tea and inanity @teaandinanity - Tumblr Blog

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Replies are now restricted due to bot spam - I hate doing this because I love talking to people so if you are a real human person who wants to talk blorbos please do not let that put you off, it's not aimed at you 😭

also on PF as Rascality

princecroutons

does croutons know how to count to 4

his mind is unburdened by the concept of basically everything

#anything that makes me gigglesnort belongs on my blog #also god what a mood #except my mind is currently burdened by depression goblins and they are an invasive species #so there is no ROOM for basically anything else #hm #perhaps not actually that much akin to croutons

laurelindorenan

A funny moment in creative writing class today:

Someone's story involved Character A believing Character B was terminally ill. In their initial draft, Character B deceived Character A – but that results in Character B coming across as super twisted, which doesn't really fit the vibe of the story. We discussed alternate possibilities and I said "You know, it's actually plausible that Character A could think that Character B was terminally ill without any deception required. In fact, my fiance thought I was terminally ill for several weeks at the beginning of our relationship."

It was like a bomb went off at the class. Everything exploded. The professor collapsed in his chair and laughed so hard that he cried for a long time. I got bombarded with a million questions. The professor could only get the class back on track by intentionally avoiding looking at me for rest of the class because he was in danger of hysterically laughing again at any minute. No one left after class ended because once the bell rang I was called upon to give the full story.

greater-than-the-sword

Well now you have to give us some explanation of how that happened

laurelindorenan

It's been nearly 3 years since I've told the story on my blog (and even then, I think it was in the tags of some other post?) so I might as well.

Spring of 2023, my fiance and I were going on super casual dates. Emphasis on super casual, because most of the time they were like grocery store trips with dinner attached, and I thought they were platonic hangouts. I hadn't had so much as a crush by that point, so I was pretty clueless.

He was totally in love with me though and just playing it cool, because the guys at our school have an unfortunate reputation of practically proposing marriage on the first date (which kills the chance to organically get to know a person) and because he knew I would be easily spooked (unfortunately true).

After we went on a hike together (I invited the whole friend group, but only he came), I realized we were becoming good friends. On the ride back, right as he was dropping me off in front of my dorm, I told something that I told my good friends: I have a chronic illness called fibromyalgia. He was very quiet. I said goodbye and got out of the car and we didn't speak of it again.

From then on, I was pretty open about my chronic illness. I made a billion jokes about it and such. He always got weird and quiet when I did. I was sad about that. "Great," I thought, "yet another person who is weirded out by my health issues. I hoped he would be better than that."

Once I started suspecting that he was in love with me, I used that as evidence to gaslight myself into believing that we were just friends, because clearly he was too freaked out by my crazy illness to be in love with me, right?

But then he started hardcore pursuing me and asking me to hang out with him in some small way every single day, and in general being very kind and thoughtful and caring for me in every mundane way he could.

Then, several weeks later, he confessed his love. The story of the events leading up to that love confession are also very funny (involving migraines and an impassioned rant about Sheldon Vanauken's A Severe Mercy) but I will not bog this narrative down with the details. The next day, we had a good old-fashioned DTR. I told him I reciprocated his feelings and then, because I was still bothered by how weird he got whenever I brought up my chronic illness, I said "Oh, by the way, I'm super open with talking about my fibromyalgia, so feel free to ask me any questions if you're curious about how it works!"

He said, very earnestly, "Are you dying?".

Rewind to the day we went on that hike. I say I have a chronic illness. He completely misses what it's called (I guess "fibromyalgia" doesn't stick in the brain) and just hears chronic illness. I was the first chronically ill person he had met before and the wires got crossed in his mind and he mistook it for terminal illness. He didn't want to ask, though, because he assumed it was a very sensitive matter.

A couple days later, he overheard me have a conversation with another chronically ill friend about death and suffering and Christian hope. In that conversation, I said (quoting Sarah Sparks) "you know, with this chronic illness, every day I'm learning how to die."

He took that as confirmation of his suspicions: I was dying. He told no one. He just bore that silently for weeks. When I made jokes about my terminal illness, he thought I was being very brave, but did not have the heart to joke along with me.

Fast forward back to the DTR conversation. After I find this out, I laugh in his face for like ten minutes (poor guy). I ask follow-up questions, like

Q: How did you cope with the fact I was dying?

A: I just decided I wanted to spend as much time with you as I can, for the time I had left, and then when the time came I'd cross that bridge when I get there.

Q: When did you think I was dying?

A: Well, I figured there was no way you would move to [UNGLAMOROUS COLLEGE TOWN] in your last year of life, so I figured you had like...five years, maybe?

He was so matter-of-fact about it. After I stopped laughing, I was deeply moved. Here I was, thinking that this guy was freaked out by my chronic illness, when all along he was quietly preparing to weather my terminal illness with me for the rest of my life.

A week later, in a follow-up conversation, I asked, "So is the reason why you've been so kind to me was because you thought I was dying?" and he replied, "Nope! My behavior was not conditional. I wasn't kind to you because you could die. I was kind to you because I could die at any time, and I want to be like Jesus in whatever time I have left."

Anyway, that pretty much convinced me I had to marry him and now, in a little over six weeks, I'm going to get that taken care of.

#story time!#this is so sweet omg #what a good egg. I hope you have a wonderful (long!) life together!

chirasul

we got a full redbox and now we're playing go fish with the redbox movies

chirasul

I would never pay money for a redbox. if you ask politely and are very very persistent (i.e. annoying) they will let you take it away

here's my dad and i taking it away

a redbox makes a wonderful addition to your patio

fishmech

for those wondering why they're free to take now, it's because the company that made those "chicken soup for the soul" books bought them a few years ago and then completely collapsed so bad they couldn't afford to dispose of or even take the blu rays and dvds out of their kiosks all over.

so any of them is free game because they're all located on other business' property and they usually don't want to have to pay to get rid of them either. so asking the store manager usually gets you the ok to pull it out and keep it.

chirasul

there was a period of time right after their bankruptcy where you could put in any debit or credit card and it would spit out movies without charging you. you could even put in like an expired or deactivated card, or a visa gift card with a $0 balance, didnt matter, they'd just start spitting discs out. a lotta people raided redboxes for movies for a couple months, with some people doing what me and my brother and my dad did here, taking the whole box and signs and marquees as well. because managers sure as hell don't want a big abandoned piece of trash on their sidewalk disappointing customers. BUT they're also often too cheap to pay someone to remove it. so they just sit there.

luckily there are no shortage of freaks like us who will just take them away on our own volition. we did it all "by the book", too: we set up cones and caution tape, disconnected electricity properly, used an angle grinder to grind down the bolts in the concrete so nobody would trip on them, then cleaned everything up afterward and sealed off the electrical panel so the store would know everything is safe and tidy. though they were hesitant when we were first contacting them, they were honestly very relieved and grateful when we finally took it away, especially once they saw that we "knew what we were doing" (we don't) and look like we've "done this before" (we haven't).

the fun part: the reason why this redbox, in particular, was completely full and unraided is because the computer hardware inside had failed some months before the bankruptcy, and a failing company sure as hell wasn't gonna send a tech out to our podunk dipshit city to fix it, so it was impossible to rent movies or take any discs out. plus, for who knows how long, people were returning old redbox discs to this machine and not taking any out, leading to a much higher variety of movies than your average redbox.

there is a thriving community of redbox hackers and modders out there, as well, creating open-source software for repurposing the machines and not letting their very interesting and robust disc-management hardware go to waste. this one belongs to my brother (who was very annoying persistent and did all the legwork of contacting managers and securing permission) who is a programmer by trade and will be hacking it into a family-access movie library, with whatever discs we want. i mean the machine is completely weatherproof and has a built-in AC unit, it would be such a waste to not try to turn it into something cool.

if we get another one, i'm gonna try to mod it into some sort of art or zine vending machine. the disc boxes are just the right size for small print art or stickers. would make a great "little free library" too.

remember: the rules are made up. act like you belong there and you can get away with anything. this applies to your own life

#story time!#redbox #also good life advice

speedlimit15

grocery store mission barely accomplished took massive damage to the hull and all internal systems. shield repair could take days

storybookhawke

Affectionately, which is your least favorite major location in Dragon Age Inquisition?

Forbidden Oasis

Hissing Wastes

Fallow Mire

Exalted Plains

Storm Coast

Hinterlands

Western Approach

Emerald Graves

Crestwood

Emprise du Lion

Bald egg / results

Voting ended onJun 2

I don't even ask this to be critical/negative, I'm just curious what region do you go "ugh..." when you reach it while playing DAI?

#emprise du lion #because if you make me do a quest #and attach AN UNSKIPPABLE CUTSCENE to a REPEATING PART OF IT #then the second time I go there I already want to break into the dev offices and put 1 Tbsp salt in every beverage in the building #and remove and hide all the ink cartridges and all the pens

catchymemes

#i maintain this is because we stopped teaching kids to read #they stopped teaching phonics and started teaching on vibes #shockingly this has resulted in borderline illitteracy #because if you teach kids to play mad libs if they don't know a word #half of them never STOP doing that #and then they start fights about shit no one even said

brawlite

if you posted a fic on ao3 and there was a typo* in your fic's description, would you want someone to comment** to tell you about it?

yes, i would want to know

no, i would not want to know

Voting ended onMay 23

* typo along the lines of a spelling error, the wrong your/you're or there/their/they're used, etc. ** in this scenario, a comment is the only way to get in touch with the fic author, no social media dm option

no nuance. just yes or no. feel free to leave any commentary or whatever!! i'm curious.

#yeah #I tend to follow the 'can you fix it in a couple of seconds' school of 'is it polite to quietly tell someone about an issue'#and that is the fic equivalent of having something stuck in your teeth #everyone will notice so one person gently and politely going 'hey--' means you stop making that impression rather than catching it yourself #and going 'OH GOD HOW LONG HAS THIS BEEN LIKE THAT'

willgrahamscock

do you read fanfic for a fandom you haven't engaged with otherwise?

no and I wouldn't

no but I'd try

yes and I liked it

yes but it's not for me

I don't think ppl should read fanfic without understanding the source material

Walter White

Voting ended onMay 27

just stumbled across a video of someone asking for fic recs and when asked what fandom they replied 'any' and my mind short circuited, pls add your thoughts in the tags

#have and do and will continue in the future #sometimes you finish everything from Known Fandoms by an author you are REALLY enjoying #and you look at the rest of their oeuvre #and go either #'I think cultural osmosis has given me enough grounding that I won't be totally lost [click]'#or #'I have NO idea what this is for but the premise sounds awesome [click]'#and I have never regretted doing that

stellanslashgeode

Okay, so. Star Wars has all these concepts that weirdo New Left boomer George Lucas tosses in there but because of storyteller limitations it would kill the plot to fully explain them all, so later writers have to come in for the spin-off materials and bat clean-up to fully explain all this crazy crap. And I would like to talk about something that made me actively angry at first, but which I now adore. And that is the Naboo.

So much about Naboo culture is infuriating from a logical standpoint. They have a queen, okay. A constitutionally elected queen? Weird, okay. Don't know why they'd do that but... She's FOURTEEN? Excuse me? Is it a ceremonial thing or, oh no it's not? Legit head of state? Why does she dress like that? Why does she talk like that? I'm so tired.

Here's the explainer. Let me go cook.

There's this joke in Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy where the last living human goes back in time and finds out humans aren't actually from Earth, but an alien culture that tricked all the middle managers, pedantic weirdos, and other infuriating folk into getting in a space arc which they gave the wrong evacuation coordinates to simply get rid of them. The Naboo are like this but they're all artists and poets and hippies, but like classy ones. They fled their home planet during a war and crash landed on Naboo, then did a colonism to the Gungans because, hey, they were fleeing a war and it was do or die. This spiritual rot in their creation story is later rectified by Padmé. But it's super important to their cultural psychology. They're hippies, but will subjugate if needed. They are "peaceful" but I guarantee you every single one of them has a tiny extremely shiny pistol up their sleeve and they will draw down on you if backed against a wall.

The scene that I think says it all is at the end of Phantom Menace when Padmé is surrounded by Nute Gunray and his droids, they've got her dead to rights, but Sabé her double creates a distraction so the queen can make it to her throne. This one piece of furniture is the Naboo in a nutshell. It's richly carved with artistic details, it has two seats to the side so the queen's handmaidens can read the lips of people in the back of the room and use hand signals to communicate with the queen while she can remain focused mostly on who is speaking to her. It is hundreds of years old. And it has a secret compartment in the armrest that is FULL OF GUNS. Layers of artistic opulence hiding their true intentions.

The Naboo were created to be backwards compatible with Princess Leia. They're compassionate pacifists, but they will shot you if needed.

Why do they elect teenage royalty? It's a little creepy. It's giving "age of consent is emotional maturity". It makes no sense.

The explanation they give outsiders is they want youthful idealism untainted by cynicism. What they don't tell you is that they take kids with stated interest in politics and put them in an advanced highly competitive Leadership Academy which is like Model UN mixed with Battle Royale. Well, they don't kill each other but it's intense. It's like what the clones went though just all diplomacy training and tea ceremonies all the time. Which is crazy but so Naboo.

Oh, and all the delegates for the royalty election run using pseudonyms for security. Imagine voting for the head of state but you can't run a background check. It's so crazy.

Why does Padmé dress like that? Well, fashion is one of Naboo's major industries so it's like she's wearing the entire Fall line catalog at once. To advertise not only the talent of her people, but to show how much they favor her. BUT that dress has multiple layers of padding and resin armor. And aforementioned spots for those little silver blasters. And it breaks up her silhouette making her harder to shoot. And it's so elaborate you pay more attention to the crazy dress and not if the person wearing it is really the queen or a decoy. Everything about Naboo is like this.

Queen Amidala has that weird accent while Padmé does not. Because all her handmaidens helped create the accent together so they all can imitate it. It's like if you gave girls at a rowdy sleepover the job of federal counterintelligence. That's what they came up with.

The handmaidens wear colorful identical clothes so you can't tell them apart, hoods to partially conceal their identity, and they don't wear the queen's fancy makeup. So one of them can be the queen and spy on people in the audience. Because the Naboo don't trust shit for shit.

Their public face is so silly to hide all the truly weird shit they do behind the scenes.

They use their reputation as artist hippies to conceal multiple layers of subterfuge and disguise their methods of self defense and assuage their paranoia due to wartime trauma and their disturbing colonial past. All of them are completely off their rocker even by Star Wars standards. And I love them so much. They put on a show so everyone thinks they have them figured out but what they have going on is far more weirder and more sinister than meets the eye. You know how catty, neurotic, and competitive art school students stereotypically are? Yeah, planet art student. Love them!

There you go, @charmwasjess

roach-works

honestly this goes further than anything else to explain why padme heard this bonkers greasy teenage anakin confess to her that he wiped out the entire village of native people who killed his mother, and padme (ostensibly our conscience) (actually a valedictorian of the naboo political school of move fast break things and look gorgeous doing it) was just like '👍'

whetstonefires

also Darth Sidious is from there, too, so you can interpret him as to some extent the intersection point of everything weird about the Naboo and, uh, everything about the Sith.

like...a planet destroying laser is pretty Sith Lord, and having a Galactic Empire is classically Sith, but faking your way into being Emperor via elaborate indirect election fraud and a whole faked-up proxy war, and mounting your hyperspace-capable space laser on a deeply gratuitous whole-ass artificial moon? there's distinct traces of Naboo aesthetic sensibility showing through there.

also he hates his home planet, which we may assume is why after becoming emperor and having no more reason to please anybody but himself, he wore nothing but an ankle-length hoodie for twenty-five years.

#star wars #worldbuilding #this is incredible and I love it

thethirdromana

The top 100 novels of all time published in English, as voted for by authors, critics and academics worldwide. How many have you read?

How many of the Guardian's 100 best novels of all time have you read?

0-10

11-20

21-30

31-40

41-50

51-60

61-70

71-80

81-90

91-100

Voting ended onMay 19

Bonus: add in the tags which one is your favourite.

penny-anna

https://www.theguardian.com/books/ng-interactive/2026/may/12/the-100-best-novels-of-all-time <- the guardian list

^^ ease of counting!

#I counted 11 but the checklist says 13 and I have ADHD so we will believe the checklist #but also #since it's in reverse order #I did spent a chunk of this going 'why the FUCK is Mansfield Park on here'#'if this is the only Austen on the list I WILL be fighting the author of this list in a Denny's parking lot'#IMO there is in fact Too Much Austen which is a weird thing for me of all people to say but also that's 4 out of 100 slots for one author #on the plus side they didn't put The Catcher in the Rye on there at all so good job for that #as for my personal fave #that goes to Rebecca #which is LOVELY #like most of the books I can check off were things I read in school because they were assigned #and my opinion on most assigned Literature ranged from 'it's fine' to '20 years later I still resent being made to read it'#(there were a few exceptions but my preference is for things which entertain rather than anything that Improves My Mind)#(and this is why these days I consume a few hundred thousand words of fanfic a week and a few books a year)#but Rebecca I read because a friend recommended it #and I had roughly the same reader experience I had with The Last Unicorn #where the first line made me perk up and the rest of it then lived up to that initial !!! feeling #they're not particularly similar books #but there's something in the overall mood that makes me think of small-scale watercolor paintings #a delicate hand creating something dreamlike and luminous #basically Rebecca would also be on MY top 100 if I tried to make one #and if something can win literary accolades AND is a pleasure to read then it's genuinely a damn good book

catchymemes

#the personal reasons are depression #I would really like my neurochemistry factory to start producing useful things again

thepollingstation

Are you confident you are the only person alive with your full name?

yes

other

Voting ended onMay 21

#last check had less than 400 people in the US with my surname #and I don't think it's that common in the country of origin either #so with the relatively uncommon first name and a middle name #it seems reasonable to suppose I might be the only one

json-derulo

having the Aviation Accident Investigations Autism™️ has actually done wonders for the way I process and respond to my own fuck-ups

json-derulo

And I don't just mean "oh, my little work mistake is actually nothing compared to a fiery crash that kills people," either. The reason commercial flight is so many orders of magnitude safer than any other form of transportation is because after every accident and incident, an independent regulatory body investigated it with the express goal of figuring out exactly what happened, why, and how to prevent the same thing from ever happening again—not to root out which person deserved the blame or the liability.

It's a simple, shockingly effective idea. It's also worlds away from how most people approach their own mistakes and the mistakes of others.

json-derulo

Because it’s never just one person’s fault. And even when it is, it still isn’t.

The sharpest, best-trained pilots make worse decisions when they're tired or sick or stressed out, so there's two of them. The most dedicated and experienced air traffic controllers garble an instruction over the radio sometimes, so pilots are trained to always repeat clearances back to catch misunderstandings quickly. The best and brightest maintenance mechanic still overlooks a screw or misconnects a wire once or twice in her career, so aircraft systems are built with two or three or four layers of redundancy, and pilots are exhaustively trained to deal with failures safely.

Everyone eventually has a bad day. Every component breaks down. Every computer gets a bad a Windows update and spirals into a reboot doom loop. If it’s possible for one person’s mistake to domino into a mushroom cloud of a fuckup, then that task is too critical to be one person's sole responsibility. The accident sequence starts with the design of the system—so how do you improve the system to keep it from happening again?

json-derulo

oh yeah. The “modern commercial aviation is the safest form of transport” thing only applies to planes, btw. A helicopter is a beautiful metal horse that wants to break its legs and die so so so badly

disease-danger-darkness-silence

So I was in the civil air patrol for a long time. I had my solo wings almost purely bc of the hours of instruction and flying that I received that I made sure to log. I've flown Sitabrias, I've flown Cessnas, etc. I have flown a small jet before, but I didn't take it off or land it.

I was also in JROTC. I have flown naval helicopters, because on Navy air bases they think, "Oh shit you have a 16-year-old with solo wings? Think she'd like to fly this Chinook?" instead of anything sane.

OP, I need to stress that, "A helicopter is a beautiful metal horse that wants to break its legs and die so so so badly," is the most accurate description of a helicopter to date and I will be sending it to EVERY pilot I know.

#a helicopter is a beautiful metal horse that wants to break its legs and die so so so badly #is entering my lexicon #airplanes #helicopters