You Call This Archaeology?

I do feel bad for plants in general. Like, I know they are often as vicious as animals in many ways, just slower. But, I mean, they just show up and they’re like, “I Think I Will Evolve To Eat The Sun And Also Make Oxygen And How Now Is All This.” And, like, everything fucking dies at first (totally not plants fault, btw. okay maybe it was but they didn’t mean to) but then new things evolve. And they’re like, “Fuck it, eating each other suuuucks. Let’s eat the plants which give us life.” And so we start doing that. And plants are all, “Oh Dear No, I Do Not Care At All For Being Eaten. I Will Make Myself Into Poison Sometimes.” But, y'know, stuff kept eating plants anyway so plants, ever the bro, came up with a new idea. “I Have Made A Decision About Being Eaten And You May Eat Me Friends And Here Is An Especially Tasty Bit Packed All Full of Delicious Sugars Which I Have Produced At Great Cost (What They Do Not Know Is That My Seeds Are Within And Shall Be Propagated Near And Far By Their Dung)“ But that’s not good enough for animals, no, not at all. We love the fuck out of some pomegranates but also alliums which are like, "I Have Not Decided To Go In For This Being Eaten Business. I Shall Be Very Foul Tasting And Also A Poison.” But no, sorry, onions, you fucked up. You accidentally wound up with a species that just doesn’t give up or fully comprehend the idea of things tasting “”‘bad’“’ or other concepts like not eating poison. (Sorry, plants, later we turn some of you who are not poison into a poison we consume recreationally. We really enjoy eating poison.)  Legit, alliums are deadly to, like, every other species. And we call them aromatics and throw them in everything. Peppers are the best, though. They completely got on the being eaten train. BUT ONLY BIRDS Peppers are like, "You May Eat Me, Fair Avian, For You Are Sure To Spread Me A Great Distance. But, Mammal, Take HEED. Should You Eat Me Then I Will Burn You Most Terribly.” And we were all about that. “The FUCK, burning? I love pain,” said humans, presumably. “You know, peppers, you and evolution have done a good job at burning us but I am pretty sure we could make your chemical agony even more potent. Come hang with us,” humans added to a very confused pepper just before creating the ghost chili.

A helpful guide to some common birds here in the western US

I love tumblr. I love that tumblr is the best social media site of 2021.

Every other site has spent the last decade perfecting the art of targeted ads. I am a wallet of flesh and blood which must be stripped bare and profiled and picked apart for the maximally efficient way to squeeze profit from my presence. Every other site will fold and morph itself to a shape of my liking - like a fairy tale trickster stealing memories and taking their mold - to lull me into compliance and loosen my coin purse.

Facebook sees me searching fitness equipment and injects my timeline with athletic wear ads. Reddit profiles the subreddits I follow and eagerly promotes a new coding bootcamp or cloud service at every turn. Google overhears me lamenting over my moving to-do list on voice call and fills in my “how much to tip movers” query before I’ve gotten the third word typed out.

Tumblr never even tried.

They could have. The information is there. The basic infrastructure, presumably, exists. Tumblr can recommend me tags based on tags I follow, blogs based on blogs I follow, even posts that for one reason or another may strike my fancy. Tumblr could be - SHOULD be - funneling this framework into advertising, as the only means that free-to-use social media platforms can turn a profit in our capitalistic hellscape.

They just don’t.

Today I saw an ad for treating Hyperhidrosis - a condition, I think, in which a person sweats too much - and I saw it twice, four posts apart, and it is so incredibly benignly impersonally ineptly untargeted toward me compared to all other pinpoint-aimed advertising that I’m endeared to it. Tumblr knows NOTHING about me. 8 years, 51,000 likes, and tumblr has not learned a THING about me.

Advertisements for a mattress? Shitty mobile game ads that don’t make even the slightest pretense at being anything other than a candy crush rip-off? Choose-your-own adventure games either about Royal Espionage or Choosing The Wrong Dress For Your Date with ZERO in-between.

And then this. This here. The culmination, the crown-jewel of tumblr’s nihilistic non-compliance with the state of social media advertising. Any pretense of capitalistic exchange is abandoned at the gas station by the side of the road. This is not a company. This is not a product. This is not anything that fulfills the contract of consumer and seller. 

THIS. THIS IS WHAT TUMBLR HAS TO OFFER INSTEAD.

“Pour vinegar on your bread, fuck you.”

“Put it in the garbage, fuck you.”

“Your wife says you’re a fucking dumbass, fuck you.”

That’s it. That’s the advertisement. You vinegar-breadless cuck. You virgin extraordinaire bereft of bread and garbage can. I am fucking your wife right now in our vinegar-soaked motel bed. She puffs a cigarette which I pulled from the trashcan and we both laugh heartily at her recounts of your immasculine ineptitude. I don’t want your money. I don’t want anything from you. Fuck you. 

Amazing. Amazing. What a state of things to ring in 2021. What a great platform we all collectively choose to be on.

kinkmeme: humans

you're on my list of people to ban from my life

this is a harvest mouse appreciation post

literally the cutest animal ever in history look at this lil fuzz

tiny bean ! friendly bean

they climb on basically everything. probably to get closer to kiss u

if this mouse gets any more disney than this it will probably break out into song

just look at this tiny nugget !!!

harvest mice use their tails for stability while climbing but also to be unnecessarily cute. this deters predators

tiny feet !!!!! tiny toes !

momma with itty puffs

kisses !! 1 hit KO

they are literally too small how dare

harvest mice !!!

harvest mice !!!!!!!!!!!!!!

harv e s t  m i c e  !! ! !!!

thankyou for your time

epic sax office 

This lady is Alethi and you can’t tell me otherwise

By Jan Lehner for Russh Magazine

A GUIDE FOR YOUNG LADIES ENTERING THE SERVICE OF THE FAIRIES, by Rosamund Hodge

I.

This is the lie they will use to break you: no one else has ever loved this way before.

II.

Choose wisely which court you serve. Light or Dark, Summer or Winter, Seelie or Unseelie: they have many names, but the pith of the choice is this: a poisoned flower or a knife in the dark?

(The difference is less and more than you might think.)

Of course, this is only if you go to them for the granting of a wish: to save your father, sister, lover, dearest friend. If you go to get someone back from them, or—most foolish of all—because you fell in love with one of them, you will have no choice at all. You must go to the ones that chose you.

III.

Be kind to the creature that guards your door. Do not mock its broken, bleeding face.

It will never help you in return. But I assure you, someday you will be glad to know that you were kind to something once.

IV.

Do not be surprised how many other mortal girls are there within the halls. The world is full of wishing and of wanting, and the fairies love to play with human hearts.

You will meet all kinds: the terrified ones, who used all their courage just getting there. The hopeful ones, who think that love or cleverness is enough to get them home. The angry ones, who see only one way out. The cold ones, who are already half-fairy.

I would tell you, Do not try to make friends with any of them, but you will anyway.

V.

Sooner or later (if you serve well, if you do not open the forbidden door and let the monster eat you), they will tell you about the game.

Summer battles Winter, Light battles Dark. This is the law of the world. And on the chessboard of the fairies, White battles Black.

In the glory of this battle, the pieces that are brave and strong may win their heart’s desire.

VI.

You already have forgotten how the mortal sun felt upon your face. You already know the bargain that brought you here was a lie.

If you came to save your sick mother, you fear she is dead already. If you came to free your captive sister, your fear she will be sent to Hell for the next tithe. If you came for love of an elf-knight, you are broken with wanting him, and yet he does not seem to know you.

Say yes.

Keep reading

ok but, this was around 13 years ago so my parents would have been around 68 years old. They’d been to Maritzburg to visit my gran, and they got home and my mom was complaining about my dad, how, when they’d had a flat tyre and he was messing with it putting in the jack to change the wheel - he said to my mom “just lift the car for a moment”. So she did that, and he got the jack in, and then she was complaining about how he’d just casually ask her to lift the car, but...

okay this reminded me of the strongest human being (I use that label with some reservation) I have ever met and I still think about him like once a week because about 4 years ago on Thanksgiving night my sister, cousin, and I were going to pick up a friend about a 40 minute drive from home, and I got lost and tried to turn around on a little gravel pull-off on the side of the road, but my front tires got stuck in the snow.

we were in the middle of nowhere with no cell reception, and the only sign of life was a single, completely dark house across the road from us.

We all did our best to push the car out, and we’re strong people, but we couldn’t make it budge. Cold and stuck, we climbed back and wondered what to do. A car full of men pulled over beside us and asked if we needed help, but getting out of our locked car on a backroad at night with strange men felt like a bad idea, so we said a tow was coming and waved them along. We did that twice before finally deciding our only option was to accept the next offer for help and just risk it,

when a man came out of the house across the street.

He’d clearly been watching us and figured out why we’d been lying to people, which really surprised me & he said “it’s okay, you can stay in your car and keep the doors locked. Just start backing up when I say so.”

I had the window cracked and told him “it’s too stuck. There’s no way we’re getting out. Could you call a tow?”

And he said “just back up when I say so.”

So he walked around the front of the car, squatted, and said “okay back up,”

and I did, and

he lifted

the front of the car Into The Air. Off its front wheels, and we backed up while he essentially wheel-barrowed us back onto the road.

And we were honest to god yelling. We couldn’t help it. We just yelled until all four wheels were back on the ground and he was waving us off while we thanked him.

And then I looked at my sister and cousin & said “he REALLY told us we can KEEP our doors locked as if THAT WOULD’VE FUCKING STOPPED HIM!!!! As if he couldn’t have just RIPPED EM OFF THE HINGES.”

I later looked up the weight of my car, and it’s 3200 pounds without anything or anyone in it.

This haunts me.