the problem with having a decade old tumblr blog is that there are posts on it from a decade ago

i’ve become a completely different person like 5 separate times since making those posts and there are STILL people finding them somehow

Happy birdie

(via)

Misty lake

You ever have a random thought that's not intrusive, but somehow simultaneously so instinctive and so detached from your regular everyday life, that you vaguely figure it was probably just an ancestral spirit possessing you for a second?

I was baking an apple pie for fun, freehanding cardamom by vibes alone. And a thought pops into my head, must not be wasteful with them, spices are expensive. And I had to halt right there for a second. Why would I feel financial guilt about the amount of seasoning in homemade goods, when I spend money on far more frivolous shit every single day? My own weight in cinnamon would cost less than my rent.

Thank you for your concern, Maarit from the 1600s, but trust me, we're good. I can measure this cardamom with my heart and not the scale.

credit to alterdiego7

I'm turning 30 this month, and for some reason have become suddenly interested in material possessions. like what if,,,,,,,,my couch was nice. what if my sheets were nice. is this what happens to you??

D:

this is a legitimate problem in robotics.

like, if you're a bomb disposal guy and your team has a cool bomb-disposal robot which you've given a cutesy name to, you may hesitate to put that robot in harm's way, which is NOT OPTIMAL in the bomb-disposing field.

it also doesn't help if you hold funerals for the robots after they get exploded (this happens pretty regularly).

anyway nobody has worked out how to stop humans from pack-bonding with literally inanimate objects and they probably never will. (like even knowing it's a problem, I *still* think those EOD robots deserve funerals).

In 2007, the US military rejected a multi-limbed anti-mine robot because it's demise was too inhumane.

oh perfect, this is EXACTLY what I was talking about

Scientists in films: this alien/AI is not human and therefore undeserving of any kindness or sympathy

Scientists irl: This is my friend Robob he's five feet long, has ten legs and was built to explode mines and if anybody hurts him I will tear apart time and space to get revenge

Toad Words

            Frogs fall out of my mouth when I talk. Toads, too.

            It used to be a problem.

            There was an incident when I was young and cross and fed up parental expectations. My sister, who is the Good One, has gold fall from her lips, and since I could not be her, I had to go a different way.

            So I got frogs. It happens.

            “You’ll grow into it,” the fairy godmother said. “Some curses have cloth-of-gold linings.” She considered this, and her finger drifted to her lower lip, the way it did when she was forgetting things. “Mind you, some curses just grind you down and leave you broken. Some blessings do that too, though. Hmm. What was I saying?”

            I spent a lot of time not talking. I got a slate and wrote things down. It was hard at first, but I hated to drop the frogs in the middle of the road. They got hit by cars, or dried out, miles away from their damp little homes.

            Toads were easier. Toads are tough. After awhile, I learned to feel when a word was a toad and not a frog. I could roll the word around on my tongue and get the flavor before I spoke it. Toad words were drier. Desiccated is a toad word. So is crisp and crisis and obligation. So are elegant and matchstick.

            Frog words were a bit more varied. Murky. Purple. Swinging. Jazz.

I practiced in the field behind the house, speaking words over and over, sending small creatures hopping into the evening.  I learned to speak some words as either toads or frogs. It’s all in the delivery.

            Love is a frog word, if spoken earnestly, and a toad word if spoken sarcastically. Frogs are not good at sarcasm.

            Toads are masters of it.

            I learned one day that the amphibians are going extinct all over the world, that some of them are vanishing. You go to ponds that should be full of frogs and find them silent. There are a hundred things responsible—fungus and pesticides and acid rain.

            When I heard this, I cried “What!?” so loudly that an adult African bullfrog fell from my lips and I had to catch it. It weighed as much as a small cat. I took it to the pet store and spun them a lie in writing about my cousin going off to college and leaving the frog behind.

            I brooded about frogs for weeks after that, and then eventually, I decided to do something about it.

            I cannot fix the things that kill them. It would take an army of fairy godmothers, and mine retired long ago. Now she goes on long cruises and spreads her wings out across the deck chairs.

            But I can make more.

            I had to get a field guide at first. It was a long process. Say a word and catch it, check the field marks. Most words turn to bronze frogs if I am not paying attention.

            Poison arrow frogs make my lips go numb. I can only do a few of those a day. I go through a lot of chapstick.  

            It is a holding action I am fighting, nothing more. I go to vernal pools and whisper sonnets that turn into wood frogs. I say the words squeak and squill and spring peepers skitter away into the trees. They begin singing almost the moment they emerge.

            I read long legal documents to a growing audience of Fowler’s toads, who blink their goggling eyes up at me. (I wish I could do salamanders. I would read Clive Barker novels aloud and seed the streams with efts and hellbenders. I would fly to Mexico and read love poems in another language to restore the axolotl. Alas, it’s frogs and toads and nothing more. We make do.)

            The woods behind my house are full of singing. The neighbors either learn to love it or move away.

            My sister—the one who speaks gold and diamonds—funds my travels. She speaks less than I do, but for me and my amphibian friends, she will vomit rubies and sapphires. I am grateful.

            I am practicing reading modernist revolutionary poetry aloud. My accent is atrocious. Still, a day will come when the Panamanian golden frog will tumble from my lips, and I will catch it and hold it, and whatever word I spoke, I’ll say again and again, until I stand at the center of a sea of yellow skins, and make from my curse at last a cloth of gold.

Terri Windling posted recently about the old fairy tale of frogs falling from a girl’s lips, and I started thinking about what I’d do if that happened to me, and…well…

!.

You know how if you go through years and years of “best science fiction short stories”, every so often you find some short story you’ve never heard of before, but it’s just amazing and brilliant and leaves you wondering why you never read stories with that plot before? This is one of those.

Seriously, wow.

this made me smile.

i’m still smiling.

I love this one. Thank you.

I came here to shitpost, and shitpost I will.

I don’t have any words

I know they're just trying to stop random idiots climbing on it, but the total lack of explanation makes this sounds like every government warning in a horror movie ever.

anyway who wants to go find out what secrets and treasures are on the boat with me

With the disclaimer that I’m not into Homeric scholarship at all so this is just me pulling things out of thin air and overall vibes, but I love the idea of the Odyssey reimagined as a horror story. Something crawls out of the carnage of the Trojan War and drags itself home across a monster-infested Mediterranean, and past a certain point that thing is more revenant than living human. Again, this is more fanfiction than textual interpretation, so please refrain from being annoying in the notes.

Enough feminist retellings of Greek Classics, I want cosmic horror retellings that really lean into the idea that everyone is powerless against their fates and the gods. Everyone is already dead, Odysseus died a long time ago, but Athena won’t let him die, and Penelope weaves and undoes and weaves again and waits for the shambling corpse of her husband to make its way home and lie down next to hers, and perhaps what happened to Hector and Achilles was a mercy after all?

I love when characters are biologically alive, but narratively dead, when they passed the narrative event horizon a long time ago and now the only thing left is their metaphorical reanimated corpse being dragged through the remainder of the story, and I love when this is a deliberate literary device to hammer in the tragedy and horror of the event that marked the point of no return for their character arc.

the what

*coughs* Friendly doll person here.

So Mattel came out with different Barbie body types a couple years ago, right? There’s your normal body, but there’s also Curvy, Petite, and Tall now.

Around the same time, they came out with the Made to Move body, which has a ton more articulation than your normal Barbie.

Customizers love the Made to Move body, because hey, a lot more fun positions to put a doll in for photographing. But now Mattel has started making the Made to Move dolls with the additional body types from above. We’ve gotten a Curvy Made to Move doll so far, afaik.

This Queen Elizabeth doll, though? Is the first time there’s been a Petite Made to Move body released by Mattel. So customizers were buying it up not out of any care about Queen Elizabeth — but they were buying it to pop her head right off and use the new body for other dolls!

The thing i like the most about tumblr is learning tiny details about communities i would otherwise not even be aware of. thank you for this info

https://vm.tiktok.com/ZTdQuxw52/

I think I found my new favorite rabbit hole. This voice actor does Shakespeare scenes in a southern accent and I need to see the whole damn play. Absolutely beautiful

if you're not from the us american south, there's some amazing nuances to this you may have missed. i can't really describe all of them, because i've lived here my whole life and a lot of the body language is sort of a native tongue thing. the body language is its own language, and i am not so great at teaching language. i do know i instinctively sucked on my lower teeth at the same time as he did, and when he scratched the side of his face, i was ready to take up fucking arms with him.

but y'all. the way he said "brutus is an honourable man" - each and every time it changed just a little. it was the full condemnation Shakespeare wanted it to be. it started off slightly mock sincere. barely trying to cover the sarcasm. by the end...it wasn't a threat, it was a promise.

christ, he's good.

the eliding of “you all” to “y’all” while still maintaining 2 syllables is a deliberate and brilliant act of violence. “bear with me” said exactly like i’ve heard it at every funeral. the choices of breaking and re-establishing of eye contact. the balance of rehearsed and improvised tone. A+++ get this man a hollywood contract.

I’m not from the South but let me tell you something: I have never understood or felt any of Julius Caesar as clearly in any other interpretation as I did with this actor. Just. Gave me chills.

Space Jam but literally