Fun fact!! It’s cuz your body feels your pulse falling rapidly and is like “I don’t know if you’re dying or falling asleep and I’m not willing to gamble” so it shoots you up with adrenaline fuel to make you not die™. It’s one of my favourite facts

how bout it gets with the fucking program we’ve only been at it nearly every single night for my entire goddam life

yeah my sleep cycle can be a real hypnotic jerk

Does anyone else’s brain do the thing where you’re falling asleep and it decides to “hear” a noise or “see” a flash of color? Because my brain likes doing that on top of the falling thing.

GO 👏 THE 👏 FUCK 👏 OFF. Also, the American educational system is trash. I applaud this child’s parents for giving her a voice and standing up against bias authority.

(Can someone caption this?)

Classroom full of mostly black and brown students:

Black student: [unintelligible—and then]  …and then throwing everything away beneath it because it doesn’t pertain to you. I’m sorry —

White teacher: —you know what, I’m sorry -I’m sorry…

Black student: —No, no, no…I let you talk -I let you talk, you’re gonna let me talk.

[Other students gasps]

White student: Go ahead. Finish.

Black student: I’m sorry that this is the way that it is. You’re right, it is fucked up. But white people control everything…and that’s not fair. And when anybody, any other minority tries to say anything about it or change it, we’re complaining or we’re ungrateful or all this other stuff because we still have this or that. But then you say something about ‘Oh, I don’t want—there’s too many Latinos and there’s too many—’

White teacher: I didn’t say that—

[Various students disagree]

White teacher: I said I want to control the border!

Black student: You said you don’t want this to turn into a Latin country because there’ll be too many 

White teacher: I did not say that.

[Various students disagree]

Student 2: You said you want to preserve the American culture.

Black student: There is no American culture. American culture is EVERYTHING.

[Various students agree]

Random: Mayonnaise!

[Students laugh]

Black student: And because you are white and so closed-minded, you refuse to accept that, you refuse to accept—

White teacher: Don’t tell me I’m closed-minded—

Black student: Everything you’ve said to me is closed-minded.

White teacher: Just because I don’t agree with you doesn’t mean I’m closed-minded.

Black student: You don’t need to agree—I -I’ve had conversations with people that don’t agree with me, but if they at least listen and try to accept—you’re not accepting the truth.

White teacher: Why do I have to accept what you think is right?

Black student: You need to accept the truth! Not what I think is right, what is actually happening right—

White teacher: Well, let me tell you what I think. You said white people have been in control of everything….who is the president of the United States right now?!

Students: A black man!

*Various sounds of incredulity*

Black student: WITH A WHITE CONGRESS! WITH A WHITE SENATE! WITH WHITE EVERYTHING ELSE! HE DOESN’T HAVE THE CONTROL OF EVERYTHING!

Random: GO OFF 

Other Random: GO OFF–

*The class is in an uproar*

Random student: YOU ARE SO PRIVILEGED THAT YOU JUST DON’T SEE IT!

White teacher: Do we have to yell?!

Black student: Yes, because I’m mad.

Reblogging for the captioning. Thanks!

YES, BECAUSE I’M MAD.

This gives me hope. I’m 22. I’m not that old, but I’m assuming I’m older than these students in the video. To see this young intelligent woman school her teacher on white privilege and the affects of white supremacy gives me hope. They are young and using their voice! This is gives me hope ya’ll. 

this👏student👏deserves👏an👏award👏for👏putting👏up👏with👏that👏teacher👏

Fuck yeah, that girl

i fucking love her

PJO STANS MAKE SOME NOISE

@stormy-adventures

When you remember the anti-vax movement

I first reblogged this in January, and here my ass is in March 2020 self-quarantined at home.

THIS POST DID NOT AGE WELL

This post was prophetic

I think back to these memes everyday. And they did, indeed, not age well.

Thanks, I hate it

This actually show how each and every time we are super unprepared to deal with it.

Every goddamn time

when i watch old movies i’m constantly surprised by how much acting has improved. not that the acting in the classics is bad, it’s just often kind of artificial? it’s acting-y. it’s like stage acting.

it took some decades for the arts of acting and filmmaking to catch up to the potential that was in movies all along; stuff like microexpressions and silences and eyes, oh man people are SO much better at acting with their eyes than they were in the 40′s, or even the 70′s.

the performances we take for granted in adventure movies and comedies now would’ve blown the critics’ socks off in the days of ‘casablanca’.

there’s a weird period in film where you can see the transition happening.  right around the fifties, I think.  the example my prof used when i learned about it was marlon brando in “a streetcar named desire” - he was using stanislavski acting methods and this new hyper-realistic style and most or all of his costars were still using the old, highly-stylized way of acting. it makes it way more obvious how false it is.

i even noticed it in ‘the sting’, which was 1973. i actually think they used it on purpose to get the viewer fished in by the second layer of the con; the grifters at the bookie’s were acting like they were acting, and the grifters playing the feds were acting for reals. if you’re used to setting your suspension of disbelief at the first set’s level, then the second set are gonna blow right past you.

or possibly the guys playing the grifters playing the feds just happened to be using the realistic style for their own reason, and it coincidentally made the plot twist work better. but i like to think it was deliberate.

i was thinking about this again, and when you know what to look for, it’s really obvious: old movies are stage acting, not movie acting. it just didn’t really occur to anyone to make the camera bend to the actors, rather than the other way around. just image search old movie screenshots and clips and gifs, you’ll see it. the way people march up to their mark and stand there, the way they deliver their lines rather than inhabiting the character. the way they’re framed in an unmoving center-stage.

this is a charming little tableau, quirky and unexpected, but it’s a tableau. it lives in a box.

now, i usually watch action movies, and i didn’t think it was fair to compare an action movie with what appears to be an indoor sort of story, but i do watch some comedy tv. so i looked for a brooklyn 99 gif with a similar framing, intending to point out that the camera moves, and the characters aren’t stuck inside the box. but i couldn’t even find the framing. they literally never have all the characters in the same plane, facing the camera, interacting only within the staging area. even when they’re not traveling, they’re moving around, and they treat things outside the ‘stage’ as real and interact with them, even if it’s only to stare in delighted horror.

as for action, it took a while for the movies to figure out what, exactly they wanted to show us, and how to act it. here’s a comedy punch:

here, also, is a comedy punch:

the first one looks like a stage direction written on a script. the second one looks like your friends horsing around and being jerks to each other. the first one is just not believable. the physics doesn’t work. the reaction is fakey. everyone’s stiff. even the movement of the camera is kind of wooden. the second one looks real right down to the cringe of his shoulder, and the camera feels startled too.

i’m not saying this to dis old movies, i’m just fascinated and impressed by how much the art has advanced!

I’m going to bed, but I also want to say that I think, without actually bothering to explore it and make sure, that there’s been a similar shift in comics, probably related to the shift in acting/camera work. And I think you still see remnants of old “stage acting” comics in the three-panel style set ups (you might still see it in long form comics, but you’d probably call it bad composition)

Now can someone explain why people in old films talked Like That

Y’all, THAT’S HOW PEOPLE TALKED.

Seriously, I used to work in a sound studio, and one series of projects required us to listen to LOTS of old audio recordings. Not of anything special - just people talking.

AND THEY TALKED LIKE THAT.

It was so fucking wild to hear just a couple of people being like,

“WELL HI THERE JEANINE, HOW ARE YOU TODAY?”

“OH, NOT TOO BAD, JOE, THOUGH MY HUSBAND’S BEEN AWAY ON BUSINESS FOR A FEW WEEKS AND I MISS HIM SOMETHING TERRIBLE.”

“WELL IT’S A HARD THING, JEANINE, BUT YOU’LL GET THROUGH IT.”

“WELL I SUPPOSE I’VE GOT TO, HAVEN’T I JOE?”

All in that piercing, strident, rapid-fire style we associate with the films of the era. If you’ve watched lots of old movies you can imagine the above in that speech pattern.

I don’t know if people talked like that because it was in movies but I suspect it’s the other way around.

Same goes for the UK - When they made the TV series The Hour, set in the 1950s, they had to tell the very well spoken, privately educated Dominic West to tone down his imitation of a 1950s newsreader because being accurate would have sounded to a 2011 TV audience as if he was doing a parody. When you watch Brief Encounter they’re not speaking like that because they can’t act, they’re speaking like that because it was the norm on screen. It now sounds unnatural because it’s not the norm any more.

Obviously there were people with regional accents and who didn’t speak in a heightened manner, but they didn’t get to be on TV or in movies unless they were villains. (And usually the villains were putting it on, like Richard Attenborough in Brighton Rock. Sure, he was Richard Attenborough, but he was brought up in the Midlands, and by the on-screen standards of the time, that was common.)

Even the Queen’s very posh accent has changed over the last 50 years and become “more common" - check out newsreel footage etc for proof - and recordings of her father are almost like someone from a foreign country (well, it is the past).

There is, for many film historians/critics, an actual turning point from mannered, theatrical, or “overplayed” acting on screen to naturalistic/American Method realism on screen. It happens in the 1954 movie On the Waterfront, during a traveling shot in which Marlon Brando’s character and Eva Marie Saint’s character are walking together. Eva Marie Saint accidentally drops her glove in the middle of the scene. Marlon Brando instinctively picks it up as his character, and continues the dialog, all the while playing with the glove–turning it about, trying it on, etc. Eva Marie Saint stuck with him, never broke, and the director didn’t call “cut.” 

Before that scene in that movie, if an actor dropped a prop by accident, they would have re-shot the scene–because Brando mostly disappeared out of frame as he bent down to pick up the glove, and (as is explained above) movies were framed to keep the people in the scene in the frame. I

t’s a pretty famous scene in movies because Brando’s character doesn’t give the glove back, but instead uses it to amplify what the two characters are experiencing, naturally and without artifice. It is, for all intents and purposes, the exact moment that screen acting changed.

Okay, but here’s the thing about television specifically: given the size of TV screens when they first came out? Stage acting was the only thing that could be READ. Watch Star Trek: TOS on a modern screen and it looks absurdly overacted. Film of the same era is not, and yet the TV is.

And that’s not a fault of the actors; they were all very capable of naturalistic film acting (yes, even Shatner) – as the later movies would bear out. It’s because they were acting for the small screen, not the big one.

Stage acting and stage makeup is what it is because people are far enough away from the stage that you have to cake on the makeup garishly and exaggerate the hell out of your for it to be VISIBLE. And in early television? Yeah, those constraints actually very much applied. You could move the camera, sure, but the quantity of visual information you could send was just damned limited.

Here’s another example of that.

Watch some Classic Dr Who. You may or may not notice it without watching for it, but every shot of the TARDIS is taken from the same angle.

The TARDIS was, at that time, a stage set. The camera was behind the fourth (Sixth?) wall. It was fixed. And most TV sets were built like this. They had a specific fourth wall and everything was filmed from that angle.

Fast forward to the new series, and you’ll see that the TARDIS is being filmed from different angles all the time, including following the actor around.

Three things have changed:

1. Cameras have become much smaller.

2. Set building for TV has developed as an art. Those early sets were built by people who were trained to build stage sets.

3. Overall technological improvement resulting in things being cheaper.

The TARDIS set that was just retired? Each of its walls was designed to slide out. So you could put the camera anywhere you wanted. Presumably this is the case with the new one too. They couldn’t imagine doing that back in the day. Nor could they afford the complexities of a set like that.

It’s actually my opinion that TV has very much matured as an art form…this century. This decade. We are doing and seeing things that couldn’t be done ten years ago, twenty. Heck, even five.

Going back to speech patterns for a moment – I was a young child in the 80s, so my memories of the norms of the time period are limited (especially because I was incredibly sheltered), but the books I read at the time and the popular movies of the time all have this kind of – whimsical, sardonic speech pattern going on. Think John Waters dialogue. 

I always thought it was kind of stylized. But then I ended up in a weird part of YouTube one night and found someone’s home video of just walking aroud a 7-11 convenience store at midnight talking to people in Orlando, Florida. Just trying out their new camcorder for shits and giggles, talking to other customers, talking to the cashier, etc. And you know what? They all talked like a goddamn John Waters movie. It was the weirdest thing, like I was watching outtakes from The Breakfast Club or Say Anything. I expected one of the Cusacks to walk into frame any second.

Anyway, so I think it’s super cool how human speech and interaction shifts over time, and if you’re living through the shift, you don’t really notice it as it happens.

A) I think you mean John Hughes but I’m very amused by the idea of everyone talking like it’s a John Waters movie

B) This is still happening only now you can pick up people’s net accents. My friends with tumblrs have tumblr diction. My friends who only spend time on facebook for social media sound VERY different. People who use twitter heavily put emphasis on different things and have a different meme literacy (you all know the difference between the way greentext sounds and the way “RIP but I’m different” sounds).

Anyway have fun listening for tumblr accents now

What gets me is that I had a medium-strong tumblr accent before I joined tumblr. ( @magikarpjumpest and I have talked about this a few times) The way I break clauses, my stress patterns, hell, I do the Midsentence Emphatic Capitalization in speech. And I think that ties in to why I do the Giant Tumblr Rambles in a way that I just… don’t, on FB. I’m too rambly for twitter, and while I can use ‘tag group dialogue’ as a facebooker, and occasionally will in speech (yes, I code-switch my social media dialect in person; I’m conscious of the fact that I mirror, but it’s not generally a thing I decide to do), that’s not my default setting for phrasing. Established tone/accent conventions of tumblr already correspond somewhat to my natural way of speaking, and it’s much easier to get two forms of dialogue that are already close to merge. It also means that engaging with longposts here is much easier because people are more likely to be using humor and syntax that feels natural to me. Twitter threads have a concision to them. Greentext boards -I can read them, but it’s like reading something with a very heavy transcribed accent that I almost never hear in person -it’s a headache-inducing amount of effort that’s usually not worth it to me for a downtime activity. FB doesn’t do paragraph breaks the same way, and the emoticon usage is different enough that I don’t like dealing with it. 

This is a wild read from start to finish!!

Having lived through early Web 2.0, I can tell you that “accents through time” also applies to internet “accents.”

You know how people now will end sentences with “Lol” to indicate they’re not mad (e.g. “I have to go now lol, Mom’s home”)? Yeah, we didn’t used to do that. We also used to have a sarcasm tag! I’m going to apologize to the people with screen readers and tell you I promise this is reasonably short. It looked like this:

“Yeah, well, Obama is a ~*~*~Muslim.~*~*~

The asterisk action tags used to be a non-ironic, non-cringey thing, too. Like this:

“NINA GUESS WHAT”

“What??? :D”

“(Typing notification)”

“*waits*”

The term “teal deer” to replace “TL;dr” was a thing. And, of course, in the early 2000s you had 13375p34k, which for younger folks was “leetspeak.” One is the Homestuck characters uses it, but it’s not just a quirk—people really talked like that.

We are far enough into the internet era that even internet accents have changed.

This is a *fantastic* post and something I find very fascinating, because I tend to focus really strongly on character dialogue and speech. Also I’ve definitely noticed that my internet ‘accent’ is definitely slightly antiquated. I’m still much more likely to use a :3 or a -3- text emoticon over a smiley, and I’m not in the habit of using reaction gifs, and I definitely still do actions inside asterix’. 

then again I’m also the kind of person who uses words like antiquated, so I wonder if soon enough it’ll all sound the same amount of old fashioned?

Last time I saw this it didn’t have the internet accent add ons especially! Which is something I’ve noticed for sure. I never used - or indeed saw - the sarcasm tags as used, but I wonder if part of that was ‘area of internet’ also. I definitely am more likely to use actions in asterisks than emoji, and more likely to use text-based ones than image. And I don’t really like reaction GIFs in most places. X’D Much less use them myself.

I can also track when certain patterns of my own text ‘accent’ started to change - more from personal chatter than what platform(s) I spent time browsing or posting on, really.

— African Proverb  (via internetexplorers)

so apparently the “bad vibes” I’ve been feeling are actually “severe psychological distress”

Be prepared to get comments like "Your hair is so pretty. You wrote her hair so pretty. Why is she so pretty?" And "Your writing is so good. I can really tell what he's saying and oh he smells so nice. That's a cool looking bag. Your beta has awesome shoes I bet. What's her name?"

Let the endless compliment cycle begin.

I’m so into this

Fun family story: when my aunt was marrying her wife everyone was really excited but also dreading it because my aunt is known for her insanely long speeches so everyone knew her vows would be like 9 hours long so when it came time for her to say her vows she had a shit ton of cue cards in her hands and even her wife started groaning and my aunt took a deep inhale and then unravelled all the cue cards which were taped together and they all just read ‘HOT DAMN’ in giant letters and those were my aunts vows.

And now since I officially have permission to use this photo

GET FUCKED

A scorpion, not knowing how to swim, asked a frog to carry it across the river. “Do I look like a fool?” said the frog. “You’d sting me if I let you on my back!”

“Be logical,” said the scorpion. “If I stung you I’d certainly drown myself.”

“That’s true,” the frog acknowledged. “Climb aboard, then!” But no sooner than they were halfway across the river, the scorpion stung the frog, and they both began to thrash and drown. “Why on earth did you do that?” the frog said morosely. “Now we’re both going to die.” 

“I can’t help it,” said the scorpion. “It’s my nature.”

___

…But no sooner than they were halfway across the river, the frog felt a subtle motion on its back, and in a panic dived deep beneath the rushing waters, leaving the scorpion to drown.

“It was going to sting me anyway,” muttered the frog, emerging on the other side of the river. “It was inevitable. You all knew it. Everyone knows what those scorpions are like. It was self-defense.”

___

…But no sooner had they cast off from the bank, the frog felt the tip of a stinger pressed lightly against the back of its neck. “What do you think you’re doing?” said the frog.

“Just a precaution,” said the scorpion. “I cannot sting you without drowning. And now, you cannot drown me without being stung. Fair’s fair, isn’t it?”

They swam in silence to the other end of the river, where the scorpion climbed off, leaving the frog fuming.

“After the kindness I showed you!” said the frog. “And you threatened to kill me in return?”

“Kindness?” said the scorpion. “To only invite me on your back after you knew I was defenseless, unable to use my tail without killing myself? My dear frog, I only treated you as I was treated. Your kindness was as poisoned as a scorpion’s sting.”

___

…“Just a precaution,” said the scorpion. “I cannot sting you without drowning. And now, you cannot drown me without being stung. Fair’s fair, isn’t it?”

“You have a point,” the frog acknowledged. “But once we get to dry land, couldn’t you sting me then without repercussion?”

“All I want is to cross the river safely,” said the scorpion. “Once I’m on the other side I would gladly let you be.”

“But I would have to trust you on that,” said the frog. “While you’re pressing a stinger to my neck. By ferrying you to land I’d be be giving up the one deterrent I hold over you.”

“But by the same logic, I can’t possibly withdraw my stinger while we’re still over water,” the scorpion protested.

The frog paused in the middle of the river, treading water. “So, I suppose we’re at an impasse.”

The river rushed around them. The scorpion’s stinger twitched against the frog’s unbroken skin. “I suppose so,” the scorpion said.

___

A scorpion, not knowing how to swim, asked a frog to carry it across the river. “Absolutely not!” said the frog, and dived beneath the waters, and so none of them learned anything.

___

A scorpion, being unable to swim, asked a turtle (as in the original Persian version of the fable) to carry it across the river. The turtle readily agreed, and allowed the scorpion aboard its shell. Halfway across, the scorpion gave in to its nature and stung, but failed to penetrate the turtle’s thick shell. The turtle, swimming placidly, failed to notice.

They reached the other side of the river, and parted ways as friends.

___

…Halfway across, the scorpion gave in to its nature and stung, but failed to penetrate the turtle’s thick shell.

The turtle, hearing the tap of the scorpion’s sting, was offended at the scorpion’s ungratefulness. Thankfully, having been granted the powers to both defend itself and to punish evil, the turtle sank beneath the waters and drowned the scorpion out of principle.

___

A scorpion, not knowing how to swim, asked a frog to carry it across the river. “Do I look like a fool?” sneered the frog. “You’d sting me if I let you on my back.”

The scorpion pleaded earnestly. “Do you think so little of me? Please, I must cross the river. What would I gain from stinging you? I would only end up drowning myself!”

“That’s true,” the frog acknowledged. “Even a scorpion knows to look out for its own skin. Climb aboard, then!”

But as they forged through the rushing waters, the scorpion grew worried. This frog thinks me a ruthless killer, it thought. Would it not be justified in throwing me off now and ridding the world of me? Why else would it agree to this? Every jostle made the scorpion more and more anxious, until the frog surged forward with a particularly large splash, and in panic the scorpion lashed out with its stinger.

“I knew it,” snarled the frog, as they both thrashed and drowned. “A scorpion cannot change its nature.”

___

A scorpion, not knowing how to swim, asked a frog to carry it across the river. The frog agreed, but no sooner than they were halfway across the scorpion stung the frog, and they both began to thrash and drown.

“I’ve only myself to blame,” sighed the frog, as they both sank beneath the waters. “You, you’re a scorpion, I couldn’t have expected anything better. But I knew better, and yet I went against my judgement! And now I’ve doomed us both!”

“You couldn’t help it,” said the scorpion mildly. “It’s your nature.” 

___

…“Why on earth did you do that?” the frog said morosely. “Now we’re both going to die.”

“Alas, I was of two natures,” said the scorpion. “One said to gratefully ride your back across the river, and the other said to sting you where you stood. And so both fought, and neither won.” It smiled wistfully. “Ah, it would be nice to be just one thing, wouldn’t it? Unadulterated in nature. Without the capacity for conflict or regret.”

___

“By the way,” said the frog, as they swam, “I’ve been meaning to ask: What’s on the other side of the river?”

“It’s the journey,” said the scorpion. “Not the destination.”

___

…“What’s on the other side of anything?” said the scorpion. “A new beginning.”

___

…”Another scorpion to mate with,” said the scorpion. “And more prey to kill, and more living bodies to poison, and a forthcoming lineage of cruelties that you will be culpable in.”

___

…”Nothing we will live to see, I fear,” said the scorpion. “Already the currents are growing stronger, and the river seems like it shall swallow us both. We surge forward, and the shoreline recedes. But does that mean our striving was in vain?”

___

“I love you,” said the scorpion.

The frog glanced upward. “Do you?”

“Absolutely. Can you imagine the fear of drowning? Of course not. You’re a frog. Might as well be scared of breathing air. And yet here I am, clinging to your back, as the waters rage around us. Isn’t that love? Isn’t that trust? Isn’t that necessity? I could not kill you without killing myself. Are we not inseparable in this?”

The frog swam on, the both of them silent.

___

“I’m so tired,” murmured the frog eventually. “How much further to the other side? I don’t know how long we’ve been swimming. I’ve been treading water. And it’s getting so very dark.”

“Shh,” the scorpion said. “Don’t be afraid.”

The frog’s legs kicked out weakly. “How long has it been? We’re lost. We’re lost! We’re doomed to be cast about the waters forever. There is no land. There’s nothing on the other side, don’t you see!”

“Shh, shh,” said the scorpion. “My venom is a hallucinogenic. Beneath its surface, the river is endlessly deep, its currents carrying many things.” 

“You - You’ve killed us both,” said the frog, and began to laugh deliriously. “Is this - is this what it’s like to drown?” 

“We’ve killed each other,” said the scorpion soothingly. “My venom in my glands now pulsing through your veins, the waters of your birthing pool suffusing my lungs. We are engulfing each other now, drowning in each other. I am breathless. Do you feel it? Do you feel my sting pierced through your heart?”

“What a foolish thing to do,” murmured the frog. “No logic. No logic to it at all.”

“We couldn’t help it,” whispered the scorpion. “It’s our natures. Why else does anything in the world happen? Because we were made for this from birth, darling, every moment inexplicable and inevitable. What a crazy thing it is to fall in love, and yet - It’s all our fault! We are both blameless. We’re together now, darling. It couldn’t have happened any other way.”

___

“It’s funny,” said the frog. “I can’t say that I trust you, really. Or that I even think very much of you and that nasty little stinger of yours to begin with. But I’m doing this for you regardless. It’s strange, isn’t it? It’s strange. Why would I do this? I want to help you, want to go out of my way to help you. I let you climb right onto my back! Now, whyever would I go and do a foolish thing like that?”

___

A scorpion, not knowing how to swim, asked a frog to carry it across the river. “Do I look like a fool?” said the frog. “You’d sting me if I let you on my back!”

“Be logical,” said the scorpion. “If I stung you I’d certainly drown myself.”  

“That’s true,” the frog acknowledged. “Come aboard, then!” But no sooner had the scorpion mounted the frog’s back than it began to sting, repeatedly, while still safely on the river’s bank.

The frog groaned, thrashing weakly as the venom coursed through its veins, beginning to liquefy its flesh. “Ah,” it muttered. “For some reason I never considered this possibility.”

“Because you were never scared of me,” the scorpion whispered in its ear. “You were never scared of dying. In a past life you wore a shell and sat in judgement. And then you were reborn: soft-skinned, swift, unburdened, as new and vulnerable as a child, moving anew through a world of children. How could anyone ever be cruel, you thought, seeing the precariousness of it all?” The scorpion bowed its head and drank. “How could anyone kill you without killing themselves?”

I used to think it was important to have common interests with the person that you are in a relationship with but now I think it is more important to be similar in other aspects. like how kind you are. how you treat the people you care about, how you treat strangers. how you deal with anger. how you deal with pain. and not necessarily dealing with all these things the same way but being perceptive enough to understand what action each situation calls for. it’s important for both people to be on the same page about what that action should be. it’s important to me to have that kind of synchrony.

This is the post exudes emotional maturity.

Corvids are just the best

i love birds so much

based on a true story

I don’t think Fortnite is to blame for kids nowadays not reading…

That’s the joke. It’s the authoritarian overbearing parent.

He was being sarcastic lol

Reminded me of these

That violin one hit close to home.

I remember doing homework once, asked my grandmother if she was proud of me. “Do some thing for me to be proud of.” That hurt.

That comic up there – I witnessed almost that exact scenario. Teacher wanted the kids to all pick books. One kid spots something on the shelf and gets visibly excited. Pulls it out and starts reading. Teacher sees it, snatches it off him and tells him that this is a book for 8 year olds (the kid was 15ish) and tells him to get a book more appropriate for his age. Kid slouches around the shelves for about 10 minutes, finally picks up a book at random and sits in his chair tucking the edges of each page into the binding to make that looped-page look. He didn’t read a word. He sat there and did this to his book for the remainder of the reading session:

He had been genuinely excited about the 8 year old book he’d picked up. It was a new one in a series he used to read as a younger kid. He’d been actively sitting and reading, and then he was embarrassed in front of his classmates, told off for reading a kids book, and voila. He lost all enthusiasm for reading anything else that day.

What’s worse? That kid had been hit by a car like a year and a half earlier. Severe brain trauma. Had to re-learn a lot of basic things, like how to speak and how to read.

An 8 year old book would have been perfect for him. Easy enough to read that it would have helped rebuild his confidence in his own reading ability. A book meant for 15/16 years olds? A lot harder to read than a book for 8 year olds. Especially if you’re recovering from a relatively recent brain injury.

And yeah, the teacher knew all about his brain injury, and the recovery. He just seemed go be of the opinion that the kid was 15, so he should be reading books for 15 year olds, irrespective of brain injury.

Reading this thread I’m reminded of Daniel Pennae’s The Rights of the Reader, which can be found in a lot of bookshops and school libraries: 

The child speaking at the bottom in Quentin Blake’s distinctive spiky handwriting is saying ‘10 rights, 1 warning: Don’t make fun of people who don’t read - or they never will’

I remember at one point at my old school, I’d read so much one year for that AR test thing that they banned me from the Library just cause I was reading so much.

I would just like to take a second to thank every single fanfiction writer who’s ever published a fic. In the last 3 weeks, I’ve read over 890,000 words of fanfiction while in quarantine. I know legally, fanfiction writers are not considered “essential” but let me tell you: they are essential to me. Essential to my sanity, my wellbeing, my happiness. Fic gives me so much joy and such a love for the world and the people in it, and fic writers don’t ask for anything in return, except occasional engagement. So from the bottom of my heart: thank you fic writers. Thank you for keeping me company during this time of isolation. Thank you for writing stories that give me hope and take my mind off of my anxiety. Thank you for making me laugh even when I don’t think it’s possible. Thank you for giving me something to be excited about when it feels like the world is falling apart around me. Thank you, thank you, thank you. 

I made a chart.

“fuck” I think properly describes it

The trifecta

The Trifuckta

The unholy trinity

Anti anxiety.

I’VE BEEN LOOKING FOR THAT CAT ONE FOREVER

So mesmerized

The cat

Hey my followers with anxiety here’s some things that might help.

this for my followers with anxiety 🥺 i hope this helps

As someone with anxiety I literally can’t ignore these tips so I’m just gonna reblog