i survived SuperWhoLock...barely

cal. she/her. just an awkward old being awkward and old

[story-addict]

THE PROMPT IS: POWER COUPLE

“You saved my life in the snow. Now, let me save your honor in the sun.” PURSUIT OF JADE (2026) | marriage of convenience

"You are my wife. In the Wei house, your word is my command, and my sword is your shield. Let no man forget it." PRISONER OF BEAUTY (2025) | arranged political marriage, enemies to lovers

“I love the moon, yet the moon doesn't know.” “Now, the moon belongs to you.” LEGEND OF THE FEMALE GENERAL (2025) | gender bender

"I believe in destined fate. We’d be just like before, meeting, falling in love, staying together, standing by each other and never parting again." FATED HEARTS (2025) | enemies to lovers

“We spent thirty years suspecting each other, only to find out in the end that the person I hated most was the only one who truly knew me.” THE PRINCESS ROYAL (2024) | time travel/rebirth, second chance, enemies to lovers

"How. Are. You?" "Fine. Thank you. And you?" HOW DARE YOU!? (2026) | transmigration, fake relationship

"Only now do I realize you are more important to me than I thought." LOVE IN THE CLOUDS (2025) | fake relationship, gender bender

"Fate is not unchangeable nor is it insurmountable. This time I will gain the strength to topple mountains. I will take control of my destiny." BLOSSOM (2024) | time travel/rebirth

[kaity--did]

So sick of the "protect the children" rhetoric literally kids are receptive to anything

For example:

Penny: But do daddies carry babies?

Me: Well, some daddies can decide to carry and have babies. You usually see mommies do that but some daddies can, and that's not really any of our business.

Penny: cause it's their body? And they get to decide?

Husband: yes! Like in our family mommy carried you and I went and got soft pretzels whenever mommy wanted

Penny: oh I love pretzels. And I've decided to be a which mermaid

That's it that was the whole discussion

[radicalideal]

It all comes down to children as property instead of people, doesn’t it? They’re trying to protect their kids from being damaged not in the sense of “afraid and confused”, but in the sense of “my property disagrees with me and might be less willing to submit”.

[kaity--did]

I've never thought of it that way but you're so right! Never even occurred to me because I do in fact see my child for what she is, a human being with thoughts and feelings and opinions

[byjove]

I hate how people call it a ‘gender war’ like gender-based violence doesn’t primarily go in one direction and there aren’t incels with podcasts saying that the 19th Amendment should be overturned. There has never been a Gamergate for women, there has yet to be a female Elliot Rodger. This is not a war. Women are occasionally lobbing unfriendly comments at men and men are detonating nuclear bombs on them. And there is a definite reason that women today are outspoken about being disillusioned by and disgusted with their male peers and committed to decentering men in their lives and it isn’t because all these women are radical misandrists who do not see men as human. Gender war makes it seem like a petty squabble with two offensives and not women realizing that many of their male peers genuinely hate them.

*TERFs, I sincerely hope you shit yourself in a public place, go fuck yourself and do not touch my post. This post is not for you.

[byjove]

The early 2010s millennial hope of a better more progressive future contrasted with the sharp traditionalist alt-right U-turn that so many Gen Z and millennial men went down scarred generations of women.

[thenightling]

[eisenkrahe]

I just got to Mars and I’m about to start a thriving black market enterprise.

[atomictourists]

I’m either a himbo British Navy captain or a kinda faggy naturalist/physician. Yes I watched Master and Commander again.

[babbleismysuperpower]

the last thing i watched was cloud atlas which has several main characters so i have lots of professional options. (including “sad gay composer” because boy howdy has ben whishaw ever found his niche.)

[cappuccinoandglitter]

Fake psychic detective. I will fail immediately.

[peppermintquartz]

I’m either noping the fuck outta spooky town or being eaten/murdered by some creepy beastie. Good times 👍🏼

[whatamievendoinghere-imsoold]

I'm hunting yao across the mortal world and the wilderness while surrounded by a beautiful polycule (ok, but how does HMH have chemistry with almost every actor/actress he works with, even the ones who aren't meant to be romantic) and the three teens (yes, I know technically speaking one is an ancient mountain god but he looks and acts like a teenager) they've somehow adopted.

[herpsandbirds]

[anarchomikeism]

[ancaporado]

[wageronvoluntaryism]

Never forget what they took from us.

[wageronvoluntaryism]

For those asking how it compares today

[cheese-sample-official]

and also

[bmxpotato]

Mid-year 2026 update (this is without tax):

[slightlyirritable]

Remember this the next time someone argues that raising the minimum wage will raise prices

[bethanyactually]

to be clear, the U.S. federal minimum wage in 1999 was $5.15/hour, so a worker who made the minimum wage could buy the items on that receipt with 41 minutes of work.

in 2026, the federal minumum wage is $7.25, so a worker who makes minimum wage would have to work 95 minutes--more than twice as long--to buy those same items.

[copperbooms]

when did tumblr collectively decide not to use punctuation like when did this happen why is this a thing

[rodimuss]

it just looks so smooth I mean look at this sentence flow like a jungle river

[prismatic-bell]

ACTUALLY

This is really exciting, linguistically speaking.

Because it’s not true that Tumblr never uses punctuation. But it is true that lack of punctuation has become, itself, a form of punctuation. On Tumblr the lack of punctuation in multisentence-long posts creates the function of rhetorical speech, or speech that is not intended to have an answer, usually in the form of a question. Consider the following two potential posts. Each individual line should be taken as a post:

ugh is there any particular reason people at work have to take these massive handfuls of sauce packets they know they’re not going to use like god put that back we have to pay for that stuff

Ugh. Is there any particular reason people at work have to take these massive handfuls of sauce packets they know they’re not going to use? Like god, put that back. We have to pay for that stuff.

In your head, those two potential posts sound totally different. In the first one I’m ranting about work, and this requires no answer. The second may actually engage you to give an answer about hoarding sauce packets. And if you answer the first post, you will likely do so in the same style. 

Here’s what makes this exciting: the English language has no actual punctuation for rhetorical speech–that is, there are no special marks that specifically indicate “this speech is in the abstract, and requires no answer.” Not only that, it never has. The first written record of English (actually proto-English, predating even Old English) dates to the 400s CE, so we’re talking about 1600 years of having absolutely no marker whatsoever for rhetorical speech.

A group of teens and young adults on a blogging website literally reshaped a deficit a millennium and a half old in our language to fit their language needs. More! This group has agreed on a more or less universal standard for these new rules, which fits the definition of “language.” Which is to say Tumblr English is its own actual, real, separate dialect of the English language, and because it is spoken by people worldwide who have introduced concepts from their own languages into it, it may qualify as a written form of pidgin. 

Tumblr English should literally be treated as its own language, because it does not follow the rules of any form of formal written English, and yet it does have its own consistent internal rules. If you don’t think that’s cool as fuck then I don’t even know what to tell you.

[sussexbound]

i love this post

[willowgrovecreates]

This is super cool! Also idk if this has any relevance whatsoever but if you wanna have an argument inside one tag you cannot have commas in it so that’s a real existing constraint that has forced tumblrites to construct commaless sentences and perhaps this has helped in adopting the custom into posts as well ok I have no idea if this is what’s happened just I think it’s a reasonable assumption there might be a connection

[sanerontheinside]

^this.

The tags are absolutely a factor. You want someone to take a breath in the middle of a sentence, you start a new tag. You want to have, as seen here, this removable piece between commas (does it have a name?) - you have 5 tags in this sentence alone. And sometimes you just

pause in the middle of a sentence…

and let your voice

trail away

[obaewankenope]

look at all you precious brilliant nerds nerding about language you make me so fucking happy omg

language is this constantly evolving thing tbh, it doesn’t remain the same unless it’s dead and the people who used it gone so seeing the evolution of the language used on tumblr is literally so fucking amazing i want to cry with joy at it

because we also add in words from other languages, or make entirely new words up as additional terms to denote something (see ‘tol’ and ‘smol’ in relation to ‘tall’ and ‘small’) and this is constant. we are doing this daily without any sort of breathing space because there’s millions of us on this hellsite and we are constantly talking and so the language changes day-by-day until we have general, universal rules for what to do in a post, what to add in our tags, how to add it, why we add it, what we mean by it

we’ve created a language in the same way our ancestors all did: by building on the ones that came before and changing them to suit our needs and our system

and that’s fucking awesome okay

awesome

[adora-korra]

I love this so much and language is so great and I’ve noticed the lack of punctuation thing recently, even on twitter, and used it for like a specific kind of rhetorical effect. idk it’s so fun I fucking love linguistics and the evolution of language

[elenorasweet]

I also loved that the following one-word responses all sound drastically different out loud and showcase different reactions:

What?

What.

what

[solitarelee]

Oh hey! This is the post that caused me to write a thesis. Yall know this post is cited in like five different academic papers that I found while researching for it? @prismatic-bell is a username I see screenshots of in academia these days. P sure they’re in the tumblr book too. Wild. 

[prismatic-bell]

I’m sorry, I WHAT?!

[ishimarukiyotaka]

literally the worst way of ending a series is “all the survivors are happily straight married with tons and tons of babies!” 

[ishimarukiyotaka]

people still getting mad at this post i made in 2014 so I will add here. in 2026. that the point of this post isn’t “happy endings bad” its when the story’s only way to imagine a happy ending is a heterosexual nuclear family for everyone.

[thestuffedalligator]

The urban fantasy show I actually want to see is a hospital drama with a dedicated wing for supernatural illnesses.

Vampirism. Lycanthropy. Cheap spells gone wrong. A woman brought in for her prenatal has to be told her baby is a lindworm. Someone is literally being followed by the anthropomorphic personification of the Black Death.

Someone somewhere out there is having their perception of the world irreparably shattered by the knowledge that magic is real, and at the other side is a team of doctors who have to roll their eyes and pull out Grimm’s Complete Fairy Tales because some high school kid tried to go Carrie with a cheap spellbook and turn all the kids at prom into frogs, and the doctors have to wrangle a couple dozen teenagers into admitting if they have a true love who can break the spell.

[sindri42]

I want the hospital director to be some dark entity that feeds on human misery but figured out that if you successfully treat the source of the misery then instead of hunting you down as an abomination the humans start bringing more miserable people to your house en masse and things kinda got out of hand from there.

[omicronus-1326]

Grimm's Anatomy

[byjove]

Donald Trump desperately trying to initiate the Red Scare 2 but no one giving a fuck is hilarious to me. The GOP has already villainized and fearmongered about immigrants, transgender people, DEI hires, ANTIFA, etc. and introducing a new supervillain hiding amongst us just isn’t working. I wish there was a communism WAS the greatest threat to America.

[byjove]

During yesterday’s speech he said something to the tune of “The communists want to seize your house and give it to your neighbor.” which shows how out of touch he is, how advanced his dementia is and how the Red Scare tactics of the 1950s are not applicable to the 2020s because no one owns their house anymore and most of us would prefer our house being owned by our neighbor instead of our landlord.

[byjove]

The Red Scare tactics of the 1950s are sooooooooo outdated in today’s world. Saying shit like “Under communism, the government will assign you a job and you will not get to pick!” would make 85% of my generation be like “That sounds awesome, I’m so sick of AI job interviews, just got rejected for the job I applied for shoveling elephant shit at the zoo.”

[byjove]

suspicious…

[byjove]

there are apparently a lot of mushrooms that are poisonous to some people and edible for others. unlike food allergies, it’s not an allergic immune reaction, it’s mushroom poisoning but only for some people

[byjove]

edibility is FAFO

[ashbelero]

Been talking to a girl who works at the bookstore cafe for a while (not flirting… I think?) about the works of Chuck Tingle. I was excited to tell her about the book tour last month and showed her this pic.

Her: Is he… wait, is that him?

Me: Yeah!

Her: Is he wearing a costume? What’s that on his head?

Me: That’s his… have you never seen a photo of him?

Her: No… wait, does he usually wear that?

Yes. Yes he does.

[byjove]

I hate Joe Exotic but this exchange reset my brain

[byjove]

me when I’m baffled by the inefficiency and callousness of everything and then I remember it’s all corrupt girl

[three-crows-in-a-suit-of-armor]

tfw you have to read the entirety of The Anthropocene Reviewed by John Green for AP Literature & Composition and school starts the day after tomorrow

[sizzlingsandwichperfection-blog]

don't worry i can summarize it for you: Humans are worth the trouble.

[depsidase]

[broken-horn-of-equius]

[therantingsocialscientist]

Some more context:

People Are Calling Meta Ray-Bans "Pervert Glasses"

On Bluesky, users quickly embraced the term "pervert glasses" to refer to Meta's Ray Ban smart glasses, following a shocking investigation.

The Backlash Is So Strong That People With "Pervert Glasses" Are Afraid to Use Them in Public

Meta's camera-equipped "AI Glasses" are so divisive that some adopters are reportedly leaving their expensive smart glasses at home.

[neovagina-penisis-evangelion]

Okay ❤️ Yay ❤️

[averagefairy]

I still love this website so much because it feels like the last connection we have to an internet that doesn’t exist anymore like I can come on here and scroll through posts that are literally just funny or beautiful or interesting with no intention to sell me something or influence me we are all just here for a laugh. Nothing is just for laughs anymore EXCEPT tumblr dot com

[iminato]

Reblog if you have mourned the death of a fictional character.

[ianoshea]

If you do not reblog this you are in fact lying.