Not “Only my reading of canon is correct” or “Interpretations are subjective and all valid” but a secret third thing, “More than one interpretation can be valid but there’s a reason your English teacher had you cite quotes and examples in your papers, you have to have a strong argument that your interpretation is actually supported by the text or it is just wrong and I’m fine with telling you it’s wrong, actually.”

If the text says the curtains are blue you can argue about what that means; but if you’re going to claim they’re actually yellow you’d better have a really good argument.

i beat myself up for not knowing enough about my special interests a lot but then i remember the average person off the street has no idea what the carboniferous is and i feel better

are you really bad at it or are you in "good at it" spaces

Me: ah shit, I misidentified that yellow rumped warbler as a female goldfinch, I should literally be hung at the gallows for this. I'm such an IDIOT

My friend, pointing at a vulture: check out that fucked up crow lol

kinda funny that there's no tariffs on the vatican but at least 10% on all other microstates in EU

italy about to invent levels of catholic corruption never seen since the 17th century

Here’s a good one

AI disturbance overlays for those who don't have Ibis paint premium. found them on tiktok

how do you use these?

Put these on the top layer above everything, set layer to 'overlay' then adjust opacity. You can put it on whatever opacity you want but usually 30%+ is most effective.

The point is to obstruct the picture so AI can't read your image because AI counts every single pixel in your art

By this post alone, in less than 5 hours.

I need you all to calm the fuck down

NEEDED AND NO WE WONT THIS IS BRILLIANT

still sometimes think about how when my apartment got raided by cops back in 2021 i had a massive neon sign on the wall of my living room that just said "crime"

ik it's an old-ass joke but the ability of ppl on this site to Not Know Who They're Following. like it was on the news. not the local or even the national news . this was a global scale international diplomatic incident

maybe i’m a joyless bitch but i actually do NOT think it’s funny to see women being like “the house is just in my husbands name” or “my husband makes all the money” or “i don’t even know who our mortgage is with” or “the only bank account/credit card is his and i get an allowance” like i do NOT find that cute or romantic and i am begging these women to Stand Up. you should at least be named on the deed to your house and the title to your car and the bank accounts even if you don’t pay for them/earn all the money. you can’t stop existing in the eyes of the law and the credit unions simply because you have a husband. if you’re raising his children and washing his socks half of everything he’s got is yours and it needs to be yours LEGALLY BY NAME. "he takes such good care of me :)" girl you are a PRISONER!! that’s all

"But my husband is a good man! He would never abuse/leave/cheat on me!"

Alright, let's give you the benefit of the doubt and say your husband is a perfect angel of a human being. He does take care of you, and he does it well. Your life is great, you get along, you have beautiful kids and a beautiful home.

What's going to happen to you if he stops being able to provide?

If his job lays him off or cuts his hours? If he becomes too disabled to work? If he goes to prison? If he dies suddenly?

What if you have to get a job to make sure you and your kids can still eat and have a home?

If you plan on seriously sharing your happily ever after with someone, you are going to have to pull your head out of the romantic fairy tale clouds and start planning for the worst case scenarios.

if your husband was really a good man you would be on the mortgage so if he gets hit by a bus the bank doesn't take the fucking house back. if he was really a good man he'd make sure you had enduring legal protections to take care of you after his death, not just whatever bits of money he cares to dole out during his lifetime.

I feel like this rise in "trad" appeal comes from telling people that they can choose to never deal with certain hard parts of adulthood as long as they only do their traditional half.

Men, there's no need to ever bother with cooking or cleaning or nannying your own children (all degrading feminine work) as long as you assume the role of the protector and the household head who can win the bread and make the decisions.

Women, there's no need to learn the hard and complicated things about taxes, mortgages, utility bills and work (scary masculine concepts) as long as you focus on looking beautiful, keeping the house in order, and mothering your husband's children.

But actually, men who don't know their children's doctor information, or birthdays, or know how to change a diaper, or how to do laundry, or how to grocery shop, are NOT cute.

And in fact, women who don't know anything about their own finances beyond "teehee my husband gives me an allowance" are also NOT cute.

I get why these things are appealing, because they come with this false promise that you can fall into a role and never ever half to think about half the hard parts of adulthood.

But if you're an entire adult person, then you do need--for yourself, for your family, for your children, for your safety--to know these things. Especially financials, because if your partner leaves you (or if you need to leave your partner), you need to know your money and your bills.

When you ignore one half of these in favor of just your traditional gender role, you get men living in squalor whose children no longer talk to them and women in total financial ruin after their husbands leave or die.

Sharing responsibilities to ease a burden is fine. It makes sense. But that is not the same as closing your eyes entirely to half your life, thrusting that responsibility entirely on someone else, which could leave you dangling off a cliff if that person ever leaves

Whoever wrote that Vanguard message did so with shaking hands, between sobs & swigs of bourbon straight from the bottle.

They're right, though. Now is exactly the wrong time to make dramatic investment moves. Everybody's shit is doing the same thing; unless you need your retirement money in the next twelve months or whatever, you're better off leaving it alone and waiting for the eventual correction. Like, this is not a comforting lie, this is good advice!

Adultier adult here, having had to talk to my retirement management people earlier this week. (I hate it. It's useless. But I told them to divest me from anything that holds TSLA in the portfolio/fund because Elon is an asshole and the company's financials are shit.)

This week has caused about three percent (3%) of my 401(k) to vanish.

And that's okay.

I can't touch that money without a tax penalty (or emergency) until the 2030's. It's not paying for cat food or keeping my electricity on. This is a privilege not everyone enjoys (yet).

If you're in a position to have any kind of investments, don't do anything rash and/or bananas with important chunks of money. (My financial guy gave me this advice, too. I specifically asked about cashing out the whole fucking thing.)

Yes. 100% this.

My qualifications: I worked in banking & mortgage for 10 years & had my Series 6, 63, and insurance licenses. I was qualified to sell mutual funds and annuities.

Obligatory: None of this constitutes specific financial advice. Please consult your financial professional who has an active license for specific advice.

That said, generally speaking, if someone has a 401k or IRAs and other retirement investments and they don't need to access them right now, don't fucking touch it. Don't even look at it. If they don't feel comfortable putting more money into it right now, that's understandable, and they can turn their contributions off (though it might not make sense to do so, depending on their tax bracket - traditional 401k contributions are pre-tax, so putting that money back in their taxable income may just turn that money into income tax payments, and that's not even considering employer matching, which is Free Money).

Shit is wild right now, but that money is not Real Money until you cash it out. All of your losses and gains are Schroedinger's Gains and Losses. Until you open the box - that is, make a withdrawal - those losses aren't realized. And since you will end up with absolutely ridiculous tax penalties if you take money out of retirement accounts early outside of a few specific circumstances, opening the box early is a bad idea.

So, since the losses aren't real until you open the box, and you can't open the box until years from now without getting like half the cat taken by the IRS, don't even think about looking at the box and seeing the predicted percentage of alive cat that you might find inside there.

Another financial professional here. I second all of this.

If you're lucky enough to have a retirement account, the best strategy is always to ride the market waves. Decades of numbers and returns back this up. Don't move or pull your money. Don't stop contributing. Especially if you are many years away from retirement.

Think long term, not short term. In the long run, the stock market still averages returns every year.

I’ve been listening to the people in the apartment below me have arguments for two years now and I still can’t figure out what language they’re speaking. The best I can narrow it down is like if Portuguese and Hebrew had a baby. Is that a common pidgin combination

I just listened to a clip of this and jesus christ you fucking got it. there are like 3500 people in the whole united states who speak this and two of them are in a very fraught marriage four feet below me

It's so nice being on tumblr because you don't even have to make your own post but people would still follow you anyways if you're good at rebloging posts they like

Dunno how to put it properly into words but lately I find myself thinking more about that particular innocence of fairy tales, for lack of better word. Where a traveller in the middle of a field comes across an old woman with a scythe who is very clearly Death, but he treats her as any other auntie from the village. Or meeting a strange green-skinned man by the lake and sharing your loaf of bread with him when he asks because even though he's clearly not human, your mother's last words before you left home were to be kind to everyone. Where the old man in the forest rewards you for your help with nothing but a dove feather, and when you accept even such a seemingly useless reward with gratitude, on your way home you learn that it's turned to solid gold. Where supernatural beings never harm a person directly and every action against humans is a test of character, and every supernatural punishment is the result of a person bringing on their own demise through their own actions they could have avoided had they changed their ways. Where the hero wins for no other reason than that they were a good person. I don't have the braincells to describe this better right now but I wish modern fairy tales did this more instead of trying to be fantasy action movies.

"In [fairy tales], power is rarely the right tool for survival anyway. Rather the powerless thrive on alliances, often in the form of reciprocated acts of kindness - from beehives that were not raided, birds that were not killed but set free or fed, old women who were saluted with respect. Kindness sown among the meek is harvested in crisis."

-Rebecca Solnit