Hey, if you're a minor and you're following my blog, I just need you to be aware:

You have been on this earth for fewer years than my cat has.

She turns 20 this week, everyone please say happy birthday 🥳💖

Update! She tolerated wearing a hat for the occasion ✨

Good news, everyone!! 🎉

SHOTS SHOTS SHOTS SHOTS

we’ve just been watching on the sidelines as Kendrick Lamar sends Drake to the fuckin Shadow Realm

what the actual fuck is this shit. fuck you spotify you capitalist bastards

six skips a day thing sucks but you know what? i can live with it. ads? i mute them when they come on and resume music like nothing happened. its inconvenient sure but i can deal.

now, apparently, you can only access the lyrics of five songs per month if you don't pay for spotify premium. which is still about 11 quid per month which is still fucking ridiculous when all you get out of it is. you dont have to hear ads. you can listen to stuff you wanna hear. the sound is good. you can organise your queue. and now they're paywalling fucking lyrics scrolls literally just because they can.

(and they still don't pay their artists by the way)

you know what's particularly evil? spotify does not add its own lyrics

they take their lyrics from musixmatch which is a volunteer run site, i've personally spent hours adding lyrics to obscure songs i like, there is more than one song on spotify whose lyrics i added!

if you're gonna paywall people for work i did voluntarily so that others could have easy access to it, where's my cut of that?

May the fourth be with you.

and also some money

After more than a year I’ve finished the letters of my cross-stitch. It was mostly stitched on the subway during my commute. It’s been my constant companion for months. I don’t want to let it go, but also I’m not sure how to continue yet.

I was powered by spite about how often astr*l*gy comes up in my circles, and I’m not sure a different project would entertain me as much. Though I do love the feeling of cross-stitching.

[image description: the words “Lesbians Against Astrology” cross-stitched in large letters on off-white fabric in the colors of the lesbian flag. end image description.]

“Nobody’s going to want to sit on high-speed rail for fifteen hours to get from New York City to LA.”

Me. I will sit on high-speed rail for fifteen hours. I’ll sit on it for days. I’ll write and read and nap and eat and then do it all over again. I’ll stare out the windows and see America from ground level and not have to drive. I’ll see the Rockies and the deserts and cornfields and the Mississippi River and your house and yours and yours too. I’ll make up stories in my head about the small towns I see as we go along. I’ll see the states I’ve yet to see because driving or flying there is a fucking slog and expensive to boot. I’ll enjoy the ride as much as the destination. And then I’ll do it all over again to come the fuck home.

Me getting slammed with notifications on this post in particular:

Edna St. Vincent Millay, from a letter featured in The Letters of Edna St. Vincent Millay

[Text ID: Please forgive a girl that's had a hard spring, / End ID]

My grandfather and my godfather (a beloved neighbor and dear family friend) had a long standing bet- for one dollar- about who would die first. Both of them being slightly pessimistic (in the funny way), they both insisted that they themselves would be the first to die. Any time my grandfather had a health scare, he’d gleefully call up my godfather to boast that he’d be passing “any day now” and he was sure to win the bet. It was a big family joke and they were always amiably sparring and comparing notes about who was in worse shape, medically speaking.

When my grandfather was in hospice care dying of liver cancer, my godfather was quite ill also. It took him great effort to make the journey to see his dying friend. As he came into the room, supported by a family member, he shuffled to my grandpa’s bedside and silently handed him a dollar bill. He was ceding his loss of the bet, as they both knew who was going first. My grandpa had been in quite bad shape for a while and was no longer able to speak but let me tell you he snatched that dollar with unexpected strength and literally laughed aloud. He knew exactly what the gesture meant and he couldn’t help but find the humor within the grief. It was the last time any of us heard my grandpa laugh, as he passed shortly after.

When I talk about my appreciation for “dark humor” I’m not so much thinking about edgy jokes, but rather the human instinct to somehow, impossibly, both find and appreciate the absurdity that is so often folded into the profound grief of life and death. When I tell this story I think it kind of perturbs people sometimes, but it’s honestly one of my favorite memories about two men I really deeply admired. I could never hope for anything more than for my loved ones to remember me laughing until the very end, and taking joy in a little joke as one of my final acts.

*NOTE: in this case, phobia refers to a very strong irrational fear, not being a little scared of something. if you can handle snakes but they make you nervous, that's not a phobia.

huge thank you to people reblogging and talking about their phobias in the tags. it's genuinely super nice to hear that im not alone in this and im not super irrational for being scared of things. <3

blown away by how bad this madame tussauds gaga is. off-brand kermit. fucked.

@boss-battles

Item: Tunic of the Off-Brand Kermits; contains forty single-use Off-Brand Kermits. They are activated by removing them from the Tunic, and once activated, for one hour they will tell incomprehensible jokes and sing strange little songs; they can walk and will obey simple instructions about where to walk to. When the hour is up they become inert stuffed animals.

oh that’s actually kinda cute

Also at that conference was the great Peruvian novelist Mario Vargas Llosa. During the next two days the three of us made two discoveries about one another.

The first was that each of us had attacked at least one of the others in print. I had dissed Eco’s book. Umberto had criticized Mario for being too right-wing. Mario had criticized me for being too left-wing.

The second discovery was that we all got on like a house on fire.

It was Umberto who suggested we should now call ourselves The Three Musketeers. (This, remember, was the time of the Three Tenors, Pavarotti, Domingo and Carreras.) I remember asking, “Why Musketeers? Why not, for example, The Three Stooges?”

“No,” Umberto insisted. “It has to be Musketeers, because first we were enemies and now we are friends.”

- Selman Rushdie

One of my previous bosses, the Archivist for the State of -redacted for privacy-, had one of these (or very very similar prototype format) that he kept in his briefcase.

Whenever someone in a meeting would say something along the lines of “we don’t need to worry about that/budget money for that/do that, everything is digital now!” He would pull this bad boy out of his briefcase and say “this has digital files on it, please access them. Oh, you can’t? Well what about this? or these?” And pull out a selection floppy discs and CD types.

And that is how he fought the good fight for a budget for the archives because digital preservation is expensive and difficult and there are a million different hardware and software types and technological obsolescence is a nightmare.