Oh yeah I was confused because one of my friends was horny as fuck but also said they were ace. But they told me it's only media and not irl, and I think there's a lot of y'all in fandoms.
Reblog because it might enlighten a wild ace roaming out there in the tall grass.
Thoughts that are mutual between cats and their people:
Yeah you're cute when you sleep but you didn't let me sleep either so I'm going to annoy you now because I'm bored. Hahah get poked, sleepy idiot.
How do you not comprehend this when I am literally staring at you. Like I understand that your brain can't understand things this nuanced but come on, how do you not get this.
I don't know if you know that what I am currently doing is an expression of affection, but that won't stop me. Knowing that I showed you that I love you is enough.
I heard a crinkly material and the sound of you chewing so I have to know what's in your mouth RIGHT FUCKING NOW.
I can't communicate with you and you can't communicate with me, so I'm just copying the tone of the sound you're making in hopes that you understand that I try.
You are doing activities beyond my comprehension, and I find this fascinating. I will never understand what the fuck you are trying to achieve here, but I am intrigued nonetheless.
Hey are you ok, you haven't done your weird thing in a while. Yeah I don't get why you do that but I know you do that when you're ok.
the asexual double edged sword is that a lot of people, particularly queer discoursers(tm) online, are really really rancid about ace people who have sex, I mean like stunningly awful, so naturally sex favorable/indifferent asexuals will be very keen on making sure that they aren't erased within their own community and that people at large know they exist. at the same time, people are also Very Bad about ace people who don't have sex, and sex averse/repulsed asexuals face a lot of pressure both on societal and interpersonal scales to submit to sex that they don't want, and so naturally it'll really rub them the wrong way to constantly have "but don't worry, ace people can still conform to the societal expectation!" appended to their PSAs about their experiences of asexuality. and so everyone's just kinda upset and annoyed all the time when instead it should be peace and love on planet ace.
the asexual double edged sword is that a lot of people, particularly queer discoursers(tm) online, are really really rancid about ace people who have sex, I mean like stunningly awful, so naturally sex favorable/indifferent asexuals will be very keen on making sure that they aren't erased within their own community and that people at large know they exist. at the same time, people are also Very Bad about ace people who don't have sex, and sex averse/repulsed asexuals face a lot of pressure both on societal and interpersonal scales to submit to sex that they don't want, and so naturally it'll really rub them the wrong way to constantly have "but don't worry, ace people can still conform to the societal expectation!" appended to their PSAs about their experiences of asexuality. and so everyone's just kinda upset and annoyed all the time when instead it should be peace and love on planet ace.
13 year old me was soooo damn proud of not being like other girls because I wasn’t “‘‘‘‘‘boy crazy’‘‘‘‘‘‘‘‘ hooty hoo dumbass there’s a reason for that
Look, sometimes petty shit like this is all you have. Why you gotta burn the girls who are grasping at the few straws of self esteem they have left? Why you gotta burn the girls that believe this because they haven’t figured out their sexual identity yet?
i mean like… i was just mocking my past self, she can’t hear me… idc if 13 year old girls want to be dumbasses… just some Relatable Humor for us older gays
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whenever twitter wants to land their hot takes about age gaps in relationships, I think what’s often overlooked is that it’s not all that unusual to not be aware of how old the people in your personal life are.
if you asked me how old my coworkers are, i don’t think I could give you a single confident answer. I could give you some educated guesses based on their appearances, interests, and behavior, but not anything more specific than “I think Kat is in her 30s?”
Not only is it not unusual, but the “problem” with toxic relationships that involve an age gap usually isn’t the fucking age gap, it’s the power imbalance and the abuse of it. It’s the fact that, when you’re dealing with what I think most people imagine when you say “age gap”, that being like, a high schooler and a significantly older person who is probably out of school, the issue is that the older person has a lot more freedom, financial means, and independence than the younger person. And THAT can be abused.
Age gaps aren’t inherently bad, the older you get the more likely it is that you will have age gaps, both younger and older, in ANY relationship you have (romantic, platonic, etc.). I have co-workers who are younger than me, I have co workers who are a lot older than me. I’m on the younger end (27) so not so much co workers who are THAT much younger than me, but when I’m like. 35? I’ll STILL be around people, and probably be friendly with people, in their 20s.Maybe even very early 20s (fresh graduates) because that’s how life works.
if i am evil. i create character A, who indulges often. always eating, always fucking. but time and time again reveal that he is not hungry. he is not lustful. he performs hunger and doesnt truly feel it. he performs sexuality and doesnt truly feel it. and for fifteen years he performs indulgence into desire he doesnt feel. i create character B, who does not indulge. never eating, never fucking. but time and time again reveal that he IS hungry. he is lustful. he denies hunger but feels it deeply. he denies sexuality but feels it deeply. and for fifteen years he refuses to indulge in the desire he feels. and then. in the final season. allow character A to finally desire something. allow character B to confess his desire. and then kill them both before either is able to really indulge in something they truly desire. if i am evil. i do this.
i'm a firm believer that cas' confession was so so fucked up like you can't tell your best friend with extreme guilt issues that you love him and that's what's gonna kill you and then disappear forever and leave him to deal with that. it's so messed up. and i want cas to be confronted with the consequences of his actions.
so when they finally get cas, after the relieved hugs and "are you okay"s, i want sam to be so mad at cas. i want sam to yell at cas. "i don't know what you said or did to him, but you need to fix it. i want my brother back. dean hasn't spoken a word in months, he's not eating, he's been sick and depressed, he's lost weight, he's not showering, i barely recognise him anymore. dean has been through so much in his life but i've never seen him like this. now i have a feeling i know what happened in that dungeon but it's not my business. all i'm saying is you need to talk to him, and you need to apologise for leaving him like this, and you need to make it better. ok. good to have you back."
to clarify, i do understand cas' point of view. i do understand that it was the only way to save dean, and that cas never told him about the deal before because cas is the kinda guy who will do things by himself. he's even worse than dean at asking for help or sharing his burdens. i don't blame cas for what he had to do, when i think about it rationally. but unfortunately, even when your actions have good intentions, they still have consequences. and the consequences of saying that to your best friend, even if you don't know he loves you back. even if you think he just likes you. those consequences are fucking devastating. who wouldn't be left broken. of course dean would be messed up. we saw how he was after cas died in s13, and that death wasn't even his fault. losing cas again, and knowing this time he was directly (although indirectly, but those nuances don't register in dean's brain) responsible? that cas died because he loved him? that cas was unhappy this whole time, because of him? that he didn't even get to say it back, that cas died thinking he was unloved? boyyyyy what a way to fuck a guy up. so yeah, on the anger show, i think people would be angry. dean would, but he wouldn't show that right away, because he would be so relieved he would put all of his feelings aside to welcome cas home and make sure cas never goes further than the next room (and even that is difficult). so sam would be angry on dean's behalf. cause the thing is, cas has never seen dean grieve him. but sam has. he's seen it so many times, and it gets worse every time, and he'd wanna make sure it doesn't happen again. he'd wanna make sure cas knows how his absence affects dean, so he doesn't leave again. so they finally talk it out and figure out exactly what they mean to each other.
When Cas lets himself out of Dean’s room, he almost trips over Sam.
“Whoa,” Sam says, drawing his legs towards himself and flipping his book shut. He’s seated against the wall opposite the bedroom, and his feet had been nearly touching the end of the hall before Cas had stumbled over them. His eyes flick to the shut door, and then back to Cas. “Dean’s asleep?”
Cas nods. “Out like a light,” he replies. “Jack, too.” Cas had left them curled together. They’d gravitated towards one another as soon as Cas had extricated himself. He’d go back before they woke up—wouldn’t dare to let either of them wake up without him in the room—but even the sound of their snuffling breaths hadn’t been enough to drown out the darkness.
“Yeah,” Sam replies, hauling himself up with a hand against the wall, and then continues with an inexplicable, “They would be.”
He meets Cas’s eyes for a beat, long enough that he knows he should follow as Sam makes his way down the hall and towards the kitchen. The bunker lights are as bright as usual, harsh fluorescent chasing away almost every shadow.
Sam sets the book down on the table, before turning towards the counter. “Coffee?” he asks over his shoulder.
“Yes, please.” Cas slides into a seat, recoiling slightly in surprise when his fingertips come away with the slightest layer of dust. He brushes it onto his pants, and glances around the space, finding it in slightly more disarray than he’d grown to seeing it.
Turning back with two mugs in hand, Sam pushes one towards Cas and sits down as well. “Ah,” Cas says, pulling his mug towards himself and looking down at the dark liquid. “Do we have milk?”
Sam purses his lips. “We’re out,” he replies.
He’s a little off-kilter. Cas can feel it—has felt it, since the moment that he stumbled back into the world, immediately embraced by Jack, and then, more hesitatingly, Dean. Sam had waited till they were done before grabbing Cas into a tight hug of his own, and then making space for Eileen to also tuck herself into their sides.
But when he’d stepped back his eyes had really only been on his brother, desperate, sharp-edged relief barely hidden—not even Eileen managing to hold his attention for more than a few seconds until they’d all decided to part ways for bed, and she’d taken his hand to lead him down the hall.
Not towards Sam’s room, Cas realizes now, but to the library. He takes a sip of his coffee, the steam obscuring his vision, and when he puts his mug down with a soft thud, something shifts in the air.
It suddenly becomes glaringly evident that Sam is furious.
Cas swallows. It had been much easier for Cas to maneuver out of bed than it should’ve been, with the mattress occupied by two full-grown men and an almost fully-grown boy. He presses his tongue to the roof of his mouth, feeling the lingering bitterness as he waits.
He expects Sam to ease into it.
He doesn’t.
“I don’t know what you told him before you died, but every guess I have makes me so fucking—” Sam’s voice raises, loud, before he cuts himself off and takes a deep, shuddering breath, before biting out, “If we hadn’t gotten you back this time, I think I would have had to watch him just wither away.”
Cas’s stomach drops.
“He wouldn’t eat. Wouldn’t sleep. Every minute was spent researching or hunting down leads. I started to only buy decaf, just so that he’d fucking pass out sooner. He would’ve figured it out, except he stopped coming into the kitchen for anything other than coffee, and I put the beans in a Tupperware. He didn’t even get mad about that, and you were there when he lectured me about leaving the bag open that one time.”
“You were trying to save him, I get it, but,” Sam closes his eyes and swallows, anger plummeting into heartache. “It’s not much of a save if it just damns him to spending the rest of his life trying to get you back.”
“And I know,” when Sam blinks up at him, his eyes are shiny, matching Cas’s own, “I know you’ve been back for less than twelve hours, and I’m so happy Cas, so, so happy that you’re back. But you have to understand that every time you go, I have to watch him fall apart without knowing if he’ll be able to put himself back together, and half the relief of you being back is knowing that I get him back, too.”
“I’m sorry,” Cas rasps, and Sam shakes his head.
“I don’t need you to be sorry, man,” his hands tighten around his mug. “I need you to not do it again. Ever again. The self-sacrifice play isn’t an option. He doesn’t get over it, and I don’t think he knows how to. I don’t think he wants to, he thinks that he deserves it for letting it happen, for letting you do that and I—”
“He’s lost so much, Cas, so much, but every time he loses you, he loses himself, too. And I need my brother, I can’t—”
Sam Winchester is almost forty, and Cas has known him for over a decade. But he’s never seen him look this young and lost. “He needs you to stay,” Sam pleads. Don’t die for him, he doesn’t say, but Cas hears it all the same.
It’s not a promise Cas can make, not with the lives they lead, not even with Chuck gone. But. “I’ll stay,” he says softly. Sam’s shoulders slump in relief.
“I didn’t understand, for a long time,” Cas admits. It hadn’t been clear, not until they’d gone back to Purgatory, and by then it was too late. “I know it’s not an excuse, but. I do want to stay.” I want to live for him. For the life we could have together.
“Good,” Sam says, and he sniffs a bit. “Good, I—good.”
Cas nods, blinking away his own tears, and looks down at his coffee. Black, because Dean didn’t care enough these past few months to put milk in his own cups. Decaf, because Sam desperately wanted his brother to rest. Off-kilter and not like it should be.
But fixable.
“In the morning,” Cas says, meeting Sam’s eyes, “I’d like to buy us groceries. And get a night light.”
Despite your reputation as a Dark Lord, you have a strict moral code. So when a young girl showing signs of abuse wandered into your realm, you took her in. Now the neighboring kingdom is acusing you of kidnapping their princess. You have to choose between returning her to her abusors or war.
You choose war. You have a reputation to uphold after all, and you reason that it’d be good to overthrow the abusive rulers of the neighboring kingdom and put an ally on the throne. For purely selfish reasons of course. Just a means of expanding your empire, nothing more. And luckily for you, you have a guest who will likely be more than happy to help if you were to ask her.
But that can wait. Your guest is tired, jumpy, and understandably in need of time to rest and recover. You won’t need her help for the warfare aspect anyway. You ensure your demonic servants will protect her with their lives and make her feel safe and welcome. Then you set aside some time in your busy schedule of conquest to check on the poor girl. Purely to determine whether she’s in prime condition for manipulating, of course. Your future puppet ruler will be more likely to cooperate if you build a solid foundation of respect and trust, after all.
Years of serving as the Dark Lord have taught you that your minions work harder when you treat them well. So you provide your young guest with everything she requests, within reason of course. She says she hasn’t slept well lately because her stuffed animal was left behind when she fled home. You ask if there are any other things of hers she misses from her old home. With a now completed list, you send your most covert operatives to the enemy palace to execute a most wicked heist of a stuffed animal and the princess’s dog dubbed Sir Meatball, as well as a few books she would read for comfort. You congratulate yourself on how evil it is of you to steal a dog. And just for good measure you have your minions perform reconnaissance on the palace. You’ll have to invade it soon anyway. May as well multitask.
The interesting thing is the hero the enemy sends to fight you. The chosen one it would seem, although it continues to baffle you how young he is. Young and impressionable. He barely knows how to hold that magic sword he wields. It’s barely light enough for him to lift. You send your winged minions to carry him toward your evil castle of dread and terror. You greet him at the landing pad on the roof. He insists on dueling you, even as his sword shakes in his sweaty palms. The prophecy says he will defeat you in a one-on-one duel. Very well, you decide. If something goes wrong you have medics on hand. You wouldn’t want someone to die from a friendly duel. He’s no match for you, you soon find. You humor him for a while. He obviously came a long way to duel you after all, and you can tell he’s trying very hard to hit you with that sword. You give him a few passing tips as you fight, and he thanks you awkwardly.
Then the princess interrupts your duel. “Maximus!” She chides, “you promised to take me dragon riding this afternoon!”
You turn to your dark secretary of doom, Jerry, who squints at the evil schedule of hopelessness and cries out. “Ah! She’s right, my lord. My sincerest apologies.”
“That’s alright, my faithful minion,” you say while holding the tip of the chosen’s sword between two fingers. “This whole duel thing was a bit of a spontaneous thing, and I should have looked at the schedule first.” You look down at the boy. “I’m sorry, child, but it seems I have a commitment to fulfill with the dear princess. Can we reschedule this duel for a later date?”
“Wh-what? No! The duel has already started, you can’t just back out like that!” He says, trying with all his might to pry his sword free from your grip.
“Very well,” you say with a sigh. “In that case, I forfeit, and you win the duel by default. There, that fulfills the prophecy. Would you like a ride home?”
The chosen one blinks with shock. “I-“
“Oh, what am I saying? You’ve come all this way, you must be exhausted. You ought to stay for dinner later. We’re having doom chicken soup of eternal darkness! It’s absolutely to die for.”
The boy looks at the princess quizzically. She assures him it’s just normal chicken soup. You vehemently deny this, saying you’re evil cook of evilness Frederick is supernaturally good at his job, and to refer to the fruits of his labor as “just normal soup” would be an insult to all the work he puts in.
You take the princess dragon-riding, and later that evening during dinner the chosen one breaks down crying. You ask him what’s wrong. He opens up about his confusion. He’d spent his entire journey up on this point dreading the responsibility thrust upon him. He’d barely survived several encounters with monsters and demons and now that he’s here, he’s questioning his entire perspective. After all, he says, you’ve been treating him better than anyone ever did back home and despite the spiky black armor you seem so genuinely kind. He doesn’t know what to do, he confesses.
You reassure him that no one expects anything of him, and that he can stay as long as he’d like, or he could simply go back home in the morning. You won’t stop him. He says he still has to fulfill the other half of the prophecy, freeing the princess from those who would cause her harm. The princess assures him that she is not in any danger where she is, and that if he really wants to fulfill the prophecy he ought to help you overthrow her parents.
The morning after the chosen’s first night in the castle, the princess is kind enough to show him around the evil castle of dread and terror while you have a meeting with your generals in the evil strategy room of underhanded plotting and scheming. The enemy is employing light magic to scorch the farmland near the borders of your kingdom, shriveling crops and burning small villages to the ground, leaving destruction and death in the wake of their recently begun invasion. One of your sneaky scouts of nosiness, Gregory, is too terrified to speak at first of what he’s seen, but you provide him with a blanket and a hot cup of wicked leaf-water of deepest blackness so he can comfortably gather his thoughts and process what he’s witnessed. He wraps his tail around his leg nervously, clasping his clawed hands as he tries to form the words.
“Th-the enemy, my lord. Th-they’re using h-healing magic as a t-torture method! I-I was the only one of my scouting party to escape capture, a-and I’m ashamed to say I couldn’t bare to observe for long before it was t-t-too much. I-I panicked, your evilness! The way they made their skin boil and swell with cancerous growths a-and…oh dark gods below, the bones, the protruding bones!”
Your hand rests on the lower right side of your rib cage, where you can still feel the stumps of the bones that grew outward and pierced through your flesh all those years ago. You know from experience what those scouts must be going through, and though you’d never show it in front of your subjects, you’re terrified.
As he finishes his tale, Gregory breaks down into sobs, begging for forgiveness from his captured comrades under his breath. You gently tell him it’s alright, that there was nothing he could have done. At least by running away he ensures that this information got back to you. You make a vow to him that the crimes of the enemy will not go unpunished. Once Gregory has been led out of the room, the door closing behind him, you lean back into your spiky black chair at the head of the map table and rub your temples. You ask Jerry if that was the last of the scouts who returned today. He says yes, that was the last one. You thank the gods below, and begin planning a counterattack on the borders, as well as a rescue operation for the captured scouts. You have faith in their capacity to resist revealing valuable information to the enemy, but with torture methods like that…
You push the thought out of your mind for the time being. You have faith in your evil minions, and the amount of subtle manipulation of impressionable children you have to do per day has recently doubled. Over the next few weeks, you start teaching the chosen one how to properly wield a sword. He’s a quick learner, and though you’re still much more experienced and can effortlessly defeat him in a serious match, you know from experience that minions tend to learn better from positive reinforcement, so you’re sure to point out what he’s doing well just as often as you criticize him. The princess sits in on many of your practice sessions with the chosen one, and though she shows no interest in wielding a sword herself, she does pay enough attention to be able to shout out advice to him mid-sparring match, which the chosen one says he doesn’t mind. The two of them were fast friends from the start, and having lived together for almost a month now, they’ve become quite close. Good, you think, rubbing your hands together menacingly. Strong bonds of trust between your minions makes them more powerful. Together with the two of them, you will conquer the enemy kingdom and expand your empire in all its dark glory.
“Maximush?”
“Don’t talk with your mouth full, Ethan. You’ll choke.” The princess chides.
The chosen one takes a moment to swallow his food. The three of you are having a picnic atop the all-seeing watchtower of evil oversight, enjoying the view of your land from high up.
“Maximus?”
“Yes, Ethan?”
“Everyone’s the hero of their own story, right?”
“In a manner of speaking.”
“So why do you go out of your way to make yourself seem evil and scary? Don’t you think you’re on the side of good?”
You take a pause to think how to answer. “Oh, well, plenty of reasons, not the least of which being that it’s amusing coming up with overly complicated titles for all the more mundane aspects of my life. But I suppose it’s just that I decided that I didn’t need to prove myself to people who judge based on superficial things like appearances.”
The children watch you intently as you take a bite of your Dark Ham Sandwich of Broken Dreams. It seems they want you to elaborate. You swallow the bite, then continue.
“In my youth, I was feared and hated just by nature of the type of magic I used. Dark magic, they called it. It perplexed me, the superficial reasons for which they would argue that my magic was inherently immoral. Why was necromancy considered evil? Those people are dead, it’s not like they need their bones for anything anymore. Why do we have all these peasants barely getting by, working themselves to the bone in the hot sun, when we could re-purpose the skeletons of the dead and triple our crop output? And sure, demons don’t tend to be beautiful by conventional standards, but I’ve found that they’re fair to a fault, they follow rules to the letter, they have a strong sense of justice, and they enjoy games quite a bit. It seemed to me that they’d make stellar lawyers and government officials. They punish wicked souls in the underworld, yes, but the key word is wicked! I never understood why people frowned upon creating contracts with them. So, eventually, I suppose I gave up trying to fight their perception of me and embraced it instead. I decided I wouldn’t just use dark magic, I’d be a dark lord, king of demons and commander of an army of the undead! I began reanimating a lot of corpses to help me build my empire, had them work at night instead of in the day so they wouldn’t burn to ash in the sun. I recruited other black magi and taught them what I knew about efficient use of undead for manual labor. I started making contracts with hordes of demons, offering them reasonable pay and homes of their own if they’d come live and work in my empire. 200 years I spent building a nation from the ground up. Another perk of dark magic is that it tends to extend your lifespan. With necromancy, dead tissue can be reanimated, and after playing games with demons for fun for about 20 years you get good enough at it to be able to beat the grim reaper in a wager for your life with relative ease. Not that my dozens of active demonic contracts don’t make me functionally immortal in and of themselves. If I die, my contracts become void and all my demonic servants go back to hell, and I’m told they’d rather stay here for as long as possible if they can help it. No stars in the underworld.”
The children stare at you for a moment.
“Two hundred years?!” The princess exclaims.
“Is that why you never take that helmet off? Is it just a skull underneath?” The chosen one asks.
You laugh. You inform the chosen that no, it isn’t a skull, just rather grotesque. You promise to show them both once they’ve finished eating and you’re out of the sun. You burn rather easily in the day.
Later that night, you’re tucking the small princess into bed when she asks you something. She says she was always told back home that light was good magic and dark was bad, but all she’s ever seen light magic used for was to hide any visible bruises before she could make a public appearance, and from what she’s seen, dark magic seems to be the good magic. You pass her her stuffed animal and tell her that in truth there’s no good or bad magic. Magic is a tool, and any type of magic can be used for great good, or great evil. There’s no bad magic. Just bad people. As you blow out the candle and walk out of the princess’s chambers, she calls after you.
“Maximus?”
You pause in the doorway.
“I don’t think your face was that gross.”
“Yes, well I’m sure it was mere coincidence that Ethan threw up his lunch after seeing it. Goodnight, Penelope. Sleep well.”
Yet another post that reads like four shakespeare characters who come out in the middle of the play to talk about something completely unrelated for comic relief
I’m sorry but the THOUGHT that has been put into this, I actually CAN’T—
The fact that nearly every line is so metrically considered- near perfect iambic pentameter witb the occasional trochee for emphasis, but usually retaining a strong sense of rhythm nonetheless. And then the king comes in at the end, so wound in his disbelief that his response is reduced to prose.
And the even better thing about this is how easy it would have been to structure the king’s line into iambic pentameter: it is effectively already said as such because of the way wizardlyghost has phrased it, yet they haven’t!! They did not break the line, rendering what, by all typically of both Shakespearean canon and other periods context should be the character with the most command and authority in the whole play. If there was ever a more effective way to convey a genuine “what the fuck??”, I know of it not.
But it gets better!! Shakespeare regularly uses meter in order to represent class divide; the nobility usually speak in iambic pentameter, save for a few particularly chosen moments (e.g. Lady Macbeth’s descent into madness, Othello’s realisation of Desdemona’s “betrayal”) or just lines where Shakespeare needs to suggest high emotion or when a character is lost in thought. Supernatural characters like the fairies in A Midsummer Night’s Dream and the Witches in Macbeth usually speak in trochaic tetrameter, an inversion of iambic pentameter. Lower class characters, particularly those used for comic relief (usually under the influence of alcohol), speak with no structure at all: their language is plain prose. Therefore, if this is a conversation between these types of characters, as the prompt from silvergirachi suggests, why the hell are the characters speaking so eloquently???
Now, this is Tumblr. It is subsequently logical to assume that this may have merely been a humorous recreation (and a very good one at that) of the Shakespearean style in a way that is widely recognisable to an audience that may or may not have read a great deal of Shakespeare, which is understandable. However, logic is boring so I’m going to probe further into this to the point where future historians will look to this as an example of overanalysing.
The inherent eloquence of the characters here suggests an unusual subversion of the roles typically assumed in Shakespearean comedy. This could be interpreted along two major avenues: firstly, that the rhetoric displayed by the speakers is fundamentally representative of how truth can be expected even from the most seemingly pointless or ludicrous discussions. Furthermore, it could suggest that it matters not how well constructed your speeches are: if you talk bullshit, it’s going to sound that way despite your attempts to hide it.
This is similar but not identical to the second avenue of interpretation: there is the implication that the noblemen in the play are in fact the comic relief characters, therefore implying that the “common people” of the play are the ones whose influence, though not expressed in such a highly spoken manner, makes a lot more sense than whatever the hell this is. If this was a real Shakespeare play, I would call it a subtle exploration into the innate corruption of the rich and powerful. Well done, op.
Now, I doubt any of this is actually grounded analysis in any way, shape or form, but if someone else can take this to the extremes of writing a Shakespearean scene, why can I not analyse it as such? And where else to do so than Tumblr?
You know what, I’m going to tell you guys a story.
In my Sociology class a few semesters ago, our prof had us break off into groups and, much to our naive joy, began distributing Monopoly boards! We had no idea what was going on but yay! Games! Of course, once our group, and a number of others, got the board we began to work at setting up and distributing the money…
until suddenly our prof told us to put the money down and pick up the dice.
“Roll the dice and sort yourselves from highest to lowest,” our teacher commanded. "Now, the highest number is the upper class. The next one is upper middle class. The next two or three are middle class. The last person is in poverty.“
Well, as the person who rolled a two this was startling and not wholly welcome news.
From that point the game changed entirely. We had to hand out the money so that the “upper class” had this fucking mountain, and then less for upper middle, even less for middle, and I didn’t get any triple digit bills. We would all collect different amounts from passing go as well.
The biggest change though? Going to jail. Upper class didn’t. Period. Upper middle class could go but they only had to stay for one turn or they could immediately pay their way out. Middle class had some pretty easy guidelines for when they could pay to get out. As lower class, it was really easy for me to wind up in jail and REALLY hard to get out. But since I was working with so little money when everyone else had so much I was in jail all the time because there was no “game over”. If I couldn’t pay I had to go to jail for a certain period of time. I had to take out loans with interest I could never pay back just to get out only to wind up back in it again, rolling dice turn after turn hoping to be able to get out.
It was simultaneously the most enlightening and most awful game I had ever played. I was bored and frustrated and a little terrified about it all. And it wasn’t only me. I would never win, I sort of accepted this, but it was amazing how the middle classes reacted as well. They were stressed. Because they were always that close to either being able to one-up the upper class or from crashing into poverty with me. They had to fight constantly just to stay in the middle.
(I should also mention that the upper class player in one group felt so bad for the lower income players that they ended up overhauling their entire game and creating a “socialist” society instead. I’m not sure how our teacher felt about that one.)
Worth stressing this is entirely in the spirit of the original designer’s aims for Monopoly.
Monopoly’s original form of The Landlord Game which was explicitly designed to teach people about the unfairness of rent systems. To quote from the wikipedia entry, just as it’s the easiest source to hand…
Magie designed the game to be a “practical demonstration of the present system of land grabbing with all its usual outcomes and consequences”.[2] She based the game on the economic principles of Georgism, a system proposed byHenry George, with the object of demonstrating how rents enrich property owners and impoverish tenants. She knew that some people could find it hard to understand why this happened and what might be done about it, and she thought that if Georgist ideas were put into the concrete form of a game, they might be easier to demonstrate.
When the usual suspects start making “don’t bring politics into games” noises, I roll my eyes pretty hard. They have no idea of the history of the form.
All the letters, large and small case. Quartz veins in stone.
Molly Montgomery collects natural unedited rocks on the beach creating an alphabet that took years.
Follow us on Telegram : The Fabulous Weird Trotters
“Tumblr doesn’t have an algorithm” actually it does. It just gives us the ability to use the website without it, and we’ve all decided to use it that way and only that way because engagement algorithms suck.
already got a blazed marvel post. the adpocalypse is closer than we think so heres your daily PSA
don't interact with corporate tumblr accounts
yes even to dunk on them. i don't care if you have the sickest burn of the century lined up, don't even give them the time of day
the eventual and inevitable fall of twitter marks a change in the advertising industry, and tumblr is unclaimed territory. if we want tumblr to remain the social media bastion it has become, it needs to remain as unappealing to corporations as possible. do not engage. in a marketing strategist's eyes, any kind of attention is good attention. don't "silence, brand" them. don't kungpowpenis them. don't send them hate anons. don't hate-follow them. corporate tumblrs are not a single entity and they will not be harassed off this site. we only have a shot at repelling them because of tumblr's lack of an algorithm. so turn off recommended posts on your dashboard, put it chronological order, and install an adblocker. if you don't seek out these blazed posts and actively ignore them when they happen upon you, the corporations will starve. in this case, the best kind of protest is a silent one
Just saying: Tumblr loses several million of dollars per month. It has been losing millions of dollars per month for ... years. We are not even close of changing that and make this site profitable yet.
And if that doesn't change, you may not believe it, but tumblr will close. Back in 2019, if Automattic hasn't bought it, I'm pretty convinced Verizon would have closed before the end of the year. This time, once Automattic says "we can't keep losing millions per month on this"... I don't think there will be anyone else willing to buy this hellsite, even for a single dollar.
Personally, I would prefer Tumblr to be paid by its own users and not being reliant on advertising. I work here, I could have almost everything for free, but I pay my own blazed posts and crab gifts because of this. But we are FAR from getting enough income from people subscribing, blazing or buying gifts. FAR.
And we are not talking about Facebook-like greed here, "Tumblr wants to squeeze us to make even more money!!!". We are talking about Automattic keeping Tumblr alive for three years already, losing millions and even if doing it costs a significant percentage of the income of the company. And no company would let something like that happens forever.
So if you like tumblr, if you enjoy this boiling cauldron of feral goblins, boicot advertisement if you want, but then toss a coin to your tumblr each month.
And it's ok if you can't, but then please, let people, or companies, blaze their posts in peace. If they bother you so much, just install an ad blocker.
But if you are actively trying to make advertisers to flee Tumblr, or bullying people who blaze posts, you are actively working towards the closing of this site. So why don't you just move your shit to TikTok or wherever and stop trying to ruin this place for the rest of us?
Oh I have looked through the notes and holy fuck, how does some people even function in the outside world?
There are several variations of "we have to keep this site unprofitable!!". And holy shit. Christ on a stake. Forgive my French, but me cago en la puta hostia como se puede ser tan corto.
Repeat with me:
You.
Don't.
Keep.
Any.
Site.
Unprofitable.
Because if it's unprofitable,
you don't get to keep it for long.
Full stop.
Do you know why Tumblr has stayed around for so long while being unprofitable??
Because it had been run by FOUR DIFFERENT COMPANIES IN THE LAST TEN YEARS.
So each one of those companies tried to make it profitable for two, three years and failed. And at that point, they just sold it to someone else to try.
The last time, Verizon sold it to Automattic for the business equivalent of a jar of peanut butter and a half-full cola bottle. Because they were going to close it anyway, so better to get that than nothing. And you know why Automattic could get it for cheap? Because. No. One. Else. Offered. Anything. Verizon announced very publicly they were trying to sell it and they got one (1) offer. Because purchasing Tumblr means you are purchasing a thing that puts you several million in debt PER MONTH.
So can you picture, can you imagine, what it will happen if the current owners decide that they can't keep having this thing that costs them so much money per month to maintain?? It has been owned by Automattic for three years already, longer than what it was owned by Yahoo or Verizon. Can you imagine what it would happen if they decide to stop losing money on this thing??
No, there won't be any new owner.
And no, there won't be any fucking tumblr anymore.
I see your point. The problem is we've seen every single social media site turn into an algorithmic hellscape once they started having major advertisers like this. How can we be confident Tumblr won't do the same? How can we be confident that Tumblr won't get dollar signs in their eyes with these brands escaping Twitter, and start changing the site to accommodate them? We've heard promises before from other social media platforms that things will get 'better' once the money comes in, and we've been betrayed by algorithms and absolutely heinous business practices.
Because the presence of big brands or not is not the symptom of being an algorithmic hellscape or not. Data collection is.
Big brands were advertising on the internet way before the hyper focused ads and data mining became The Way of paying for internet services.
If tumblr starts asking you to fill a profile with your personal info, ask you to connect your contacts, etc, that's the symptom of a turn towards an algorithmic advertising business model. But Tumblr could have done that at any point in the last 10 years and become a money-making machine like the other major social networks. And it didn't happen, for a reason: neither the current management nor the past one wanted to do that and they always have been trying to make Tumblr the platform that manages to succeed while respecting its user's privacy.
You know, I personally don't care about Marvel, but I have gotten blazed posts by Tor books and I was delighted. And if you think about it, marvel blazing its posts is EXACTLY what we want to happen all over the internet. Being realistic, we are not going to make this site to be 100% user funded for a long while, so ads are inevitable. That being the case, what's a better option than the brands sending their ads to everyone, without any segmentation, paying for N impressions and that's it. That was how internet ads were before Google and Facebook became the big brother and started selling our info to advertisers so they could convince your uncle to embrace fascism.
And if Tumblr manages to get to profitability with a mix of "old school ads" and users paying for stuff, we will be demonstrating that there is another way to make a social platform sustainable without it being a facade for a user-data mining gig. But if we boycott every single other way to make money here, not only we would kill Tumblr, but we will also make it the case study proving that privacy invasion and data selling is the one and only way to make money with any social network.
This is another important bit to understand: I would love tumblr to be funded by user donations, like ao3. The problem is... tumblr is not ao3. Let's left aside the "Tumblr is owned by a for-profit corporation" bit (Actually, it wouldn't be the first time that Automattic just open-source a project and donate it to its community to be maintained collectively), the problem is the type of platform both things are. Ao3 stores only text (I'm not an ao3 user, so please someone correct me if I'm wrong), but Tumblr ... well, doesn't.
To give you an example of what I mean: Based on its text limits, a single Tumblr post could contain the entire Lord of the Rings trilogy (well, you would probably need to edit it to be strategic with the paragraph breaks, but character-count-wise it could fit). And yet, that humongous post (suck that, colors of the sky!) would take about 1/20th of the space and bandwidth that any regular gifset post takes already. And it doesn't need transcoding of the images (so more powerful servers can do the job) nor worldwide data centers (you don't notice much if you are downloading 4mb of text from the opposite side of the planet... but you will if you are downloading 50mb of gifs).
Long story short, the numbers the AO3 team publishes are super impressive. Also, their yearly donations wouldn't pay for a single month of Tumblr server costs (without even thinking about paying staff). So yeah, it would be lovely to have an ao3 situation, I agree. But it's not even close to being a realistic hope :S
I encourage folks to read the reblog chain. Because it raises some very real points that im going to TLDR since that is a lot of text (i still recommend reading the whole thing)
tumblr is a for-profit site. at some point, if it doesn't make money, it WILL get shut down
since a lot of you cannot or will not pay for subscription (not saying that is not valid! just that it's not happening) the money has to come from somewhere else therefore,
(but really 2.a) unless you don't want tumblr turned into an algorithmic hellscape, leaving brands alone* is the price you pay.
Please note im saying leave them ALONE that means you do not need to engage with them! which is actually consistent with OP's post! You can just ignore them (seriously installing firefox with ublock origin and maybe xKit if you're feeling fancy I have never seen an ad on this site unless a mutual posted a screenshot. Never. Not one)
imo there is a big difference between a site "being profitable" and a site "turning its users into the product" and the latter is MUCH WORSE.
tumblr needs to remain ungovernable, but it (unfortunately) cannot remain unprofitable, because then it will die.
