Celestial Disaster, Hopeful Romantic

You can call me Ariea (she/they) ~ I'm genderfluid and bisexual, legally I can't make decisions (/j) ~ Stuck in my niche little fandoms ~ 19 🎂

[chillyfeetsteak]

little thingy from the other week, stuff on my mind

[supreme-leader-stoat]

Or as I've always liked to put it, "No matter how suspicious you might find the neighbor who never opens their blinds, they will never be as suspicious as the neighbor who wants free rein to peek in through people’s windows."

[guccifloralsuits]

If THE modern translator of the OG Odyssey text wrote this about my film adaptation I’d kill myself

Emily Wilson you’re goated

[insomniac-arrest]

This felt so good to read.

[gailynovelry]

The fastest way to accomplish The Project is to cease being afraid of The Project. The Project cannot maim you. The Project cannot kill you. The Project is more afraid of you than you are of it. It is okay if The Project turns out differently from how it was in your head, and it is okay if it has flaws. You are capable of engaging with The Project.

[pan-dreamon-ium]

anyone else hoping for Poly MAAM or is it just me and my friends ?

[the-gender-bending-squid]

Desperately, yes

[gumballrightfoots]

this place used to be filled with bad bitches and hoes

[owlgams]

Hello old friend, I sent you out there years ago and you went and spread a lot of good karma, I just need your favour again, help me find some work 🧡

[romirola]

Reblogging empjel to celebrate finishing my first week at a new job!

I have reblogged empjel each time I change jobs. And each time, I renew my hopes that empjel will offer you what you need and that we all like our jobs. ❤️

[shakespearesdaughters]

Franz Kafka diary

[the-gender-bending-squid]

Good things always happen on Saturdays

[dittography-direwolf]

Totally normal for a legitimate for-profit company to refuse to reclaim or stop running their products even after they're no longer being paid to do so. I'm sure it's very normal to just keep running your service for free when your contract's been terminated. Spending money to continue running cameras that supposedly no one is looking at is definitely not an indicator they are just run by the federal government to spy on everyone and only a wacko conspiracy theorist would think so.

[the-gender-bending-squid]

That time of night to be thinking thoughts

[escapedaudios]

Hey girls I'm curious about something and I need insight into girlbrains help me out.

So you know that stereotype that boys like to have cliche fantasies about dying in battle to protect their loved ones while reflecting on their lives on their final moments? Bleeding out in the snow while victorious but fatally wounded seems to be the most popular one for some reason. Yeah, those fantasies.

There's definitely a version of this for women but it's a little different. Less of a "dying in battle to save people" fantasy but more like a sympathetic, tragic self-insert heroine type of fantasy. I don't have the insight to see a pattern of what the most popular tragic fantasy scenarios are. I wanna know what the most popular scenarios are and see if I can find a common thread.

Anyway I'm trying to collect as many tragic daydreams as I can and I want to see if I can find a winner. This is a completely non-judgemental question of pure curiosity, so don't worry if you think your tragic heroine fantasy is cringe, too dark/depressing, or a maladaptive daydream or whatever, I still want to know about it. Tell me any and all scenarios featuring romanticized suffering or death that you've imagined yourself in. Also, are they something you still do, or something you used to do when you were younger but grew out of? Tell me everything.

So far "being dragged away from your loved ones by assailants while screaming" and "beautifully tortured artist and/or philosopher with traumatic backstory" seem to be the top contenders. Being persecuted in the actual literal witch trials is a popular pick too. I want more anecdotal information because I just know there's a pattern in there.

[the-gender-bending-squid]

Okay bff says that her top 3 are: the tragic love of Phantom of the Opera; being a mermaid and getting captured; and being a princess whose castle is under attack, running down a beautiful staircase to escape but being fatally wounded, reaching the balcony and watching the sunset in your final moments

For me it was Beauty and the Beast stories, making potions/casting spells, looking for fairies in the garden, and having magical powers to defeat evil (and getting heavily wounded in the battles)

[depsidase]

[adistraughtjester]

I am hoping that this is some sort of exaggeration or oversimplification because this is just blatant erasure of a major element of Greek culture and replaced by a more Christian version and I want to bang my head into a wall. That’s not what xenia is, and you just erased a major part of the Odyssey.

[adistraughtjester]

@watchanddream Sure! This got a bit lengthier than I intended, but I wanted to try and be thorough.

Put far too simply, xenia is the practice of hospitality, but it's also a ritual and in a sense a contract between guest and host. When a stranger arrives at your doorstep, you're expected to feed them and give them a gift as the host. Typically, you're not even supposed to ask them their name until they've finished their meal. Once you've done this as the host, the guest is now expected to share stories and information about themselves, and not burden you or your household. Typically, people focus on how hosts violate xenia, but guests can also violate xenia.

This is called a guest-friendship, and once it's established, you are expected to offer the same to your host should they ever visit. It's a ritual of hospitality, yes, but it's also used to establish alliances and can be passed down through generations. For example, in the Iliad, when Glaucus and Diomedes discover that their grandparents were guest-friends, they decide not to fight, but rather exchange armor.

Theoxeny is a common story you see in myth where a god (typically Zeus) disguises themselves as a mortal and requests to be hosted by someone. Should the host follow the rules of xenia, they'll be rewarded, but if they fail, they'll be punished or killed.

This is important to the Odyssey, as it comes up multiple times, but in particular, the cyclops, and the suitors. In both these instances, Odysseus arrives disguised and gives a false name, the practices of xenia are failed, and Odysseus reveals himself and punishes the one that failed to follow xenia. The suitors in particular fail xenia, as they both fail as hosts, AND as guests, for burdening Odysseus's household.

Xenia being treated as the golden rule comes across to me like a Christian reinterpretation, as while many Greek philosophers did have something similar to the golden rule, those were philosophers, and the idea that it's a religious command from a god seems much more in line with a Christian idea of where the rule comes from. (Note, I'm aware that other religions had something similar, even as a command from a god, but I highly doubt Nolan is drawing inspiration from those instances)

[flannel-pup]

The even more irksome thing to me is how severely this misses that christianity IS A MEDITERRANEAN RELIGION and the Bible references Xenia in a Babylonian-ized form SEVERAL TIMES!!! Specifically Theoxenia is WHAT GOT SODOM AND GOMORRA DESTROYED.

Homophobic christians love to act like Sodom was wiped out for being gay, but what actually is meant to be understood from this story is that when divine strangers came to town, Lot's family not only took them in, but also took violence upon themselves for defending the visiting angels, to stave off the other people in the city who intended to rape and rob the stranger. For this, Lot's family is spared while the city is destroyed. Skeptical? This story from genesis is even given explicit interpretation instructions later in the Bible-

Ezekiel 16:49-50 — Now this was the sin of your sister Sodom: She and her daughters were arrogant, overfed and unconcerned; they did not help the poor and needy. They were haughty and did detestable things before me. Therefore I did away with them as you have seen.

The withholding of food when they had plenty is also the original definition of gluttony, but that's almost secondary.

Theoxenia is brought up again explicitly in Hebrews 13:2- "Do not forget to show hospitality to strangers, for by so doing some people have shown hospitality to angels without knowing it." This passage gets used a lot nowadays to guilt conservative christians for their xenophobia (hey where have we seen that root word before?), but the social context of contemporary social law being codified in early christian writings is still noteworthy. Reducing Xenia to "the golden rule" is not only bad history, it's not even good biblical scholarship.

[sag-dab-sar]

Philoxenia still exists in modern Greek culture and has a lot more to it than "the golden rule." But silly me, modern Greeks don't exist they're just characters in a book.

[adistraughtjester]

Yup!!! One of the reasons this in particular annoyed me so much is while adaptations can and probably should make minor changes to their stories to suit their medium, there’s a difference between changing a part of the story and misrepresenting an important cultural custom. This is just one example of the absolute lack of interest Nolan’s shown in catering to modern Greece or representing Greek culture, while taking one of its foundational stories and making it his own. Unfortunately, he’s part of a long history of doing this to Greek culture and ancient Greek history.

[the-gender-bending-squid]

Coming home after weeks of travel just to find Someone Unexpected in your house is a grief that cannot be named

[canisitsnotlupus]

I think this is super important to remember.

[rubyvroom]

No kill shelters result in animals dumped on the highway and tossed in the river because the rescues wont take them. That’s the part they never tell you.

Meanwhile the spca will take every animal, and if they have to euthanize them at least it will be done kindly and not via neglect or cruelty.

[rubyvroom]

Because people in the notes are not getting this, let me explain:

No-kill shelters TURN AWAY animals. When they’re full - and they often are because most of these no-kill shelters are small - they stop taking them in. While they are “taking their time to find the right homes for every single animal”, many other animals never get in the door. Somehow they don’t count those animals, or track what happens to them. A success for them doesn’t include the ones they turned away. They’re taking their time because they can. 

The No-Kills who brag about 100% adoption rates are the worst, because they tend to reject the most. The animals who will be difficult to adopt out? They just don’t take those. Special needs? Too old? If they’re going to be hard to adopt out, they can claim to be full, even if they’re not. 

They are telling owners they absolutely cannot take their fifteen year old cat because they are full of litters of kittens. Adorable kittens that will turn over quickly, and boost their adoption numbers. So what happens to the fifteen year old cat? After days of being rejected at the shelters they get dumped on the side of the road somewhere, or worse. 

You cannot imagine the VOLUME of animals that a city shelter deals with. The kill shelters are not allowed to turn anyone away. The difficult cases, the special needs, the elderly, the feral. The dog that bites, the cat that pees everywhere. Every animal is going to be taken in and treated with kindness. They are going to be assessed and treated for their fleas and conditions and behavioral problems. They will get their time on the adoption floor. They will get the best chance possible to find a new home. And if it’s not possible, they will be humanely euthanized, and that cage space will go to the next animal who is already waiting for it. It never stops. While you were working on the paperwork to adopt out 1 cat, three people brought in 4 more. It’s a numbers game that you cannot win if you aren’t turning people away.

A lot of times kill shelters get the animals that the no-kill shelters refused to take. Maybe their owners bring them. Or maybe they got literally thrown in the garbage, abandoned, or put in a bag and tossed in the river, when the no-kill shelter said they were full. The police and rescuers will bring these poor injured animals to the city shelter where they will be cared for. The volunteers will spend days and weeks trying to wash the tar out of their fur, or treat their broken bones, or whatever other horrible thing has happened to them. They will feed and house them. They will put most of them in new homes. They will save many many more animals, by orders of magnitude, than a no-kill shelter ever will. A no-kill shelter will brag about dozens or maybe hundreds of  adoptions. Kill shelters are dealing in thousands of successful adoptions, and they still have to euthanize because it just isn’t enough. There are just so many animals to take in.

And then, after all this, the No-Kill Shelters get to claim the moral high ground somehow, and self-righteous types will refuse to adopt from the only shelter that takes absolutely everyone. It’s infuriating. 

[nevershootamockingbird]

[ Begin ID: Three screenshots of a twitter thread by @/hannahschramm4. The tweets read:

The difference between a “kill” and “no-kill” shelter is so misunderstood and prompts me to write a 7 tweet rant on why you need to know the difference and give equal support to both

Municipal shelters are more often tagged as “kill shelters” because they are contractually obligated to serve the community they reside in. If Cleveland City Kennel, Lorain County Kennel, and others alike get a call for an animal they HAVE to bring it in regardless of their

current volume of dogs. So if they have 20 kennels and all are full they must bring it in regardless. Contrasting, private shelters (more often “no kill” shelters) have the ability to pick and choose when and what to accept into their shelter. They do not have to exceed their

max amount of animals. So going back, people often boast that they’d never support a “kill shelter”, never volunteer for one, never adopt from one, never even visit one. And essentially, that’s the problem. Since they are contractually obligated to take in an every animal in their

municipality and they get no adoptions, inadequate staff, no support from the community, no adoptions animals are senselessly euthanized because of the stigma that they are creating themselves. If we all showered municipal shelters with the same love “no kill” private shelters

got, euthanasia wouldn’t even be considered because kennels would open because the community supports them and adopts/fosters/etc. “Kill shelters” aren’t full of monsters who hate animals, they’re typically minimally staffed with volunteers that work so hard to save every single

animal with little to not supports from their community. thanks for coming to my TEDTalk, support your local shelters. All of em :)

This thread is excluding situations where animals have no other option but euthanasia, for example: overly aggressive animals or incurably sick animals. No shelter is exempt from those heart breaking cases! / End ID ]

[fluorescentbrains]

seeing straight men be disgusted by booktok smut recommenders has actually radicalized me to the side of booktok smut recommenders. girls your taste may be atrocious but i will never disparage you for exposing mainstream discourse to the concept of soaking through your underwear. spent my whole life listening to men talk about penises it’s about time they get jumpscared by women talking about pussy in crude detail on social media. go forth and goon my warriors

[insomniac-arrest]

I work at a bookstore and hearing one of my male coworkers call smutty romantasy "the downfall of society" because it's "literally just porn" radicalized me

Men have an entire industry. Entire industries dedicated to their sexualities. Let women have fantasy sex. there's not even a camera crew involved.

[furiousfurious]

Left this in the notes

[insomniac-arrest]

😂

[goodattellinglies]

[fuckthisshit-ugh]

please read this even if you're not indian. especially if you're not indian.

you've seen the jokes. india is "dirty", indians are "everywhere", why don't they fix their own country. ok. let me tell you why, and what's happening right now while nobody's watching.

first, the history you skipped: britain ruled india for two centuries and drained it. economist utsa patnaik's research estimates around $45 trillion in today's money was taken. the india that got independence in 1947 was one of the poorest countries on earth. every "why is india like this" question starts there. you don't get to profit off a robbery and then mock the crime scene.

now, what's happening RIGHT NOW:

in may the question paper for NEET leaked. that's the national medical entrance exam. over 2.2 million students took it. cancelled. years of studying, families' savings poured into coaching, gone overnight because someone sold the paper. students died by suicide after. these were kids who wanted to be doctors.

and out of that came a protest movement. a gen z group called the cockroach janta party, started by a 30 year old named abhijeet dipke, got 22 million instagram followers within DAYS. they've been doing a sit-in at jantar mantar in delhi demanding education minister dharmendra pradhan resign.

and then there's sonam wangchuk. if you've watched 3 idiots, he's the real engineer the character was based on. built solar schools in ladakh. invented ice stupas so himalayan villages have water. spent his whole life on education. he's 59 and he's been on hunger strike for 17+ days now. reporters went to see him this week and he was too weak to talk. and the troll armies are calling him "anti national" and "foreign funded". a man starving himself for other people's children. that's the thing here, anyone who asks a question is suddenly a traitor.

it's not one incident, it's everywhere you look:

• infrastructure worth thousands of crores failing within months of the ribbon cutting. tunnels collapsing in regions where heavy rain is a guarantee, not a surprise.

• youth unemployment near 10% for ages 15 to 29, 13.6% in cities. in a country of 1.42 billion where more than half the population is young.

• only about the top 3% of indians earn above 10 lakh a year. meanwhile billionaire wealth keeps ballooning and the headlines celebrate it.

• manipur burned for over two years. an ethnic conflict, tens of thousands displaced, and the prime minister barely said the word manipur while it happened.

• journalists raided. critics' houses bulldozed. activists sitting in jail for years without trial under laws like UAPA. our press freedom ranking has cratered.

• even the petrol is a fight now, ethanol blending pushed through while drivers complain about their engines and get no straight answers.

and through all of it, the PM, who came to power on religious polarisation (americans, sound familiar?), travels abroad for photo ops and has not held one single open press conference in over a decade. not one.

what i'm asking:

if you're not indian: share this. our media mostly won't cover any of it because the big outlets are owned by the same billionaires the government serves. the only reason wangchuk's fast is getting any coverage is people refusing to look away.

if you ARE indian: speak up even if you're comfortable. especially if you're comfortable. join the protests. add to this, correct me, translate it. staying quiet is a choice when nothing in this post touches your life.

india is not "dirty". india was robbed, and it's being robbed again, from the inside this time. but it's also the country where a 59 year old will starve for strangers' kids and 22 million young people will rally behind a party literally named after cockroaches, because cockroaches survive everything.

we can still save her. but only loudly.

reblog. share. don't scroll past.