So Leafy

just another blog of stuff somebody likes

[echo-at-the-pond]

[notsosecret-transgirl]

[ilthit]

[inthesensethat-deactivated20240]

[obvolution]

[caats]

[straycatj]

It seems the psychological coercion of that black menace to me...

[gothgrr666]

IG : @emperorofmischief

[drunkenskunk]

[empress-of-dark2005]

[evergreen-femme]

[themauvesoul]

Hate diet culture so much bitches will b like “don’t eat processed carbs they’re so bad for you” like and??? So what?? God did not give us grain and stone to grind it with for no reason. Bread is inevitable. Bread is food for the heart and the soul. U think I’m gonna give that up in pursuit of instagram fitness?? U think I’m gonna deny myself the simple pleasure of toast with jam so I can endlessly chase an ever-shifting standard of beauty that ultimately means nothing? In 20 years I will no longer be beautiful and in 60 my body will be vacant food for other, smaller creatures. But the taste of fresh bread? Of homemade donuts and still-warm pie? I will carry the taste on my tongue into whatever follows this life. So like. Stop telling me I should diet lmao. I’m not abt to martyr myself just to get a man to look at me.

[mockiatoh]

Op genuinely thank you for this

[rylandsgrace]

This is cinema actually

[cannibalchicken]

he was neither impressed nor offended

[ellynneversweet]

He was whelmed.

[banrionceallach]

You know, that Mythbusters post legitimately changed my life. Before seeing it, I had exponentially more guilt and stress about not being able to sleep, which of course, further exacerbated my inability to sleep.

Now, every time I wake up about three am, knowing I have to get up at 6.45, instead of stressing and panicking about how my day is going to be sleep deprived and miserable, I just tell myself 'Time to activate Mythbusters Protocol' and lie there with my eyes closed safe in the knowledge that I am measurably reducing later feelings of exhaustion.

And when this happens, about 70% of the time the reduction of guilt and stress means I actually do fall back asleep, so all in all instead of getting only three or four hours sleep, I get five to six and a half.

Which y'know, major improvement in health and energy.

[resiliencewithin]

I did some research into rest at the behest of my therapist and this is research backed. Even closing your eyes (not even napping) can be restorative. Some of the research even suggested that it was more restorative than actual napping.

So I reframed bedtime as ‘going to rest’ over ‘going to sleep.’ Helped me in the same way as op.

[fandomsandfeminism]

Broke:

Belle has Stockholm syndrome because she falls in love with the Beast, her kidnapper.

Woke:

Stockholm syndrome was coined to slander a woman who had been in a hostage situation but openly criticized the poor police response which recklessly put her in more danger and escalated the violence. She was then belittled and discredited publically by the police for this.

So. Yeah. Maybe Belle does have Stockholm syndrome actually.

[reallysaltygarden]

If anyone is curious here is the wikipedia section describing this.

[ID: Gif image from Disney's Beauty and the Beast with Gaston leading a large group of villagers down the road holding a torch. The atmosphere is dark.

Wikipedia screenshot containing the following:

According to accounts by Kristin Enmark, one of the hostages, the police however was acting incompetently, with little care for the hostages' safety, which forced the hostages to negotiate for their life and release with the robbers on their own. In the process the hostages saw the robbers behaving more rationally than police negotiators and therefore developed a deep distrust towards the latter. Enmark had criticized Bejerot specifically for endangering their lives by behaving aggressively and agitating the captors. She had criticized the police for pointing guns at the convicts while the hostages were in the line of fire and she had told news outlets that one of the captors tried to protect the hostages from being caught in the crossfire. She was also critical of prime minister Olof Palme, as she had negotiated with the captors for freedom, but the prime minister told her that she would have to content herself to die at her post rather than give in to the captors' demands. Ultimately, Enmark explained she was more afraid of the police whose attitude seemed to be a much larger, direct threat to her life than the robbers.]

Hope the ID helps, it's my first time writing one.

[problematic-faves-appreciation]

Excerpts from “See What You Made Me Do: The Dangers of Domestic Abuse That We Ignore, Explain Away, or Refuse to See” by Jess Hill

Here are some other facts you should know about Nils Bejerot: He had a major influence (this involved founding the "Swedish National Association for a Drug-free Society") on Sweden's zero-tolerance approach to drug use.

And he wrote "Barn, Serier, Samhälle" (Children, Comics, Society), basically the Swedish version of "Seduction of the Innocent"; an infamous anti-comics book by Fredric Wertham that led to the Comics Code Authority.

Bejerot described comic books as a "significant mental hygiene and cultural problem that concerns us all."

This is the man who coined the phrase "Stockholm syndrome", guys.

[amygdalae]

Wooooahdude I just found this out but you're heirloom tomatoes actually. Did you know this

[amygdalae]

Because you're so

[twentybrokenipodclassics]

[bloody-monstrous-wolf]

[formlessdemi]

if they want you to eat pussy till your tongue withers in agony then you eat pussy till your tongue withers in agony

[official-pussy-posts]

Official Pussy Post

[afloweroutofstone]

Fun fact about the early Catholic church is that, despite spending generations being persecuted by the Roman empire, it took less than 15 years under Theodosius I to go from “the empire is Catholic now” to “and also every other religion is banned.” You can literally read St. Augustine move from “state religious persecution is unacceptable” to “state religious persecution is cool actually” over his lifetime as Catholicism came to power. I’m sure there’s no broader lessons to be learned there

[medicinemane]

Just gonna keep pointing to the part in Asimov’s auto biography I Asimov, where he talks about antisemitism (cause it’s all really good stuff even all these years later), but I’m once again gonna just share the last 3 paragraphs cause… well you tell me they’re not relevant to this post and relevant all these years after he wrote them:

Even as I write, Jews are immigrating from the former Soviet Union into Israel. They are fleeing their country because they fear religious persecution. But the moment they set foot on Israeli soil, they become Zionist extremists who are merciless toward the Palestinians. They change from persecuted to persecutors in the blink of an eye.

That said, the Jews are not alone in this. If I’m sensitive to this particular problem, it’s because I’m Jewish myself. In fact, this phenomenon is universal. In Roman times, when the first Christians were persecuted, they pleaded for tolerance. But when Christianity prevailed, did tolerance reign? Not on your life. Instead, persecution was soon going on in the opposite direction. Or take the case of the Bulgarians, who demanded freedom from their dictatorial regime, but once they had it used it to aggress against their Turkish minority. Or the people of Azerbaijan, who demanded of the Soviet Union the freedom denied it by the central government, only to immediately attack the Armenian minority.

The Bible teaches that the victims of persecution must in no circumstances become persecutors in their turn: “Do not mistreat an alien or oppress him, for you were aliens in Egypt.”(Exodus 22:21). But who follows this teaching? Personally, whenever I try to spread the word, I get hostile looks and make myself unpopular….

[from-the-coffee-shop-in-edoras]

So the 1990s movie Independence Day was everywhere last week (for obvious reasons), and I was reminded of a particular pet peeve of mine in media: the big disaster epic where thousands or even millions of people die, but that’s not meaningfully acknowledged because we’re so focused on the eventual triumph of Our Heroes.

On one level, I get it. It’s hard to make an exciting, crowd pleasing movie if you stop the momentum at some point to mourn the catastrophic loss of life that goes along with your big action set piece. But honestly, that’s all I’m thinking about anyway when a major population center gets blown up or wave after wave of soldiers get mowed down or whatever. Who were those people? How did the loss of each one change the world in some way? How do you pick up the next day without them all? And that’s something I’ve always thought Tolkien, by contrast, did very well!

No, he doesn’t spend page after page giving us the backstory on every rank and file soldier to die at the Pelennor Fields, for example, but he does acknowledge that the victory was every bit as tragic as it was triumphant. He takes the time to give us the names of both captains and nobodies who died before we ever got to know them. He shows us there was a real human impact, and by giving us those names, he invites us to think more about them. Who were they really? What were their lives like? Who loved them back home and will miss them when they don’t return? Tolkien engages with that and even sometimes for the enemies, such as the Southron who dies at Sam’s feet in Ithilien.

I’m not necessarily on the same page with the broader culture on this point because a lot of people don’t seem to have this particular hang-up about their media and would (perhaps rightly) view too much of a focus on that kind of thing as extremely depressing, which is not what everyone is looking for in their pop culture diet! But I love and appreciate Tolkien for it anyway. And it’s probably no coincidence that a lot of those Name Only — or very close to it— dead guys are the ones I gravitate to the most easily in my own thoughts and fan fiction.

[ultraviolet-eucatastrophe]

This is an excellent point, and - not to delve too far into authorial intent or inspiration, except that I do think it's important here - Tolkien experienced war and its cost and its senseless, faceless mass violence first hand, and I definitely think that shows in every poignant moment like this. It's a story that is about war, and about tragedy and death, but it never ever stops reminding you of life you know?

One instance of this that always stands out for me is actually from the Silmarillion, at the very end of the fall of Númenor, and I had to pull the quote because it is heart-wrenching and beautiful:

"Then suddenly fire burst from the Meneltarma, and there came a mighty wind and a tumult of the earth, and the sky reeled, and the hills slid, and Númenor went down into the sea, with all its children and its wives and its maidens and its ladies proud; and all its gardens and its halls and its towers, its tombs and its riches, and its jewels and its webs and its things painted and carven, and its laughter and its mirth and its music, its wisdom and its lore: they vanished for ever."

Of course, Tolkien was an academic and he was a linguist but that also made him a historian. His work is heavy with the weight of ancient people and the records they did - or did not - leave behind. Here he takes a moment to write a beautiful, lyrical almost-poem, an elegy to the whole lost civilisation of Númenor; not only its death, but also its life, and the lives of all the nameless people who lived there, who were innocent in its fall but inevitably, tragically caught up in its fate.

And that, to me, is why Tolkien's tragedies work so well; the knowledge that these people all had individual lives, that shine brightly through the obscuring clouds of history as he writes it. He knew what kind of thing might survive the broad sweep of history, and what usually doesn't, and what becomes folklore and legend and survives in some form that way. Tolkien's goal was to write myth, but he makes the underlying emotion feel so achingly real.

[stuck-between-wind-and-water]

Splitting is so frustrating

[prokopetz]

Any time somebody argues that you should avoid the use of obvious pop culture references and current slang in prose fiction in order to avoid "dating" the text, I'm reminded that our primary evidence for when several of Shakespeare's plays were written is that their dialogue quotes specific pieces of contemporary popular media, and that there's strong evidence many of the words he's credited by modern authorities with inventing are literally just contemporary youth slang. Like, if it's good enough for Shakespeare it's good enough for me, buddy!

[prokopetz]

(Besides, trying to deliberately cultivate "timelessness" in one's work is a fool's errand because it's a state which any work which survives for long enough achieves without effort. Shakespeare reads as "timeless" to modern audiences not because of anything he did, but because only dedicated students of a specific twenty-year slice of early modern history are able to catch the references. If your work is still being read in four hundred years, the experience will be much the same!)