date: 22/04/21

the covid situation in India is extremely bad right now. there are 200k+ new cases every single day, there's a SEVERE oxygen shortage in hospitals, and less than two percent of the country is vaccinated. I've had two covid deaths in the building I live in.

our government does not care.

I'm aware most of this site and my followers live outside India, so here's what you can do.

- if you're in the US you can use this link to find your representative and then contact them asking them to support the suspension of vaccine patents. here's an email template, though PHONE CALLS are more effective.

- this is the UK link to find your MP

- https://peoplesvaccine.org/take-action/ has more things you can do and resources to educate yourself

- this is a constantly updating Google Doc listing fundraisers accepting international donations . It includes organisation distributing food, oxygen cylinders, PPE, and covid kits to frontline workers and vulnerable people.

- DO NOT GIVE ANY MONEY TO PM-CARES IT IS A FRAUD

please fuck the thoughts out of me

Girl you need to get out of bed faster than this

I'm giving it all she's got boss

hey writers- if you're ever working on a story, and you hear a voice telling you to make all your characters aromantic, or polyamorous, or maybe even both, that's an angel talking. and you should listen

sadbuddies

Taylor calls herself crazy all throughout TTPD, but maybe I’m just as insane because I actually think she’s quite normal? Because if I ended a once happy 8 year relationship because the love was gone and we were both no longer in love to then get with a situation-ship who has been pinning for you for years only for them to abandon you when they finally got you, I’d commit full arson.

I hate it here is for all the girlies who grew up reading books as a precocious child and dreamt of worlds that exist only in a sophisticated imagination, for the girls who live in delusions

I hereby conduct this tortured poets society album meeting in all of its mania and sorrowful blues as I move from unhinged impressions to unhinged first-listen analysis because I am incapable of saying less.

(and to all the Aimees i’m so sorry but that’s on Kim)

This Anthology is taking me so long to process, but nothing feels like the first jarring moments of I Can Do It With a Broken Heart - the cacophony and flashes of a birthday breakdown bopping to 80s arcade game synth. It's crumbled cake and mascara streaks when Bejewelled is actually a delusional Mirrorball,

and The Secret Garden reference in I Hate It Here, oh god, she’s so me:

I hate it here so I will go to / secret gardens in my mind / people need a key to get to / the only one is mine / i read about it in a book when I was a precocious child

I need to come back to that. But the whirlwind of Who’s Afraid of Little Old Me? Plans cancelled. IM THE ONE barricaded in the bathroom with a bottle of wine, actually. It's me chained-up in that poor things victorian mourning dress shrieking elegies in my tortured nightingale screams.

She's Grammys Taylor looking at the crowd of her peers rolling their eyes, she's the litany of snide jokes diminishing her success, and the children, sisters, friends, and girlfriends of those who wronged her loudly singing her songs.

so i leap from the gallows and i levitate down your street / crash the party like a record scratch as I scream / who’s afraid of little old me

i was tame i was gentle til the circus made me mean / don’t you worry folks we took out all her teeth

ohhh, the throwback to Speak Now and the significance of MEAN. The song and its titular word show how childish language encapsulates that pointless spite and the bone deep hurt mean behaviour breeds - but now she’s a phoenix risen, and they hurl her youth and her downfall back in her face - word for word, surprised face - its the dark side the The Lucky One, of not escaping the cage of fame games.

you lured me and you hurt me and you taught me / you caged me and then you called me crazy

i wanna snarl and show you just how disturbed this has made me / you wouldn’t last an hour in the asylum where they raised me / so all you kids can sneak into my house with all the cobwebs / i’m always drunk on my own tears isn’t that what they all said?

PUT NARCOTICS IN MY SONG took me out. This album is funny in the most sardonic and absurdly humorous ways,

like the classic cowboy western guitar strings in her crime songs (I Can Fix Him, No Really I Can - pistols drawn), but especially the ones leading into Fresh Out The Slammer. Fucking genius, and to follow on with static sounds at 2:26ish to the house where you still wait up, is exactly the kinda detail I adore.

Naively, I thought Florence was done with me after Florida!!! It's a lyrical meme for single 20 & 30 somethings who moved away from home,

my friends all smell of like weed or little babies / and the city reeks of driving myself crazy / little did you know your home’s really only / a town you’re just a guest in

and the haunting morphs from the ghost of your girlhood into the catalogue of decisions and delusions which get you through adulthood. Yet it feels almost like an interlude within the song when

me and my ghosts we’ve had a hell of a time / yes i’m haunted but i’m feeling fine / all my girls got their lace and their crimes / and your cheating husband disappeared/ well no one asks questions here

appears like an alternative pov for No Body, No Crime with the girls and their ghosts and their pacts made over wine. Every Action has an Equal Reaction. Run away to Florida, or Texas, and lose yourself to lose the heartbreak. Its self-destruction, it's trauma-healing, bonding, and its breaking.

(what a song for an angsty girl collab, problematic girl in hand with problematic girl, lyrically and thematically, maybe the real love story is the friends we make along the way.)

And that wasn't even the last of it. It's Florence 2.0 with B side Cassandra, but instead of Dance Fever, its Taylor’s glorious mythology with all the allusions, parallels, intertextual and lyrical ruining of my mind:

when the first stone’s thrown they’re screaming / when its burn the bitch they’re shrieking / when the truth comes out its quiet

so they killed cassandra first cus she feared the worst / and tried to tell the town / so they filled my cell with snakes i regret to say / do you believe me now?

No apologies anymore. A girl given the gift of prophecy by Apollo, the GOD OF POETRY, is cursed with her prophecy never being believed: Burning all the witches even if you aren't one, indeed. She saw the truth of the Trojan horse, and the Trojans insulted her. Rep snake branding and the current cultural view of KK and Ye. I don't need to say anything else.

i was in the tower weaving nightmares / twisting all my smiles into snarls

the family the pure greed the christian chrous line / bloods thick but nothing like a payroll / bet they never spared a prayer for my soul

I literally played that THREE times before I got over it enough to finish my first listen,

and i’m still thinking about Clara Bow and that Stevie Nicks tambourine we collectively freaked over from the Spotify installation, and all the silent movie speculation from the track title release.

you look like Clara Bow in this light - you look like Stevie Nicks in '75 - you look like Taylor Swift

Three women whose public profession became entangled with their pain. Silver Springs. Boyfriend songs. The jokes. Clara Bow.

Clara feared being left behind by 'talkies.' Miss Americana. The fear of 30 bringing death to a woman's Hollywood/Musical career,

beauty is a beast that roars down on all fours demanding more / only when your girlish glow flickers just so / do they let you know?

Three women who beat the odds - three women whose talent, craft, and popularity carried them through.

But there's something more to unpack here with cycles and patterns - of the past endlessly repeating. It's the transient nature of fame and our fleeting view of beauty mapped out in the untouchable, ever-changing, and culturally worshiped moon.

Public speaking is actually really easy if you don't respect a single soul in that room. I've had an incredibly easy time delivering speeches when I hated everybody I saw and they all thought I did amazing because my disdain was read as confidence. I don't have any tips for you I'm just telling you a fact

To all the people in the notes wondering how we got anywhere before GPS: we got lost a lot. Like a lot. If it was a new place we would pull out the maps, we all had local maps in the car and then these huge huge huge books of maps called atlases and we'd have one for every state we'd be driving through

And before a trip we would plot our whole entire route, and go back over it every night at the hotel, and we would write all the directions down on a little note and someone would be in charge of navigation and making sure we didn't miss any turns.

For local stuff all directions would be described in reference to other things. You still see this when older folks give directions. Do you ever get the "do you know where the ruby Tuesday is? No? How about the Buffalo wild wings? Yeah okay so from there go down til you see a Wendy's and turn left..." instead of them just telling u the address so u can plug it into ur GPS? That's why.

I have fond memories of getting helaciously lost in Kentucky because we had to go around a bad accident, and we didn't have a Kentucky map because we hadn't planned on going thru Kentucky and we stopped at a gas station to get a map but they didn't have any and my dad came back to the car swearing up and down about these goddamn Kentucky communists who didn't even sell maps in their gas stations,

honestly the funniest thing about this post is referring to kentuckians as communists.

never let anyone tell you that trawling through mediocre victorian poetry isn't worth it. we just happened upon an absolute BANGER of a worm poem. go read it or else 🪱🪱🪱

the reviews are in... glad everyone's enjoying song of the worm

[id: tumblr tags reading 'dude This Fucking Rules', 'holy fucking shit! that was legit so cool?', 'holy shit that is fucking metal', 'oh this fucks severely', 'yeah no this fucking SLAPS', 'yo this RULES']

Holy fucking shit this is one of the most incredible things I have ever read. I am dead serious. I PROMISE you that you want to read this, and you're going to immediately send it to all your weird friends who you also know will love it.

The original link is down -- you can read it at

The Smallest Man Who Ever Lived - Initial Thoughts

hi! I don't usually to this but here are my thoughts about Taylor Swift's The Smallest Man Who Ever Lived. The purpose of this post is not to hate on Joe Alwyn btw, i'm just trying to decipher the meaning and link the lyrics to other songs. Lmk if you agree/disagree with anything :)

extra note: this is just a theory and i really know nothing about taylor’s life. so don’t take anything said as factual 🤍

--

Verse 1 pt. 1:

Thoughts:

Two things jump out at me with this verse.

One: "gazing at me starry eyed" is a direct reference to Call It What You Want, where Taylor describes Joe as possessing "Starry eyes" which light up her darkest nights.

Two: "Jehovah's Witness suit". This part really stood out to be because I literally had no clue what she was talking about. The area I live in doesn't have many Jehovah's Witnesses, so the concept of a suit commonly worn by one is pretty alien to me. However, upon further research I have concluded that it's just a suit with a buttoned up jacket and tie - something Joe often sported when out with Taylor at special events. My sister also suggested that it had something to do with Joe's role in Taylor's life. Jehovah's Witnesses remove themselves from "worldly influences", and tend not to celebrate occasions. This could be indicative of Joe's lack of interest in her achievements, and his detachment from her life as a pop star.

Overall, this part of this song is really just her questioning if the man she loved ever existed.

Verse 1 pt. 2:

Thoughts:

So there's definitely some sort of substance abuse going on with Joe. I don't want to delve too much into it, because I think the lyrics speak for themselves and it's obviously a very personal situation, but I do think the second half is of the verse is interesting. It seems like Taylor was ignored/completely ghosted during her relationship, which was something I had never considered before.

Chorus

Thoughts:

Essentially Taylor is saying that she never wants to be with him again, but hopes that he knows how much he screwed her over.

When I hear "rusting my sparkling summer was the goal" I immediately think of august, with the song being set in summer and the lyric: "salt air and the rust on your door". August follows the story of a woman wanting love from a man who has no intention of doing so, which is a similar theme in this song.

I love the phrase "the smallest man who ever lived". It paints such a vivid image of how insecure and bitter a person can be. It's also notable that Joe being small contrasts Taylor being "too big to hang out" with (Anti-Hero).

Verse 2 pt. 1:

you hung me on your wall

stabbed me with your pushpins

in public showed me off

then sank in stoned oblivion 

Thoughts

"you hung me on your wall / stabbed me with your pushpins" reminds me of a postcard being stuck on a cork board. This alludes to me that Taylor is being preserved and cherished as a memento, which can be validating but also objectifying is some aspects. The imagery of her being stabbed reiterates that she is suffering because of him.

"in public showed me off / then sank into stoned oblivion" is another reference to possible substance abuse. It seems like when they were together around cameras, he appeared proud of her, but in private his affection was inept.

Verse 2 pt. 2:

cause once your queen had come

you treat like her like an also-ran

you didn’t measure up

in any measure of a man

Thoughts

I saw a few people refer to the first part of this verse as Taylor talking about infidelity. I actually think the "queen" she's referring to is herself, considering the next line she says he treats her like"an also-ran". If you didn't know, an also-ran is "someone in a competition who is unlikely to do well or who has failed". Joe considers Taylor his competition rather than his equal, and subsequently treats her as though she is sub-par.

"you didn't measure up / in any measure of man" is such a bad*ss line i love it. Here, she's saying Joe didn't possess any attributes of a "good man", like honesty, loyalty and respect.

Bridge pt. 1:

were you sent by someone who wanted me dead?

did you sleep with a gun underneath our bed?

were you writing a book?

were you a sleeper cell spy?

in 50 years will all this be declassified? 

Thoughts

Taylor is questioning if Joe's intention was to ruin her life. She cannot fathom why someone would do the things he did to her without any motive. So instead, to rationalise her suffering, she suggests a plethora of reasons why Joe might've acted this way.

Taylor also asks if he is a "sleeper cell spy", which might be a reference to Stars at Noon - a 2022 film starring Joe Alwyn and Margaret Qualley where he plays an intelligence agent.

Bridge pt. 2:

and you'll confess why you did it

and i'll say good riddance

cause it wasn’t sexy once

it wasn’t forbidden 

i would’ve died for your sins

instead i just died inside

Thoughts

She's questioning what it is he wanted from her, because, once again, she cannot fathom the idea of someone being so cruel for no reason.

"cause it wasn't sexy once / it wasn't forbidden" weirdly enough reminds me of cruel summer, where Taylor speaks about having a forbidden, sex-driven relationship over the summer. This also once again reminds me of august, where a similar relationship is endured between augustine and james.

"i would’ve died for your sins / instead i just died inside" is a very blatant reference to peace from folklore, where she says "all these people think love's for show / but i would die for you in secret". It's actually really sad to see how the sentiment of her dying for Joe has evolved into something more sinister.

+++ is good riddance a gracie abrams reference??? (love that if it is)

Bridge pt. 3:

Thoughts

Wowwwww. This one is actually insane! Did he actually do something illegal? Or is this a metaphorical crime? I don't think you're able to determine that from these lyrics alone, but man, it leaves you curious. It's interesting that even if he did get put away, Taylor assumes that he'll be able to evade punishment. Perhaps this is because he doesn't have a guilty conscious? Or maybe there's not enough proof to fully prosecute him? I have no clue, but one thing is for sure - this part makes me feel awful.

Bridge pt. 4:

Thoughts

The first thing I think of when I hear this part is Taylor's grammy's after party, soon after which their breakup was announced. Joe posted a photo of him and Jack, confirming his attendance, but no pictures were taken of Taylor and Joe. Maybe he had "crashed", and attended without her permission? As for the part about crashing a car, I couldn't find any info on Joe being in an accident around this time. But then again, maybe it was covered up? Or perhaps it was a minor crash?

"you said normal girls were boring / but you were gone by the morning " sounds like a washed up ex begging for forgiveness. To me, it tells the story of Joe coming to a party and telling Taylor that she was better than "normal girls" and that he wanted her back, only to depart the next day.

Bridge pt. 5:

Thoughts

She speaks about how Joe is an actor who continues to try and grow his career despite trying to undermine Taylor's. He will carry on about his life as if nothing happened between them, but somewhere in his mind he is aware of how much he hurt her.

Concluding Chorus:

Thoughts

This part reminds me of Bad Blood's "You forgive, you forget, but you never let it go". Taylor is going to move on from Joe, but she will forever maintain her disdain towards him and what he did to her.

Random things I noticed while listening

--

If you made it this far, thanks for reading!! I'm writing this extremely sleep deprived so please tell me if what i'm saying is coherent. Also please do expand on my thoughts!! I'm kind of just jotting down whatever comes to mind, so feel free to correct/add anything you like <3

ps. this is all speculative!! No hate to Joe because i actually have no clue what he did :p

++ going to quickly mention that is it is of my opinion that this song is NOT about m*tty h**ly. I don't think they dated nearly long enough for him to have such a detrimental impact on her mental health, and for her to of metaphorically "died" because of him. Plus, there's a lot of references in this song to other works about/involving Joe.

Taylor gaslighting us into thinking we didn’t know and didn’t see her sad and heartbroken during the summer of 2023 is actually pretty funny to me