2025 on Tumblr: Trends That Defined the Year
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oozey mess
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Aqua Utopia｜海の底で記憶を紡ぐ
Sweet Seals For You, Always
One Nice Bug Per Day
taylor price
titsay
TVSTRANGERTHINGS
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Keni
Origami Around
Andulka
#extradirty
Peter Solarz
AnasAbdin
Sade Olutola
if i look back, i am lost
Cosimo Galluzzi
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@tunditur-unda
"sir this is a wendy's" = "I have no idea why you're here for that but this is possibly the LEAST relevant place for you to be right now"
"ma'am this is a map store" = "this is an even more relevant place for you to be than you know yet"
getting lost in boston is fun because I turned around on a street corner three times and some guy yelled "hey stupid! the bus is that way!" very helpful interaction and accurate insult, 10/10 no notes
one time I walked around a building a couple times looking for a bathroom and this guy went "this bitch thinks she's on a merrygoround, where the fuck are you tryna go? bathroom? one floor down to the right behind the door that says bathroom."
My very first time in Boston. I was absolutely miserable, trying to drag my giant suitcase up a lengthy set of stairs in the pouring rain. This guy who had already reached the top looked back at me with the most pure expression of disgust I’ve ever seen in anyone’s eyes, marched back down the stairs, grabbed my suitcase, carried it to the top, left it there for me, and walked away without ever saying a word. I think about him often.
For the people in the notes going "why is Boston like this": a) the insults are a way to show you have no ulterior motives when helping someone (and don't need to be thanked or repaid), and b) Boston was settled by the Irish
also the Italians. mixing Irish and Italian sociocultural attitudes had the effect of multiplying the Sass Levels by the power of infinity, in the sense that you get all of the clever dry wit of the Irish and all of the bitchy gossipy condensation of the Italians rolled into one very stereotypically overly-friendly American package.
also worth noting that who you are to them doesn’t matter. they’ll talk to strangers like that and will also talk to their best friends like that. they’re just Like That.
More from the notes:
Every time I see this post someone has added a new roundup to it. So I just have to keep reblogging it. What a tragedy. Anyway,
My favorite scenes in the LotR books are the ones where Legolas has vital information and just decides it's not important to share.
Like when Gandalf spent literal PAGES trying to figure out why the vibes were off in Moria and Legolas chimes in with just "it's a balrog :) that shit's evil :) we're so fucked :)" like what do you MEAN you knew already and just didn't tell him??
Or at the beginning of Two Towers when Aragorn thinks there's something nearby so he puts his ear to the ground to listen, and then like 10 minutes later is like "hmmm i hear horses" and Legolas is just like "mm yep. there are 105 blond bitches with spears" like you just let your friend put his face in the dirt and you can SEE them??
Legolas please gain a sense of urgency
It's because legolas hasn't spent enough time with non-elves to remember that they don't know what he knows.
gandalf is scratching his head in moria, and legolas is thinking "oh man, the wizard noticed something off *besides* the obvious balrog that we all are aware of??"
"I wonder what aragorn is listening for? must be hard to hear, what with all of the horses. How many horses are there, actually? 1... 2... 3..."
"What do your elvish eyes see?" is Aragorn saying, as politely as possible, "Because the REST OF US are at a significant disadvantage, Prince Dipshit."
This is the part where I'm obligated to mention that Legolas can see further because canonically, the world is flat but only for elves
Jamie Lee Rattray goading Kiara Zanon (Scepters vs Fleet 3.27.2026)
I don't know if I'm articulating this right but one of my favorite feelings is when something still manages to hit me the same way things did when I was young enough for life to feel fresh and completely unexplored.
You get to some point in life and you start bringing all of yourself into everything you interact with.
That's also not bad but it feels different.
Sometimes there's a strange comfort in being hit by something in a way that drowns you out.
I need to have the wind knocked out of me by things still being new from time to time.
It keeps the soul from shrinking.
It doesn't have to be a big, life-changing event, either. You find it in doing things intentionally.
So, you know how certain Christian missionaries are trained to act in a very obnoxious way, so that most people they preach to will reject them outright, so they feel like the world hates them for being Christian and they can only be friends with fellow Christians? You know that thing?
I think as activists, we sometimes need to stop and ask ourselves whether we're acting like those missionaries. I think this type of behavior is a little more ingrained into our society than some of us realize, and some of us have internalized it without realizing what it's actually meant to do.
OP I know that this is probably a different direction than you were going, but genuinely this advice would do so so much to help people not fall into secular political cults.
A lot of high control groups use this tactic to isolate their members. It’s absolutely not just evangelizing Christians. New age wellness cults often encourage their members to make outlandish and offensive accusations regarding the mental and physical health of other people or their children, because they know that the backlash their members receive will reinforce the idea that the “mainstream” simply has no room for people who like crystals and essential oils. White supremacist cults will seed the vocabulary of new recruits with Nazi dog whistles that fly over those recruits heads, specifically so that they will get clocked as possible neo-Nazis and shunned by anyone who might offer them another perspective and help them to get out before it’s too late. And a lot of left-leaning political cults strongly encourage members to share their views in the most inflammatory ways possible, and then say “you see? everyone outside of this small circle is evil and cannot be relied on” when, inevitably, that produces bad results.
Sometimes I think that activists fall into these patterns completely accidentally, either because they were raised in culturally Christian evangelical environments and never unpacked it, or else because they just aren’t any good at approaching things in a non-inflammatory way and no one’s shown them how.
…But sometimes, these structures emerge in activist circles because those circles are legitimately becoming high control groups.
I think some things to watch out for especially in this regard are:
Are you being directed to behave in an extremely hostile and alienating way? (even if it’s by someone who you trust!)
Does the group you are in immediately shut down any conversation about the effectiveness of an antagonistic strategy? In particular, do they shut that conversation down using in-group stock phrases?
Is experiencing harsh rejection seen as something of a rite of passage?
Do you receive more validation from the group you are in after you have been rejected by someone outside the group than at any other time?
Have you ever been concerned that the antagonistic strategy you are using hurt someone you cared about, only to be quickly advised by members of the group that that person was toxic and that you should actually completely cut them out of your life?
These to me are all pretty significant red flags about the group in question, whatever the specific thing that brings people together there is. If you start noticing them in a group that you are a part of, be that an in-person activist circle or a Discord server or anything in between, take a step back and seriously consider the possibility that the good thing that you joined is turning into something different, and possibly dangerous.
In the words of Jonestown survivor Deborah Layton, “Nobody joins a cult. You join a self-help group, a religious movement, a political organization. They change so gradually, by the time you realize you’re entrapped – and almost everybody does – you can’t figure a safe way back out.”
this is a pdf detailing the BITE model of authoritarian control, a method for determining whether or not you're in a cult.
even if you feel confident you are not and have never been in a cult, it's a good idea to familiarize yourself with the signs, just in case one begins to sneak up on you in the future.
Ok, I actually want to talk about this for a moment.
Jonestown, one of the most infamous cults in history, with a mass suicide / mass murder that left more than 900 people dead of cyanide poisoning, hundreds of whom were children… was a leftist political cult. That fact is an unambiguous and completely undebatable matter of historical record.
This isn’t a footnote in the story of Jonestown, and it isn’t a weird anti-leftist gotcha either. Jonestown attracted people to their cause with anti-segregation and anti-poverty activist work, and they did actual, meaningful good for those causes. The People’s Temple was a leftist org, unambiguously. They created mutual aid networks for food aid, and rent assistance, and job placement services, and clothing donations, and winter heating. They leaned heavily on the Indianapolis Human Rights Commission in order to push desegregation, and led sit-ins and boycotts and protests. They participated in significant voter registration efforts. They led the fight against the eviction of tenants from San Francisco's International Hotel.
People joined The People’s Temple because it was a good thing when they joined it. They didn’t start out as brainwashed cultists, and they didn’t gravitate towards the leadership of Jim Jones out of masochism, or inherent submissiveness, or a perverse love of creeping authoritarianism. They fell in line under Jim Jones because he’d built a community that was genuinely helping people, and was advancing a political cause that seemed worth fighting. They followed Jim Jones because he earned their trust.
Jim Jones then used the trust and the social capital that he had gained from all of the above in order to elevate himself to the status of a messianic figure, and abuse and profit off of his followers. Slowly but surely, he boiled the frog. It was all good – and then it was mostly good – and then, well there was some abuse, but it wasn’t that bad, and it wasn’t really his fault – and then there was a lot of abuse, but the outside world would destroy them if given the chance, so wasn’t it the lesser of the two evils? And then, eventually, it got so bad that hundreds of people poisoned themselves and their children at his command, and murdered everyone in the compound who refused and resisted.
Your cause of choice is not immune from abusers taking advantage of it!
It doesn’t matter if you’re right. It doesn’t matter if your cause is just. It does not matter if your good thing really is a good thing, because there is always the possibility that it will one day be co-opted by a monster. And if the fact that it started good is enough for you to ignore that gradual, subtle change, you could end up in a truly horrible situation.
One of my best friends in undergrad got sucked into a cult. Years later, we talked about it, and he told me something that I’ll never forget which is, it’s only when you look all the way back at things that they seem crazy. You start off with things that are totally normal and innocuous: “we’re stronger together”; “oppression is bad”; “you can accomplish more if you believe in yourself”; “empathy is important and we should all try to bring more of it into our lives”; etc. Then, you move to something that’s just a little step away from that. And then again. And then again. And then again. But it never feels like a big jump, because it’s not! A -> Z is crazy, but A -> B wasn’t, and B -> C wasn’t, and C -> D wasn’t, and…
This friend was smart, and rational, and independent, and normal, and by the time he and his wife left, they’d gone from just thinking that we should all practice more emotional mindfulness, to being terrified that leaving the cult and the cult leader would literally kill them, via the cult leader having magical powers.
If your only analysis is “Where I started was good, and no single step since then has been crazy” that is utterly insufficient to keep you safe.
“This can’t possibly be a cult, because when I joined it was a leftist political org and there’s never been a single instance where it suddenly changed” is literally the exact logic that kept people in Jonestown until it was too late.
Levels of understanding other slavic languages
oh we also have X and it means the same!
that looks like X but misspelled
that's just the archaic variant of X
this sounds a lot like Y from another slavic language I know which means X in mine so this almost 100% also means X
this word is completely different but I can kinda tell the meaning from the morphology
what
okay right now I'm gonna have to dissect the entirety of this language's history to figure out how the FUCK did y'all get to the point of calling X that and not something more normal
I wanted to ask for X and accidentally called someone a whore
I don't even have to look at the blog and I just know this is from a Pole about Czechs
suffering
KAKAOVY CHLEBICEK???!!!???
hissing growling scratching you etc etc
for example
(Polish: are you looking for a squirrel?, Slovak: excuse me, he is doing what to the squirrel?)
(also "hladna pića" means "cold drinks" in Croatian. means "hungry cunt" in Slovak and Czech)
("you're weird" in Czech is the same as "you're amazing" in Croatian, while "you're amazing" in Czech is the same as "you're terrible" in Croatian)
My favourite recent-ish example of #8:
Don't forget this:
And of course pomoć (help) vs pomoč (ordering you to piss on something)
Also remembered this shop from my trip to Croatia (piko means meth in czech and slovak)
My choir was performing in some Czech church in mid 2000s. We were about to start THE 2137 song in Polish.
Conductor raises his hands and buddy whispers urgently "hey, the second line is 'he fucked people'!"
Conductor goes pale "Hledal! We'll be singing HLEDAL ludzi!"
We almost traumatized a bunch of Czech grandmas. Good times.
My favourite non-edgy Czech-Polish false friend examples
denne čerstvé (sounds like "boring and stale" in Polish, actually means "daily, fresh" in Czech)
Dupetky (idk what it's supposed to mean, but sounds like "little asses" and that was probably not the intention, given how "dupa" (Polish for "ass") is not a word in Czech).
My Ostravak ass forgot the average Czech doesn't use "dupa"
Yeah, the "szukat" problem... I watched Ogniem i mieczem in the original Polish. The whole movie is about a man trying to find his fiancée, who got lost in the war. Constantly talking about how he wants to try to find his fiancée. He is trying to find her in Kiev. Then his friends are trying to find his fiancée. Four of them. All talking about trying to find her.
As a Czech, shit was weird...
Levels of understanding other slavic languages
oh we also have X and it means the same!
that looks like X but misspelled
that's just the archaic variant of X
this sounds a lot like Y from another slavic language I know which means X in mine so this almost 100% also means X
this word is completely different but I can kinda tell the meaning from the morphology
what
okay right now I'm gonna have to dissect the entirety of this language's history to figure out how the FUCK did y'all get to the point of calling X that and not something more normal
I wanted to ask for X and accidentally called someone a whore
I don't even have to look at the blog and I just know this is from a Pole about Czechs
suffering
KAKAOVY CHLEBICEK???!!!???
hissing growling scratching you etc etc
for example
(Polish: are you looking for a squirrel?, Slovak: excuse me, he is doing what to the squirrel?)
(also "hladna pića" means "cold drinks" in Croatian. means "hungry cunt" in Slovak and Czech)
("you're weird" in Czech is the same as "you're amazing" in Croatian, while "you're amazing" in Czech is the same as "you're terrible" in Croatian)
My favourite recent-ish example of #8:
Don't forget this:
And of course pomoć (help) vs pomoč (ordering you to piss on something)
Also remembered this shop from my trip to Croatia (piko means meth in czech and slovak)
My choir was performing in some Czech church in mid 2000s. We were about to start THE 2137 song in Polish.
Conductor raises his hands and buddy whispers urgently "hey, the second line is 'he fucked people'!"
Conductor goes pale "Hledal! We'll be singing HLEDAL ludzi!"
We almost traumatized a bunch of Czech grandmas. Good times.
My favourite non-edgy Czech-Polish false friend examples
denne čerstvé (sounds like "boring and stale" in Polish, actually means "daily, fresh" in Czech)
Dupetky (idk what it's supposed to mean, but sounds like "little asses" and that was probably not the intention, given how "dupa" (Polish for "ass") is not a word in Czech).
My Ostravak ass forgot the average Czech doesn't use "dupa"
Yeah, the "szukat" problem... I watched Ogniem i mieczem in the original Polish. The whole movie is about a man trying to find his fiancée, who got lost in the war. Constantly talking about how he wants to try to find his fiancée. He is trying to find her in Kiev. Then his friends are trying to find his fiancée. Four of them. All talking about trying to find her.
As a Czech, shit was weird...
aerin frankel x the locked tomb
@cagedandpacing posted this yesterday and I have but a simple mind.
I know we've talked the long-term nuclear waste warning messages to death, but I just cannot get over the ultimate hopelessness of conveying "this is a bad place and you should stay far away from it" to any species intelligent enough to understand the message, without actually convincing them it's full of wonderful treasure you don't want them to have. "Maybe we could cover it with a LANDSCAPE OF THORNS projecting from the ground!" Bestie you just described every video game fortress I've ever had to break into, and they are always full of goodies. The harder you make it to get into, the more obsessed people will be with getting into it. Look at the pyramids! Not designed to be gotten into, and guess what: chock full of treasure. If a cat could read that warning message, they'd be convinced it was a vault filled with canned tuna. If you put absolutely nothing in a room and close the door, within fifteen seconds there's a paw reaching under that door. Every species is like this. I don't know what makes us think that wouldn't also be true of whoever's going to see those messages some day.
I think we'd have better luck with reverse psychology. Find a way to convey the message "COME CLOSER, I AM JUST A NORMAL VAULT BENEATH SEVERAL DOZEN FEET OF SOLID CONCRETE :)" and your job is done. Ten thousand years from now, there will be entire religions based around the unimaginable horrors that lurk within the Suspiciously Welcoming Hole in the Ground. By the time they reject the ancient superstitions and finally go into the hole, all the waste will have decayed to harmless levels, and we'll be remembered until the end of time as having pulled the biggest delayed prank in the history of the universe. I am willing to stake our reputation and the future habitability of the planet on this.
Vault with concrete perfect size put people in to explore. Inside very stable isotopes and no radiation poisoning, put explorers in vault with concrete. Put explorers in vault with concrete! No problems ever in vault with concrete because no interesting elements with high atomic numbers or rusting barrels of waste, good shape, great for peoples explore. Supportive concrete vault safe for small exploring peoples. Avault with concrete yes place for people to explore, good place, vault give love to exploring people and no radiation poisoning. Friend vault with concrete.
Fantasy setting where the kingdom has a secret police with the mission of finding any modern-world people isekai'd in so they can be whisked off to the academy and all their future knowledge transcribed
It's a known thing that isekai events happen. All the major nations do this. The coming war may very well be tilted in favor of whichever kingdom gets the most Japanese teenagers appearing within their borders
They are worried that the flow of isekai protagonists is slowing down, what with increased traffic safety measures.
So they hire a evil wizard to send a minion into our world, with only one goal: increase the number of automobile accidents, and keep their isekai harvests bountiful.
The minion can't return, of course. Travel is one way, unless you isekai back, and that's a one in a million chance.
So the poor fish out of water minion stuck in our world can never return. At least they gave him plenty of precious gemstones with which to start his car-accident empire. So don't worry, squire Musk will not starve in our world.
I’m gonna need to remember this prompt for when I’m having a bad day
AITA for eating plastic?
I (12NM) have worked out a system with my roommate (30s, F) wherein I can let her know that I’m hungry and need more food by chewing on plastic, something she hates. Given that she does not speak Cat, this is a reliable way for me to pass along information. However, I also find chewing plastic fun and tasty on its own merits. This causes my roommate to ineffectively curse at me. AITA for eating plastic whenever the hell I feel like it, whether there’s food in my bowl or not?
My parent (57F) says that cats need healthy fats in their diet. I (3NF) thought this meant I should hop up on the table and lick the butter (it was delicious!). She yelled at me. AITA?
getting lost in boston is fun because I turned around on a street corner three times and some guy yelled "hey stupid! the bus is that way!" very helpful interaction and accurate insult, 10/10 no notes
one time I walked around a building a couple times looking for a bathroom and this guy went "this bitch thinks she's on a merrygoround, where the fuck are you tryna go? bathroom? one floor down to the right behind the door that says bathroom."
My very first time in Boston. I was absolutely miserable, trying to drag my giant suitcase up a lengthy set of stairs in the pouring rain. This guy who had already reached the top looked back at me with the most pure expression of disgust I’ve ever seen in anyone’s eyes, marched back down the stairs, grabbed my suitcase, carried it to the top, left it there for me, and walked away without ever saying a word. I think about him often.
For the people in the notes going "why is Boston like this": a) the insults are a way to show you have no ulterior motives when helping someone (and don't need to be thanked or repaid), and b) Boston was settled by the Irish
also the Italians. mixing Irish and Italian sociocultural attitudes had the effect of multiplying the Sass Levels by the power of infinity, in the sense that you get all of the clever dry wit of the Irish and all of the bitchy gossipy condensation of the Italians rolled into one very stereotypically overly-friendly American package.
also worth noting that who you are to them doesn’t matter. they’ll talk to strangers like that and will also talk to their best friends like that. they’re just Like That.
More from the notes:
A mark on your forehead identifies the god you must worship to stay alive, usually by joining its local church or temple. Your mark is unknown, meaning an old, forgotten god sponsored you. To survive, you must either find an old temple to worship at, or do the arduous task of building a new one
Nobody in your small coastal village has ever seen the Godmark that you were born with. It’s a dark russet sequence of criss-crossing lines, with a vertical arrowhead on the left and a circle on the right, just over where your brow meets your temple. Some of the traders who come down from the mountain say it looks like one of the scripts used in the hinterlands, but not a language that any of them recognize.
“If she’s got the temperament for it, she should try her luck inland,” they advise. “No point her starting a temple here if she’d find her people elsewhere, with a little searching.”
At first, your parents are reluctant to send you away. Though you’re well-behaved and diligent in your chores, you’re a sickly child with no God to worship. And besides, you’ve always been the dreamy type–inclined to lose track of time watching the path of rain droplets chasing down the window, or the fronds of an anemone as it sways in a rock pool.
Instead, they send you to the temple of the Storm to learn all you’ll need for your own God. You are happy there, for a time: making up beds and serving food to the castaways who pass through, keeping vigil at the lighthouse, burning incense and praying with the loyal widows and orphans of the drowned.
One such widow, an old, old lady, touches the mark on your forehead. “I recognise those letters. We wrote this way in the town where I grew up, way off past the mountains.”
Your heartbeat quickens. “What does it say!?”
She squints, eyes engulfed by wrinkles and hidden behind smudged glass. “A… Ar… Oh, I can’t remember how to speak it. I left before I learnt my letters properly. There was a war, you know. But I remember,” she says, mistily, “the most beautiful pink and white flowers used to grow, on the borders of the wheat fields…”
You try to ask more questions, but remembering the war distresses her, and so you speak of other things. When she’s drifted off to sleep, you get to your feet, go home and tell your parents: you are leaving in search of your God.
The Bisexual flag is officially 25 years old today 🥳 💗💜💙 (December 5th, 2023)
happy birthday to this gorgeous flag!! remember that bisexuality has never excluded trans and nonbinary people and has never had any restrictions on preferences to genders :))
Happy birthday, bi flag and your explicit representation of bisexuality as an inclusive and expansive way to experience attraction!
