Reblogged nerdinaflowercrown
Close to you (1/2)
and speaking of things I read and forgot about, here’s one I was able to identify a while back with the help of Reddit. Paul Jennings is an Australian children’s author who usually writes about weird events with some gross-out humor for the kids, but he does the occasional story that’s just creepy. Granddad’s Gifts is one of them.
A boy and his family visit his grandmother’s farm, I think to help her prepare it for sale, since the grandfather is dead and she can’t manage on her own any more. The boy sleeps in a room with a locked cupboard, which he is instructed not to open, and of course does, finding a fox skin for wearing as a shawl. Apparently the grandfather shot and skinned it for the grandmother but she was upset by the fox’s death and they locked it away, buried the remains of the fox under a lemon tree, and never spoke of it again.
Anyway, the boy works on the farm every day, and is given two lemons from the bigger of two lemon trees on the property after work. Instead of eating them, he puts them in the cupboard, only to hear moving and chewing noises in the middle of the night. He also dreams about his grandfather, who he can’t remember well, but had striking blue eyes. In the morning, the lemons are gone, and when he touches the tail of the fox skin, he can feel two bones that weren’t there before.
So every day, he puts his lemons in the forbidden cupboard, and every night the fox skin regains two parts, and this goes on for his entire stay. Until the last day, when he finds that his grandmother has taken the last two lemons and made a pie for the family. The boy opens the cupboard to find a complete and live fox, with the exception of its eyes, which are still taxidermy glass, blind and stumbling. He locks the cupboard, then goes and sits on the step and cries, at which point his grandmother says that she doesn’t understand what the problem is, but he can have the two lemons off the small tree if he wants them so badly. The boy knows it won’t work, because it isn’t the tree where the fox was buried, but he takes them anyway.
The next day, he sees a fox run into the woods, which turns and looks at him for just long enough to notice that it has blue eyes.
His grandmother mentions that the small tree has rarely grown any lemons, and it is strange that it never grew well, because that’s where his grandfather is buried.
AUSTRALIAN CHILDREN’S LITERATURE, EVERYONE
Paul Jennings’ stories are great
Hey. Look at me. Please leave yourself a note somewhere you'll see it later that says "it is going to take years if not decades to get the United States government to the level of functionality it had in November of 2024." If we elect a democrat in 2028, we are not going to be up and running by 2032.
Please make sure you have a reminder in your phone reminding you to not look at 2028/32/36 Democratic candidates and say "why are they not promising/delivering Cool Shit?" because you are going to understand that to get Cool Shit we must have competent people running a decently funded government, and we are not going to have that.
We are not getting UBI. We are not getting single payer healthcare. We are not getting free college or free preschool. We are not redistributing wealth on a large scale. We are not getting free internet. We are not getting ranked choice voting.
If we are lucky, we are going to get an IRS that can collect taxes, qualified schoolteachers, research grants, Social Security, and a government that thinks maybe it should be a priority for people around the worlds to not have AIDS, malaria or TB.
To be clear, I don't mean we should forget or take our eyes off the ultimate long-term goals of getting Cool Shit, but to get there, we're gonna have to support things like "half-measures" and "small steps" and "not tearing down people who won't get us all the way there" and "understanding that they are starting from the basement basically because every government institution is being decimated"
As someone who just spent the last four years helping unfuck the shit Trump did to it in the last term, we had EASILY another decade left to go to get it back to pre-2016 functionality. We were working so hard, and we really thought we'd have a chance if we had a Harris presidency to actually get things cleaned up and at least working okay.
and then the average american voter decided to throw a few thousand tons of kerosene and a lit match on top of all of that work, (and also my entire fucking life and career) because boohoo we didn't get instant fucking gratification
Forget the IRS, y'all are gonna be lucky to have potable drinking water in 2032. Or consistent access to routine vaccines.
Get your asses in the street April 5th, because guess what, voting was civic engagement on easy mode and if you want a even slightly functioning country you're gonna have to start in on doing it on hard mode. Join an Indivisible group, that's a good first step--but fucking remember, this mess is not fucking getting fucking cleaned the fuck up for the next ten to twenty years, easy.
Sometimes i feel like younger queer kids are getting a bit to bold with openly talking to people they don’t know In The Context Of:
More than once i have had a younger/same age queer person come up to me in public settings and say something about “finding other gays” or clearly clocking me as nonbinary and I’m like :)))))))) hey buddy I’m here with my conservative parents can you fucking not out me :))))))))
Just say you like my outfit or hair and move on, fuck even tell me you like my shoelaces. Don’t call me gay and limp your wrist at me when you don’t even know me? Especially when there’s a bunch of ppl around?
i was out with my ex once when three *very* young queer kids, like thirteen years old, came up to us and asked us “are you guys, you know…” and did the limp wrist thing at us. one of them loudly exclaimed that it was so cool to meet other queer people in real life. this was in public in an unbelievably conservative area - we didn’t even feel safe holding hands because we were surrounded by Mormons. we got lucky that day, but I’m begging y’all to remember that the world doesn’t work like the internet. other queers are real fuckin people. don’t do this shit. OP is right; tell me you like my jacket, or my patches, or the rainbow spokes on my wheelchair, but don’t out either of us!
This used to be standard operating procedure not even ten years ago: NEVER OUT OTHER QUEERS, even if they’re supposedly already out. Never assume that it’s okay to let third parties know that so-and-so is queer. Ever. You never know when you’ve found the one uncle with the heart condition that they can’t bear to risk telling, or the one neighbor who’s just threatening enough that they don’t mention it around, or even the grandma that they haven’t gotten around to mentioning it to yet. You might have just ruined a very important milestone for someone, or you could have put them at actual risk of harm.
Also… stop freaking assuming. If you don’t see a pride flag on them, please don’t just assume. You can’t tell ANYTHING about a person’s gender or partner preferences by what they’re wearing on any given day, what their hair looks like, or whether or not they’re using makeup. You legit cannot, and you look like a jerk when you try.
this is even more important now that Trump is in power.
some people will be choosing to live in the closet and it is not your job to pressure them one way or the other.
protect your lgbtq siblings - honor their choices - and never talk to cops, collaborators, and snitches.
Younger queer people have grown up in a better world, but we’re in a time of backsliding right now. Do NOT out other queer people. Also, I’m not gonna tell you how to present yourselves in public………..but please, I am begging you to re-evaluate HOW safe you are in the current climate.
Reblogged livingmeatloaf
i posted this old as balls gifset ten years ago today
Happy anniversary old as balls gifset
We are pleased to note the continued survival of this meme to the point that it, too, is Old As Balls
Reblogged
You know, I used to be pretty self conscious when I'd find a new artist/blog and scroll through their stuff, liking as I went. Felt like I was bothering them, leaving so many notes behind.
Having had someone do this to my blog, I'm less self conscious about it because it is a DELIGHT to look in my Activity and see a long list of the same person's name! Very flattering, and puts a smile on my face!
So... if you feel bad about scrolling through someone's blog and leaving a ton of likes, don't! It's very nice :)
Reblogged livingmeatloaf
lately my kids have been playing Baby Knife, which consists of somebody acting as a baby with knife hands chasing people while going "baby knife baby knife" over and over. is this a thing or are they just insane
we have a new teacher this year who has never had kindergarten before & she rounded em all up & told em No Baby Knife and No Zombies and idk how to tell her that 1. all kindergarten recess games boil down to Give Birth And Kill Each Other and 2. the absurd vaguely inappropriate games they make up are usually better than when they try to play an Actual game like soccer
Baby Knife is straightforward. theres a baby knife. baby knife chases you. thats about it. when they try to play Real Sports every single child is playing by a different set of rules unbeknownst to the others and none of them are playing by the Actual rules. everybody is mad at everybody else and running up to tell on their colleagues for cheating every 3 minutes. this doesnt happen when they play Baby Knife
if no one's said it, it's normal. It's just Tag with flavor. Tag is boring so you gotta add imagination.
Our baby knife as kids was Raptor Tag. Raptors hunt in packs so the person who was "it" had to run around pretending to be a velociraptor and to tag people they had to actually tackle them and "eat" them for 5 full seconds (others could come to the rescue and save them in that time, but risked getting eaten too or instead if the raptor switched targets). Eaten players then became raptors, until the whole pack was teamwork-hunting the last wily or lucky kid. There were no winning survivors- the game was won as a group once everyone was a raptor.
Reblogged livingmeatloaf
Hit by the sudden urge to completely rewrite the fanfiction I never finished in 2020 as a way to grasp at something certain in uncertain times
Reblogged livingmeatloaf
If you're a writer you're supposed to write a lot of bullshit. It's part of the gig. You have to write a lot of absolute garbage in order to get to the good bits. Every once in a while you'll be like "Oh, I wish I hadn't wasted all that time writing bullshit," but that's dumb. That's exactly the same as an Olympic runner being like "Oh, I wish I hadn't wasted all that time running all those practice laps"
Reblogged livingmeatloaf
HE BROKE THE RECORD
Senator Cory Booker just broke the all-time record for the longest Senate floor speech, speaking for over 24 hours without a pause (no food, no bathroom breaks, only water to drink) as a protest against Trump and Musk and what they're doing.
The previous record was set in 1957, when Strom Thurmond spoke for 24 hours and 18 minutes protesting the Civil Rights Act.
Senator Booker has blown past that record, currently at 25 hours and still speaking as of 8 pm local time. Respect.
Representation matters.
Happy Star Trek Day!
I was at DragonCon one year when Avery Brooks was on a panel, and a Black dude stood up and talked about how the year DS9 came on, he became the sole custodial guardian of his small son, and he was *terrified* and felt helpless, because he hadn’t really had a father himself, and he didn’t really know any Black fathers he particularly wanted to emulate, and no Black single fathers at all. He talked about how every week he’d put his kid to bed and sit down and watch Deep Space Nine, and think to himself, “Okay, this, I want us to be this kind of father and son,” and how, silly as it might sound, the idea that Ben could be there for Jake, all the time, successfully, and earn his admiration and trust, was the only source he really had of inspiration, the only voice that was telling him he could handle this job.
I swear to fuck there was a whole auditorium of people in tears by the time he was done, including both him and Brooks. It was one of the most beautiful moments I ever saw about the sometimes bloodless-sounding term “representation,” and about fandom in general, and I will never forget it.
Reblogged jungwildeandfree
I once wrote a 1500 word essay on something I'd forgotten to read in the 40 minutes before class. Including the time it took to read the thing I'd forgotten to read.
I got an A on that paper.
Writing is a skill. Skill is muscle. If you don't use a muscle, it atrophies. If you are a student and you are tempted to use genAI to cheese an assignment, I am begging you for your own sake to not do it.
This is not a moral stance about genAI (which is shit at what it's ostensibly for, and full of lies and evil, and fueled by art theft and burning rainforests, and there is no good reason to ever use it for anything; that's the moral reason for why you shouldn't use it), it is a purely pragmatic stance based on the fact that if you use it you will never learn the single most essential skill that is used in every single workplace.
You will never learn to bullshit.
And if you cannot bullshit, you will not understand when you are being fed bullshit by others.
For your own sake you must learn to do your own thinking, your own bullshitting, because our trashfire society runs on bullshit and for your own good you must become fluent in it, because very few people will bother to translate it for you. It was asinine in the late 90s, and it is asinine today, but it is the central truth of adult society: everything is bullshit, and you need to know what is going on beneath the bullshit, and you need to be able to bullshit back if necessary.
I know that the expectations being placed on you are ever-increasing, and I know that it does not seem rational to put effort into explaining the plot of a Charles Dickens novel to someone who has read the thing 50 times and will read 50 identical essays about it over the weekend. I know you are being handed ever-greater heaps of what is functionally mindless busywork because of an institutional obsession with metrics that don't actually measure learning in a useful way. High school was nightmarish in the 90s and I am fully aware that it has only gotten worse.
Nevertheless, you must try, if only for your own sake. Curiosity is your best hope, and dogged determination your best weapon. Learn, please, if only out of spite.
I was able to get an A on that paper because I was able to skim the reading, figure out what it was about, and bullshit for 1500 words in the space of 40 minutes.
Imagine what you can do if you learn to bullshit like I can bullshit.