Travelling Fae @travellingfae - Tumblr Blog

"There's no hope for the future." And that's how they felt during the Atomic Age, during the World Wars, during the Enlightenment Revolutions, during thr plagues, during the Viking raids, during the fall of Rome.

Yet, we persisted.

ave-immaculata

letmetakeastabatit

CS Lewis had something to say about this

angie-words

Been feeling a bit hopeless of late. Wasn't expecting to stumble across a quote that would fundamentally alter my perspective and make me cry during my lunch break but here we are

outrageousring5655

This is an excellent sentiment.

catastrophic-writer-deactivated

Story Time:

Working in retail is really fun, and the times when major fuck-ups happen, they can be either anxiety-attack inducing, or make it possible to get through the rest of your god-awful shift with a smile depending on the customer. My all-time favorite absolute fuck-up is as follows:

This kind woman is just doing her thing. She scans her membership card from her keychain. The register beeps to acknowledge the scan. We continue as usual. Neither of us notice right away, but after I’ve scanned a few more items, I hear a very quiet, “Um,” from the lady, very polite. I look at her. She is looking at the screen of my register, blinking. I, too, look.

And lo and behold. There is a charge of over four-thousand dollars ($4,000) worth of garlic bread staring us in the face. There are no words for a minute. We’re just… in awe. How did this happen? How the hell did this happen?

She didn’t even have garlic bread in her cart.

I sputter a partial apology - I was incapable of forming actual sentences in the moment - and try to void the garlic bread. Since there was no garlic bread to scan, I try to manually remove $4,000-some from this transaction.

Well, the registers don’t like it when you try to void off more than five dollars ($5) from a transaction, so naturally it pings my manager for confirmation, but she’s not by her pager.

At this point, both myself and the lady are just… dumbfounded. She’s not even mad. I’m not even all that embarrassed. Both of us are just looking at the screen. There’s a bit of laughter, but it’s mostly just… confusion.

I have to call through the whole store for my manager on the intercom because she’s not answering. She shows up, ready to override and void it, when she too, sees what exactly is being voided.

“What… did you do?”

“I genuinely. Have literally. No. Idea.”

She voids it, and I go to finish the transaction and tell the woman her total (minus the garlic bread). My register pings. It tells me that she hasn’t scanned her membership card. Odd. I distinctly remember her doing that. The woman goes to scan her card again, and I notice that her library card is stuck to her membership card. I tell her gently, and she separates the two and scans her card.

My manager, hovering nearby still, sees this and says, “I think it mistook the barcode of her other card for garlic bread, and the remaining digits were read as the price.”

And that’s when the laughter really came over us. There were no hard feelings at all. In fact, the woman was incredibly glad that the receipt still showed the garlic bread and the voiding of. I will remember it until the end of time, my only regret in the entire situation being that I didn’t take a damn picture, because she has proof and I don’t. But I swear to God it happened.

TDLR; Library Card Charged $4,000 of Garlic Bread.

anais-ninja-bitch

that’s just how valuable library cards are. each one is worth at least $4000 of garlic bread

nudityandnerdery

A picture is worth a thousand words, a library card is worth $4000 worth of garlic bread, if we can figure out how many words the average library card can check out at once, we can probably work out a picture-to-garlic bread conversion here, too.

pseudomantis

is-the-owl-video-cute-deactivat

a squirrel or perhaps a cardinal posted this

phaeton-flier

How about you mind your own damn business

ilexvici

Tribbles have picked the wrong man to mess with

startrekrenegades

[[*TNG theme song plays* *Patrick Stewart runs outside and shouts* YOU MOTHERFCKERS ARE GONNA KILL ALL MY LILIES *shoots guns twice* PEST CONTROL! *TNG theme song*]]

rita-lashette

Best. Thing. Ever.

takemetotheenterprise

I can’t express how to ecstatic I am to find this video again in the depths of tumblr. It might be one of my favourite posts

dontlookatmeijustknowstuff

@dovemortician required viewing

azspot

“Because the truth is, tech doesn’t have an image problem. It doesn’t have a message problem. It has an intention problem. What’s wrong with the axe murderer who broke into my house is not that he hasn’t successfully persuaded me to buy into his narrative. What’s wrong is that he’s trying to kill me with an axe. Similarly, when you launch a product that’s designed to put millions of people out of work, block access to sources of verifiable truth, replace human creativity with slop, and lower the barriers to every sort of atrocity, the problem isn’t that you haven’t told the public a good story about those things. The problem is that you are trying to do them.”

— The 40 Most Rage-Inducing Problems in Tech

santhipoma

glasshomewrecker

Everyone should be aware of nitter.net

for any address to twitter you can replace the “x.com” with “nitter.net” and you will be able to browse as if you have an account. Lifesaver.

Similarly, imginn.com works for most Instagram addresses. I still haven’t found one for Facebook.

kira-7

This is a spot from an italian estate agency (we are governed by the right-wing party)

The woman says "Ridiculous..."

If you want to spread it elsewhere, here's the official link

arctic-hands

[Video Description: An ad with piano music over it all, showing an elderly woman in her home, knitting, when two younger men walk by her window, which catches her attention. She stares out her window at them as they kiss each other while walking, the old lady staring in disbelief. Cut to the old woman approaching a residence with a broom in hand, staring up at the second floor window where a small rainbow Pride flag is hanging. The old woman stares up at it and mutters "Ridiculo", before getting up on a ladder with her broom to remove the flag. Focus on the flag fluttering to the ground as church bells chime. The scene then cuts to the couple from before, approaching their home with grocery bags in hand before one stops and stares at the second floor, stopping his partner who then drops the groceries as he too stares up. It's then revealed that the small pride flag had been replaced with a gigantic, hand-knit pride flag. It then cuts back to the old woman's home, where a tin of rainbow-colored yarn sits on her table. The hands of the old woman are holding and fondly touching an old black and white photo of two young smiling women, leaning against each other. Cut to the old woman's face as she stares out with a look of happy pride on her face. At the end of the video, the name "Idealista" appears on screen, followed by "buon pride" along with a rainbow. End VD.]

spaceofentropy

One correction:

The old lady is not in her home. She is at work. She's meant to be what in Italian is called "la portinaia", aka a cross between a doorwoman and cleaner of a residential building. She's in her small "office" space, at the entrance of the building, from where she can survey the coming and goings of the inhabitants. It's a job that has mostly disappeared, but is culturally very clear to us as having the connotation of "potentially gossipy, one-million-percent judgmental woman who sees everything that goes on in the apartment complex, knows everyone and their secrets, and has Strong Opinions™️".

In this case, thankfully, the Strong Opinion™️ is that those two men are ridiculous with their teeny tiny flag for ants.

devincastro

tguzz

I will always reblog this

bradspace3000

still remember how revolutionary this ad felt 10 years ago

annesophiewashere

excuse me but it still feels revolutionary

stevviefox

Keep reblogging until it feels normal everywhere.

ruffboi-mags

For context: this came out in 2011 in Australia. Same-sex marriage would not be legalized until December 2017.

It was only legalized in 8 US states (the 8th only a few months before), and wouldn’t be legalized nation-wide until 2015.

It was only legal in TEN COUNTRIES in 2011. We wouldn’t hit 20 countries until 2017. (Australia was 23rd)

As of today (April 14, 2026), I believe only 38 countries have fully legalized same-sex marriage. Out of somewhere around 200 countries in the world. That’s only ~19% of countries.

This is still revolutionary.

takeitwithagrainofsugar

Until May 17, 1990 (!), homosexuality was registered as a mental illness by the WHO.

alchemistdoctor

I am begging you. Please learn about stress/discomfort tolerance. Practice raising it. You need this to survive. If someone online can ruin your day with a throwaway comment, you desperately need to understand discomfort tolerance and consciously, systematically build that shit.

Also! Stress tolerance is such an important skill that having a learning disability in that area is a major symptom of a whole lot of other disabilities/mental illnesses! Struggling with it is a huge part of life! It sucks!

Am I saying everyone with misophonia needs to listen to chewing noises all day? No. But you need to find ways to tolerate it enough that you don't treat others like shit if they make a mouth noise near you.

No, you don't have to read the fic with your trigger tags. But you do need to be able to handle scrolling past the tags without being upset.

It is hard! But not having it also makes you so so so easy to manipulate. That grandma is racist AF because her mom raised her to be uncomfortable around black people and she never fought that discomfort. Trans people make so many cis people uncomfortable and that discomfort turns into bigotry real fast.

Letting your discomfort dictate your actions and beliefs about things is a great way to become a terrible person. Learn. Discomfort. Tolerance.

sometiktoksarevalid

lelif

on survival

-// @aridante // @orivu // @buzzkillgirls // ? // ? // richard siken// @cemeterything // moomin, tove jansson// @disenchanted-killjoy // isn't that enough, shawn mendes// @ prettytheyswag on twitter// @ coletyumuch on twitter// ? // ? // bird by bird, anne lamott// undertale// @strawberrycircuits

fandom-trash-goblin

we've got a life to love living.

teaboot

advice that has literally saved and improved my life

yarrow-heather-and-hollyhock

I wanted to post about this because I know many of my mutuals are avid crafters and I don't know how much attention this endeavour is getting outside of end-of-life spaces-

The Loose Ends Project matches crafters with a project that is unfinished because of death or disability. They offer help with a spectrum of textile mediums in over 80 countries. One project I find particularly lovely: “My mom was making this octopus for me. She was 67 years old when she passed away from COPD. She was hospitalized for pulmonary rehab several times and would always take it to work on while she was there and loved to talk about it with people."

(the red heart marks the last stitch made by this person's mom) Anyway, if something like this is something you'd like to be involved in, they are always looking for more crafters <3

the-fibre-stuff

My favourite recent finishing project that they posted about wasn't precisely something that the crafter left unfinished. The knitter in question had had dementia, and thought she was knitting scarves. So a finisher was found to piece all the little bits of knitting together into a blanket.

pinehutch

lyraeon

A while back I learned something important from my therapist, and since I was trying to recount it anyway to share with a friend, I thought I would bring it to y'all as well.

We have all had at least one of those days where we've stayed up way too late doing something fun but we just don't want to stop doing it. Logically I figured that's just because "well yeah I don't want to stop, I have to go to sleep then to work and those suck compared to it."

Except then that starts happening often and you feel bad about always staying up every night, but then you feel worse and get more stressed because you know you're doing something you're "not supposed to", but because you're more stressed you want more fun time... endless cycle.

But as I was talking about it all and told her I thought I was self-sacrificing, the therapist had a very useful question for me:

"How do you normally know it's time to stop having fun? Like you know it's time to finish work because your shift's over, you know it's time to stop doing the dishes when they're all done or the washer's full, what is your signal to stop having fun?"

And I had to search for a while to answer.

"When the activity is done" - okay sure, but many games and books and series, or doing your own creative thing, "done" may take days upon days or even be non-existent.

"When I had to pass the controller" - obvious and easy one! If you knew you had a finite turn then the defined end is readily there, and you're also prepared for it! But requires pre-arranging the limits.

"When I got in trouble for it" - ding ding ding, we found the big problem.

When you grow up with "fun" being a forbidden activity you're only allowed to do after everything else is done to 100% perfection, then you learn to sneak it in where you can fit it. And you need that shit, seriously - you cannot get through life without some source of enjoyment, some tiny glimmer of joy among the tedium.

Many of us learned to read under the covers, or to play our gameboy in the bathroom and hide it under the sink, or that we could get away with running around the backyard for another 20 minutes if we just learned which intonation of "come inside" was the actual trouble line, or whatever other ways to cram in as much joy as we could before the hammer came down, for whatever severity that meant in your house.

And so that feeling of "I shouldn't be doing this, I'm going to get caught, but if I'm going to get in trouble anyway I might as well get as much out of this as I can" becomes part of what you expect to feel when you're having fun. And you only know how to stop having fun when you feel that way when you get in trouble for it - and in absence of anyone else controlling your behavior, that means the bad guy becomes either whatever task pops up to remind you responsibilities exist, or your significant other pointing out it's really late and they wish you'd come to bed, or your boss yelling at you for being tired all the time... or it becomes you.

If you don't learn that fun isn't a forbidden activity, if you stay stuck in the mindset that it's something you have to cram in in secret and hide that you're even doing? It becomes so so easy to hate the voice of reason in your head that's trying to encourage moderation and we're going to regret this tomorrow.

And that escalates. You keep being too tired the next day. You keep feeling even worse when you sit down to enjoy yourself the next night because now you're already tired, so stress gets to you faster, and now you feel guilty about how late you're staying up so you're not really enjoying playing your game or scrolling Tumblr or whatever anymore, you're just nervously glancing at the clock, "have I spent too long yet? How much longer can I do this before I get in trouble?"

Even though now you're in your 20s or 30s and it's been a decade since the last time anyone else told you it was bed time.

Learning that you're allowed to have fun isn't easy; guilt and shame are emotions that run very, very deep. And neither is learning to have a healthier relationship with saying "okay, that's enough for today".

For one, you have to stop threatening yourself. "Tomorrow is gonna suck" and "You're going to regret this" and "we're going to get in trouble at work" don't work. You already feel bad, you already know it's gonna suck, so why wouldn't you try to cram in one more hour now while it's not the day that's going to suck yet? Punishment is not incentive.

Because by now you're in a situation where sleep is a horrifying punishment that ends any fun, but you're not enjoying your fun anyway because you're tired all the time on top of feeling ashamed for doing something fun, and you're spending the entire time beating yourself up for being an idiot with no self control who can't even handle going to bed on time like a normal human being...

etc etc etc.

You will hear a lot of people give advice on how to get rid of the idea of having to "earn" sleep or fun or happiness by doing "enough" other things. To learn to accept that just being alive is enough reason to "deserve" to do those things. That will work for some people, but for others it just ends up one more thing to scold yourself about, especially when you're already in the habit not of denying yourself entirely but instead of doing it and feeling guilty the whole time.

But learning to set limits ahead of time, so that you're not anticipating some unknown time that a nebulous authority figure is going to finally have their horror monster timer run out and leap out at you but instead know when and what to expect? Holy shit it helped.

Don't get me wrong, it hella felt like depriving myself at first, like I was being grounded, and I looked at my phone beeping saying it was bedtime quite often and got annoyed.

But then I stopped treating fun as something that had to wait until the end of the day and everything else had to be done first. It is way easier to stare down sleep and go "I don't need you", especially if you have any kind of insomnia making the idea of being in bed a dreadful one on top of it. It is harder to say that about dinner, or calling a friend, or walking the dog. Plus then the day isn't over yet, so giving up on your fun isn't also accepting that as the defining moment of the end of your day!

So you have to start practicing looking for places to squeeze in a little more fun - "I've got an hour before dinner, that's perfect to make some tea and watch two episodes." "My favorite youtuber just put up a new video, why don't I take a break to watch it before I finish this homework?" "I need to go grocery shopping tomorrow anyway, and if I leave an hour early I could go kick around the bookstore first."

And once you do, fun starts to feel less shameful.

Don't get me wrong, if your issues run deep enough it still does sometimes. But when you get to have these moments of joy that you don't feel the need to hide or apologize for and where punishment isn't part of the routine, then fun stops feeling like something you have to dig your claws into for fear of having it taken away from you once someone catches you with it. And that means that finishing a level and glancing over at the clock is something you do because it actually managed to click a satisfaction switch in your head and you wondered if it was a good note to end on for now, instead of something you do with your breath held and the berating words already cycling in your mind.

I am not offering this advice expecting it to work for everyone or be easy or anything like that. I am someone with Depression, ADHD, and pretty severe PTSD sharing a technique that one therapist told me that really happened to click for and help me specifically, in case it might help someone else be a little nicer to themselves today, too.

inkskinned

Every day I handle more money than I will ever make. Every day.

At the start of my employment, my boss showed me videos of people stealing, and we both had a chuckle about it. How silly they were! There was a camera overhead, and it’s not to watch the shoppers. See, we can’t actually stop shoplifters. They get away with it maybe nine out of ten times. But we, who are watched and tallied and witnessed? We are always caught.

At first it was hard to hold one hundred dollars bills. An amount I had never seen before. An amount that didn’t exist in my household. It’s normal now. Here is something that is not for me.

“What the hell, I’ll take another,” says the man, pondering our 200 dollar watches. What the hell. Total comes to 580 and not even a flinch in his face. I have been working for 11 hours today and made only 110 dollars. It will go to my rent. Today I work for free, it feels. When I get my check, I will have 35 dollars left for food and saving.

The six hundreds he hands me go into the cash register. For a moment, I imagine having money. Then I put it away, counting out his change.

I know for a fact we sell our products for double what they are worth. That I could be making commission. That they could hand me those 580 dollars and change my life and not even mark the difference in their checkbooks. He’s not the only sale they make today, but I am the reason they made it. He’s not the only one spending 600 dollars, but if I hadn’t spent two hours with him telling me about his life, he wouldn’t have spent any. I go home. I don’t own a watch.

I have watched and rewatched a video on how to make salmon four ways. My shopping list is always the same. Pasta. Rice. Tuna. If I can afford butter it was a good week. I dream of the world I will never walk in, where I can throw the best fish fillet in the cart with a shrug. I hold hundreds in my hand and look up at the camera. I put them under the cash drawer.

I go to work. I scrap together my savings. I eat my bowl of rice slowly. My manager takes a paid week off from work just for his birthday. He owns a yacht.

I’m not worth the cost of a watch.

inkskinned

i wrote this while i was working at orlando’s walt disney world parks.

i was part of their college program. i moved to the state for it. they legally owned the building i was living in and still charged me rent. i ostensibly was being charged to work for them. it was a 2 bedroom apartment and they placed 6 adult women in it in forced triples.

as many as one in ten disney employees have experienced homelessness while working for the company. despite huge efforts to unionize, strike, or otherwise demand fair treatment; disney has refused to increase employee quality of life.

disney admits publicly that a good portion of their success is because the employees (“cast members”) are dedicated, passionate, and selfless. this is never reflected in pay. even “face” characters (ie those that are princesses etc) make barely above a minimum wage.

at the time that i worked there, i made $8.50 an hour. at one point i was asked to create a human shield around a bag because a bomb dog had alerted to it. for eight fucking dollars an hour.

i now work a very cushy office job. i have bought the salmon and cooked it all four ways.

i go to the store. i am nice to the person behind the counter. she looks up at the camera while she counts out my change. there is nothing fundamentally different about her and i.

we are both worth more than the watch, anyway.