tbh shoutout to the over 40s on tumblr, sorry the internet acts like yall belong in the retirement home when ur literally just regular adults with hobbies

I was going to leave comments in the tags, but I decided this was important enough to put on main.

In college, my friend group collectively got into the SCA - Society for Creative Anachronism. They're the people who get really into medieval reenactment, the fighting and crafts and cooking, they have kings and queens and knights and events and a good percentage of them (but not all!) work or have worked at Ren Faires.

I am forever grateful my friends dragged me into that, because it was my first introduction to fandom in older adults. Middle-aged dorks. Elderly nerds. Absolutely as intense and weird and hilarious and fun as any fan in their teens or 20s. I started getting into fandom already knowing there was a road ahead for me as I got older, full of handmade costumes and late night movies and shelves of pewter dragon goblets and mixed-aged road trips to meet ups and conventions.

And it kills me that so many people don't know that sort of community even exists. On both sides, even! I went to Philcon a few years ago, which tends towards older fans, and an older woman I was talking to sadly told me that she thought fandom was dying out, because she never saw younger fans any more.

Over the past decade, there's been a really toxic movement towards keeping different ages strictly separated, both in and outside of fandom. There's this strong implication that if an older person wants to interact with a younger person, there is something inherently predatory about that.

Yeah, that attitude sucks. That drive towards separation and puritanism sucks. Declaring that younger people should have nothing to look forward to and that older people should stay separated and lonely sucks. It sucks and we are all worse for it.

Don't fear age. Don't put an age limit on having fun. Give yourself a damn future.

Beverly passed away in 2019, but she was one of many of my favorite, elder cosplayers that frequent DragonCon and remind all of us to keep playing as long as we can.

s/o to this skeleton babe from 1936

This is a really poignant illustration of the seductive nature of glorifying war but that is a LOOK and she is SERVING it

I've seen Death depicted as a card dealer or other sort of gambler, a guy in a suit, a farmer, a robed apparition, and any other number of things, but this? This has to be the best Death I've seen yet. An old seductress saying "hey kid, don't you wanna die in a trench for a government that doesn't give a fuck about you, just like your dear old dad?" This goes hard as fuck.

"I used to know your daddy." kicks like a mule.

it’s very funny to grow up and become the age you used to think adults were so old and wise at and realize that their inner monologue was ABSOLUTELY “shit shit shit shit shit shit” the whole time 

My mom was 23 when she had me.

If I’d done the same, I’d have a kid in school right now, with a personality and everything, and because I don’t, I have ice cream for breakfast sometimes.

I remember once standing in our kitchen and asking how old she was, and she said she was twenty-six. She was getting her driver’s license, and had stuck some documents onto our fridge. I’m older than she had been then, now.

I have no idea what I’m doing. She had no idea what she was doing. There are kids right now who don’t know what they’re doing, but they think I do. So I guess I gotta fake it for them, right? Just like mom did

Tumblr is currently serving me an ad for "Voda, the LGBTQ mental health app" offering "daily meditations, self-care and AI advice" and as a therapist I am begging you not to download an app where an AI tries to help you with your mental health. Please do not. They tried to have an AI chatbot counsel eating disorder patients and it told them to diet. That shit is not safe. Do not talk to an AI about your mental health please. You don't need to talk to a professional but talk to a PERSON.

I'm also getting these ads. Fuck that shit

I think one of the consequences of getting older is finding out that your parents were kind of right when they complained about technology? At least you can see they weren’t entirely wrong.

I’ve been hearing from friends that it’s getting harder to find quality refrigerators that don’t connect to the internet. Why exactly does my refrigerator need wifi? Or even a computer, at that? Older fridges can last decades because they have so few failure points. They have one job and they do it well. 

I tend not to use my smart TV very often because the damn thing glitches and it’s laggy and too much of a hassle unless I am really committed to watching a movie in my living room. And the worse thing is...can you even buy a non-smart TV these days that isn’t secondhand? Are they even making ordinary...yanno...televisions that don’t need software updates and internet connections, anymore?

Someone in the comments of this post asked how bluetooth earbuds are forced and everyone pointed out that a lot of phones (especially iphones) simply do not have the ports to plug in wired headphones anymore. You must get the apple wireless headphones - and I think that’s the crux of the problem. I am glad I have an android phone because I can use the old wired earbuds I've had for over 12 years. If I wanted to, I could buy wireless earbuds and use them instead, because my model of phone gives me that option.

And that's the kicker: the problem is that as things are "advancing," more and more, options are being taken away. It has nothing to do with consumer demand - obviously there are a lot of people that are not happy with these developments. But as we’re seeing, the products being made don’t reflect customer preference or choice. It’s always about is best for the companies making and selling those products.

Every day we’re hearing about new apps and tech startups and really...does anyone really want this shit? Is the nth attempt to make crypto work, the billions spent on the Metaverse, doorbell cameras; is a fridge with an IP address really allow it to do its job better? Is that actually going to improve the lives of anyone who aren’t the developers of that product? Just the other day I was reading about a tech startup that wants to be able to beam ads into your car's GPS screen. Video ads! On a screen! To tell drivers what's nearby when they can just...continue to look out the window because they're supposed to be driving a goddamn car.

The problem of a world run by tech companies is that the tech isn’t being made to accommodate us, we are being forced to accommodate the tech.

We’re the ones paying these companies to burn fossil fuels on our behalf. Like yeah, individual restraint is never going to be a solution, but Amazon wouldn’t burn so much gasoline if you didn’t give them money to deliver things to your house. And shell wouldn’t be burning fossils fuels if you didn’t have a car. Etc

I don’t recall ever being consulted on whether we should persist in powering every device around us with poisonous hydrocarbons churning out uncontained radioactive waste in addition to coating the planet in a blanket of CO2. I’ve never once paid anyone to maintain the stranglehold of gas-guzzling individually piloted death traps on my countrys transportation infrastructure. I never gave Amazon any go ahead on establishing a retail monopoly over virtually every consumer good in my daily life. Yea yea, the conservation of expected culpability, etc. But it’s a pretty attenuated guilt you incur from vampires dominating the relevant market so they can gatekeep access to the necessities of human existence behind washing yr hands in the blood theyve amassed and are amassing

My favorite banned terms on this site are "suicide prevention" and "safe sex"

Fuck nasty and kill yourself inmediately after

Salmon male grindset

burning man 2023 explained

and lastly: when the ground here gets wet, the sea monkeys hatch

What's that poem about the cockroach and the moth where the cockroach is like "I wish I've ever wanted anything the way that moth wanted to burn itself up in that lantern" because we had to read that in high school and it still fucks me up to this day

Ok I found it it's called "the lesson of the moth by archy" and it's by Don Marquis

archy and mehitabel are a treasure, newspaper columnist Don Marquis wrote a lot of these free-verse poems in character as a cockroach named archy (always lowercase because he's a cockroach and can't reach the shift key!!) who was using his typewriter & while it started out as a way of poking gentle fun at the avant-garde poetry of his time (the 1910s - startling how little "avant-garde poetry" has moved forward, isn't it) it evolved over time into some genuinely beautiful and moving poetry

ALSO many of them have illustrations by Krazy Kat author George Herriman which are frankly iconic and adorable!!

Trump would be such a good drag queen like just such an unbelievably incredible and talented drag queen it's such a bummer that he's decided to be a fascist and a threat to democracy because that cunt would devour at the House of Yes

such a loss

his cadence, his tiny bitchy hand gestures, his cunty little nicknames for people that are insane but also somehow stick to your brain? 

“the problem with ron desanctimonious is that he needs a personality transplant, and those are...... noT yet available.”

if he’d laid the garbage fire of his entire soul aside for a wig and heels back in the 80s, we’d live in a better world. 

(via @dragonprincessmew )

• An Oxford comma walks into a bar, where it spends the evening watching the television, getting drunk, and smoking cigars.

• A dangling participle walks into a bar. Enjoying a cocktail and chatting with the bartender, the evening passes pleasantly.

• A bar was walked into by the passive voice.

• An oxymoron walked into a bar, and the silence was deafening.

• Two quotation marks walk into a “bar.”

• A malapropism walks into a bar, looking for all intensive purposes like a wolf in cheap clothing, muttering epitaphs and casting dispersions on his magnificent other, who takes him for granite.

• Hyperbole totally rips into this insane bar and absolutely destroys everything.

• A question mark walks into a bar?

• A non sequitur walks into a bar. In a strong wind, even turkeys can fly.

• Papyrus and Comic Sans walk into a bar. The bartender says, "Get out -- we don't serve your type."

• A mixed metaphor walks into a bar, seeing the handwriting on the wall but hoping to nip it in the bud.

• A comma splice walks into a bar, it has a drink and then leaves.

• Three intransitive verbs walk into a bar. They sit. They converse. They depart.

• A synonym strolls into a tavern.

• At the end of the day, a cliché walks into a bar -- fresh as a daisy, cute as a button, and sharp as a tack.

• A run-on sentence walks into a bar it starts flirting. With a cute little sentence fragment.

• Falling slowly, softly falling, the chiasmus collapses to the bar floor.

• A figure of speech literally walks into a bar and ends up getting figuratively hammered.

• An allusion walks into a bar, despite the fact that alcohol is its Achilles heel.

• The subjunctive would have walked into a bar, had it only known.

• A misplaced modifier walks into a bar owned by a man with a glass eye named Ralph.

• The past, present, and future walked into a bar. It was tense.

• A dyslexic walks into a bra.

• A verb walks into a bar, sees a beautiful noun, and suggests they conjugate. The noun declines.

• A simile walks into a bar, as parched as a desert.

• A gerund and an infinitive walk into a bar, drinking to forget.

• A hyphenated word and a non-hyphenated word walk into a bar and the bartender nearly chokes on the irony

- Jill Thomas Doyle

A zeugma walked into a bar, my life and trouble.

hate how any mention of being on knees is immediately assumed to be sucking dick. because maybe theyre eating pussy. did you even think about that? no you only think about yourself

Ruby Keeler & Lee Dixon dance on a giant typewriter in Ready, Willing & Able (1937)

So jaded by cgi that I didn't think this was impressive at all until I realised it was all an actual size set

It took me a solid few seconds to realize those type bars swinging back and forth at the top are actually peoples legs

For years I would look at posts and questionnaires about neurodivergence that takes about being so focused on something that you forgot to eat and be like, "Couldn't be me. Being hungry is so uncomfortable! Your stomach is growling and cramping? How do you ignore that?"

Then someone informed me that neurotypical people have a whole bunch of "hungry" sensations before they get to that point.....

They what

Yeah, I don't get it either, but apparently this is a Whole Thing.... Like they somehow detect blood sugar dropping and go, "Ooh, time for lil snack!"

See also: there is a feeling of "oh, I need to pee" that happens before "fidgeting around in my seat to finish this thing before running to the bathroom"

I read this and was like, "this can't be real" and then I looked for sources and like--

WHAT??????

what the fuck

This map is the most up to date version as of 3-4-2023 and takes into account all recent movement on anti-trans legislation

Yeah, I am going to signal boost this rq

Version up to date as of June 25 2023.