I’ve written about it again and again and again and again, but what makes the Murderbot Diaries so special is how compassionate it is. It is a series that is essentially about growth and healing from trauma, about someone who has been hurt and abused all its life having its pain recognized by the narrative and being allowed to learn, over and over, that when it is ready to reach out it will find that there are still kind people in the world who will answer that need with care.
There are thousands of other, crueller, more callous stories out there that will tell us the complete opposite. That no one can be trusted, that everyone will fail and disappoint you, that you’re on your own, that the world is full of selfish, short-sighted, small-minded people who care only about themselves, and that you must become equally selfish, short-sighted, and small-minded to survive. Some of these stories are the very real experiences we accrue in real life. In stories like these, no one ever helps you– if they do, it’s incompetent and useless, or going to cost you something you can’t afford to pay. In stories like these, you’ll only fall if you try to lean on others. You must reject them instead, and one day you’ll fall anyway.
But that’s a miserable way to live. None of us are born alone, and none of us are fit to survive alone, and none of us can live without each other. And even at its most cynical and anti-social, Murderbot lives this truth. It rejects the senseless vengeance of the mass murder spree, it finds context for its emotions in the stories of media, it reaches out–wherever possible–to help those it can help, trying earnestly to do its best by others. And in doing so, it finds itself surrounded by genuine friends and allies it can rely on. Humans, bots, other constructs–whole communities of people who will never abandon it as easily as it fears.
It’s so important to have stories as compassionate, as real, and as true as the Murderbot Diaries- so that when real kindness is offered to us with an outstretched hand, we can recognize the evidence of our eyes, and trust enough to reach back and take that offered hand. And one day, to be healed enough to offer that hand to others in their turn.
tumblr will never die because we’re all too incoherent and petty to leave. someone will just pirate the source code and start running “tunglr” and we’ll all move over like the chucklefucks we are
every time web developers try to “rebrand” or “repurpose” this website we just sink our heels deeper into the quicksand of our own absurdity
look what im saying is there was a story abt a group of artists whose house was demolished in order to make room for a new shopping mall and, once it was constructed, they fueled their rage and pettiness at being displaced into finding an unused room in the building, renovated it into a condo, outfitted it with a fully stocked kitchen, china hutch, AC, TV and gaming system and then proceeded to live in the mall undetected for years. that creativity? absurdity? sheer stubborn pettiness? thas tumblr babey!!!!
hey. i got bad news. starting june 22nd my hours at work are getting cut down from 26h to 16h/ week. unfurtunately the whole store is getting hours cut by corporate, so its not just me. corporate gave only a week’s notice they are doing this. my boss feels awful and 16h is the max that it can give me.
not only am i looking fur housing fur september, i’m going to have to job hunt again to find a 2nd part time job, cause there’s no way i can sustain myself with 16h/w. i would b very grateful fur donations so i can buy food and pay rent these next few months. i thought things were getting better, but this cut to my hours is really screwing me over. usually i include a silly lewd in these types of posts, but tbh im way to exhausted to bother…
just saw a birth announcement thing that was like “3 inches went in. 19 inches came out” and i am on the floor in tears i’m laughing so hard what is wrong with heterosexual people
I think every lesbian who says she wouldn’t date a bi woman is functionally on the same wavelength as men who say they would only marry a virgin
it all boils down to “penis steals women’s purity” and there’s literally no non-shitty way to believe that. being gay doesn’t give you a get out of jail free card for being sexist
The core appeal of Willy Wonka is that he’s a nigh-omnipotent maniac who uses his near limitless powers over reality to trick shitty people into killing themselves. You can’t make him the protagonist of a whimsical coming of age tale - you have to treat him like Jason Voorhees, or Dracula, or any other horror icon. Give him some new victims and new interesting kills and set him loose, that’s all audiences want.
I feel like I watched a somewhat different movie…
This is why Gene Wilder is the only Willy Wonka I respect. He plays it SO FUCKING SINISTER and nobody since has even come close.
i really could write an essay on how shit is that we’ve completely abandoned the monster-of-the-week episode format even when rebooting shows that relied on it to replace them with grimdark edgy plotlines where nothing feels good or accomplished at the end of the day
I think you can expand Monster of the Week format, more generally, to Guy Of The Week. Because this format also works for detective stories, medical dramas, lawyer procedurals, what have you. The point is that every week there is a new Guy and the new Guy brings a new Situation
Theory that Rouxls Kaard is actually kinda OP (and that he talks in butchered English because whatever he says in normal speech can automatically become a rule)
like, i’ve said this before – remember when the big cultural event was the hbomberguy james somerton video? – that’s like, in the imagination of anyone who thinks that copyright law “‘protects creators”’, surely the most clear-cut use case imaginable, where a guy straightforwardly and blatantly plagiarised people and made huge amounts of money off it. and did copyright law stop him? no! people knew he’d been plagiarising them for years and the only thing that made him stop was a youtuber with a bigger audience dropping a vigilante video essay on his head
i usually would never reblog a post and add commentary not in the tags but i feel like i have to share that in my middle school dare program they also did this and i wanted to know why police officers liked donuts but in my child mind i assumed that there were tons of people submitting questions so at lunch a couple of my friends and i all wrote “WHY DO POLICE OFFICERS LIKE DONUTS” over and over again and i probably submitted close to like 20 over the course of the week. when the cop came back he was like “we got some interesting questions this week, like, why do police officers like donuts, why do police officers like donuts, why do police officers like donuts, and why do police officers like donuts” and so on
one of my favorite twitter accounts that is defunct now is it was this account called like Crazy Optical Illusions or something and they would just post popular optical illusions but edit them so they werent optical illusions anymore and they would just pretend and people would be very confused / angry in the comments
hi, filipino here. just want to say that our independence day is june 12, not july 4. july 4 is when the united states government decided that they would recognize our freedom, specifically because it is your independence day and they wanted to cement their cultural hegemony over our country. and because of their influence on our country this was recognized for a time as our independence day. we still commemorate it, but i hope you can understand why we don’t want our independence day to be associated so closely with our former colonizer. it wasn’t even a work holiday for us.
june 12 is the day that we filipinos declared our own independence for ourselves, and that is what we celebrate as independence day
Slutshaming women is not ok
Slutshaming Alexander Hamilton is totally ok
Tumblr logic
he cheated. on his wife.
he’s also been dead for several hundred years this is the funniest post ive ever read in my life
fave things about this post:
the idea that thousands of people are calling alexander hamilton a slut
calling any founding father a slut
the idea that people are SHAMING Alexander Hamilton for being Such A Slut he is being SHAMED for being such a naughty little tart, SPREADING HIS LEGS FOR EVERYONE IN CONGRESS
that this was probably prompted by people expression dissaproval for Alexander Hamilton cheating on his wife - that the OP thinks “slut shaming” and “Isnt it gross that he cheated on his wife” are the same thing
Alexander Hamilton has been dead for 210
210 slutty, slutty years
the way that this is presented in such a CHECKMATE SJWS way when they’re talking about a founding father who cheated on his wife and has been DEAD FOR 210 YEARS
the fact that the words “Slutshaming” and “Alexander Hamilton” have been used in the same sentence
i mean just apply what we’d traditionally think of as “slut shaming” to Alexander Hamilton.
His frock coat is too tight, his breaches are so short, have you SEEN how often he powders his wig??? I heard he gave Thomas Jefferson a handy behind the stables AND that he got fingered by John Hancock
All my haters become aligators when I activate my gatorinator.
you laugh now, but when my gatorinator is ready, it’s all over
ALT
update:
transmogrifying my haters into an animal that is known for something called the “death roll” has backfired in a manner no one could have forecasted
Having taken stock of the situation, it’s not as bad as I originally thought. It’s not like these crocodilians are an urgent problem, much less a representation of my own mortality. There’s no ticking clock here.
People have been nagging me to share “the curry story” on here for ages, so alright, I’ll do it. (If you’re Indian and reading this, I am so sorry).
I swear to god, everything I am about to say in this story is true.
When I was eleven, I moved to a small town in rural England and acquired a new best friend at school. Her at that point seemingly-very-normal-parents- nice suburban house, three kids, trampoline in the backyard- invited me over for dinner, and said they were making curry and rhubarb crumble.
“Curry and rhubarb crumble”. Never in the history of mankind have words been so untrue.
The “curry” consisted of, I swear I am not making this up, a vague mixture of * deep breath, oatmeal, tofu sausages, corn, tomato juice, chopped onions, raisins, “leftover broccoli leaves”, kale, and scrambled eggs. The only spice in it was the tiniest smidgen of turmeric. All these ingredients were vaguely stirred together, undercooked, and stuck under a broiler for ten minutes.
They gave me a massive portion. I somehow, I still don’t know how, was polite enough to finish it.
“I’m done,” I said.
“No,” said her father. “In this house, we LICK our plates clean.”
He did. They didn’t make me hold it up and lick it like they all did, but they did make me clean the plate with a piece of bread and my fork until they were satisfied.
Desert came. The rhubarb crumble was entirely unsweetened. Not so much as a raisin. I can’t remember what the crumble part was, because my mind is still haunted by the memory of being forced to eat an entire bowl of unsweetened rhubarb. You know in old Looney Tunes when characters would be tricked into eating allum and their heads would shrink? That’s what eating it felt like. They made me clean my bowl of that too, and wouldn’t let me leave the table until I finished.
The next time, (I was in middle school and as yet too polite to turn down my best friend’s parents) they made “spaghetti and meatballs and salad”. The spaghetti was utterly plain and so undercooked it was crunchy, the “meatballs” consisted of a single large orb of some grey material i have yet to identify, and the salad was, i shit you not, limp boiled lettuce. Crunchy spaghetti, unidentified lumpy grey stuff, and boiled lettuce.
The fascinating thing is that, while yes, these people were obviously health nuts, it was so much more than that. They were health nuts who also cooked like aliens who had never seen human food before. Or like small children making “potions”. One of the more edible things they served to me once was a dessert they made up which consisted of halved apples rolled in cornflour with some milk poured on top. One time, they were convinced to make pizza as a treat. They decided to put an onion on it. Fair and fine, you’d think. Not in that house. They just cut the onion in half once, and stuck each unchopped half facedown on one side of the pizza.
Speaking of onions, one time, my friend decided to make a banana and yoghurt smoothie. Her dad came in, said it wasn’t healthy enough, and made her add an onion to it.
They had a homemade cereal I thankfully was able to opt out of trying which 100% looked like the contents of a vacuum bag. I still have no idea what it contained.
Amazingly, it was by no means just me who experienced this. It was a small town, and every girl in it my age had a selection of horror stories about being invited to dinner at this friend’s house in the exact same ritualistic horror-film fashion. We used to sit around comparing them at sleepovers. Age did not exempt you. One time, this friend’s six year old brother had a friend over for dinner at the same time, poor soul. His mom arrived to pick him up, and wasn’t allowed to take him home until he finished whatever crime against cooking was on the menu that night.
Every story was the same. The ritual that never varied. Every time, these people would make a huge fanfare out of inviting you over for dinner, act all hospitable and excited, set the table, and then serve you a massive helping of the worst food in the world, and make you clean your plate of it, desert included. Who the hell forces you to finish your DESERT?
It’s a mystery to me. They clearly had SOME degree of self-awareness, because after I came to my senses and started coming up with excuses to avoid eating at their house they would tease me saying things like “ohoho, you don’t like LIKE our food do you”. If they had been a bit more fun and less generally puritanical sort of people, I could totally believe this was a family trolling activity where they secretly schemed to come up with the worst possible dishes, secretly filmed themselves forcing people to eat them and watched it and laughed afterwards, I could believe it.
All I’m saying is I’m pretty sure they weren’t aliens, but the more I type this out, the more tempted I am to believe it. Fuck it, maybe they WERE aliens.
I’m reminded of this British sitcom…
On one hand, this is definitely a My Parents Are Aliens episode. This is Brian and Sophie trying to Be Good Earth Hosts when they have no context for anything (and have possibly been led astray by a misinterpreted news article or a joke they didn’t realise was a joke.)
(Especially the onion in the yoghurt-and-banana smoothie. Of all the examples that was the one that really broke my brain.)
On the other, I feel like I can maaaybe see how this happened? These are
Obsessive health nuts
Who are also vegetarians (no meat mentioned in the original post). And I don’t know how old OP is, but I do know that it wasn’t easy to be a vegetarian in Britain pre 2010’s.
They clearly have little knowledge of international foods (meaning they’re trying to be Modern Wellness Vegetarians using mostly British cuisine, which is great at pastry and cheese but has no idea what to do with vegetables. Anyone trying this will be swimming upstream.)
They also don’t understand nutrition well enough to health nut effectively. They think they do, but they don’t.
Also they’re just really really bad cooks.
Who have a tendency to take ideas to absolutes/extremes
And who have a generally puritanical way of thinking
They believe that:
How healthy a food is is inversely proportional to how nice it tastes (Mild forms of this are common among anyone for whom vegetables mostly came in the ‘boiled to death’ variety, but generally they stay mild.)
Therefore, making something healthier means making it taste worse. (And because they’re take-things-to-extremes people, there is no upper limit to this. This is probably why the smoothie had to have a wildly unsuitable vegetable rather than added strawberries or low-fat yoghurt instead of regular. Hooray, it’s now disgusting! It has been Healthified!)
ONLY the healthiness of a food matters. Wanting it to taste nice is suspect. This is a puritanical household where we shun all earthly pleasures!
All these traits and ideas are common enough, but it’s rare to find all of them in one person. This couple not only seem to have all of them, but they have the most obsessive versions of each cranked up to eleven. They are the ultimate example of puritanical wellness obsession, stuck with the worst cooking skills in the world and a cuisine that doesn’t lend itself to wellness obsession. They’ve done it. They’ve maxed out three different kinds of Toxic Food Beliefs. I’d congratulate them, were it not for the suffering they’re inflicting on everyone who spends more than ten minutes in their house.
The stealth camper guys are getting so creative. I don’t care how practical this is I love it just conceptually. This guy looked at all those vans disguised as worker trucks and went “I can do something way more interesting”.
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