You have better places to be-- but you're welcome to stay. any/all
currently screaming about mcyt, SBI, and Batfam to anyone unfortunately close enough to hear me
pfp: @LilzeztheNyan
My Ao3
It's my cat's birthday (anniversary of me getting him) so I told him the story of his life while petting him real good
Highlights include:
For your first two years (when you were small) you lived in a foster home with people who raised you into a very polite young man. Two is like you plus me, that's what two is.
Some people adopted you before me and they called you Timmy (which is a stupid name) and they returned your ass almost immediately because you were so annoying at that age.
Like think about how annoying you are right now at seven years old, but way worse.
I'm better than them though, I don't call you Timmy and I wore earplugs to bed for three years because you love to scream at bedtime. Earplugs are like when I roll over and go back to sleep even when you are yelling so so so loud.
I got you at a time in my life when I was really sick (being sick is like when I'm up late because I'm throwing up and you are a very handsome good boy who sits with me) and they had to put me asleep for a procedure. A procedure is like what happened to you when they put you asleep and took your balls away.
Now you've lived with me for five years. Five is like the number of toe beans on one of your feet. When I clip your nails five is when we're halfway done. But we're hopefully not even halfway done with how long we get to be together. I'm gonna have to figure out new ways to help you count.
“It’s digestible” is pertinent!! Okay, for those of you who haven’t researched Crisco for writing fic about gay sex in the mid-late 60s:
The first-edition of The Joy of Gay Sex, published in 1977, declared, “Vegetable shortening may be the best lubricant, since it is not only greasy but also digestible”[4] Such a statement perhaps gives new meaning to the companies boastful declarations that “Its digestible” and “Crisco has been making life in the kitchen more delicious for years.” Similarly, in the 1978 sex manual The Advocate Guide to Gay Health, Crisco even earned an entry in the book’s index. Discussions of the shortening’s use as an anal lubricant indicate its popularity, with statements such as: “The lubricant, typically the cultic Crisco, must be copious.”[5] In fact, Crisco was so synonomus with gay sex that discos and bars around the world took on the name, such as Crisco Disco in New York City, which was one of the premiere clubs during the 1970s and early 1980s. Other clubs or bathhouses, such as Club Z in Seattle, even featured murals with Crisco. Thus, Crisco was conversely also one of many things that led to the formation of gay identities during the 20th century.
from this essay: http://www.columbia.edu/~sf2220/TT2007/web-content/Pages/drew2.html
Love this post for so many reasons but most especially because this is from all the way back in 2012 and and yet not a single blog in this thread is deactivated
Love the gay history, but i just wanna correct that the “it’s digestible” in the gay stuff was a reference to crisco’s tagline it had been using since 1911, the actual meaning of its digestible is because it’s main competition came from “enhanced” lards which were rendered pig fat mixed with non food thickeners that literally did not digest and caused people to basically just shit out pig cream, since crisco was veggie based the body digested it along with the food
This post is the opposite of net zero information. Not only did I learn several new facts about gay history but also we rounded our way back to the original question of the tag line and the mini obelisks.
I really wanted to re-draw the iconic maiko sunset scene, and then I thought what if they go back there a lot and it becomes theire "couple spot", and they keep going there when izumi is born! I think it's really cute
The idea of a popular teenage subculture where girl & boys pretty much all dress the same feels impossible now but for a while it was reality and it was beautiful.
Why is babs constantly hanging out in dick’s apartment instead of him randomly climbing through her window and bothering her while she’s on her computer. We used to be a country
it feels so evil that you can't still access your university online library after you graduate *remembers my principles* it feels so evil that everyone can't access to that stuff all the time
Character analysis and meta really is all about finding the ways in which the character's need for control expresses itself through their behaviour and especially their relationship and then looking for what it takes for those patterns to be disrupted 🙂↕️🙂↕️
And like. Seriously though, this is obviously not true, there are more things to analysing the psychology of a character than that, like what they're running from and what they think will happen if it catches them (not to mention the non psychology aspects of meta like symbolism references to other tales their role in the genre re- the typical tropes, socio-political aspects etc etc etc.) but like. It's an interesting self-awareness thing to realise that this is the thing I identify first in every character. Like I can only say "the key to Jason/Mia/Barbara/Bruce/Cass/Dick/Tim/Rose etc.'s character is their intense need for control and the way it shapes and eats them" before it starts defining the way I approach fiction more than the characters. It doesn't mean it's not interesting or that those angles of interpretation are biased or less valid, but it does mean that I have a chosen lense of perspective to filter things through that colours my reading, and might complement and be complemented well by other perspectives that enrich our collective understanding of fiction. And it's an interesting thing to realize about yourself ! Like, what about you, do you know the thing you keep coming back to every time you start reflecting about fiction?
Avatar Aang, the world's last Airbender, learns of an ancient power that could save his culture from extinction. With the help of his friend
for people living in the u.s. -- AMC has started putting up listings for the aang movie! looks like paramount listened and they're giving it a theatrical release, although a very limited one by the looks of it. start poking around and see if your theaters are getting it!
Avatar Aang, the world's last Airbender, learns of an ancient power that could save his culture from extinction. With the help of his friend
for people living in the u.s. -- AMC has started putting up listings for the aang movie! looks like paramount listened and they're giving it a theatrical release, although a very limited one by the looks of it. start poking around and see if your theaters are getting it!
(I started writing this post just now as a message to a friend who asked for language-learning advice. But I’m a GIANT NERD when it comes to language learning, so it got wayyy too long to be a message. So I’m posting it here in the hopes that it might help others as well. I have not edited this or even read through it all yet – it just poured straight out of my fingers – so please let me know if you spot any typos!)
Okay, first of all, there are two parts to language learning: active learning and passive exposure. You can choose to do only one or the other, but you’ll have the most success if you do both.
ACTIVE LEARNING
Active learning is pretty much what it sounds like: actively focusing on the language, learning new words, sounds, phrases, idioms, etc. It’s often centered around a textbook, sometimes with accompanying audio, but you can do active learning in other ways too. For example, you can read a news article online and check a dictionary for every word you don’t know. Or do the same thing with a foreign film – when you hear a word you don’t know (or see it in the subtitles), pause the movie and look it up.
Active learning makes you progress fast, but it also tires out your brain and overwhelms it with new information, making it easier to forget things you’ve already learned. That’s why it’s best to space out your active learning sessions and fill the gaps with passive exposure.
PASSIVE EXPOSURE
The goal of passive exposure is for your brain to randomly encounter words and phrases it learned recently and go “Hey! I recognize that!” This is SO important not only for reviewing and consolidating your memory, but also keeping up your motivation! If the only place you ever encounter your TL (target language) is in your textbook, on some subconscious level your brain will think it’s not that important… because after all, you never encounter it out there in the real world, do you?
Passive exposure can include any of the following and much more: listening to music in your TL; watching a movie in your TL (either with English subs, or with no subs at all and just don’t worry if you don’t understand everything that’s going on); skim-reading a book or a short story or a news article or a blog post in your TL and looking for words you recognize, even if you can’t 100% remember what they mean; finding speakers of your TL in real life and eavesdropping on them; watching instructional YouTube videos or short documentaries in your TL (the visuals ought to help you understand some of what’s going on, even if there are no subtitles); etc.
The idea is to let your TL wash over you without straining your brain at all. Zero effort, just relaxation and fun. You will inevitably notice and understand a few words or phrases, and that percentage will increase as time goes on, but you’re not actively studying when you’re doing passive exposure. Remember the two things you’re trying to achieve with passive exposure:
1) effortless review/practice, by inevitably re-encountering some stuff you’ve already learned;
2) reminding your brain that this language is a real cool thing out there in the world, not just a boring chore located in a textbook.
But there are also two more extremely important benefits to passive exposure that are drastically neglected by most language-learners:
3) picking up the correct pronunciation and accent;
4) gaining an instinct for natural, native-sounding language.
These are two things you will not learn in a language class or from a textbook. You can’t learn them except by doing a LOT of listening and reading in your TL. But the good news is that it doesn’t need to be the “Active Learning” kind of reading and listening; it can absolutely be the “Passive Exposure” kind, and you will still pick this stuff up.
The most important thing, above all else, is to figure out a method of passive exposure that works for YOU personally. This means: do NOT force yourself to repeatedly do something that you don’t enjoy, because you won’t benefit from it. To pick the right method, think of your interests and the things you like to do in your free time: watching movies? reading books? listening to music? writing in your journal? surfing the internet? You can do any of this in your TL, too. Yes, you will encounter a lot of stuff you don’t understand at the beginning. But A) that’s good for you, it helps you learn patience, which every language-learner needs, and B) the internet has free translation tools everywhere you look.
COMBINING BOTH
Personally, I like to pick a well-respected textbook with accompanying audio (Assimil is my favorite; Teach Yourself and Colloquial can also be very good, especially the older editions; Linguaphone used to be fantastic but I’m not sure if it’s still around) and work my way through it, doing one lesson per day if possible. That takes only about 10 to 20 minutes, so that leaves a lot of time for passive exposure. My preferred method is listening to music (I learned a good 50% of my German from just obsessively listening to German pop music in high school), but here are some other things I like to do:
find an internet talk radio station in my TL and put it on in the background
same deal with a podcast
translate a few keywords related to my favorite hobbies/interests into the TL and then paste that text into YouTube and watch random videos in my TL
read a news article in English, and then find a news website in my TL and see if I can find an article about the same topic in that language
watch bad reality TV or soaps in my TL with no subtitles, just trying to guess what’s going on from context
etc.
No Duolingo. No Rosetta Stone. (I’ve written a whole post about the latter here.) You don’t need to spend any money at all, though if you e.g. use a pirated resource to learn and find that it really helps you, I strongly suggest buying it from the original producer after the fact, to say thank you.
MEMORIZATION
This is very much a “YMMV” piece of advice, but: if you’re having trouble memorizing stuff, just don’t. Don’t bother trying to remember anything. Remember that “passive exposure” bit? It does a lot of the heavy lifting in terms of memory. If you keep bumping into the same word or phrase over and over again, you will incorporate it into your body of knowledge almost effortlessly. Of course this is easier with more common words that turn up again and again – but you’d be surprised how well you can get by, especially at the lower levels, with only the more common words!
Intentionally memorizing vocabulary can of course be very beneficial, so there’s nothing wrong with it. But I notice that it’s often one of the biggest pain points for language learners, and I believe language learning should be pain-free.
FROM INPUT TO OUTPUT
Once you’ve gotten a good grasp of the basics of the language, a really effective way to consolidate the knowledge you’ve gained is to use it actively and creatively yourself, in speech or writing (or ideally both!). For speaking practice, besides simply making friends who are native speakers of the language, you can search for a physical or virtual tandem. This is when you meet up with someone who’s a native speaker of your TL and is trying to learn your own language. You can meet for, say, an hour, and chat together for half an hour in your native language, and then half an hour in their native language. So both of you benefit!
Don’t underestimate talking to yourself, too. Whether it’s narrating your actions, complaining to your pet (okay, I guess that’s not technically “talking to yourself”), or simply having an imaginary conversation with someone else, it’s actually a good way to practice.
I also really enjoy writing in my journal in my target languages. The act of hand-writing a word does a lot to help me remember it. If you like writing, of course, you could also look up penpals who speak your TL.
And that’s about it. As always, I am more than willing to answer specific questions on language learning, as this is something of a specialty of mine and I absolutely love to help other folks get started on their own language-learning journeys. Please feel free to drop me a line if you need any concrete advice or are struggling with some aspect of your current language-learning efforts!
starting the countdown until gaylors start saying that Adam Sandler officiating Taylor's wedding (sorry if this is how you found out) is actually proof that it's a sham because it's a reference to I Now Pronounce You Chuck and Larry (2007), in which Sandler and Kevin James play heterosexual men who enter a mutually beneficial fake gay marriage, a dynamic that Taylor is inverting as a queer woman pretending to be straight while cleverly flagging the obvious farce to those with the eyes to see
sci fi is all about desperately trying to reclaim your violated bodily autonomy. it’s all about asserting that you are a being with agency, and you can choose what happens to your own person, even if that’s ripping tubes out of yourself. and also sometimes an alien is there
cite the deep magic to me, witch, i have amnesia @thy-valhallen - Tumblr Blog | Tumgag
