Cosmic Funnies
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ojovivo
Product Placement
2025 on Tumblr: Trends That Defined the Year
ellievsbear
❣ Chile in a Photography ❣
if i look back, i am lost
I'd rather be in outer space 🛸
🩵 avery cochrane 🩵
let's talk about Bridgerton tea, my ask is open
macklin celebrini has autism
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The Stonewall Inn
Lint Roller? I Barely Know Her
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RMH
Kiana Khansmith
almost home
blake kathryn
seen from Saudi Arabia
seen from Argentina
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seen from Türkiye
seen from United States
seen from Malaysia
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@tortilla-goblin
Complete list of all my sideblogs:
Hannibal @macabrehusbands
Supernatural @supernatural-mega-hell
Merlin @myrrdin-pendragon
Teen Wolf @nogitsune-stiles
Interview with the Vampire @throwsofwonder
Heated Rivalry @icouldmarrysvetlana
Let the historical record show that Mr. Beast was entirely ignorable if you were just like doing literally anything else. I've been on youtube as long as it's been around and I've never been recommended a video by him. I see him in passing as a meme. I thought he was a made up joke, a caricature of bad youtuber content miners until someone I trust confirmed his existence to me in late 2025.
I was in Mormon brain jail concurrently to when Elizabeth Smart was kidnapped and held, as it turned out, like 20 miles away from us. We would see billboards when we were driving past in our big white institution van, and we would see magazines in the checkout aisle, on the rare occasions we were allowed to enter shops accompanied, about Elizabeth Smart being held somewhere by some guy. This teenage girl who had been kidnapped and brainwashed and held basically in the next valley over. I don't remember how long she was with him, but this was when everyone was freshly looking for her and panicking about how she had been abducted and was being held against her will and brainwashed. Her picture was EVERYWHERE.
So. Imagine dozens of other teenage girls, being held against their will and brainwashed in Utah, seeing these billboards and going, "huh. I'm having a complicated emotional reaction to all of this. It's possible that I might unpack that in two to three decades."
Both of these situations arise from the same societal attitudes. This guy wanted a teenage girl to be trapped with him and unable to leave, regardless of her feelings on the matter, and for her to act a certain way and comply with his desires. He took her from her home and forced her to be somewhere she did not want to be and would not let her go, and he tried to turn her into a different thing. The difference in societal reactions to when one specific, unauthorized guy does this, compared to when someone's parents pay a fancy sounding institution to do it for them, tells you a lot about how we think about the autonomy of teenage girls.
In Utah, the reason these types of institutions are allowed is because their youth rights laws are abysmal even compared to the rest of the US. Children aren't people, they're the property of their parents. Elizabeth Smart's parents didn't want her to be kidnapped, so it was bad. Our parents did want us to be kidnapped, so it was fine.
Elizabeth Smart’s kidnapper’s crime was that he didn’t go through the established system for kidnapping and brainwashing teenage girls. This is not even a little bit hyperbolic.
Some ppl are confused about this, I recommend at the very least reading the Wikipedia article on the troubled teen industry. For more info, you can listen to Paris Hilton's podcast Trapped in Treatment or the Salt Lake Tribune's podcast Sent Away (or both). This is something you probably should know about if you have any interest in mental health treatment or youth rights in the USA. (Thanks Kuzu for the latter two recs!)
The types of institutions I'm referring to, which operate primarily in Utah, accept kids who have no criminal history or history of drug use, which is usually a requirement in other states, or that is my understanding of how it worked at the time I was imprisoned. And I am equally against them in both cases, to be clear. 👍
I know we talk a lot about the literacy crisis and the horrible anti-intellectualism happening rn but I think we need to talk more about how much of an entitlement complex the stupidest among us have developed
Human to human, this is such a strange perspective to have. You're literally 5 seconds away from googling anything you want. And you will only get better for it.
I remember when I was around 13 and read the physical copy of LoTR in English (not my first language), and I had to have a dictionary on me at all times. Yes, constant breaks to find the word meaning were tedious. Yet still, I got through it, because I wanted to read it. And I learned so many new words in the process.
You, a fic reader on AO3, have it so easy: highlight the word -> right-click -> choose the find word in Google option. AND THIS IS LITERALLY IT.
UGhhh. Another confirmation that, once again, people who don't write and only read, TRULY DON'T GET WRITERS' PERSPECTIVE and don’t even try to. And that's sad tbh…
We discussed this post—and the storm it caused—in my poetry seminar, and I have been thinking about it ever since.
Language is not decoration laid over thought. It is the matter from which thoughts are made. It gives thought shape, precision, and a life beyond the person thinking it.
When I choose to say that a candle guttered rather than flickered, I am not replacing an easy word with a difficult one for the pleasure of making someone open a dictionary. A flickering flame wavers. A guttering flame struggles, threatening to go out. Change the word and you change what is happening in the room.
That does not mean difficulty is automatically a virtue. A writer can be imprecise in six syllables as easily as in one. Obscurity is not profundity. The question should not be, “Will every reader already know this word?” It should be, “Is this the right word?”
Readers are free not to enjoy difficult prose, just as writers are free to choose the register in which they write. But asking every text to be frictionless is not the same thing as asking it to be accessible. It is asking language never to demand anything of us, and in turn never teach us or reveal anything to us.
If books may contain only words we already know, reading cannot enlarge our vocabulary. If our vocabulary never enlarges, neither does our ability to understand and communicate ideas. Looking up an unfamiliar word is not evidence that the writer has failed. Sometimes it is evidence that reading is doing part of its work.
This matters because language is how private thought becomes public argument. An idea cannot become law, doctrine, discovery, or common cause until it has been given a form that other minds can receive.
“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal…”
That was not a description of the world in 1776. It was, in point of fact … a fiction. It was not a principle its author lived by. Yet the sentence made a claim large enough for later generations to seize and turn against the exclusions of the men who wrote it.
Alexis De Toqueville noted in Democracy in America that nearly everyone could read, that reading materials were almost universally available, and even farmers and tradesman spoke with an intellectual clarity common only among the most educated classes in Europe.
No, encountering scrying in a fanfiction is not the Declaration of Independence. But deep literacy does not descend from the heavens. We cultivate it in smaller encounters: reading a poem twice, following an unfamiliar allusion, looking up a word because the world on the page matters enough to us.
A functioning society depends upon people who can understand difficult language, distinguish one meaning from another, and recognize when words are being used to enlighten, persuade, conceal, or deceive. That capacity is not innate. We acquire it by reading beyond the boundaries of what we already know.
Use the easy word when it is the exact word. Use the difficult word when it is the exact word. But do not ask writers to make the world smaller simply because learning its name takes five seconds.
Words matter. Also, there is no word that means scrying that is not “scrying”. Le sigh…
There's a fascinating phenomenon that isn't unique to tumblr, but which I have certainly seen here a lot, which I'm going to call the Default Assumption of Incompetence. It's when somebody has the baffling habit of always starting from the assumption that other people do not know anything about anything, or at least that having more knowledge than the assumer is extremely rare and statistically unlikely. To do this, they will frequently go out of their way to ignore context clues that indicate otherwise, or in some cases the assumer simply doesn't know enough about the subject at hand to be able to estimate whether or not this person knows what they are doing.
The assumer will see a social media post about someone's mushroom harvest, which clearly only contains exactly two distinct kinds of mushrooms, which the poster has identified and correctly named in the post itself, and the assumer will feel compelled to warn the forager to be careful out there! Some mushrooms are poisonous and they should be very careful to only pick ones they can identify! The assumer, who has ignored the fact that the poster did identify both of the mushroom species they had picked, and can most likely be trusted to do so in the future as well, has naturally assumed that the person showing off the results of their latest mushroom haul must have been obliviously picking them at random like an unsupervised toddler who is lucky to be alive.
If someone makes a post talking about how they just got a new job as a bus driver, the assumer might swoop in to warn them that driving a bus is extremely dangerous! It's so dangerous that it's literally illegal to do that unless you have a specific special training for doing that! Even a normal driver's license isn't good enough, you need a special license for it! And when the person who just got hired as a bus driver verifies that yes, they know that, they do have the license to drive a bus, and that they wouldn't have even hired someone who doesn't. The first question of the job interview was about making sure that they have a valid license for driving this type of vehicle.
"Well how was I supposed to know that?" is the assumer's standard answer to being corrected. Not embarrassed or apologetic, only defensive and insulted, as if the other person here is the one being unreasonably rude for implying that it was stupid of the assumer to assume that someone who just got a job driving a bus might not know how to drive a bus.
This kind of thing isn't necessarily about being arrogant and assuming that everyone else is stupid. It's about not assuming that everyone is smart and knowledgeable.
You see this a lot in tech support. Everybody hates those basic questions like "Have you tried turning it off and on again?" It feels ridiculous and condescending both to the person being asked and the person asking, and you honestly just want to skip it because surely nobody would bother calling tech support waiting without checking something so basic?
...and then you get that call. The one where you spend twenty minutes troubleshooting only to figure out that not only haven't they tried turning it on and off again, the device isn't even plugged in. After that, you always ask.
Somebody posts about picking mushrooms. Did they correctly identify the species? Or did they just get very, very lucky? Emergency rooms (and funeral homes) have seen a lot of people come through who were very confident in their mushroom identification skills.
I'm sure your bus driver example was intended to be an exaggerated strawman, because obviously nobody would hire someone to drive a bus without making sure they're qualified, right? You can totally just assume that from context clues.
Encounter this kind of thing enough times, and you stop assuming that people know what they're doing. Instead of getting offended that some stranger didn't automatically know how skilled you are, maybe take a moment to appreciate that they were looking out for you -- even if it wasn't necessary.
That's a valid point, but even coming from that perspective, I think it's still not a reasonable response. Someone stupid enough to go randomly picking mushrooms they don't know, has no idea that driving a bus requires a special training you can't just intuitively guess, or thinks they can just DIY electric installment stuff without at least checking beforehand whether they can do that, should simply die as the consequence of their actions.
So, tech support is very explicitly different in a very key way: they have asked for help.
The fact that someone, somewhere, has found a way to do things that make literally no sense, is not an argument for treating everybody like they're about to make the stupidest possible decision at all times.
The examples given were also very specifically about the explainers very clearly knowing less than the person they're talking to/at.
Not being able to discuss literally anything without being talked down to, leading to feeling the need to include giant paragraphs of asides that will get get ignored and/or picked apart, is *not fun*.
Sharing an experience in a social space is not a request for basic guidance on a topic you have in no way demonstrated any need for.
I think most people understand that if they responded that way irl chatting with someone they are vaguely friendly with, it would not go down well.
Context matters online as well.
the fun thing about having a mental health crashout in your thirties is that sure yeah you're crashing out, but at the same time there's a part of you standing across the room smoking ben affleck style, going yeah yeah you're crashing out. you crashed out before you will crash out again can we wrap this up yet. and the most annoying part about it is that they're right, and that that does Not stop you from crashing out even a little. love and light on planet earth.
People legitimately think there was no criticism of the Harry Potter series before her TERF/soft holocaust denier era and I'm sorry to tell you but people were criticizing the Cho Chang banking goblins werewolf-AIDS metaphor elf emancipation is silly series years before Joanne's public turn to transmisogynistic chauvinism.
There were things to criticize of the series.
top 10 jobs for serial killers:
cop
member of any branch of the military (often combined with some of these other jobs)
‘polite family man’
truck driver
nurse (gerontology and neonatal specialties especially)
construction/contracting
doctor (gerontology and surgical specialties especially)
anything in the animal agriculture field (particularly pig farming)
preacher (Protestant evangelical especially)
account
i have a secret third opinion about self dx discourse which is “why are you guys treating the DSM like it’s the fucking bible”
the amount of leftists who uncritically support the DSM-5—wielding it online in battles against random individuals who might be “faking” a disorder—boggles my fucking mind. you guys realize that the DSM-5 isn’t the only diagnostic manual on the planet, right? you realize that we place it at the top of the global hierarchy because it’s american, right? has it occurred to you that the APA shouldn’t have so much authority over what counts as a “real” mental illness? has it occurred to you that perhaps there are other diagnostic manuals? in fact, there are dimensional models that don’t rely on sorting individuals into “disorder/no disorder” boxes in the first place. food for thought, lmao
They keep refusing to add CPTSD to the DSM. Even though the research consistently supports that it is a real, distinct disorder, requiring a different treatment approach from other, superficially similar diagnoses.
Judith Herman first proposed CPTSD in fucking 1988.
The ICD recognizes it, by the way. But the APA clowns in charge of the DSM continue to stick their fingers in their ears and go la la la about it.
See, the DSM is fundamentally part of the American healthcare system. It's been shaped by the demands of a for-profit industry and the necessity of dealing with insurance companies to get anybody treated. It's not like there's NO real science in there, but there's also a whole lotta bullshit, and a whole lotta reality just... left out.
(Getting swindled by a genie) it’s like talking to a fucking tumblr user with you
the genie: how dare you say I'm fucking a tumblr user
kicks rock where's MY socialist muslim elected offical
love the global audience chiming in we're in this together
oh no they’re going to start calling democrats the same thing they’ve been calling democrats for 20 years now
"Here’s a trick I learned during the Obama presidency for handling certain types of political labels. Take, as an example, the Tea Party claim that Obama is a Communist. Don’t take the word of the person making the claim (Tea Partiers). Don’t rely on the rebuttal of the target (Obama), because that will just be dismissed. Go to the group itself (Communists) and ask them. Ask an actual Communist if Obama is a comrade and see how they answer. Watch as they laugh at you, then explain in great detail how they wish there was a Communist in the White House, but here’s a long and exhaustive list of why that just isn’t so. Now apply this logic to the claim that Hillary is pretty much the same as a Republican. Ask an actual Republican if they think Hillary Clinton is one of them. Watch them laugh, and then explain in the same exhausting detail why that just isn’t so. Some of them might concede that she’s better than Trump, but that’s not the same thing. Finally, go ask a White Supremacist if Trump is one of them. As they excitedly explain how Trump is the guy they’ve been waiting for all these years, and how he’s really empowered their movement, use this to guide how you will be voting in November."
Source: a 2016 facebook posts by Craig Enan, since then deleted (OG link here)
People are unfazed if you hate women but if you dislike dogs they assume you're a bad person
Tumblr users will read a post complaining about normalized misogyny and hyperfocus on your claim that it's ok to dislike dogs
Being a cyborg is cool right now, thanks in large part to gee-whiz media coverage. But actually using a bionic arm can really suck.
...the media’s coverage of these new kinds of prosthetics is so focused on the initial joy or incredulity — on the idea that “lives are changed” — that they forget to ask if these hands are actually useful and what happens in the weeks and months after the unboxing.
The media narrative, says James Young — husband of Ashley and a cyborg himself — is designed to be reassuring to people: If you happen to, God forbid, lose your arm, “they” can replace it. “People want to make sure that the technology is out there that can remake you as you are right now,” he says.
For Alexis Hillard, the creator of the YouTube channel “Stump Kitchen,” the obsession with cyborgs is “continuing to drive that wedge between disenfranchised disabled people and those with money and power, creating a new ‘desirable disabled person.’”
A good read for our followers writing amputee characters in contemporary or speculative fiction settings.
As always, take this not as a message to "stop writing cyborgs/advanced prosthetics ever," but rather to read and center disabled perspectives, understand your motivations, and trace your logic.
- Writing With Color
