worms in my brain 🪱🪶

22 ✧ he/they ✧ fanfic author who never writes ✧ multifandom, currently very much into bg3, hollow knight, stormlight archive + my own dnd campaign :) ✧ 18+, minors do not follow

[rosie-dear-rosie]

I love you speculative biology. I love you worldbuilding projects. I love you creature design. I love you fantasy biology. I love you speculative evolution. I love you science fiction.

[caesxr]

‘beyond the scope of this paper’ is a dear friend to me. I Am Not Fucking Talking About That

[eddieintheocean]

Introductions to academic papers will be like "everyone knows that the sea is cold (citation), as well as salty (5 different citations). Things live in there (citation) and the environment is important to that (2 citations)"

[shabbytigers]

How to like everything more

on the skill of enjoyment

ANHEDONIA REMEDIES!

GET YOUR ANHEDONIA REMEDIES HERE!

if you are lost in the rut, i am begging you to read this essay by Sasha Chapin suggesting what, essentially, my take, are potential jump-starts back into living life in real time. like actually experiencing experiences

do it now! don’t lose months, years, or decades! there is a life beyond doomscrolling, and it’s finite (sorry. sorry. i know okay)

[moderndryad3]

Ok I found this genuinely helpful today, having recently been dealing with long-term stress and a creeping amount of anhedonia. There are several brilliant ideas in here, I highly recommend giving it a read.

[batmanisagatewaydrug]

listening to one of my little book podcasts and the girlies are LOSING IT because they read Parable of the Sower and don't know what to make of the #problematic relationship between the teenage protag and a man older than her father. literally out here talking about how it's a weird oversight in a book that's otherwise so brilliant and progressive, like it's some kind of mistake that Butler made. I genuinely like this show and mean no disrespect to the host but some bitches are not cut out for Octavia Butler, that's like the most normal relationship she ever wrote.

[batmanisagatewaydrug]

at risk of being pretentious I've long suspected that a fair number of people who hype Octavia Butler up for being a Black Woman Science Fiction Writer not only not haven't actually read much of her work but would throw up if they did

[batmanisagatewaydrug]

#need to get into her stuff where do I start

HI so glad you asked! I'm a big advocate for starting wherever you want, but I do have notes!

Fledgling and Kindred are Butler's two standalone novels, which can be a great starting point if you don't want to worry about committing to a series. Fledgling is a story about a young amnesiac vampire trying to regain her place within a complicated vampire society after losing her immediate family and memories, and it goes DEEP on the complicated power dynamics between vampires and their harems of human thralls in addition to the nuances of vampire racism. Kindred has a relatively straightforward premise, which is that a Black woman from, presumably, the 1970s begins finding herself teleported backwards in time with no explanation to a slave plantation in the American south, where she navigates an uneasy dynamic with a white slaveholding man who is one of her own ancestors.

her short story collection, Bloodchild, could also be a great place to start to sample Butler's style and interests and see if her work appeals to you. most of the stories in the collection do a great job conveying the career-spanning fascination she had with dissecting and examining different power dynamics, including those between humans and nonhumans.

Parable of the Sower is probably Butler's most well-known work, and follows a teenage girl named Lauren's path to become the leader of a spiritual movement known as Earthseed in the middle of a collapsing America ravaged by climate change in the distant year of... 2024. uh oh gamers! the first book is presented as Lauren's journal, while the sequel combines her journal with the efforts of Lauren's estranged daughter to locate her many years later.

if you want to get into the real freak shit (psychic coercion! alien tentacle sex! horny cult in the desert revolving around werewolves from space!) I'd recommend either the Patternist or Lilith's Brood series. a crucial note about the former is that I strongly recommend reading the books in the chronological order in which the events occur, rather than the order in which they were published. publishing order is Patternmaster, Mind of My Mind, Survivor, Wild Seed, and Clay's Ark, but the most comprehensible reading order is Wild Seed, Mind of My Mind, Clay's Ark, Survivor, and Patternmaster. note that Survivor was disowned by Butler and was never reprinted, so physical copies are hard to find. I read a PDF!

whatever you pick, have fun out there!!

[mrsterlingeverything]

You never recover from being weird in middle school

[important-animal-images]

[fanboy-feminist]

And then immediately going “my dad died of a stroke in 2010” was just. The worst feeling I’ve felt all year.

[featurefilms]

I Saw the TV Glow (2024) dir. Jane Schoenbrun

[circusheart]

cant stop thinking about this this was sooo crazyyyyy

[shakespearenews]

A sheep in the role of Cordelia in “King Lear With Sheep.”Credit” Nick Morris.

Source: ‘King Lear With Sheep.’ Yes, Sheep.

[crabussy]

"live every day like it's your last": scary. weirdly foreboding. not a good thought process if you get anxious easily. stressful. so much pressure that it loops back around to making you do nothing. "live every day like it's your FIRST": everything becomes fascinating. renews the excitement of discovering things for the first time again. makes you feel like exploring stuff. #mywisdom

[shadyparade]

[morrithal]

I love you paladins I love you knights I love you sword and shield brawlers I love you intimate healing I love you warriors with a code I love you unbearable weight of expectations I love you longing for the quiet life you gave up so others may have it I love you fighting to the last breath I love you doing the right thing I love you doing the wrong thing and spending the rest of your days dealing with the consequences I love you hubris I love you god complex I love you plate armor

[anais-mirliaz]

frolicking with mama :)

[mityenka]

when you grew up as a lonely uncool girl it will never stop haunting you by the way. you will meet a cool person at a bar or the train station or at a friend's party and you can wear your most stylish outfit and striking eye makeup and you will swear that they can see through all of the facade and see the lonely terribly insecure teenage girl you used to be who desperately wanted to connect and you will swear that they know that there is like an insurmountable gap between you. this will happen forever

[tref0il]

WHEN ON PERIOD:

do not crash out

your feelings are NOT valid

do not send that text

don't kill yourself. lock in

do not act on negative emotions until at least 2 days have elapsed