"shipping and blorbofication are not inherently at odds with understanding a story's deep themes" and "some people can't grasp the themes of a story because they never learned how to engage with stories outside of the lens of shipping and blorbofication" are two statements that can coexist

Olu's in his cosy era 🍊

earlier this week i made a post about how hartford stage’s 1991 production of falsettos ended with whizzer on the aids memorial quilt. i’ve actually managed to find the clip of the scene itself and it’s beautiful

Image of a text that reads: In conversation with some coworkers, today, one of them said that homeless people should have to work for their meals just like the rest of us.

I said, "Okay, I know a man who is homeless. He'd be happy to work. He's got a business degree. He would be happy to come clean your house, do your yard work, or help you with your filing, walk your dogs, babysit your kids, or just about any office job. What time tomorrow should he come see you?"

They all just looked at me.

I said, "Mind you, he's homeless, so he hasn't showered in a while and the only clothes he has are the ones on his back because he lost all his stuff last week when ge got picked up for vagrancy and they wouldn't let him go back for his bag. It would be a few weeks before what you are paying him is enough to get shelter and such."

And still they stared at me.

I finished, "See? It isn't that easy. He can't get a job because he's homeless with no access to hot water or clean clothes. He can't get access to shelter, hot water or clean clothes without a job. You want him to work for his meals? Give him a hand out of the vicious circle. Stop pretending that all he has to do is get a job."

Unhoused people are not intruders into our communities, they are our communities’ failure to take care of their own.

hey, i've been homeless about three times, depending on what you count as homeless. And there is something else very important that people need to realize.

you know those studies that show that if you don't physically touch a human baby it will die even if it has everything else it needs? And the ones that show that as an adult being ignored by everyone around them can drive a person mad?

When you are homeless, no one ever touches you except in an abusive way, and the only people that don't pointedly ignore you are usually treating you negatively.

Being surrounded by people who treat you like a pariah is like a form of mental torture, and it breaks you down mentally.

It only takes a few weeks of that before you are doing things like having imaginary conversations out out loud. Being homeless will take a person with a normal mental deficiency like high stress or mild depression (you know, things you are likely to feel if you become homeless) and it will tank them all the way down into delusional or dissociative etc in a pretty short amount of time.

(incidentally this is why so many homeless people wind up drug addicts. You do ANYthing to escape your situation, and it's not the physical situation you are trying to escape, it's the mental one)

the point is, when you see a homeless person doing something like screaming at an empty park bench, you don't know if they are homeless because they were already crazy, or if being homeless is the thing that drove them crazy.

Every time i see a discussion about homelessness that asks what to do about the mentally ill people on the streets, i never see this point addressed, and it's an important one.

Either way, they need help. You can't just say something like "they should have to work for their dinner"... often that's not even really relevant to the situation. If you help them regain their sanity and stability enough, yeah, a lot of homeless people would actually prefer to work for what they have, be a normal person and live a normal life, but behaving "normal" just isn't possible for most of them in their current state.

reblog to give the person you reblogged this from a fucking break

Some fanart of this ancient figurine! Also got commissioned to draw her hanging out with a friend!

just made the best non-looping gif i think

i said it was non-looping i'm sorry what am i supposed to say!!!!!!!

Everybody looking at this post

Here's a huge post of me checking various online fundraisers for people in Palestine or their families. Lots of people won't notice it because it's cut off right before I even start writing anything but please do refer to it if you're wondering where else your money can go. If you have any rich friends go guilt trip them into donating on those fundraisers.

Link.

thank you samba 🙏

The new fitness craze taking the nation's yards by storm!

DO NOT DO THIS!!!

If a website has a paywall, like New York Times, DO NOT use the ctrl+A shortcut then the ctrl+c shortcut as fast as you can because then you may accidentally copy the entire article before the paywall comes up. And definitely don't do ctrl+v into the next google doc or whatever you open because then you will accidentally paste the entire article into a google doc or something!!!! I repeat DO NOT do this because it is piracy which is absolutely totally wrong!!!

Also do NOT append "12ft.io/" before a URL ! Typing an URL like this https://12ft.io/<URL> will redirect to a site that would break the display of the page by removing the paywall !

Honestly it's kind of prohibited to mash CTRL+P before some paywall windows can load in to get a PDF of the article. Really shouldn't be done tbh very dangerous🤷🏿‍♂️ ❌️

J.R.R. Tolkien's The Hobbit illustrated by Tove Jansson

A Guide to Historically Accurate Regency-Era Names

I recently received a message from a historical romance writer asking if I knew any good resources for finding historically accurate Regency-era names for their characters.

Not knowing any off the top of my head, I dug around online a bit and found there really isn’t much out there. The vast majority of search results were Buzzfeed-style listicles which range from accurate-adjacent to really, really, really bad.

I did find a few blog posts with fairly decent name lists, but noticed that even these have very little indication as to each name’s relative popularity as those statistical breakdowns really don't exist.

I began writing up a response with this information, but then I (being a research addict who was currently snowed in after a blizzard) thought hey - if there aren’t any good resources out there why not make one myself?

As I lacked any compiled data to work from, I had to do my own data wrangling on this project. Due to this fact, I limited the scope to what I thought would be the most useful for writers who focus on this era, namely - people of a marriageable age living in the wealthiest areas of London.

So with this in mind - I went through period records and compiled the names of 25,000 couples who were married in the City of Westminster (which includes Mayfair, St. James and Hyde Park) between 1804 to 1821.

So let’s see what all that data tells us…