@theartofmadeline
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occasionally subtle
i don't do bad sauce passes
祝日 / Permanent Vacation
Mike Driver
One Nice Bug Per Day
tumblr dot com
shark vs the universe
Jules of Nature
Kaledo Art
PR's Tumblrdome
Claire Keane
cherry valley forever
oozey mess
KIROKAZE
ellievsbear
2025 on Tumblr: Trends That Defined the Year
JVL
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@toysoldieralan
Im enjoying the longevity of tumblrs recontextualization style of humor. a seemingly innocuous post followed by like "posts that a gnome would make" or like "are you a phone"
More from the notes:
I love this post
The horse thinks as it scratches an itch
these are getting weird
My parents each have a Tesla and each have an anti-Elon bumper sticker.
The logic both have used is they don't want their cars to be vandalized.
They both don't like Elon and wouldn't buy a Tesla if they needed to buy a new car now.
"Try our new AI tool", "Use ChatGPT", "Our AI assistant can help"
It will come when you call
Originally posted at: https://blog.chrislegge.com/it-will-come-when-you-call/
I'm a deeply angry person. Not that I have a temper or anything like that, quite the opposite actually.[^1] No, it's more of a deeply ingrained anger at the world. I've come to find out it's described as an "autistic sense of justice". It's deep anger at my core about the way the world works and the injustices around us.
I was also extremely emotionally repressed for a large part of my life. No negative emotions were allowed in my mind. I was "above that". Eventually the negative emotions would build up, as they always do, and find new ways to come out. New health complications. Sure. Get into a fight on the phone with my brother and hurt my hand slamming my fist into the ground or punching a wall I knew I couldn't damage? All the time. Bite my nails and pick my cuticles until they bleed? Absolutely.
I hated that I couldn't control it. I would think “I should be better than that” and repressed harder. I followed this cycle of internal abuse until a few things happened. First I started seeing my now spouse who accepted me for who I was, not who I "should" be. Second, I first read what is now my favorite book, Night Watch by Terry Pratchett.
You do the job that's in front of you.
How did a fantasy book help me? Well, first you need to understand something about the book and the author.
Night Watch is the 29th book in the Discworld series, but it's also part of a sub series about the City Watch of the Disc's largest city. It was instantly my favorite sub-series. The arc of its main character, Sam Vimes, is one of the best I've ever read. He goes from being an alcoholic police sergeant to a man who reforms the profession for his city and, eventually, much of the wider world as well. Vimes would be the first person to say ACAB and that there’s a better way to do good than just "being a copper". He spends the length of the series moving the world to be better around him out of sheer force of will. One step at a time.
Then there's Terry Pratchett, who himself had a very righteous indignation and anger at the injustices of the world. I can't speak to whether he was neurodivergent or not, but I felt a real connection with this restrained, directed anger. I wanted that level of control that he seemed to have and that he wrote into his character.
It’s a real soldiers’ song: sentimental, with dirty bits.
The Glorious 25th of May is an extremely important day in the book. It's the date of a failed revolution that Vimes and several characters were a part of and they all hold a day of remembrance for it every year, wearing lilacs as symbol of their shared experience.
The story follows Vimes getting sent back in time and taking on the role of the sergeant who taught his younger self how to be a better person and not give in to what he called "The Beast" (the unrestrained anger that he knew would destroy everything if he let it). This builds up to the Glorious 25th and the formation of the People's Republic of Treacle Mine Road.
There’s a lot of humor and absurdity in the course of the story, but there’s so much heart and sentimentality as well. There are parts I still cry over even though I’ve read it dozens of times. There are passages I think about when things are dark and seem like they will never get better. When I feel like I'm going to lose myself in the anger, I think of two parts in particular.
"When we break down, it all breaks down. That’s just how it works. You can bend it, and if you make it hot enough you can bend it in a circle, but you can’t break it. When you break it, it all breaks down until there’s nothing unbroken."
That stays with me, but it didn't rewire part of my brain the way another did.
Hold it back! Tame it! Don't waste it!
There is a scene that resonates with me in a way that it has basically become a core belief of mine. Vimes is stopping his younger self from giving into the anger he feels at a jailer who committed unspeakable acts. Before The Beast wins, he steps in at the last minute and says, in my opinion, one the best lines of all time:
“No! That’s not the way! This is not the time! Hold it back! Tame it! Don’t waste it! Send it back! It’ll come when you call!”
I read that when I was discovering more about my anger and it all clicked. The anger I felt could be put to better use than just being locked away and forgotten about until it came out in uncontrollable ways. I could use it, direct it, not be a slave to it like I had seen in others so many times before.
This sentiment is continued in the next book in the series, Thud. In it there is a mental representation of this idea, called The Guarding Dark. It's how Vimes keeps himself in check when it would be easier to just let everything go and let The Beast take control. It results in a scar on his arm after he resisted being overtaken by the Summoning Dark (a spirit of vengeance).
All of this felt like a way forward when I read it. I found myself trying to overcome the anger not by repressing it and pretending it wasn’t there, but instead acknowledging it and trying to find a use for it. Let it fuel my art. Turn it into kindness for others. Give it a purpose. Drive me to be better than I was before.
They were remembering who they were not singing it with.
Terry Pratchett fans have been using the 25th of May as a kind of day of memorial since his passing in 2015. People wear lilacs and talk about how much both the book and Pratchett's other work means to them. I was already in the habit of rereading Night Watch in May, but I make sure I do it every year since then. It's cathartic and feels important that I do it.
Now, every year on the 25th of May, my partner and I wear lilacs. What's more, for the last couple of years I've been wearing the lilac everyday. You see, when I got my first tattoo I wanted to be something important, something that keeps me, me. So, there was only really one choice: I have a lilac sprig and a representation of the Guarding Dark on my arm. It's there to make sure I never forget who I am and why I'm here.
With everything going on in the world, this country, and my life in general, I'll admit my tolerance window has been very small. The emotions are always close to bubbling over lately. So, when I'm close to letting them take control, I have taken to tapping my arm where the tattoo is. It reminds me who is in control and the overwhelming feeling recedes.
Tame it. Don't waste it. It will come when you call.
¹ It's actually very difficult for my anger to rise to the surface. So much so that a friend I used to work with made it his mission to make me mad so he could see it. At one point he walked into my office, saw papers on my desk, and slid them off with the back of his hand like a cat knocking something off a counter. He stood there in defiance for a second and I went back to work. Exasperated, he picked up and organized the paper (it was just a random jumble when I had them on my desk before). He said a few swears and left the room. Poor guy still hasn't seen me get mad to this day.
Not a fan of the collective delusion tumblr has going on thinking Luigi didn’t kill that guy and is being framed
Look, there are two distinct things going on here, and I really fucking hate that they happen to overlap and look like the same thing:
Thing #1 is that a bunch of Tumblr users have decided that they support the murder and want the murderer to get off, so they’re basically just repeating crap like “Luigi is innocent, he was at my place the whole time *wink*” and it’s kind of weird and gross
Thing #2 is, the case has been actually quite horrifically botched by the cops pretty blatantly planting evidence, some of which has actually been thrown out at pretrial. Relevantly, the cops didn’t obtain a warrant to search the backpack until after they had done so, and they all turned off their body cameras for 11 minutes between finding the backpack and opening it “for the first time,” for some unexplained reason. To be clear, this doesn’t mean that Luigi Mangione didn’t do it in an “eyes of heaven” sense; this means that there is less untampered evidence than there should be in a “presumption of innocence” sense. He might very well have actually killed that guy, but him being framed is nonetheless very real.
"Framing a guilty man" is exactly what went down in the OJ Simpson murder trial.
OJ did it. He killed those people. There was ample evidence. But the LAPD was so corrupt, so routinely racist, so accustomed to simply dictating the terms of a case, that instead of simply collecting the evidence that proved his guilt and letting the prosecution take it to court, they framed him. They fabricated evidence, broke chains of custody, tampered with witnesses, lied under oath, to make sure the guilty man looked guilty. This was how they typically treated Black men they wanted to pin a crime on, guilty or not. But OJ was rich and famous and could afford a legal team that fought back and exposed the corruption to the jury —a jury of Angelinos who had witnessed the LAPD's lawlessness during the Rodney King beating.
So the jury, correctly, found him not guilt. Not because he didn't do it, but because corrupt officers of the state made it impossible to prove his guilt.
I don't know if Luigi Mangione did it or not. But if the cops set out to frame someone for murder, I think their behavior would be indistinguishable from how they've behaved towards Luigi Mangione.
The scent rolled over him. He looked up. Overhead, a lilac tree was in bloom. He stared. Damn! Damn! Damn! Every year he forgot. Well, no. He never forgot. He just put the memories away, like old silverware that you didn’t want to tarnish. And every year they came back, sharp and sparkling, and stabbed him in the heart. And today, of all days… He reached up, and his hand trembled as he grasped a bloom and gently broke the stem. He sniffed at it. He stood for a moment, staring at nothing. And then he carried the sprig of lilac carefully back up to his dressing room.
Night Watch - Terry Pratchett
once again unequivocally lost in the sauce at the implication that younger vimes suspects that john keel!vimes is his dad who left when he was young. my favorite subtext of night watch i love the way it just sits there just out of focus
when sam says here's your hard boiled egg i bet you like your toast cut into soldiers and the yolk still runny. because i do. thats the culmination of 'this strange man looks like me and looks at me like he seems almost afraid of me, took me under his wing over every other person in the watch house and acts protective of me even when he doesn't need to. he just came in from pseudopolis but knows this city too well to be anything but a local. and not from the nice part of town, the roughest of the rough part, where i came from, too. he asked after my mum but blew me off when i told him she wanted to meet him. he asked after my dad and looked distinctly unsurprised to hear he wasn't in the picture. he seems to know what i'll do before i do it. sometimes looking at him is like looking in the mirror. there's a tightly coiled anger in him, i can see it, and it looks like something in me i've felt before. on our first patrol he taught me how to walk. i know him i know him i know him'
"bottom" please consider 🫵 whether the word you are looking for is in fact "submissive" ! because if we decide that taking dick means your personality & character r inherently subservient 😃 we might as well just throw in the towel on the most basic premise of feminism & 🔫 kill ourselves 🎉
Im enjoying the longevity of tumblrs recontextualization style of humor. a seemingly innocuous post followed by like "posts that a gnome would make" or like "are you a phone"
“this makes me personally uncomfortable”, “this seems in poor taste”, “this is somehow harmful but presumably because you’re misinformed” and “this is actively malicious” are all different things. remember that
"you can't pick and choose what you like from canon" common misconception! yes you can
but please do not get this very true concept confused with “you cannot pick and choose what is canon”
they are two very different things.
thank you for this addition seriously
If you have ever known anyone with a kink for being hit, or beat up, or raped and you're okay with them, you also gotta be okay with the people who's kink it is to do the hitting, the beating, or the raping. At the end of the day, we're adults playing pretend, and that's it.
With every single sub i have the first thing we ever do is establish the safe word (stoplight system), and the non-verbal safe word in case they can't talk for any reason. If I can't tell where the sub is at, I will ask them point blank what is their color, and if they can't give a response, we stop. The goal is to make the other person feel good, including pain, and the most important part us knowing your subs limits and LISTENING to them. I will *never* hurt a sub in a way that they have not explicitly expresssed interest in.
Makes sense to me. The “getting hit” kink requires a “hitting” kink. It’s like Transformers. Megatron can’t exist without Optimus Prime.
yes Steve, its exactly like Megatron and Optimus Prime from Transformers
the thing about media literacy is that understanding why the author chose to specify that the curtains are blue is the same skill set as understanding that the way the author characterizes all black characters as angry or all chinese characters as meek and silent is racist. it is the same skill set as being able to identify when a news source is biased or when someone is feeding you propaganda. the ability to ask "why did this person choose to present this premise in this specific way?" is a critical skill in a world full of misinformation. why are the curtains blue? maybe it's a characterization detail. maybe it's extraneous worldbuilding. why is this character written as being right all the time? maybe you're intended to disagree with them. maybe it doesn't matter. maybe you should still ask why.
Incredibly violent take of mine but I actually don’t think you need to relate to a story in any way to enjoy it. You can enjoy a story even if you can’t point at a character and insert some aspect of your personality or identity into them. In fact I would argue the need for a character like that to be present in every single story you experience is a sign of stunted growth.
I think a lot of people would benefit from unlearning the idea that casual sex is inherently disgusting, harmful, or immoral just because they personally don’t want to partake in it. You can stand up for sexual safety and consent without acting like people who enjoy fucking strangers are degenerates. I take no issue with anyone asserting boundaries or stating that they’re not interested in certain kinds of sex or even sex as a whole. But when you condemn or express disgust at others for engaging in consensual sex, that’s when you start to sound like a puritan.
Btw, this includes self-proclaimed “feminists” who shame and lecture women for giving men “access” to their bodies. Bodies are not commodities and sex is not inherently transactional. You don’t lose anything by having sex on purpose with a person you find attractive. Sex is not some metaphysically transformative thing that bonds you to the other person forever. It is literally not that deep.
Everyone is so weird about people who cry easily. Fellas, is it evil and manipulative to *checks notes* have an involuntary stress response?
actually a coworker of mine said something interesting about this. I was saying that I truly can’t help how easily I cry, and I hate when people assume I do it on purpose.
and he paused for a second and then said, “when you’ve been taught from a young age that crying is weak and you should train yourself never to cry for any reason, you assume that everyone else has trained themselves too, so anyone who cries has to be doing it on purpose. it took me a long time to realize that wasn’t true.”
listen we’re never gonna run out of ways the patriarchy hurts all of us.
