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i've felt worse

@trans-seraphim / seraphim.blog

Sera Gwen / 25 / Virgo || Lesbian / Poly / Trans (she⁠/⁠her) || I relate to Lapis on a spiritual level (icon by)

Blind people must save a lot on electricity.

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stomatium

They do actually!

I had a blind professor, last semester, and I swung through his office to make up an exam. It was a while before I knew he was in there because he was sitting with the lights off. I finally went in, apologized, and took the exam by the light of a nearby window (which was fine). Forty-five minutes into dead silence he panicked and yelled in this booming voiced, “WAIT, YOU CAN SEE!!!” before diving across his desk to turn on the lights. I’m sure he was embarrassed but I thought it was endearing and it highlighted a large aspect of disabled life that I hadn’t previously considered.

Sort of relatedly I once had professor who was deaf, but she had learned to read lips and speak so she could communicate easily with hearing people who didn’t know sign language. One day she had gotten off topic and was talking a little about her personal life, so that one of the students said “Oh, I know, I grew up in Brooklyn too.” 

She stared at him for a long time and then said “How do you know I’m from Brooklyn?”

And he said “You have a Brooklyn accent.”

She said “I do?” and the whole class nodded, and then she burst out laughing and said “I had no idea!  The school where I learned to speak was in Brooklyn.  I learned by moving my mouth and tongue the way my teachers did.  So I guess it makes sense that I have their accent, I just never thought about it.”

My moms a sign language interpreter, and she’s signed with people from all over the US. According to her, when she signs with people from the south they sign with a “drawl.” They have slower hand movements and exaggerate certain parts of the sign. People from the Midwest sign very fast and people from the south sign very slow.

So we were at a restaurant once and my mom started interpreting for someone who was trying to order and she was like “oh you’re from the south!”

And they were like “how did you know that?”

And she said “you sign with a drawl.” And they were really surprised that it came through that much.

It’s really interesting that even when not speaking verbally accents and heritage come through.

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urbanfantasyinspiration

Humans are so fucking fascinating

Fandom terms have to sound silly, like blorbo or squick, because fandom needs humbling. Not a lot. But just every so often you need a good grounding reminder that all of this is literally made up nonsense for fun.

If you take a fictional thing so seriously that silly words genuinely annoy you, you've gone too far and you need to dial it back.

My one friend group can't stop saying, "See you in hell!" in a cheerful voice instead of, "Talk to you later!" and my other friend group can't stop calling things "penis" instead of "cool" or "good", so I just unironically uttered the phrase, "Sounds penis, see you in hell," as I got off the phone.

I think everyone should be doing this btw. Maybe, "Sounds penis, see you in hell," could be our, "Always."

I tried to quote this post to my housemate the other day but botched it so said "nice cock, kill yourself" and now it's turned into a call and response so instead of saying goodbye one of us says nice cock and the other tells you to kill yourself

tbh no april fools gag tumblr ever pulls will ever be as good as the lizard election of 2016 staff put more effort into that than the rest of this website combined and it shows

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cishetsbeingcishet

for those of you who werent here in 2016 on april fools that year the entire fucking website was transformed and there was an election for a position that wasnt even ever specified and the candidates were four lizards (or three lizards and a salamander as a scandal would later prove) and it was called decision2016

each lizard had their own 3d models and tumblr blog and campaign and there was also a tumblr blog dedicated to reporting on the election and they made like whole ass news broadcasts with a guy in front of a green screen

you could vote for your favorite candidate and there was a built-in function that let you make and post a campaign poster

in case anyone was wondering the winner of the election was mop. relatable and reliable. #Mop Could

lest we forget

This was absolutely the biggest April Fools effort I ever witnessed while on staff. I already posted about this in an ask but here’s more of the shit that went down behind the scenes.

- Like all April Fools, this was done entirely through volunteer work on Staff. No one was forced to work on April Fools, it’s always employee-initiated and driven, even if it needs approval from leadership.

- The prank almost didn’t go through because leadership felt that the lizards weren’t relatable enough, so the compromise was to give them hats.

- The video updates on the Decision 2016 blog were greenscreen Fiverr actors that were all recorded months? Weeks? in advance? I wasn’t on creative so I don’t know all the deets about how those were made.

- As mentioned in my post, the victory speech by Mop was one of our designers screaming as loud as she could in a closet near the end of the day. The full audio was never posted but staff kept passing around the scream on slack and laughing about it for months afterwards

- There was a “war room” dedicated to advancing the election narrative as votes came in, posting updates in real time and also pushing changes to code as necessary (for bug fixes and what not)

- The votes were real and the “election” was decided by real users, even if the graphics and whatnot were exaggerated for comical effect. Mop won because Mop won. Democracy at work

- Someone brought in their own lizard to celebrate the proceedings. It was a bearded dragon

- This was the culmination of what was probably the most cohesive and imaginative (and largest) creative team Tumblr ever had. Unfortunately almost all of them are now long gone, and Tumblr Creative is now just a skeleton crew compared to their peak

- Wretched Tooth Doesn’t Like To Talk About Himself

- People drew porn of the lizards and posted it on Tumblr. Staff saw it and were sending it to each other on the company Slack. We thought it was great. I mean, terrifying, but great

- This picture of David Karp is my favorite photo of David Karp I have on my phone

If you have an old phone in a drawer, and you listen very carefully, you can occasionally hear the occasional tap of an emitted SIM card hitting the side of the drawer as the phone transmutes to a lower-end model.

Transcript

[A decay flowchart, starting with the iPhone 16 Pro Max. It alpha decays into the 14 Pro Max, which alpha decays into 12 Pro Max and beta minus decays into the 15 Pro. The former beta minus decays and the latter alpha decays into the iPhone 13 Pro. The 15 Pro beta minus decays into the 16 Plus. The 16 Plus alpha decays and the 13 Pro [unlabelled] decays into the 14 Plus. The 14 Plus beta minus decays into the 15. The 15 alpha decays into the 13 which alpha decays into the 11 which alpha decays into the X which alpha decays into the 7.]

[Caption below the panel:] Physicists believe that an iPhone 16 Pro Max will, if left alone long enough, eventually decay into an iPhone 7, the heaviest stable model.

*Mr beast voice* I'm paying this trans woman to take Ubers until she gets physically assaulted in one

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