Two Social Llamas

I think the best advice I ever got to stop myself from getting in my head over issues i was having with a partner/friend was “Are you deciding on ultimatums in your relationship without the other persons knowledge or consent? Are you having conversations in your head where the other party is a projection you supply the responses for? If so; you have done this person a huge disservice in not allowing them to answer on their own terms. You have done so much architecture around this problem in your mind that is impenetrable for anyone who was not there when it was being built.”

That shit really changed my life and honestly? I think made me a nicer person to be around.

jack and anne in black sails are so real to me bc their like platonic soulmate relationship makes me feel like they are the adult forms of the eternal middle school archetypes Atheist brony with transition lenses and autistic wolf girl who growls at people theyre each others date to the spring formal they're holding hands in the manga section of borders books

(via @lazarus-lazuli )

Good news! It only took him 3 tries 🎉🎉🎉 congrats cringe husband

did anyone ever tell the Backstreet Boys why

My FAVORITE quote, of all time, is from the like, 2008 VH1 Top 50 Best Boy Band Songs special when AJ was commentating this song’s #1 win and he said, “I’ve never understood this song. WHAT WAY do I want it? And why DON’T I want it that way if SHE wants it that way? What’s the way? This song makes no sense. But man, they paid me to sing it.”

He was so distressed about his confusion, and I loved it. I love this song. It is truly the song of all time.

The songwriter, Max Martin, has written or contributed to the lyrics for a huge number of pop hits since the 90s. Max Martin is Swedish, and English is not his first language, a fact which feels incredibly obvious once you know it.

It’s not my intention to mock him for this–his English is miles ahead of my Swedish!–but this sincere vagueness and novel interpretations of English grammar are a noticeable quirks of his songs, especially his earlier work, so much so that trying to tease apart the individual words and phrases of the songs is a task designed for a Greek tragedy. His songs are the aursl embodiment of “no thoughts just vibes.”

Citation: Slate’s 2014 article/highlight reel of some of Martin’s most baffling lyrical Decisions:

They don’t bring it up in that article, but Martin is also responsible for Britney Spears’s “…One More Time,” and I’m sorry to anyone in whom something was awakened with those lyrics, but our good friend Max thought “hit me” was contemporary American slang for “call me.”

I feel like this adds a thin, waxy coating of surrealism in a genre whose worst examples can lean hard toward bland vapidity, and I love that Backstreet Boys lyrics are still making people question their sanity 25 years on. But mostly I can’t get over the thought of all of these singers–many of them already really big before they worked with Martin–puzzling their way through these lyrics enough to figure out how to sell the shit out of them.

I feel like people really underestimate the impact that your mode of transportation has on how you see and think about and interact with your city. Like, driving makes your city feel like a few islands, pockets of space where you regularly go and new ones you discover only when brought there for a purpose, but all amidst an ocean of just, filler. Taking public transit makes your city feel like a network of corridoors, a glowing grid along which you may discover new things, but whose alternate winding paths you only take when given to by circumstance. Cycling makes your city feel more human in its scale, and while you can only go so far, the spaces through which you travel are far more often built for people, not machines, and that difference is tangible, while your freedom of movement gives you more opportunities for exploration. Walking can only take you so far, but you see everything meant for you along those places, and every street feels like it carries potential, with no barriers to stopping and partaking of whatever piques your interest. I think, among these, driving is the one that by far most isolates you from the place you live, while the others are, in decreasing order, most utilitarian, and in increasing order, most personally connective to your shared space.

Made the worst brownies ever created just now

Chat where did I go wrong

the reviews are in

"you need to let it go" that would be really cool, unfortunately I'll take it with me to the grave

girl dad not as in a dad with daughters but as in a girl who shares the tastes habits and personality traits of a middle aged father

ZENDAYA Met Gala (May 6, 2024)

scrubbed the bathroom floor this morning. this sense of virtue and industry will last me easily into next week.

some of you would thrive in a monastery

This was supposed to be a fast doodle but it turns out I am physically incapable of leaving work unrendered. So...here's this. They fell asleep by accident. Harrow is a blanket hog.

(Version 2 with extra details under cut. Couldn't decide which I preferred lol)

my mom, dead in the middle of a conversation, slams on the breaks in the middle of a country road so she can pull over and take a picture of all these cows running for cover from the rain and adsfkjlfkdjg and thi dskfjfgj

rthis is the only picutre she took sfdkjlfgddfs MOM this almost literally could not be worse fdkjfjkdf i love you so much

she also took a pictuer of a bluejay 

and believe it or not, a squirrel

mom vs the focus on her expensive camera vs her bad eyesight

ok i swear this is the last one but please look at this bluejay

These photos are artistically bad.

Like, the arrangement is nice and the composition pleasing to look at, which is just, so fucking funny because what is ostensibly the subject if each is so poorly framed.

OP, are you entirely sure your mother is just bad at photography and is not, in fact, actually a fucking comedic and photographical genius?

his little helix piercing lol

sequence of dyke drama in atn is like so: harrow gets furious that ianthe fooled around with gideon while she was gone (tried to do surgery on her), attacks ianthe with skeletons -> this gets ianthe wet -> gideon gets mad harrow is attacking someone ELSE with skeletons instead of her -> gideon starts flirting with ianthe in front of harrow to make her jealous -> ianthe flirts back because she loves it when harrow is mad at her -> all of this drives them into ianthe's most heavily anticipated threesome but she spends the whole time in a chair to the side while harrow and gideon cry on each other and have something that technically could count as sex (alecto is also there but she's just standing in a corner)

As per @theriverbeyond ianthe liveblogs their sex and that liveblog is the atn short story

#what if we get the griddlehark sex. but it's all from ianthe's pov and it's written like a twitter thread. what then

@gideonisms that would be a gift to me personally

harrow definitely thought they were like dating and in love after the pool scene meanwhile gideon is like shit she’s in love with a dead body not me i guess i’ll kill myself (for her)

i’m just saying that if i told a girl all my secrets and we cuddled and she kissed my forehead and then we held hands and were super protective of each other and slept in the same room i would think we were dating

obviously dietary requirements aren't a joke but my grandma sometimes runs errands for her church and i asked her what she's up to today and she said extremely seriously "ive got to track down the body of the gluten free christ, julia"

this totally scans for a swear intensifier btw. what in the gluten free christ is going on here, Julia