tchaikowsky donating his skull to the royal shakespeare company in the hopes of becoming yorick is the most dramatic ass dark academia shit ever and you can’t convince me otherwise 

I CAN’T BELIEVE THIS IS TRUE and you will not believe it that they never used on actual productions, only rehearsals because people got creeped out and didn’t want to use it, UNTIL DAVID TENNANT IN 2008

THAT MAD MAN ACTUALLY PERFORMED WITH THE REAL SKULL!

They had to stop using cause once the audience found out that was Tchaikovsky’s fucking bones(!) they got creeped out too and didn’t want it there, BUT DAVID JUST WENT “YEAH, LET ME HOLD THIS PIANIST’S FUCKING SKULL, WHO CARES”

Tchaikovsky DONATED IT FOR THAT PURPOSE. why did this creep anyone out? and why did they cave to the audience’s weird hangups?

some people are cowards

Cowards I’m not watching Hamlet unless there’s a real-ass skull in there

Let the man have his post-mortem stage time.

Man if you have the chance to recite Shakespeare to Tchaikovsky’s actual skull and you turn it down, I have already lost faith in your ability to embody Hamlet

Guys, guys I looked up the rest of the story and it turns out this isn’t the end of it:

They told everyone they stopped and then QUIETLY KEPT USING IT because OF COURSE they did.

I've had a hard time articulating to people just how fundamental spinning used to be in people's lives, and how eerie it is that it's vanished so entirely. It occurred to me today that it's a bit like if in the future all food was made by machine, and people forgot what farming and cooking were. Not just that they forgot how to do it; they had never heard of it.

When they use phrases like "spinning yarns" for telling stories or "heckling a performer" without understanding where they come from, I imagine a scene in the future where someone uses the phrase "stir the pot" to mean "cause a disagreement" and I say, did you know a pot used to be a container for heating food, and stirring was a way of combining different components of food together? "Wow, you're full of weird facts! How do you even know that?"

When I say I spin and people say "What, like you do exercise bikes? Is that a kind of dancing? What's drafting? What's a hackle?" it's like if I started talking about my cooking hobby and my friend asked "What's salt? Also, what's cooking?" Well, you see, there are a lot of stages to food preparation, starting with planting crops, and cooking is one of the later stages. Salt is a chemical used in cooking which mostly alters the flavor of the food but can also be used for other things, like drawing out moisture...

"Wow, that sounds so complicated. You must have done a lot of research. You're so good at cooking!" I'm really not. In the past, children started learning about cooking as early as age five ("Isn't that child labor?"), and many people cooked every day their whole lives ("Man, people worked so hard back then."). And that's just an average person, not to mention people called "chefs" who did it professionally. I go to the historic preservation center to use their stove once or twice a week, and I started learning a couple years ago. So what I know is less sophisticated than what some children could do back in the day.

"Can you make me a snickers bar?" No, that would be pretty hard. I just make sandwiches mostly. Sometimes I do scrambled eggs. "Oh, I would've thought a snickers bar would be way more basic than eggs. They seem so simple!"

Haven't you ever wondered where food comes from? I ask them. When you were a kid, did you ever pick apart the different colored bits in your food and wonder what it was made of? "No, I never really thought about it." Did you know rice balls are called that because they're made from part of a plant called rice? "Oh haha, that's so weird. I thought 'rice' was just an adjective for anything that was soft and white."

People always ask me why I took up spinning. Isn't it weird that there are things we take so much for granted that we don't even notice when they're gone? Isn't it strange that something which has been part of humanity all across the planet since the Neanderthals is being forgotten in our generation? Isn't it funny that when knowledge dies, it leaves behind a ghost, just like a person? Don't you want to commune with it?

i know it’s all just jokes but i think we should fr stop acting like the people around us don’t have inner lives. “npc” becoming an acceptable term to call people is very disturbing to me like genuinely idc if it’s not that deep…. plus the new phenomena of calling things you find no substance in “coworker music/movies/etc” like i get the conceit of the joke but i think when you refer to other people in that way consistently, you start to genuinely become convinced that people are just there to fill the background of your life, that they don’t have hobbies or families or lives beyond what you perceive, and that’s so bad. that’s sooooo bad to think of people

I, of mostly sound body and spirit, request that if I’m ever to die, someone post a new work on my AO3 that says “sorry, she died, ongoing stories postponed forever” because don’t I want my fanfic buddies to think I ghosted them. Amen or whatever you say in a will.

This was written as a joke, but for those who don't know, this is an actual optional service that AO3 provides called Fannish Next of Kin.

Be careful of Asexuals y'all, I heard they aren't fucking around

And frequently we have no fucks to give.

and categorically not to be fucked with

the upside is that they're less likely to fuck with you

Note from Anon:

“Please say your opinion in the tags! I’m asking cuz I have two oc ships and I’m afraid that the age differences might be a problem, the first is a 28 year old x a 31 year old the other is a 41 year old x a 46 year old.”

Anon, this is not directed at you as I'm sure your concern is a result of seeing the (frightening) puritanism that has become popular lately, but I desperately need everyone to learn the difference between fiction and reality. If it's fictional, it doesn't involve real people and therefore something like an age gap cannot be problematic. There is no one to be hurt by that relationship dynamic. If anyone wants to argue that a reader might come to harm by taking what they read literally and applying it to their own life, the weight of that mistake still rests on the reader, for, as as I mentioned, not distinguishing between fiction and reality. It is the responsibility of the adult reader to protect themselves. It is the responsibility of a parent to make sure their child is not reading something they aren't mature enough to really comprehend. It is not, say, Stephen King's responsibility to stop writing horror because somebody might read his books and get the idea to go drag kids into a storm sewer, because Stephen King is writing a thing called fiction, not self help books.

The ever increasing 'x is problematic so you can't write about it even in a fictional scenario' is disturbing. The age gaps listed are not even crazy. 5 years? That's normal. Go out and meet some people, please. PLEASE.

There's a lot more I could say but I don't want to make a long post.

Continue Reading

Almost 10 years after Flint and multiple enormous lawsuits, FINALLY something might be done, and I am very pleased about that.

#but anyways where's that one quote that's something like#the best time to plant a tree is 10 years ago the second best time is now#or something like that?#the best time for these policies was before the issues with Flint and the second best time is for it to happen now - commentary by @gardenvarietyfae

Things Biden and the Democrats did, this week #16

April 26-May 3 2024

Okay, so y'all know the phenomenon where American media companies say they can't produce queer stories because they'll just get censored in foreign markets? It's transparent as hell, because the dominant culture of the United States is still violently queerphobic, and in many cases, state queerphobia in other countries is the direct result of Christian imperialism. The US is not the enlightened gay haven in a world of evil homophobic foreigners, and trying to pretend that American media can't be too gay because it'll be censored overseas is asinine. We all know that, right?

Anyway, today I learned that there is an episode of the Australian cartoon Bluey that has been censored in the United States because it shows the dad character pretending to be pregnant and have a baby as part of a game of pretend. Disney refuses to air it on the Disney Channel or on Disney+. It has been made available on YouTube by the Australian rights holders.

So let's quit fucking pretending that Disney is actually scared of foreign censors, hm? The queerphobic censorship is coming from inside the House of Mouse, and it always has been.

Anyone else getting really fucking sick of this support:condemn dichotomy where folks online act like the only two possible responses to anything ever are to wholeheartedly support it or wholeheartedly condemn it?

"Oh you said that you dont think that random stranger should be sent full on death threats and doxxed for their iffy artwork? Why do you support racism" how about we all go outside and interact with real people and see how they react when you say things like that!

"I dont think you should full on ruin this persons life and all their chances of existing online forever over something that could very well be a shitty mistake that can be corrected" seems to be a real hot take among the same crowd who claims to support prison abolition

[Video ID: a TikTok that starts with a person asking "What's a word you pronounced incorrectly one time and it still haunts you to this day?" The video cuts to Justin Timberlake, who takes a pause then says, "Uh.... 'me'." /End video ID.]

It's a lot healthier to go for a daily walk than to sign up for a gym membership you won't be using because you hate that kind of exercise. It's a lot healthier to eat a frozen meal than to skip a meal because you were too tired to cook something healthy. It's a lot healthier to take a quick shower than to procrastinate an elaborate routine for days. Don't aim so high that you won't be hitting anything!

this is actually really helpful and affirming thanks

At least there’s one thing I can count on in this crazy mixed up world

oh there he is

You know, an interesting tumblr transformation that's happened gradually, and which I've seen no one talk about: ask-culture has essentially dropped off to nothing.

By which I mean, asks used to be WAY more of the tumblr economy. They used to be more common to send, and receive, and see. They were integral to the collaborative, forum-like behavior of old tumblr communities, not even to speak on the HUGE number of ask-blogs that used to exist to only be interacted with in ask-form.

I'm not saying this in a vying-for-attention way but instead in an observational way: I used to get way way more asks in like 2015, even with a fraction of my follower count. I wonder if it's due to the homogenization of social media sites? There's a lot more of this divide between "content creator" and "consumer" instead of just a bunch of peer blogs who would talk to each other. "Asks" aren't really a thing on twitter, are they? And as I understand it, the closest thing to an "ask" on instagram or tiktok would be a creator screenshotting some comment and responding to it in a new reel or video or whatever those content mediums are. Are asks just too tumblr-specific? Is that aspect of the site culture dying out as more and more people converge to using all their social media sites in the same way?

it's probably from assholes making asks a minefield of trolling/harassment for years with no real blocking ability, which turned people off from allowing asks on their blogs so as a whole the site moved away from it

but now that we do have better blocking, we should try to revive it.

Reblog if your ask box is open.