you drove me all the way up here

Drafted a couple posts because I'm not sure how to say this. Young people are inexperienced and frequently obnoxious. This has always been true. Cultural shifts and new technology only mean they will be inexperienced and obnoxious in different, more visible ways. You aren't beating the grumpy old hater allegations by cloaking your kids-these-days bitching in tiktok scapegoating and alleged youth tech illiteracy.

You have forgotten all the embarrassing ways you were inconsiderate at 18. You might still be your old manager's go-to anecdote for crazy oblivious interns. All the forums you posted on begging for answers instead of reading the fucking sticky or googling it are lost to time. But nah this generation is uniquely stupid and rude, for real this time.

everyone talks about that one xkcd about experts overestimating the average person's familiarity with their field, and that's all fun and good. but in my experience what's far funnier is when you start to think of yourself as the "average" person being described in that comic. knowing enough people who are so incredibly into one specific thing that you start saying shit that sounds like "oh no i'm no geochemist haha i really only know the formulas for olivine and one or two feldspars. and quartz, of course."

me: oh yeah i know absolutely nothing about marine biology, it's such a vast and complicated field--

also me: what do you mean you never heard of a vaquita (a species of porpoise endemic to the northern end of the Gulf of California in Baja California, Mexico. Reaching a maximum body length of 150 cm or 140 cm, it is the smallest of all living cetaceans.)

Sometimes I think a lot about my mom's cat

My mom's cat is a common domestic shorthair we found on the side of the road as a kitten

Regular cat, not a maine coon or one of those massive breeds. His mom was smaller than a loaf of bread

But in a sort of a Clifford The Big Red Dog situation, he grew super fast, and really really big, and took a super long time to stop growing

Worried that she was overfeeding him, she eased back his portions, but he stayed a massive round baby

When he started having kidney problems, she took him to the vet.

The vet took a look at him and said, "holy fuck, what are you feeding him", checked the nutritional listings on his chow, and told her "Yeah, maybe he's reacting badly to the amount of grain in this, try a meatier diet"

So my mom wound up special-ordering this specific high-protein prescription cat food made of like. Kangaroo meat or some shit that cost like sixty bucks a bag

And, as typical act two in an episode of House, he somehow got worse on the fancy specialized stuff that was supposed to be Primo Athlete Olympic Feline Blend

Like. WAY worse. His guts were inflamed and his kidneys were shutting down and he was all sore and HE WAS STILL HUGE, just miserable and sad

So shetook him back to the vet, where they had to help him pee (he was apparently close to bursting and had some kind of blockage too) and went "Yeah no this is NOT normal and we don't know what's going on, we're gonna do some tests but in the meantime you should go back to what he was eating before, at least that wasn't actively killing him" so she did

And he still wasn't great, but he also improved

And so they take his blood and do an ultrasound and a couple g's later she gets a call back like "this is gonna sound crazy, but we want you to put him on a low-meat diet. Just the least amount of protein and iron and shit. We need you to find the grainiest, filler-iest dollar tree kibble available and give him some of that bad bad shit"

And my mother is a woman of science. So she did

And he GOT BETTER

His energy picked back up, inflammation went down, he started drinking normally again, got back to pissing like a fuckin champion

And so it turns out that out of all the random ass freeway bonus cats we possibly could have scooped out of a ditch, WE got the one-in-a-million freak of nature with a SPECIFIC genetic defect that means a paleo protein free range diet is essentially poison and he THRIVES on cheap ass garbage

Like. He medically NEEDS junk food

I dont really understand how that works, but i cant argue with results.

If we had four of him, they'd outweigh my mom. And he's FINE

Also blind, but that's unrelated

Im not using him as a symbol or a metaphor or anything. I just keep catching myself thinking about my mom's Big Fucking Cat

Yall are demanding a cat tax so here's him at 25 pounds

This does not do him justice but please know he's bigger than my auntie's hunting beagle

Good grief he is huge

GUYS. DID YOU KNOW YOU CAN WRITE CHOOSE YOUR OWN ADVENTURE FICS ON AO3

Other things you can do:

Its fucking amazing. Ao3 is fucking amazing. Can I legally marry a website?

WHAT

One of those times I'm reblogging something so I can find it again later

you cannot scold us for biting the hand that bites us first. the biting was initiated by the hand

This is a fascinating concept, that I think would make a great movie in itself. Perhaps with a few musical numbers. And Hitler

Finding out that Lancelot was apparently the invention of a french writer is absolutely hysterical to me. 12th century french poet sitting around reading arthurian romances and thinking "yeah these stories are pretty good but I think what they really need is a french guy who shows up and fucks arthurs wife"

He was as tall as he was tall, and his eyes were the color they were. To describe his hair one would say that he had some. His face had all the features you'd expect, and none of the ones you wouldn't. "There he is," people would often say of him, but only when he was there. And they were right.

Douglas Adams ass type sexyman

So a while back I won a cheap eBay auction listing for a collection of love letters from the first world war.

They arrived today, and…the listing was WAY more than I expected for the price I won it for. There’s over 100, and they’re not just from WWI, but from 1906 (earliest I’ve found so far) through to 1915.

Charlie writes to his girlfriend, Gertrude. This is the most beautiful, lovesick stuff I’ve ever read. He sends her so many letters, sometimes twice a day, and lots of poems. He seems to have been an artist, as he talks a lot about small exhibitions of his stuff, and included a flyer for one. He also talks about how her parents don’t approve of them and how he’s desperately awaiting the day they’ll be married.

I haven’t found the latest of the letters, but the fact it’s up until 1915 and then stops…doesn’t give me hope for a happy ending.

This man continuously refers to his precious beloved Gertie as his queen and goddess, and whilst most of it is sickly sweet, there’s some raunchy stuff too, with him talking about how he can’t wait until they have a little house together and can ‘please each other all day’…

There’s. So many.

I’m going to put them in order by date, read them through, and then maybe even transcribe them so we can find out a bit about Charlie and Gertie’s love story.

This man was absolutely lost in the sauce

Y'all he writes about sending her pressed poppies and postcards for her collection 😭😭😭

111 years after Charlie got his dick touched in 1910, I decided to tell you all about it. Sorry Charlie.

Some more finds:

And some CODE!!!

Also all this is poems:

UHHHHH…👀👀👀

This has a lot of notes so I need everyone to know:

They got married 😭😭😭❤ (thank you to @lovesjustachemical for finding this!!!)

Kinda fucked up that you just stole somebody’s mail

Don’t know how to explain to you that acquiring, preserving, and transcribing historical ephemera that would have otherwise just been trashed from people who have been dead for over 50 years and don’t appear to have any living descendants isn’t the same as ‘stealing someone’s mail’ but Tumblr never ceases to amaze me with it’s cold takes.

something has gone deeply wrong when "focusing pragmatically on issues you can influence and working to make life better for yourself and your community" is considered an unserious distraction while "endlessly exposing yourself to media about distressing situations you can't control" is considered political engagement

something has gone deeply wrong when "focusing pragmatically on issues you can influence and working to make life better for yourself and your community" is considered an unserious distraction while "endlessly exposing yourself to media about distressing situations you can't control" is considered political engagement

Sometimes people use “respect” to mean “treating someone like a person” and sometimes they use “respect” to mean “treating someone like an authority”

and sometimes people who are used to being treated like an authority say “if you won’t respect me I won’t respect you” and they mean “if you won’t treat me like an authority I won’t treat you like a person”

and they think they’re being fair but they aren’t, and it’s not okay.

This is so well put I am stunned

Tbh I don't care about the Odyssey discourse but I saw one tweet where they're like "convenient that they would have a guy who goes on an Odyssey named Odysseus" it was my favorite tweet about the whole thing

I had a dream that I went to heaven and heaven had its own heaven-exclusive tv shows that were written and produced there in heaven and they showed me the most popular show in heaven and it was this really beautiful drama and, at the end of the episode, the credits said “Created by Mike Ehrmantraut” and they were like “oh yeah. fictional characters who die in earth media go to real heaven” and I’m like “sure but mike did some pretty fucked up stuff, wouldn’t he go to hell?” and they’re like “no, all the fucked up things he did were fictional. people only get judged for the real things they do and the only thing mike really did was bring joy to millions of viewers” and i think that’s beautiful