygiene. In much of the world today, antisemitism travels under the banner of anti-Zionism and resistance, repackaging eliminationist sentiment as liberation theology. The vocabulary shifts—anti-colonialism, anti-globalism, anti-elitism—but the emotional architecture remains. The antisemite gets to feel good. He is a whistleblower. A truth teller. A patriot. A freedom fighter. It is remarkable how stable the narrative structure remains. The blood libel accusations that convulsed medieval Europe—murdered innocents, monstrous perpetrators, the righteous community that exposes them—have proven durable and portable. Dress the accusation in the language of human rights reporting rather than theology and the structure barely changes."

[fairycosmos]

i really don’t have the time to be the way i am

[jackabbot]

a very big fan of whatever their deal is...

[lottiest]

[colinmorgan]

[dochollidayed]

#officer i jaywalked this one time three years ago pls stuff me into a police car too (newberried)

[sashayed]

wait one HOT SECOND. is this the less cute one from MERLIN? Am i looking at the SCARF ONE from MERLIN??? is that who this fucking is?????

[thebaconsandwichofregret]

yes this is “the scarf one from Merlin” also known as Merlin from Merlin, and with his own accent in this show which also ups his sexiness factor a tad

[herrhasen]

#non-merlin fans suddenly realizing that colin morgan is hot#is my new favorite thing#while the colin morgan fans sit and drink tea in the background while watching the world burn ( supercalvin )

[cinematicnomad]

#THE LESS CUTE ONE?!#I WILL COME OVER THERE AND FIGHT YOU (via colinmorgasms)

[fannishthings]

THE LESS CUTE ONE?BRADLEY JAMES WILL COME OVER THERE AND FIGHT YOU.

[katherynefromphilly]

@fannishthings in response to your excellent reblog tag of “#this post was funnier with the indents” I hereby present you with The Indented Version of this BBC Merlin Heritage Post, courtesy of a screenshot of an ancient tumblr email dug up from my fandom archives.

[rotzaprachim]

I keep thinking about code name verity and storytelling and genre but there’s also something so meta textual about how it was classified and marketed as “ya” and like, no disrespect to the ya market but that’s kind of. Wild. Given the actual goings ons of the book and the kinds of literary techniques it uses to (the line “technically speaking, I have not been raped” for instance is so goddamn haunting and went over my head at fourteen)

but what hits so hard and fascinatingly is the way that the novel in some ways flirts with ya conventions because Julie has to make her narrative fit with Von linden’s ideas of literature and morality in order to keep writing the story that he, her torturer and captor, wants to read and considers to be acceptable Moral literature.

One of the most obvious examples is her swearing. Julie says she swears a lot, which is damn likely for someone from the north of Scotland who has now spent years within the military apparatus, but Von linden hates swearing, and thus no swearing appears in the novel. He hates her swearing so much he threatens to have her mouth swabbed with toxic chemicals in order to teach her a lesson about swearing. This entire thing is a commentary on morality - he is morally comfortable with torturing and starving a young woman for six weeks before he assigns her final execution to someone else, but he draws the line at curse words - and it’s an actual commentary on Nazism itself and what it wished to achieve with the creation of a “pure” society.

And all this is reflected in the text because ultimately Julie is writing for Von Linden and according to the narrative tropes with he expects and is happy with but also in order to conceal enormous amounts of actual information under torture, specifically by presenting a very particular image of herself as a girlish plucky adventure heroine waif when it’s only gradually revealed that she is a significant intelligence officer, local resistance coordinator, and interrogator herself. Her text is submission to his ideals but it’s also rebellion. He’s the editor and eraser of her narrative but he’s still trapped by it. The fact that she doesn’t rebel from some of his standards is how she rebels. She writes knowing she’ll die but she doesn’t know she’ll trap him too.

but just… it’s about storytelling and narrative and the power of the storyteller but it’s also about EDITING and translation and von Linden is both audience and editor, and it’s so apparent in her text that he is erasing aspects of it that he finds morally repugnant in order to present t HIMSELF the idea of a clean gestapo officer who operates within a morally OK framework and then both Julie and maddie’s texts make it very clear this is not the case. He’s alright with torture but not with swearing. The narrative Julie writes mentions how she’s allowed a grey silk scarf back but NOT that she was allowed it back to cover the burns from being tortured with a soldering iron because well maybe that kind of torture is just Too Bad for someone like von Linden to acknowledge. Georgia Penn, ultimately revealed to be an allied agent, tries to figure out if Julie has been raped and/ or is pregnant and all Julie DOES NOT WRITE her answer to penn and then later in the text mentions that “technically speaking, I haven’t been raped” and she isn’t pregnant because her period stopped, neither of which, actually, is saying it didn’t happen. Julie is a plucky wee lassie heroine of her story radio operator because that woman isn’t an essential member of an entire local armed arm of the French resistance or an interrogator. All of these things are and are not the case because of the needs of the sorry she is telling in this specific way according to this specific genre.

Is this YA or do the editorial needs of a prisoner of war writing a false narrative under torture and starvation that must by nature both obscure reality and fit a gestapo officer’s ideas of morality create a narrative partially cleansed of sex and swearing and violence instead create a narrative that in some way resembles YA?

[takeintoaccount]

Years ago, fresh out of college, I llistened to this novel as an audiobook straight through start to finish on a drive from the PNW to southern California and I had to pull over at a rest area to sob my eyeballs out. As soon as I got home, I bought a physical copy and read it again. I still recommend it to people all the time.