iris by goo goo dolls really is insane though. I'd give up forever to touch you? you're the closest to heaven I'll ever be? all I can breathe is your life? and I don't want the world to see me cause I don't think they'd understand? when everything's meant to be broken I just want you to know who I am? does anyone hear me.

lets ambush mama

shoutout to the guy who ran for "class president" (not a real role at this school) in 7th grade and just put up posters everywhere about how he would bring steam powered rail back. no other policy. hope you're doing well.

using "my personal 9/11" to mean "thing i had coming and 100% deserved"

Inshallah they find him.

Best image in the universe

wizard babies be on their orb watching cocomerlin

hello fellow non-Black tumblr users. welcome to my saw trap. if you'd like to leave, please name one (1) Black woman author who is not Maya Angelou, Toni Morrison, bell hooks, Octavia Butler, or N.K. Jemisin. bonus points if she's published a book in the last five years.

For my own future reference, and for anyone else who wants it, a list of authors mentioned in the notes. (I cannot promise this is comprehensive, there are a lot of reblogs and I might have missed some.) I've included a link for each author, where possible I've tried to find one that leads you to their books, prioritising own websites/publishers, falling back on wikipedia otherwise.

If you find any mistakes in the links let me know and I'll edit. This post will be in two parts, because I literally broke tumblr with how many authors there were. I think it's about a hundred and fifty.

And here's part two:

One note - Nisi Shawl is genderfluid and goes by they/them, though there are a bunch of older printings of their books that have their previous pronoun set in them so I’m not surprised folk added them to this list of suggestions.

thank you for catching that 🫡

I see a man (fictional), I am generally like "okay". I see the same man (fictional) being put in a situation, covered in dirt and blood, perhaps soaking wet, actively sobbing and shaking like a chihuahua, and I am saying "yay" and "yippee" and things of this nature

MOOOOOOM, they’re trying to turn Tumblr into TikTok again!

remember the legend

Into battle

It's very endearing to me how many people are willing to keep an eye on a video feed so they can push a button and let a fish in the Netherlands get to the other side of a dam.

It is genuinely baffling to me, in a very kind and positive way, especially coupled with the local news continually going several shades of 'wtf, this thing is a roaring success again and we don't quite get why'. They've already quadrupled their capacity for simultaneous clicks and it's still nowhere near enough and there's just... Bewilderment.

But to come back to point 1- Citizen Science fills a hole in the soul that wanted to go out on adventures and discover things when we were younger, but the study of it was hard or we didn't have the money or our schools were garbage. But you don't have to have a degree to do things like... press a button or download and use an app, or count or transcribe notes.

Anyways- here's some Citizen Science links if the Fish Doorbell makes you feel happy and you yearn for more ways to help scientists do stuff:

Foldit (folding proteins)

Fathomverse (sea animals)

Project Monarch (butterflies)

Bioblitz, an event where citizens identify as many species in an area within a period of time

Species Watch (animal species)

BOINC’s Compute for Science

Zooniverse is a website that hosts information on many citizen science projects

Label trees in aerial photos

Count cells in fossils and modern leaves

Digitize Atmospheric Data

Count penguins

US-based Citizen Science Database

eBird (bird identification)

Merlin (bird identification by sound)

iNaturalist (nature identification)

MapSwipe (collaboration between several Red Cross organizations and Doctors Without Borders, update vital geospatial data)

Smithsonian Archives Transcription Center

It is not enough to get into a comfy sleeping position- one must go through several and spin like a rotisserie chicken to arrive at the position you started with.

We ask your questions so you don’t have to! Submit your questions to have them posted anonymously as polls.

Who the fuck is voting no and can you please give me your money? Sincerely someone who makes about $17,000 a year

Someone who makes $65k may not be "as poor" as someone who makes $17k a year but that doesn't make them rich. You're both still pretty damn poor.

They're only making about $31 an hour. This is how much my mom makes as a nurse, an "essential worker."

She has just enough money to pay her bills. She lives in a tiny, crappy house. Her car is ancient and falling apart. She doesn't have enough money to pay for all the healthcare she needs, including $20,000 of dental work she can never afford.

When I lived with her and she was a single mom, we could never afford the doctor and could barely afford food sometimes.

She will never be able to retire.

How tf do you think that is rich?

Frankly, my mom is still poor.

Your enemy isn't the person makes $65,000, or even some doctor or lawyer making $165,000. It's the people making billions off of everyone else's labor.

You can't eat the rich if you think every single person making more money than you is rich.

The working class is incredibly large. It's hard to survive on $65k and harder to survive on $17k. Neither one is comfortable.

The definition I tend to use is: if you lost your job and couldn't get another, are you fucked? If the answer is yes, you're not rich. Even if it's "I could last for several months on savings and whatnot, but yeah, after that I'd be fucked."

Rich people may have jobs and salaries, but they aren't dependent on them. "Rich" means you own things that make enough money by themselves that you don't have to have a job if you don't want to.

A pithy way to put it is: well-off people own things that cost a lot of money. Rich people own things that make a lot of money.

is the world really such a terrible place? yesterday i asked if oat milk was extra and the barista said yes so i said ok just regular milk then and when she gave me my chai latte she whispered “i used oat milk ;)” doesnt that make u want to live another day?

here is my life philosophy: next week there might be someone ahead of you in line at the store who’s short a quarter and you have a quarter and you can give it to them. if you weren’t there, they’d have to put something back. the week after that you could be getting lunch and the waiter might ask if you want some pancakes someone else ordered and never picked up. you could find someone’s lost cat. you could watch someone’s bag while they go to the restroom. there are so many ways you are going to touch other people’s lives and they are going to touch yours and there’s no way to know when it’s going to happen. so you have to keep living!!! i wouldn’t want to die knowing that tomorrow the barista will give me free oat milk just to be nice. 

When I was 11 years old - we went to Sea World for my birthday. This was to avoid the realization I had no friends, and no one to come to a birthday party and probably because someone gave my mother free tickets at work. It was kinda a shitty day despite being at a theme park full of cute animals. There was a new roller coaster there that had just opened so we decided to go on. I was nervous. I’d never been on a roller coaster.

A group of 6 college kids were ahead of us in line and started chatting with me. Full on just having a fun conversation with someone literally going through the beginning of a very awkward middle school period. I was so shocked they wanted to talk to me. I think my mom mentioned it was my birthday. They were very nice about it. When we got on the ride they told us to go ahead of them so we could sit at the front of the car since it held 8 people.

Now the ride (called Journey to Atlantis - I believe it is sadly no longer there) started with a slow ride of beautiful visuals of dolphins and oceans and computerized images of this imaginary Atlantis before going up the hill to the beginning of the coaster, where it paused for about 30 seconds, and then the ride started. The college kids must have known there would be a pause. Maybe they’d ridden it before I’m not sure.

But as we sat there on that peak, 6 people I’ve never known, and will never know again, sang a very very lonely 11 year old happy birthday. Loudly. And with gusto. They were happy and laughing and joyful. And it made me feel less alone in the world.

I am 29 years old this year, and I still remember them. I still remember that kindness. It is so important. It doesn’t go into a vacuum. It exists beside me in my daily life. And I love the idea that I have been that person to someone else too.

It’s stunningly lovely to be human when we’re kind to each other.