What I’d give for one of the Cinderella remakes to go into how when you’re in an isolated and abusive situation, sometimes you need to be saved and you’re not weak if you can’t escape by yourself
I’ve never been a fan of bad faith reinterpretations of fairy tales, especially ones which flatten the originals into “princesses is saved by a prince and nothing else”, to then go #girlboss. The princess can save herself because she’s a strong female character! (Implying if you’re in a bad situation, it’s because you’re not strong enough to get out)
He’s been trained to read the room. To read the context clues. To read politics and scheming and planning and people. He’s a Prince, it’s either that or accidentally drink poison by age 15. And he reads her and …
She’s impossibly wealthy. The dress isn’t a fabric he can recognize, but it’s beaded with cut diamonds, faintly milky opals that shimmer with a rainbow, little pale aquamarines, and somewhere are little bells gently ringing with each step - he’s a Prince and he can’t afford to dress like that. The slippers ring too … there is nothing like that crafted by the hands of humans. That’s fairy stuff. She has an in with them that eclipses royal politics. She is powerful in the Old Ways.
All this wraps around the poorest woman he’s ever seen in his entire life, and he’s seen some very, very, poor people in his time.
Poor in money, but poor in “oh you poor thing!” as well. This is someone who has been robbed blind. This is someone who carried themselves waiting for the lash, for a browbeating, for harsh, cruel, abrupt, punishment.
He expects her to be haughty, or hard, or meek or… something else… but she’s just nice. She’s just … nice.
The rigid posture comes out of his back, his tongue unsticks. She’s like sitting by the embers of a low, calm, fire. He feels warmed and rested simply speaking to her. He wonders if it’s magic, and it might be, but if it is it is magic that is her own.
And that terrifies him, because he’s trained to see these things and he knows someone with a cruel hand is waiting to douse her, and snuff her, and beat the last glimmer out of her shining eyes - eyes that put that dress to shame and and and and… she’s gone.
Oh god, she’s gone. It will be all over her sweet, kind, warm face that she transgressed and … oh god they’ll kill her, whoever they are. This will embarrass them and if there’s anything he knows, it’s that you don’t humiliate someone who has power over you and walk away unscathed.
And all he has is a fairy slipper that will only ever fit her foot (it’s not merely shoe size, it’s a kind of spiritual fit as well), and the vain hope that he can keep such a bright light from burning out. It doesn’t even touch his heart that what he’s feeling is a kind of pure philia, not until it enraptures him soul to bones, all at once. Oh god, oh no, oh shit… he’s reached well above his station, but…he can try to be good and worthy.
The way he sees it, sometimes even the strongest people can be brought low and need just… a little help. She had enough in her to do whatever she had to do to free herself of those evil relations if she had to, but she shouldn’t have to. There’s no glory in blood. Sometimes it’s okay for the ending to be happily ever after.
why is trying to make a new friend so embarrassing. hi. me again. asking for your attention once more even though i am literally just some random person to you. it’s because i want to be not just a random person to you. please understand
i think it’s fucked up that there are plants that decided they wanted to eat meat
a plant’s job is literally to just exist but the venus flytrap chose violence
what if i gently laid an uncooked steak on the soil for it to absorb
my tree biology teacher fed her calcium-deficient tree a whole-ass bbq rib bone - she stuck it in the ground near the base of the tree (after eating the meat off of it), and when she came back to collect it to show the tree biology class it was GONE
the tree had grown a root up through the center of it & out through the sides
also there’s an old story about a man who was buried beneath a tree, and when they went to exhume the body it had been completely absorbed by the tree’s roots- you could see the shape of the body in the way the roots grew, splitting up for clearly defined arms and legs. trees will absolutely eat a steak if you bury it & they need the nutrients.
that’s horrifying! thank you
Can I feed my plants bacon grease? 🤔 Would they like that? They’re perennials
Can I feed my plants
bacon grease? 🤔 Would they like that?
They’re perennials
Beep boop! I look for accidental haiku posts. Sometimes I mess up.
“You wouldn’t bake a cat just because it jumped into the oven.”
It means that just having a really, really good opportunity to do something awful is not an excuse to do it. That it isn’t enough that you never go out of your way to do evil, you’re also supposed to go out of your way to do the right thing, even in situations where the wrong thing to do would be extremely easy and profitable, and passively allowing it to happen would be easier than going out of your way to do better than that.
“You wouldn’t bake a cat just because it jumped into the oven.”
It means that just having a really, really good opportunity to do something awful is not an excuse to do it. That it isn’t enough that you never go out of your way to do evil, you’re also supposed to go out of your way to do the right thing, even in situations where the wrong thing to do would be extremely easy and profitable, and passively allowing it to happen would be easier than going out of your way to do better than that.
I can’t state enough how beneficial it was to work at the sex shop as my first retail job. We were encouraged to practice shutting down inappropriate behavior and it became a well practiced skill set. I had a flat stare, icy tones of disapproval, and a demeanor of untouchable scorn to back it all up. I could get the most hardened of perverts to back off or leave in a matter of sentences if they harassed staff or other customers.
When I moved on to selling mattresses I came prepared to handle pretty much any situation with the unruffled calm of someone who has asked Santa to stop touching himself and leave. To my vast surprise it was a skill I needed on the regular at the mattress store. For whatever reason men thought it was the height of entertainment to sexually harass me because I was young and cheerful.
They would always quickly learn they’d picked the wrong target.
One day a man strolled in, sizing me up as he came. He saw a young, tiny, afab person alone in the store and came to a stop way too close. He used his height to leer down at me and said, “I’m looking for a new headboard. Which ones are the best for sex?”
It was so stupid. He looked down at me with half lidded eyes and the grin of a man who owns an unmarked white van. He probably expected me to laugh uncomfortably or act flustered. He wanted to feel tall and powerful or maybe even sexy.
He was not expecting what he got. My face stretched into what could technically be described as a smile but was more accurately a threat display. The temperature in the room plummeted as I dropped all warmth in my demeanor. He took a half step back, suddenly aware that he was alone in a room with me.
“Well, sir, that depends on what kind of sex you’re having. If you are looking for a headboard that is grippeable, I suggest this model. The metal is rounded and wouldn’t hurt a hand gripping it tightly. However if you want something that you can secure with restraints, I recommend this wooden one as the slats are wide and quite sturdy.”
He looked liked I’d hit him over the head with a board and stared down at me blankly, taken aback by the authoritative way that I discussed the merits of his lackluster sex life. I met his eyes, a veiled threat in mine, and said, “Which one will you be purchasing?”
He tucked his tail between his legs and bought the metal one. I pulled up a thin layer of friendliness as I rang him up but he had the chastened air of a man who just ran straight into an iron pole.
Another time a man crawled up onto a tempurpedic and thrusted into an invisible partner. He gave a cocky look over his shoulder, sure that he was going to discomfit me as he asked, “How are these babies for fucking?”
I gave him a deadpan look and and said, “That depends on if you’re someone who has to rely on the bounce of springs for your thrusts. Memory foam beds are nicer on knees and joints for positions like doggy style but they absorb a lot of kinetic energy.”
He visibly deflated and got down off the bed with a vaguely ashamed air.
“You wouldn’t bake a cat just because it jumped into the oven.”
It means that just having a really, really good opportunity to do something awful is not an excuse to do it. That it isn’t enough that you never go out of your way to do evil, you’re also supposed to go out of your way to do the right thing, even in situations where the wrong thing to do would be extremely easy and profitable, and passively allowing it to happen would be easier than going out of your way to do better than that.
when i was a kid we only had windows 95 and we had to sharpen the points of our mouse cursors with pocket knives to make them precise enough to click things reliably
I feel like many people have a fundamental misconception of what unreliable narrator means. It’s simply a narrative vehicle not a character flaw, a sign that the character is a bad person. There are also many different types of unreliable narrators in fiction. Being an unreliable narrator doesn’t necessarily mean that the character is ‘wrong’, it definitely doesn’t mean that they’re wrong about everything even if some aspects in their story are inaccurate, and only some unreliable narrators actively and consciously lie. Stories that have unreliable narrators also tend to deal with perception and memory and they often don’t even have one objective truth, just different versions. It reflects real life where we know human memory is highly unreliable and vague and people can interpret same events very differently
Some types of unreliable narrator:
The Watson: is present for the event but does not have the same level of perception as protagonist
The Lemony Snicket: isn’t present for the event, reconstructs the facts based on later research, can get things wrong or incomplete
The Ted Moseby: is present for the event but has romanticised and embellished their memory of it through nostalgia to an extent that you cannot fully believe it; is also prone to misremembering or outright forgetting details.
The Katniss Everdeen: is present for the event, is the protagonist, but is completely foreign to the world and out of their depth so they don’t quite understand a lot of what is going on.
The Rose Quartz: is present for the event, but due to their personal agenda or feelings of shame hides and embellishes what actually happened in favour of a version that paints them in a better light.
The Big Brother: overwrites what actually happened in favour of propaganda.
The Jonathan Harker: is absolutely clueless about what is going on around them and the genre they’re in so their perception of events is tinted by their own naivety.
The Goob: the narrator’s own emotional bias clouds their judgement of what really happened.
The Tyler Durden: the narrator is suffering from hallucinations and doesn’t realise it.
The Pi: the narrator has survived a traumatic experience and copes with it by turning it into a wonderful tale.
Everyone is the unreliable narrator of their own lives.
EVERYONE! IS THE! UNRELIABLE! NARRATOR! OF THEIR OWN LIVES!!
woke up and someone spilled vanilla extract all over my dash, so as punishment you strange little beasties are getting all the VANILLA FACTS i know:
vanilla is the 2nd most expensive spice in the world (2nd to saffron)
which is why more than 99% of what we call “vanilla extract” is actually vanillin (vanilla’s dominant flavor compound) and is not extracted from real vanilla.
luckily, even professionals struggle to tell the difference when it comes to things like baked goods. but there is a distinct difference in non-heat treated products like vanilla ice cream. real vanilla has a more complex, individualized flavor profile.
why is vanilla so expensive? because it is a ridiculously delicate & demanding crop. complete primadonna.
vanilla beans come from vanilla orchids. these crazy flowers bloom for A SINGLE DAY and have to be HAND-POLLINATED in a process that is exhausting, delicate, and requires specialist knowledge passed down over generations.
then, if you’re lucky, you get vanilla beans.
which then require months of further specialized treatment.
the entire process takes about a year and can go wrong at any stage
vanilla has been cultivated for over 800 years (possibly much longer). the first known cultivators are the Totonac, an indigenous people of Mexico.
the Aztecs used it as a sweetener to balance out the bitter taste of cocoa. it was popular in a drink called xocolatl–the precursor to modern hot chocolate!
it is only pollinated by a very specific orchid bee!!!
which is why no fruit could be grown outside of Mexico until the 1800s
Edmond Albius, born into slavery, invented the pollination method we still use today–launching a global industry when he was just 12 years old.
today, the majority of the world’s vanilla is grown in Madagascar
if you want real vanilla, read the labels carefully–it’s harder to find than you think!
in conclusion, those tiny black specks you see in fancy vanilla ice cream? those are vanilla bean seeds! itty bitty orchid seeds!!! they are delicious and also a PRISSY BITCH!
Pulp sci-fi illustration by Italian artist, Aldo Di Gennaro (b. 1938).
This is probably the most culturally important thing I’ll ever seen in my lifetime if I’m being honest. I want this affixed over my mantle, embroidered into my denim, and emblazoned into my flesh so that generations to come may never forget this 1938 gem of an illustration. Put this on my gravestone and name my children after Alfo Di Gennaro. This is what it’s all about.
Artist was obviously a leg man, but I have never seen a female alien love interest designed as THIS alien before. She’s uniquely hairy, bugged-eyed, lines would indicate at least a partial exoskeleton, she has escaped being saddled with the mammories that a non-mammal being would not have, yet she’s got it bad for Space Force Leatherhead and he is so into her. I can practically hear his prose of her cabochon eyes of nebula violet, glowing with the passion to know and be known, in the starlight. The green of her body turning more vivid as discovery (and carnal knowledge) consume her conscious mind.
To suggest a red-blooded, human man could love Greedo’s cousin? Desire her??
This is fantastic, in every sense. How many lives did this change forever?
I have strong opinions regarding the walrus/fairy poll
In all fairness the original poll wasn’t asking “which outcome would be more likely”, it was asking “which outcome would be more surprising”.
And yes on one level those SEEM like they should be the same question, but actually one is a question of objective statistics and the other is a question of human heuristics.
In short it’s cognitively easier to reconcile “fairies are real” than it is to contend with “there is a walrus somewhere that a walrus Should Not Be” because our mental representation of fairies is pretty flexible, so it’s easily reevaluated. Meanwhile our mental representation of walruses is very well-defined and contains a lot of small rules like “do not live here” or “physically cannot knock on doors, and would not know to do so”—and resolving that many broken rules is just cognitively overwhelming for humans.
This was very lovely to wake up to. It’s completely legit, in the replies people posted videos and pictures of the ‘walk for El Vaquita’, the fake protest to get El Vaquita desperately needed medical attention.
The comments in the tweet lead to celebration of a another Chilean comrade doggo named Negro Matapacos. And this is exactly the kind of education I want this month.
a walrus is in a truck, being transported to a zoo -> the truck drivers become distracted and step out of the truck momentarily, leaving the keys in the ignition -> drunk college students steal the truck and drive off with the walrus -> oh fuck, there’s a walrus in the truck -> we fucked up -> we can’t just ditch the truck somewhere like we were planning. not with a walrus in it -> we need to get rid of the walrus -> drunk college students back up to the doorstep of a random house and lure the walrus out with fish -> drunk college students knock on the door and quickly drive away -> the walrus is now someone else’s problem
“After thirty years of intensive research, we can now answer many of the questions posed earlier. The recycle rate of a human being is around sixteen hours. After sixteen hours of being awake, the brain begins to fail. Humans need more than seven hours of sleep each night to maintain cognitive performance. After ten days of just seven hours of sleep, the brain is as dysfunctional as it would be after going without sleep for twenty-four hours. Three full nights of recovery sleep (i.e., more nights than a weekend) are insufficient to restore performance back to normal levels after a week of short sleeping. Finally, the human mind cannot accurately sense how sleep-deprived it is when sleep-deprived.”
— Matthew Walker PhD, Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams (via themedicalstate)
Jesus christ
Sleep is a super power
That last bit makes a whole lot of sense and it honestly astounds me, that I never once considered it.
But yeah that seems very obvious.
Finally, the human mind cannot accurately sense how sleep-deprived it is when sleep-deprived.
This explains why i am literally unconscious for the entire weekend. When the lockdown first happened I slept a full three days.
I theorize the reason “bottoms” appear more prevalent than “tops” on these types of spaces is that it is simply easier to be funny about being a bottom than about being a top without sounding like a sex offender
“uuuuu 🥺 pls cock me aaaaaaaa *runs into wall like Wile E Coyote running into his own tunnel painting*” easy as shit comedy
“I want to put my DICK in someone” whoa dude calm down, take it easy
No that’s literally it. Kink is stigmatized in such a specific way that it’s actually much more acceptable to say “I want to be stepped on” than it is “I want to step on them” or even “I want them to ask me to step on them.”
Like it’s much easier to find people talking openly about wanting to be submissive (which will be errantly called “bottoming” because being a sub is Ew Gross Kink) but once there’s someone to available to actually facilitate that, it’s Creepy.
it’s coy and demure to be wanted, but it’s violative to Want and that’s normal and good and hasn’t annihlated the ability of so many people to even communicate the fact that they can desire. God help you if you’re queer or neurodivergent in that cultural attitutde.
There’s also this idea that while of course kink is Wrong and Icky and means you’re Damaged, submissive urges must mean that they’re some poor abuse victim trying to recover from trauma and dominant urges mean that they’re an abuser looking for an excuse. (Some people do use kink to process trauma, but people use all kinds of behaviours to process all kinds of things. That shouldn’t be like, the assumption, and shouldn’t be expected to carry moral weight.) It’s not acceptable to express dominant desires because the only acceptable form of that kink is as a slightly reluctant therapist for helping your beloved process their trauma.
There’s a Childish Gambino routine I can’t seem to locate where he says something along the lines of “if you meet a woman who likes being choked during sex, well sure, she’s been abused. But if you meet a man who likes choking women?!?!” And that basically sums up the public perception I think. Subs or bottoms (the public perception treats them both as the same thing, or at least acts like they’re coincident enough that any other match is some weird edge case) are women or small gay men who have been kicked around and are trying to heal, doms or tops are predatory men looking for an excuse to hurt someone.
[Image ID: Tumblr tags reading: #I’ve mentioned this before lmao #expressing horniness as a dom is very easily frowned upon too #like it’s no longer cute when you say you want to be the one doing the hitting #even if everyone around you was Literally just begging to be hit #doms must express their desires directly to a sub or in chats with other doms cuz ppl are so quick to say you’re a freak /End ID]
I don’t want to make ““doctor’s appointments””and ““schedule a follow up.”” I want to be coaxed gently into a crate and taken to the vet.
Can I also get in on the part where the doctor patiently bears with me as I scream the entire time and then gives me some spray cheese on a tongue depressor?
You may also be interested in:
Wrapped in several towels so that you don’t have to look at the scary thing
Having delicious snacks shoved into your face as fast as you can eat them while an injection ‘definitely didn’t happen’
Being told that you are a Brave Lady, Clever Little Man, or Sweet Baby for just sitting still
I’d like to add that the white scarring is so important to Risso’s dolphins (presumably their social dynamics) that it has affected the structure of their skull:
Risso’s dolphins feed using suction (mainly on squid) and don’t need teeth, other cetaceans that feed this way have no teeth at all (such as beaked whales). Those 8 fuckoff knife-shaped teeth at the front of their lower jaw are EXCLUSIVELY for slashing up others of their kind
ALT
